My answer: Become selfish. It’s in your very selfish interest to protect your future in Nepal.[break]
Here is a story to make my case:
Let’s say you make it big! You become rich enough to grab a “bright” future for your family. You own a nice house in Kathmandu, and enough money in the bank after many hard years of honest work. Your relatives are filled with envy!
Let’s say you have a beautiful, small happy family - you, your partner and your two cute little children. Everyday you drive through tons of problems in Kathmandu.
No one seems to be doing much about it. You get angry, frustrated, even depressed. At the end, the only words that come out of your mouth are “Yestai ho!” So you focus on where you feel you can make a difference, which is basically to take care of your own family. You forget about the rest of Kathmandu.
As you do this, the Bagmati River that flows through Kathmandu pretty much remains the same - extremely toxic.
You convince yourself that trying to clean her is beyond your job. You start to play the blame game. It’s the damned government’s job, or some INGO’s, or some environmentalists’.
Coming back to your family, you keep raising your children in the best way possible. You put them in expensive Montessori schools, and send them to excellent summer camps so they can broaden their horizons. You convince yourself that one day, when they grow up, they’ll certainly help their country. That’s why you “mind your own business for now.”
So now, let’s say because of the highly toxic River Bagmati - the pollution in Kathmandu or hundreds of other health disasters waiting to loom here - a resistant form of mutated bronchitis or tuberculosis creeps its way through.
It’s lethal. Let’s say “unluckily” your daughter gets it. It could be from her friends in school, or through contaminated water, or from someone else, somewhere in this big city.
You rush her to a nearby hospital and put her in a deluxe first class cabin with a doctor to treat her 24/7.
The doctor consults with the best practitioners around the world. Money is never a problem, but it sure shows its limits when the doctor finally admits, “your daughter can’t be treated here because the disease is new, highly contagious, so she has to be taken abroad immediately to a better facility.” You charter a plane to Delhi. You try to leave for Delhi immediately but are stopped because she needs to be quarantined as per their state policy.
You plead and even threaten them. You directly call the high level politicians of Nepal to find a way out. You manage to pressure them.
At last you have permission to proceed. You fly out to save your dear girl. But by then, it’s too late. The disease moved fast. Too much time has already been lost.
Your little girl is no more. So now the blame game starts within you. Who’s to be blamed for the loss of your child, your future, your investment, your hope?
Do you blame the doctors and the hospitals for not being able to save her? Or her friends for transferring this disease? The toxic Bagmati River? The people who were supposed to clean it? Or the government for being incompetent?
Would you even go on to blame your neighboring countries for their apparent bias against Nepalis - for not letting your daughter get medical assistance in time?
Or go one step further and blame Nepal itself for this mess? “Satile saraapeko desh!” Or do you just blame yourself?
Would blaming anyone bring your daughter back? Certainly not. But if you could look into your past, where would you change things so that your daughter would still be alive?
Think hard for a minute before reading further.
You would’ve tried to prevent this from ever happening, right? You would’ve never let these problems get this big. You would’ve acted actively, in time to control these social, environmental problems while they were still small. After all, it’s for your own sake.
In essence, it’s in our own selfish interest to act now to solve these collective problems of the future. If we don’t, it’ll haunt my future, your future and our children’s future.
So how about making this super-selfish pledge today? To protect myself, I’ll take responsibility of my environment and my surroundings.
To protect my family, I’ll look for and support or even build a “citizen’s movement” to clean up the Bagmati.
To protect my future, I won’t remain silent as incompetent rulers destroy my future.To protect my lifestyle, I’ll be proactive in my neighborhood, my city, and my country.
Ujwal Thapa provokes you to change yourself and Nepal and writes regularly at www.whynepal.com
Related story
Pledge and reality
