He followed his father to the usual hangout as often as he could. [break]
The conversations, muffled by the constant noise of the teashop’s kerosene pump stove, was beyond his grasp but the ambiance of the chiya pasal stayed with him, and how it led people to open up and share in conversations about everyday life and beyond.
The boy, Mitra Sangroula, is now an interactive graphic designer with an eclectic taste in music. Seven years ago, he started a website called www.chiyapasal.com.
The website aimed to recreate the ambiance of collective conversations in the old Chabahil Chowk chiya pasal. Classical Nepali music was put together as a medium to connect people with similar interests through this particular genre.
“Currently, the website is in the phase of creating a network of people,” says Sangroula. “The next step is to create tools that will enable people to use chiya pasal as a platform for conversation by generating their own contents.”
If you visit the website, you’ll be greeted with an image of a cup of milk tea with a jhinga (fly) floating –what is a chiya pasal without unhygienic incidents? – and a layer of choktas – what is a cup of chiya without a thick floating film of milk? These choktas are sets of songs that share a common theme, or complement each other.
Sangroula says that a few months after the website’s launch, a group of “chiya parakhis” (tea freaks) recorded audios emulating a typical Nepali radio show.
These are comic-relief bits between songs, and you’ll hear spoof ads and spoof news that remind you of radios that play in chiya pasals all across Nepal.
“The contents reflected various issues faced by Nepalis during that time, including the stagnant political environment. We made efforts to present the news in a comical way to entertain our listeners,” says Sangroula.
When you hear the recreated news and commentaries, it’s striking how little things have changed in all these years.
The website was never promoted officially and has survived through spontaneous word-of-mouth ads. As soon as it was set up and the word got around, the website received a lot of positive feedback.
Of late, the station has received more complaints about the lack of regular updates. Sangroula says it still needs a lot of work to attain the vision that it was conceived with.
“Our foremost aim is to build a system that generates donations and enables us to give back to the community of artists what it wants as a token of our
appreciation,” says he.
Well, what we can still do on our part is to drop by, turn on Mitra’s website, tune in to it, and then be far-out before finally freaking out!
*chiya pasal: teashop in Nepali.
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