“So what is it that you will remember about this place?” I asked my boss from the US, who was in Nepal for a fortnight’s trip. For a man who had never been outside of the US in his 52 years of existence, this must have been a difficult question.
“Obviously the traffic!” he said, which failed to catch me by surprise! “That’s a common one, isn’t there something else that struck you? I mean something about the people. After all, you have travelled to this end of the world for the first time in your life!” “Oh yes Hitesh,” he replied, “the spring in people’s lives, the hustle and bustle and rawness of everyday life.” [break]
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Minutes later came his thought provoking reply that was, surprisingly, completely optimistic. I really had to scratch my head to remember when the last time was that I heard something “nice” about the future of the country: Perhaps when I was writing for a school magazine, forced to do so by my English teacher. He said “Hitesh, in the next ten years China and India will be so huge that they will become the ‘world-centers’. And right in the center of these centers is where you exist. That will be quite something! Just wait and watch the change unfold!” he smiled. I smiled back as he said, after a brief pause, “Of course, the leadership in your country should know how to take advantage of this position.” The last sentence seemed like a certain asterisk you see in advertisements next to the words ‘conditions apply’.
On the way back, for some reason, his words kept ringing in my ears. We have become used to thinking that anything said by a foreigner about Nepal is accurate. I was no different.
That was some five years ago. We both have changed our jobs since then.
A week ago, I got an email from him, where he reiterated the things he had told me years ago.
I started getting reflective about the entire phenomenon of ‘change’. We seem to have gone through tremendous change in the last two decades. Perhaps if there was a pivotal point in the entire period, it was the monarch’s final ‘interview’. As a kid, I had never imagined that one day I would see a monarch walk out of the palace. Things have never been the same since. Or at least, so I thought.
As I switched on the TV later that day to take stock of the news, I was suddenly struck by how familiar everything seemed. “Hey hold on, have things really changed?” I was forced to ask myself.
The first news to hit me was a meeting between two leaders. That wasn’t new. The only difference was that earlier, it used to be about ‘their’ (I wonder why it is ‘their’ and not ‘our) majesties ‘gracing’ some occasion, and now it’s the ‘almost’ majesties doing pretty much the same.
Next, the television showed a board that read ‘Nepal Oil Corporation’. This, to me, was a perfect symbolic representation of the stagnation we have been faced with for a while. I am not going to go into the details of how we became accustomed to the largely Nepali phenomenon of ‘oil-shortages’ and ‘queuing up’ outside gas stations. What I would certainly mention is how, as a nation, we have given up on this and branded this problem ‘unsolvable’. Some eighty percent nations in the world do not produce oil, but the concept of queuing up is alien to them.
The visuals on the screen showed protestors as the news reader outlined their demand: Scrapping some project because it planned to generate more power. I cared little about the details. If something gives us more electricity, that was good. That probably was the spontaneous reaction of “truly-badly-loadshedding-affected” person in me. I was reminded of my high school, where I remember being forced to write a paper on Arun Hydro project. I clearly remember lifting a major chunk of the article from a magazine. I made some deliberate grammatical errors and replaced a few words with their synonyms so that the teacher wouldn’t be suspicious. I succeeded in my efforts. It’s been a while since then, and yet the ever elusive ‘big’ hydro project continues to create the same buzz. Even now you hear people talking about Nepal’s hydro potential with the same zest as years ago.
As much as I wish to be optimistic, the truth is that I see no change. “Hello darkness my old friend”, began Simon and Garfunkel’s song ‘Sound of Silence.’ Every time I look at the load shedding timetable stuck on my wall, I feel Ambar Gurung would be better off translating this song into Nepali as our national anthem.
The next news piece was statistics of people leaving Nepal to work for Arab countries. Every time I read or hear anything about people working in the Gulf, I end up going back to 2005, when I lost one of my best buddies. We never got to know how he died. All we got was his body parts in a casket. He belonged to the initial generation of ‘remittance providers’. He had gone to work as a supervisor in a shopping mall. He had attended a good school and completed his Bachelor’s Degree in Nepal. If a person like him could die so mysteriously, I can only imagine the ordeals that the workers who leave in hordes everyday have to face in the Gulf today. Despite hearing these stories every day, I still fail to come to terms with their ordeal.
As much as there is a desire to see the sunny side of things, I just cannot convince myself that we are better off. I needed a change, news had gotten the better of me. I changed to my favorite sports channel.
Hiteshkarki@gmail.com
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