“What of that?” one is apt to ask. Well, that’s the point, which I shall try to make in this flâneur’s fable.[break]
•••
Two elected leaders of two “allied” “kingdoms” managed to mess up my life. One was Prime Minister Surya Bahadur Thapa of the Kingdom of Nepal in the mid-1960s, and the other was Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom/Britain (it was already becoming “less” Great) in the late ’70s.
What Thapa did was to suddenly devalue the Nepali Rupiya against the Indian currency while I was employed in Birgunj of Nepal. The Nepali Rupiya (NRs) stood comfortably at 101 for each unit of Indian Rupees/IRs100. Thapa, among his very first supremely wise official decisions in his maiden prime ministerial incarnation, devalued Nepal’s currency by another 34 Rupees, making it NRs135: IRs100. As an Indian citizen at that time, I lost precious percentages while drawing my salary in Nepali Rupees in Birgunj.
Ethnos.Gr
I’ve written about it elsewhere in the past; so I won’t go any further on this. Suffice it just to say that Thapa’s unwarranted decision pushed me to Kathmandu, which was nowhere on my mind while I worked in Birgunj. As a result, I’ve been in this Nocebo Nagar – full of other fellow pied-noirs and Étranger-s in what is chronically a cruel city and capsizing capital – for the last 47 years, counting each sunup as the beginning of another day of my arrival here where everybody is strangers to the other pedestrians on the sidewalk.
It’s Maggie’s story I need to tell – now she’s finally gone.
•••
BBC, “the world’s radio station,” announced last Monday evening that the former British Prime Minister Margaret (Hilda) Thatcher – later, Lady Thatcher, and Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven – passed away quietly in her sleep in London following a stroke in the morning. The “Iron Lady” – a malicious and unflattering epithet, courtesy of the Russians, which would later unwittingly make her internationally famous all over again, in another awed avatar – finally departed at the age of 87 years.
But my intended story goes back to ancient 1979 when Margaret Thatcher was first elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, becoming also the first woman in its history to lead the island nation. In the very early days of office, she was to earn the hideous rhyme of “Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher,” which was chanted against her prime ministerial decision of doing away with the hallowed tradition of free lunch at British schools. So it goes! And other catcalls were to follow while she occupied 10 Downing Street for nearly twelve years during her three terms as bowler, batter and wicketkeeper of Thatcherism while rubbishing and trashing most other things as “codswallop,” “balderdash,” and “bunkum” (bullshit and crap were words not found in her resurgent ultra Conservative lexicon) which were not Thatcherite in mould and mood to suit her panzer-like crushing and bulldozing of British trade unions and further pauperizing the poor. She affected Oxbridge accent and was no more a grocer’s daughter.
•••
My own Maggie story goes like this:
By the time Margaret Thatcher relocated herself to 10 Downing Street in 1979, I was back teaching English at the Pulchowk Central Campus of the Institute of Engineering (IOE) after a four-year sabbatical. I was already confirmed Assistant Lecturer and later Lecturer while at the Campus. Bloom and boom are two words I can use for my own upward career graph as well as the grand developments taking place at the Institute.
Compared to the gloom and doom of Margaret Thatcher’s London, Kathmandu was seeing some growth in the ’70s, especially in higher learning – most particularly in engineering and medicine. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) was aided by Japan in establishing the sprawling campus of the Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital (TUTH) at Maharajgunj, and MBBS graduates were already being produced in Nepal by 1976/77.
The happenings at the IOE itself rivaled the development at the IOM. The Anand Niketan housed the principal office of Dean Kul Ratna Tuladhar – the “Master Saab” from the Rana years – while the outlying area of the Central Campus already had half a dozen high-rise modern buildings for multi-faculty classrooms, labs, workshops and a hostel and a library.
As per my lay reading, Anand Niketan of Anand Shumsher JB Rana began as a mere repairkhana for the upkeep of the many Rana durbars, mahals and bhavans in Kathmandu and Patan. Eventually, the Indian Cooperation Mission (ICM) lent its hands in producing civil overseers, electricians and other blue-collar professionals in the aftermath of Nepal’s democratic movement in 1950.
When I joined the Campus in 1971, the ILO had entered the turf to create more advanced manpower and professional personnel, and I was inducted to develop its English-language curriculum and its teaching. Immediately after the ILO and its multinational experts left, World Bank specialists swarmed over the campus to further enhance it, both physically and academically. More land was acquired on the other side of the Patan Gate Road near Chakupat, and this expanse was named D Block, with more classrooms, professors’ quarters, a stadium and support offices.
•••
The World Bank had contracted, as its IOE expansion consultants, the Paisley Institute of Technology of Glasgow, Scotland, and many Scottish Sherpas descended upon Pulchowk. Since Paisley did not have an adequate English-language faculty of its own, the nearby Jordanhill College of Education was appointed for the subject specialization project in teaching and learning of scientific/engineering/technical English for the burgeoning students of civil engineering, architecture, electrical, electronics and other disciplines at the Campus. The British Council in Kathmandu supplied its own corps of language teachers in the persons of experts and VSOs (the British Peace Corps called Volunteer Services Overseas).
Apart from taking my usual classes, I was the Nepali counterpart to the Jordanhill Gurkhas in their research, fieldwork and enquiries for formulating a syllabus for teaching scientific/engineering/technical English to B Eng. and Certificate-level overseer students at the IOE. I had no official appointment nor received emoluments for the consultation works I did, save for my personal desire to learn and professionalize myself as the first pioneer of such school of specialized English in Nepal. I also represented the IOE at the meetings of the CDC (Curriculum Development Committee) of Tribhuvan University on English.
•••
As our joint works continued, my British peers began proposing that I be sent to Britain for an MS or M Phil degree course, if not PhD, in the genre of English I would teach at the IOE. They planned my stay in the United Kingdom, at least three years at an accredited university for my specific academic program.
But Margaret Thatcher was going in the opposite directions. It was said that she reduced Britain’s Overseas Development Ministry (ODM) to ODD, Overseas Development Department, and my British counterparts weren’t amused at the “odd” joke. However, they continued planning my visit accordingly: From three years of advanced studies, they pared my itinerary down to six months, and then compromised for a three-month tour, and further cut it down to six weeks and finally to three weeks.
Three weeks? I said I would myself go as a tourist if the program was for just three miserly weeks.
The Paisley and Jordanhill subject specialists were embarrassed. They completed their stay in Nepal, submitted their reports and recommendations and left for Scotland. Some days later, one close colleague wrote:
“Dear Peter,
“It’s that Mad Axe Woman [another epithet!] at 10 Downing Street who has ruined everything. Even for the possibility of publishing your novel here – Ditto! The publishing world has collapsed in Britain; especially those private homegrown publishers I’ve known have vanished. I believe many of them are in Canada and Australia now. I had them in my mind for publishing your work.”
•••
To be fair to Margaret Thatcher, what about the IOE at Pulchowk? And what about the World Bank in Kathmandu? The two agencies had all the freshly minted engineers from Russia and India – those greenhorn teachers at the Pulchowk Campus – sent to the US under Fulbright scholarships. But not a single teacher of specialized English at the IOE was considered for such opportunities. The collective inscrutability remained a mystery.
Time rolled on to the 1980s. The Scots and I separated and went our ways. We grew older, and then we forgot each other. Margaret Thatcher remained and was reelected, twice more. She was also made a Peer. Well before all these happened to her, I had resigned my Lecturer’s post, way back in 1982.
Mine is merely one tale, out of thousands, if not millions, of how extreme leaders and their decisions from one end of the earth affect the unwary and innocent in one way or the other in other corners of the world.
Well, whatever! For one thing, at least, Baroness Maggie is gone. I’m still here.
The writer is copy editor at The Week/Republica.
pjkarthak@gmail.com
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