Common Nepalis want material comforts through hard work. While I talk to them, they express a yearning to emerge from the problems created by the post-revolutionary political system. The youth in particular. They go abroad in search of work and education opportunities. Those who cannot go want to open small scale businesses so that they can buy a smart cell phone and go to restaurants on weekends by putting on knock offs of designer clothes. Middle class parents want globally relevant education for their children so that they get jobs in places like Bangalore and Singapore.
There is a kind of keenness to participate in developmental culture which they see in Delhi, Dubai, and London. They can see that the world is moving fast. Those who work and study abroad—and hundreds of thousands Nepali students do—aspire to emulate the lives of better off societies in West Asia or East Asia. The native wretchedness is unacceptable.
The politicians, on the other hand, have not moved forward either in ideas or in their plans and programs. They still go on creating more complexities. One replaces the other: the faces change but ideologies do not. Many talk about changing the world through outdated revolutions and anti-developmental rhetoric.
I recently met a policeman who was inquiring about an accident. The constable from Maharajganj spoke to me with extraordinary clarity of thought. He was planning to complete his graduation, he said. Chetanama paribartan chahiyo, he said about the present state of politics. There must be conceptual transformation of the political community; the police can do nothing against the criminals unless our politicians can differentiate between what is just and what is criminal, he added.
Nepalis are honest hard workers; their politicians dishonest shape-shifters.
“I want to educate myself and show my family that I am an educated policeman. I would then get a respectable security job with a local private firm or a multinational company,” he concluded.
Another youth said: “I want to open up a shop and to earn enough to send my two sons to India for Business Studies. After all, the senior Ambani too aspired for something within the reaches of the common people. I cannot be like him, but I can definitely make my family happy by bringing home a bucket of fried chicken form Durbar Marg on Saturdays and going to watch cricket in Kirtipur on Sundays.”
Two examples obviously do not suffice to establish my theory of the yearning for chance among common Nepalis. But the two surely represent a particular system of thought. Such ideas do not come from a vacuum. There are many such people who want to emerge from the boredom created by the staid political culture.
Talk to ten people and probably seven of them want to get somewhere through hard work and honesty. But the politicians’ cultures and modes of behavior are different. The strength of such politicians is that they can rightly claim that the political space they inhabit is not as undemocratic as Mubarak’s, Gaddafi’s, or al-Assad’s.
Perhaps this is the reason Nepalis still tolerate them, hoping they may mend their ways soon. But the sad bit is that these politicians are unlikely to change their old ways and to make way for young guns.
Recently, I met a painter from Patan. He is exploring contents to make a series of works so that he may be able to sell his monastic paintings merged with Hindu imagery abroad. With the money he makes, he wants to buy a Nano car and hit the Nepali roads on his gleaming car. He says he does not want to die before he gets to taste food from every nook and cranny of the country, which he will apparently do in his Nano.
Unlike the painter, the politicians have regressive agenda. One section heralds another revolution, demands more sacrifices, and spreads anti-imperialist messages; another is engaged in debates on constitution and keeps shifting its weight to adjust to power; the third wants the older days to return; the fourth, fifth, and sixth keep minting money even as the country reels under acute poverty. Perhaps they might also have worked out a way to get commissions on load-shedding!
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