The English-language Republica/The Week and bigger-sister Nagarik in Nepali were conceived some 16 months ago, and I’ve been with their gestation all along. Willed by the Gyawali Bandhus, the first veterans of private-sector publication in Nepal, we initially occupied a single 1,240sq ft hall which sardined in 50 people on working days. In the outage schedules of December 2008 and its winter, and with cannibalized computer software, we planned and designed Republica and Nagarik in the “cowshed” on the ground floor of the mostly unoccupied JDA Complex. Now our working space has grown more than eightfold, though we still lack a powwow hall, a library, and an audio-visual room, and perhaps a good canteen, too. The hardware/software argument is on, really.
When I first visited the JDA Complex in Sun Dhara, I was awestricken by its cruel historicity. The area was the power seat of the absolute Premier Bhimsen Thapa who, with other Sen Thapas, was eliminated by the Bahadur Pandeys. The stretch still looks eerie to me. The building itself is gaping at the entrance, with no gate to monitor the traffic of visitors. Its hallway, looking like an aircraft hanger, rises to another seven floors. The building has the Chinatown Shopping Complex at the back. The east is seeing a 14-level high-rise colossus that will obstruct our views of south Tundikhel, the Shahid Gate, Bhadra Kali, and Singha Durbar beyond. On the adjacent north are the offices of the Kathmandu Metropolitan, producing municipal jokes of the city. On the right is the Bhadragol Jail, with its Spinning Jennies going clackety-clack-boom-krang once electricity supply is resumed. On the far side is a mandir with the Nepal Telecom’s disk as the deity’s sudarshan chakra and another three-pronged antenna as its trishul. What an electronic deuta!
All these landmarks are mapped on the heart of Kathmandu, which is nobody’s everytown. One hardly belongs to it, nor does it show ownership of its residents. This is, after all, a metropolis of fast fading valentines, with a history of impossible years since the 1760s, 1840s, 1950s, 1960s, and the 1990s to this day.
This then is where the JDA Office Complex is situated, and this is where we produce Republica/The Week and Nagarik for your morning and online provocation.
This is where we labor, in the dirty sprawls of an afterthought called Sun Dhara. In my 16 months at JDA, I already see its wear and tear, the staircases with karate kick marks, the walls with snot specks, the toilets with push-button water cannons and booming thunder boxes. With many floor spaces still being leased out, there’s the occasional riot of screaming chainsaws and whining electric drills and hammering for office appointments. The upstairs Save the Children complex’s sewage pipes may burst out again, and its rich effluents may detonate another stink bomb in the editorial hall of Republica/The Week, as happened sometime ago. There’s a general lack of janitorial maintenance culture in the eight-storied monstrosity, and traditional Nepali peonage hasn’t yet changed to a professional and proactive corp. Its cleaners and caretakers need HMTTC training.
The energy crunch feared for the next five years is likely to continue for another five, until 2020. So, handheld, finger-fondled and eye-caressed printed pages will continue to usher in everyone’s day in the morning. This lopsidedness augurs well for the print media baronetcy, Nepal’s nouveau feudal, for one solid decade.
And this is where were born Republica and Nagarik, probably the only two new products seen in belly-up Nepal in the previous year.
Yes, even with the Sad Sack story that Nepal has been, with its snoozing and snorting Beetle Baileys in Kathmandu, the single-family promoters creating Republica and Nagarik as two new dailies in Nepal must’ve had prescience while they planned their company. Investing appropriate sums in Kathmandu, Nepalgunj and Biratnagar for their newspapers, the stakeholders seem to have foreseen the messages of Mr C K Lal who has often reminded us lately that print media has an assured future in Nepal, thanks mainly to the outage rendering its electronic media kaput for more than half a day. The energy crunch feared for the next five years is likely to continue for another five, until 2020. So, handheld, finger-fondled and eye-caressed printed pages will continue to usher in everyone’s day in the morning. This lopsidedness augurs well for the print media baronetcy, Nepal’s nouveau feudal, for one solid decade.
But how are things inside the print media houses when such a golden harvest is ensured? And times were mostly dynamic for private-sector print publications from the beginning – the post-1990 democratic decades – save for those 19-month colonel-editors in battle fatigues.
I touch a touchy base here. Having worked at The Himalayan Times, The Kathmandu Post/City Post, Newsfront, and now Republica/The Week, I’ve mostly seen transit-camp rookie reporters, not boot-camp recruits, to be honed and sharpened as graduate journalists on the jobs. During the last 11 years as editor at those papers, I’ve trained, tutored and mentored some 100 young novitiate greenhorns, biding their interregnum as “interns”, in my department, only to see them fly for further studies abroad, or join the UN and other better-paying and more secure INGOs, and banks.
By the same yardstick, I can say that none of the 10/12 twenty-something well-placed men and ladies with me at The Week/Republica will remain at their action stations for long. Their strategy for being here is a crafty moral improvisation, not unlike Huck Finn’s. Republica, for them, is just a steppingstone to the greener side, the present work experience yet another item in their fattening résumé. Once burnished by an editor like me, these opportunists will desert the camp which trained and sustained them. They are my version of birds on wire: They flew in from different terra incognita, homed in to perch on The Week, and will migrate once their “acceptance letters” arrive.
This two-decades-old climate of impermanence is a just-dessert culture in a new feudalistic system which practices its own hire-and-fire policies against its seasoned staff writers and editors. Journalists are hired – not appointed – on annual contractual tenures. There’s no insurance coverage against them being murdered, maimed and disappeared. No media corporate entity has provisioned for medical attention for their staff. With no employment “bond” package for wordsmiths’ long-term tenure, much less permanent secure berths, there’s no question of provident fund, gratuity and pension and incremental markups for the workforce, either. Fuel and phone subsidies are mere patchwork facilities for daily fieldwork and deadlines. There’s no comprehensive regime to appoint productive professionals, only case-by-case exploitative regimen on individual basis.
This mutual screwing is tacitly taken by the state, the civic society, and the various associations of “working” journalists, INGOs, and donors concerned with the wellbeing of Nepal’s diarists and development of its Fourth Republic.
In such a negative-reciprocal climate, therefore, there’s no sense of belongingness and loyalty in press employees because mass media barons themselves don’t practice ownership of their human resources as assets.
This leads to another dichotomy of value recognition in Nepali media: Are scribes humanoids and more readily dispensable than, say, computers? Are journos software or hardware? Are they spare parts and peripherals, or living beings subject to aging and existential angst in their present professional insecurity?
Contributors and columnists are another mainstay of Nepali media, as elsewhere. But how are they regarded and compensated? Are they affluent enough on their own, and write only to perpetuate their fame and to remain live on the circuit? I can speak for myself: All the 12 articles I’ve written for Republica and The Week so far have been gratis. This isn’t a solitary case, either: The former daily I worked at owes me some Rs. 150,000 (their righteous calculations, not mine); but truth be told that, however belated it was, they were going to reimburse me. But I left the paper at that very juncture, and that was the end of the matter.
In such creative disarray, manufactured by all players concerned, how do these various modes of mutual exclusion affect newspaper subscribers and readers, supporters and advertisers? This is another side of the argument.
But there can be hopes, albeit bordering on miracles. The promoters of Republica and Nagarik, having braved and advanced so far in the very first year of their endeavors, can yet revolutionize Nepali media, an industry sector which needs to institutionalize itself in long-term appointments of staffs with regular salary structures, medical benefits, insurance coverage, and other embracing succors. These efforts are crying to be made for mutual goodwill, belongingness and ownership in the Nepali media village of investors and their press corps.
Well, why did I write this piece, at all?
Indeed! At 67, I’m the oldest working copyeditor in Nepal. But it must stop one day – and very soon, too! I reckon with this definite likelihood, and am already toying with my long-delayed project of completing my 20 short stories and then two novels. I already worry about sustaining myself as a creative writer in my advanced retirement years.
But first thing first: I hope to see better and more assured days for my younger colleagues at Republica. I’ve spent many maverick years with them at other dailies and publications, so I worry more about their present job (in)security in journalism than my own future anxieties. That’s the only reason for me to have written this third and final essay in the genre on this most opportune day.
pjkarthak@gmail.com
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