I get irked and peeved with no one but myself. I would love to think that is among my best traits for the simple reason that these days every person is convinced their opinions are right, or we would not have so many experts giving sermons in the media—day in and day out.
Quite frankly I do not think I need any reason to feel agitated these days for that’s the only thing I seem to find in profusion, everything else is in short supply. In the course of last week alone, I had a chance to catch up with two of my closest friends from high school: one a financial consultant in Brisbane and the other a banker working in some firm in Denver. I am sure you would not be interested in knowing what transpired between us over mugs of beer. However, it’s the very discussion that I had with them that got me started with this piece of writing. Bad enough, that’s how I managed to irk myself again.
Unlike yesteryears when politics was something that never featured in our conversations, we ended up talking quite a lot about it. For reasons unknown, it certainly ceased to become a laughing matter. For it was not the upcoming elections (to be led now by a lawyer, we are told) we were talking about, but how, once again, almost against all odds, Obama had prevailed. Sad but true!
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On the plate, along with the grilled chicken barbeque and momos, was the work we three were doing. I am sure you can imagine how when old folks meet, it almost becomes inevitable that you discuss work. The only thing is the amount of time you take to talk about your work is directly proportional to amount of money you make. Well, almost! Seconds later we were doing exactly the same. My explanation about my work went something like “Guys, the machines and the computers I work with are in America, and that makes me very mindful of the Memorial Day holiday. Sadly, even after having worked my entire life here in Nepal, I can’t exactly tell you when the Martyrs day is!” We all burst into spontaneous laughter, and waited for it to subside so that we could take another big gulp of beer.
Days and weeks after both my friends made their way to their newfound Promise Lands, the whole local vs. foreign thing got stuck in my head, reminding me of the ‘stickiness factor’ of certain things that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in The Tipping Point.
In my ride through the streets of Putalisadak I noticed how Shankar Dev was getting enveloped in the crowd of Australian, Norwegian, Slovakian, Ukrainian and American college agents offering all kinds of what-not degrees. This wasn’t the road I was passing through for the first time, and yet I was bemused at how I could have possibly missed all that. I look at the throngs of hopeful students with copies of fancy prospectus and proficiency test materials in their hands. Something tells me that these aspiring students probably know the intricate details of admission process of those colleges and yet are completely oblivious as to how one gets into one of the KU, TU or PU colleges, forget about the courses they offer.
Round about the same time, I was approached by a cousin of mine who needed to fill a certain form in Nepali. And before you ask, yes, he was trying to get some papers from one of the government offices as he was desperately looking to get away from the beautiful mountains and ‘brave’ Nepalis in pursuit of decent money. I struggled like a school kid trying to pick up his fallen bicycle, for barring very few of the initial lines, I wasn’t getting any of the questions, forget writing any answer. The last I wrote a proper sentence in Nepali was when I was in O’Levels! I finally did manage to pull the form through, only to realize that the person manning the desk where we were supposed to deposit the form was entering the information into a computer in English!
That evening, I was bored to death. Bored not because of the herculean task of filling up a form in Nepali and standing in a line with strong wind blowing through my nostrils reminding me of the direction of the ‘toilet’. Rather, it was the TV I switched on that evening.
My failure to pay the cable dues on time meant I had to do with whatever they showed in one of the Nepali channels. Trust me, I could possibly withstand the strong smell of the office I had visited or filled up an even more complex Nepali form, but not the rhetoric on the television. Same people, same stuff over and over again. I badly missed BBC, CNN, Al-Zajeera—well almost any foreign channel would have done.
One morning, some days later, flipping through the pages of the newspapers, I realized that Beckham had managed to pull off yet another media ‘coup’; Messi was nearing yet another landmark. The photo on the same page of some team winning a local tournament failed to catch my attention. Rather I was eager to know how Lance Armstrong, once dubbed the greatest athlete of all time, had managed to dupe even his closest mates, let alone the doping agencies.
The professional in me tells me that when its work, I can never take things easy. Yet, when I see people walking coolly on the streets carrying some flag I can’t help wondering how life can be so free without the pain of reporting to your boss every day. And if you are a student, it gets even worse. I have by now become convinced that the amount of disruption you manage in college has a direct bearing on your ‘political future’. But getting started as early as high school was something I had never thought about. Until the little drama that unfolded when the price of cooking gas shot up and fell as quickly—and at least three high schools had students busy burning tires out on the streets. To me it seemed more like a bridge course to get into politics!
The Tarai once burned and burned badly. That notion of Tarai now has changed, but that’s nothing to be excited about either. It’s the place for kidnaps, rapes and murders. Recently one of my friends was in one of the hotspots of this region where he was told by the newly posted in charge of security that in last 15 days no case of crime had been recorded. He had issued a blanket order to this small town that shops should be closed by 6:30 and no one should be walking on the streets alone! At work, I hear my colleagues wondering how people manage to live in Baghdad. It’s so scary, I hear them say.
The movies would be the last thing many of us would identify with. At bare minimum I need something of ‘Loot’ standard—where at least characters talk in the language that you do in real life!
If there was ever a time I was forced into soul-searching, trying to identify what makes me Nepali, this probably is it. But I am not sure what exactly is bothering me.
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