Wednesday, July 1, 2015

The Road to Nowhere by Kamal P Malla

Selected quotations from Kamal P Malla’s collection of essays, The Road to Nowhere:

Three Years of the Rising Nepal
The editorial staff [of The Rising Nepal] are overworked; they naturally do not have time to read through them, edit them, or assess their comparative values. The life of a professional journalist is hectic, indeed; the machines must be fed in time; ‘the formidable deadline’ should not be crossed; so few hands, so much to do. We the consumers have, therefore, to be satisfied if for days there is nothing readable except the weather of the day we had lived through and console ourselves with an incomparable tailpiece or two.
Education: The Road to Nowhere
At least, in seminars on the examination system in committees on higher education, or in sore little opinionate essaysin our periodicals, we are ineffectually brandishing our mediocre ideas pleading for ‘change’ in the present educational system in Nepal…At times of reformistic euphoria we even decide for ‘the change.’ Yet when we come to implement our decisions for the change, we drift exactly to the opposite, by succumbing to a failure of nerves.
…education in Nepal has become something like Frankenstein’s mechanical monster. The master has lost control over the machine. The master, therefore, is no longer able to tell what the monster is going to do next. It is now the toy that plays with the master or masters.
The rich confusion and profusion of authority or educational matters, this intersection of the academic, the administrative and the political interests is an incomprehensible make-believe in Nepal.
Our graduates’ problem, however, is not that they are unemployed but that they are not employable. Their education is pathetically out of tune with the society in which they have to survive. Their education is totally divorced from the agonies of a society in transition where the pressing needs are not just of MAs in English or MScs in Physics, not just of the white collared workers, but also of the drainage experts, the plumbers, the masons, the pipe-layers, the skilled electricians, the mechanics and so on.
…the simple naked truth about our situation: we are confused about our educational aims. What do we aim at in education, and through education, in the rest of our society? Particularly through the liberal education on a mass, debased and commercialised scale?
If cancer is just a name for the wrongly multiplying cells, I imagine, it is no morbid psychology to describe our educational establishment as a malicious form of cancer with which our body-polity is increasingly threatened.
…I have a creepy feeling that education in Nepal is a lost cause: education is no longer education; it is either a political game between the authorities and the students or a commercial enterprise conspired by the academics and the degree-hunters.
The teaching profession as such is ‘permeated with upper-caste traditions’. The authors observe that especially strong is ‘the attitude towards manual effort, physical exertion—these are for the lower castes and it is self-denigrating to lift, carry, or otherwise work with the physical world’. This upper class prejudice is reflected in the curriculum of Nepal’s schools as well as in teaching methods. It is not for nothing that the courses taught in Nepal are highly abstract, with very little consideration of possible applications of the material learnt.
In a social structure like ours where education is accessible mainly to the upper-class child, where caste distinctions and tribal affiliation are still effective, where under the yoke of a strong joint-family system the women have less opportunities than men, the achievement of modern educational goals are fraught with powerful and crippling constraints.
The Importance of Being Critical
In Nepal the educational authorities have always believed in the sheer excellence of the old and the ossified. Here promotions are guaranteed and automatic. Naturally men grow old and prosper involuntarily. A youthful effort is neither a qualification nor an obligation. The only thing one should expect, if expect one must, from the Establishment is a grudging condescension which is already a great favour.
Mr Verma seems to think that literary criticism is an esoteric activity and that the literary critic is an equally scheduled class. The truth, however, is that every reader is a critic and every ‘conclusion drawn from study’ is literary criticism. If the ideal critic, as Dr F P Leavis put it, is an ideal reader, every discriminating student of literature is a critic who has a rightful place in the chain of critical being.
A critical essay is not a loose sally of the mind. Moreover, the literary critic differs from, say, the music critic or the art critic in that the literary critic has to use the medium of words, which is also the medium of the art he is responding to. So his claim to the title is closely related to the nature of the language he himself uses. The validity of a literary critic’s judgement always stands exposed by his own use of the medium.
Mr Verma’s exemplary case shows us that it is not enough to write or publish a book. The importance is not just in writing or publishing a book; the importance is, however, in doing it critically, consistently and thoroughly. The importance is in doing at least as well as one could do it.
YG Krishnamurti or MBB Shah?
At the end of the book I was left precisely where I was before I began the book. It did not make me any better reader of Shree Shah’s poems than I was before.
He steams the windowpanes and asks us to look at the world outside only to conclude on his own that the world is steamy.
Language in Nepal
During the last fifty years Nepali has taken great strides to raise itself to the status of a national language. Although nobody has ever made any objective field tests regarding the comprehension of Nepali by non-Nepali speakers, or on its use as a second language, necessity—sheer expediency—seems to have driven more and more non Nepali speakers to understand and use it in their day-to-day transactions, their inter-tribal communication and the communication with the channels of local and national administration.
The rise of Nepali, first as a lingua franca in the wake of the Gorkha military campaigns, then its continuous use as the language of authority and administration—the total ousting of all other languages from the courts and the final triumph of instituting Nepali as the national language of Nepal—completed a long and historical process that has been going on as a centripetal tendency consequent upon the political unification of Nepal.
Nepali, as an indigenous language, has no resources other than Sanskritised forms for handling an intellectual, abstract or technical discourse of any kind. More than 85 per cent of its vocabulary is similar to Hindi from which it has borrowed more words in the last 20 years than from all the rest of Nepalese languages put together in the whole history of modern Nepal. S the paradox of Nepali linguistic nationalism is that the broader the scope of Nepali, the less it sounds like a language of Nepal. Nationalism, in Nepal, in so far as it is manifestly anti-Indian in orientation, is a self-defeating aspiration, particularly when one of its major foundations is Nepali, which is bound to be increasingly Sanskritised.
Language is so much a part of one’s way of life, a code through which a people’s culture is transmitted from one generation to another. The first language policy equates nationalism with uniformity, the second language policy equates it with tolerance (positively) or indifference (negatively) while the last alternative equates nationalism with the unity based on cultural pluralism and diversity…what Nepal does with her minorities and their languages will the best test of the maturity of her democracy. To ignore them is convenient, but not necessarily the most effective way to national integration.
The Precis of Right Philosophy: A critique
A didactic and derivative frame of mind is what we have inherited from our past and it is still entrenched in our habits of thinking and feeling. This is the legacy of our abdication of the intellect to priesthood.
Words have deep roots, and precision of phrasing is possible only where there is precision in thinking.
The Intellectual in Nepalese Society
This is an essay in enquiry into the poverty of intellect in Nepal.
The tradition here is the tradition of transmission of the sacred text, the tradition of conservation or ritualistic continuity rather that of creativity, nonconformism, questioning and criticism. The preponderance of the textual over the critical, of the spiritual over the material, of the abstract over the concrete, of the magical over the empirical, of the didactic over the creative—more than anything else, characterises the tradition of Nepalese scholarship.
They [the Nepalese intelligentsia] are also a displaced stratum of society, because by their training and education (as against their upbringing and origins) they have suddenly been compelled to live in the latter half of the twentieth century without due ceremony. They woke up one fine morning from the sleep of the Middle Ages and found themselves exposed to the neon lights of an electronic age.
One plain, but primary, reason for the poverty of intellect in Nepal is the poverty of the intellectual.
The role of the intellectuals is primarily to evaluate the realities of their society. In Nepal, this is where, because of the economic poverty and bondage of the intellectual, they seem to have failed society and betrayed their ‘class obligations’—if they feel they have any. An intellectual is not just a latter-day variation on the ancient Brahmin priest: his function in society is not ritualistic…What we have in Nepal, however, is not an articulate class of intellectuals who are willing to fill in the critical-evaluative role; what we have is only a class of white-collared proletariat who work, not for wages, but for salaries of different scales.
In Nepal, however, the literate section of the population shows, not only a great dearth of idealism, or a universal paucity of effort, application and dedication, but also an endemic infection with the virus of plain materialistic success. Success—measurable material success by hook or by crook—this is the law, and for the poverty-stricken Nepalese ‘making money’ is the only visible end for which life seems to be worth living. To him the eternal choice is between ‘making oneself’ and ‘remaking society’ and making oneself is invariably synonymous in Nepal with making money.
Kathmandu Your Kathmandu
The Ranas imported everything except probably boiled rice. Of all things, they imported Western architecture and built brick and mortar labyrinths to house their harems and prodigious households. With a redeeming touch of taste, generosity and sensibility each othese Rana mansions would have been founded in an entirely different tradition. For instance, in England, ‘the great houses’ that punctuate the English landscape were built by the nobility and the gentry who were in organic touch with the rest of English society. In Kathmandu the Ranas, on the contrary, refuse even to communicate with the rest of society except for money and cheap labour. They turned their backs upon the traditional Nepalese arts, crafts and architecture. There is not a single building which shows the regime’s patronage of the homespun style.
A Rana palace is not only a depressive monument to the Western mimicry: it is also convincing evidence of a collective schizophrenia. After all, the Ranas were the rulers; they ought to feel different from the ruled; they must live differently in dream-castles inaccessible to the vulgar herd. But is not all mimicry vulgar, particularly the mimicry of a culture only imperfectly understood?
Kathmandu is not the whole Nepal. Its metaphysical absurdity lies precisely in its pretensions that it is.
In Kathmandu, Hinduism has survived, not as a creative force, but as a fabric of fossilised rites and rituals, feasts and festivals to which both the believers and the non-believers subscribe, not as an act of conscious faith, but as a matter of inherited habits.

Thursday, April 30, 2015

The great quake

APR 29 - On Saturday, following a massive earthquake, Kathmandu’s landmark, the Dharahara, collapsed.  Until now, about 5,000 people have been killed, many more have been injured, and a lot of historic temples and old buildings have collapsed. Entire families consisting of parents, children and other relatives have been buried under rubble. People living in the affected districts are all in a state of panic. 
In fact, I have no words to explain the horrors of the earthquake. I would like to offer my deepest condolences to all my friends, families, and neighbours who died in the catastrophe--a 7.9 Richter scale earthquake that shook most parts of the country.  According to the US Geological Survey, the earthquake’s epicenter was somewhere 50 miles from the Valley. And any earthquake that is between 7-8 Richter scale is categorised as ‘major’ by scientific experts.    


Video clips of people in the Kathmandu Valley look very chaotic. I talked to my mom who lives in Chitwan, and she told me that she had never experienced such ‘vibration’ and ‘shaking’ of buildings in her entire life. Many individuals came out onto into the streets. Those living in Hetauda and Birgunj also recounted similar tales. A friend reported that he ran for his life with a dozen of other people from his private apartment. Given the state of affairs, it is difficult for people not to feel terrified. Massive damage has caused fear and panic throughout Nepal. The country needs help. It needed prayers.
Electricity supply has not been stable and neither have phone connections been established properly. In the immediate aftermath of the quake, the network was congested as the everyone began calling their family members in panic. The Nepali diaspora, who heard the news in different parts of the world, also got scared to death, and started calling their family back in Nepal. Albeit, it is not the earthquake that causes the trouble, but the archetypes, landmarks, and buildings that inhabitants have built.    
Even so, it is good to see people using social media sites and seeking to help people most-affected by the calamity by bringing people together. Nepalis people Facebook instantly shared the news of the disaster on Facebook, and many others started tweeting actively to inform other people. Google launched ‘earthquake finder’ app, and Facebook has started asking users to ‘mark safe’ after the quake.
The only silver lining of this tragic even is perhaps that from this earthquake is that it has bought communities together. In these trouble times, politics should take a backseat and everyone should rise up to the occasion. Everybody has come together and joined hand-in-hand to support and help victims of this earthquake. 
Posted on: 2015-04-30 09:39
Published: The Kathmandu Post

Friday, February 13, 2015

Ystävän laulu


Mistä tunnet sä ystävän
Onko oikea sulle hän
Anna meren se selvittää
Kuka viereesi jää
Ja jos silloin kun myrsky soi
Vain sun kumppanis vaikeroi
Vene lähimpään rantaan vie
Jääköön pois mikä lie

How do you feel a friend
Is he correct sulle
Enter the sea, it will clarify
Who will be next to you
And if a storm when the ring
Only the Sun kumppanis groaned
Take a boat to the nearest beach
I am leaving out something or other


Mistä tunnet sä ystävän
Onko oikea sulle hän
Anna tunturin selvittää
Kuka viereesi jää
Kun on kaukana kaikki muu
Ja kun päättyvät pitkospuut
Kuka rinnallas ruikuttaa
Takaisin mennä saa

How do you feel a friend
Is he correct sulle
Enter the mountain to find out
Who will be next to you
When you are far away from everything else
And when the end causeway
Who rinnallas whinge
Go back to be


Mistä tunnet sä ystävän
Onko oikea sulle hän
Ajat ankeimmat selvittää
Kuka viereesi jää
Kun on sinulla vaikeaa
Ja kun tarvitset auttajaa
Silloin ystävyys punnitaan
Menee muut menojaan
Siitä tunnet sä ystävän
Kun on vierelläs vielä hän
Turhat tuttavat luotas ois
Hävinneet pian pois

How do you feel a friend
Is he correct sulle
Time to find out ankeimmat
Who will be next to you
Once you have the difficult
And when you need a helper
Then the twin weighed
Goes to other spending
Whether you feel a friend
When is he still vierelläs
Unnecessary acquaintances luotas ois
Soon disappeared from the

Artist: 

Ystävän laulu by Vesa-Matti Loiri is part of the album "Ystävän laulut" . 

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

FRIENDLY ADVICE TO A LOT OF YOUNG MEN by Charles Bukowski




Go to Tibet
Ride a camel.
Read the bible.
Dye your shoes blue.
Grow a beard.
Circle the world in a paper canoe.
Subscribe to The Saturday Evening Post.
Chew on the left side of your mouth only.
Marry a woman with one leg and shave with a straight razor.
And carve your name in her arm.

Brush your teeth with gasoline.
Sleep all day and climb trees at night.
Be a monk and drink buckshot and beer.
Hold your head under water and play the violin.
Do a belly dance before pink candles.
Kill your dog.
Run for mayor.
Live in a barrel.
Break your head with a hatchet.
Plant tulips in the rain.

But don’t write poetry.



Saturday, December 20, 2014

Should Writers Respond to Their Critics?

By James Parker

Getting a bad review is no longer an elite experience. We’ve all been trolled, oafed, flambéed in some thread somewhere.


Photo
James Parker Credit Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson 

To answer the question directly: No, no, a thousand times no. A writer should not respond to his or her critics. A writer should rise above, in radiant aloofness. Sometimes that’s not possible, of course. I was drinking with a friend in London when he spotted, on the other side of the bar, a man who days before had reviewed him cruelly in a national newspaper. My friend grew agitated. “I’ll punch him in the face!” he said. “No, wait. I’ll buy him a drink!” He paused. “What should I do?” He had no idea, and neither did I. Aggression, under the circumstances, seemed quite as promising/­futile as magnanimity. I don’t even remember what he did in the end. The point is: You can’t win.

“Sometimes you are the pigeon,” Claude Chabrol said, “and sometimes you are the statue.” Wonderful, Gitane-flavored words. But we are not statues — we are not made of stone. Anointed with guano, do we not feel it? And right now everybody feels it. Getting a bad review is no longer an elite experience. Writers and non-writers, mandarins and proles, we’ve all been trolled, oafed, flambéed in some thread somewhere, at the bottom of some page. Scroll down, scroll down, take that Orphic trip into the underworld of the comments section, and there they are — the people who really object to you. Their indignation, their vituperation, is astonishing. It seems to predate you somehow, as if they have known and despised you in several former existences. You read their words and your body twitches with malign electricity. You must get out of this place immediately, run toward the light. Let the dead bury their dead. And don’t look back — because if you do, like Orpheus, you’ll lose what you love the most.

What are the avenues, anyway, whereby the writer can respond to the critic? Letters to the editor are hopeless; they always sound either querulous or insane, with horribly writhing syntax. And swatting at each other on the Internet does no good; round and round you go, in a troll spiral. You can make the critic a character in your next novel and give him hemorrhoids. You can talk loudly against him at parties. Or, rarest and most blessed of all, you can pay attention. In his memoir, “Prince Charming,” the great poet Christopher Logue, in mellow old age, dives into “a chocolate-liqueur box filled with dated clippings of every review that my books, plays or radio programs had received since 1953.” He makes a discovery. “How differently they read now. At the time, oh, the complaining: That fellow failed to praise me for this, this fellow blamed me for that. . . . Now, how fair-minded their words appeared, how sensible their suggestions for my improvement.”

But there remains that feeling — that feeling of being misunderstood and misused. That subtracted, sad-child feeling. You may be wondering how it is that I, who have written derisive and destructive reviews of books I considered not good, who have taken pains to make public, in as amusing a way as possible, the inferior qualities of this or that author, can be so terribly thin-skinned. Is it the case, you ask shrewdly, that I can dish it out but can’t take it? To which I reply: It is absolutely the case. I can dish it out endlessly, and I can’t take it at all. I believe I share this characteristic with most members of my species.
I’m learning, though. We’re all learning. The hatchet job, at the dinner table or in print, is a decreasingly admired form. So to the authors I have injured with my criticism, I say this: Your book may not have improved, but my moral qualities have, slightly, and I regret the pain I caused you. And if we happen to meet one day, punch me in the face and buy me a drink.

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Friday, December 12, 2014

Facebook after death

So what happens to your most prized possessions online such as social media sites; e.g., Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Twitter, etc. after you die? The quest to answer this question has been haunting me for weeks and terrifying a friend of mine who is addicted to it. She spends around seven hours a day on these sites. She wakes up, eats, sleeps, and breathes—the Facebook. So after my friend’s death (who is now hysteric, I will be able to ‘post’, ‘comment’, and ‘like’ her status from school days. And, what would she think if I post something nasty on her wall? Right now, she thinks that it won’t matter because she will not be there; therefore, she will not care. 

A few decades ago, people were merrier listening to one national radio station, and most conversations happened by reading real faces. Nowadays, however, the digital society appends more complexity and disorder. In the present climate, everything real and personal happens on Facebook or social media sites in general.


According to the Huffington post report, 30 million Facebook users have died since 2012. People live as though they have another life stored in a safety deposit box of a bank. However, it is good to constantly remind oneself that our time is limited and it is good not to waste time on Facebook. After death, we won’t be here to watch our real or virtual melodrama, but we may contemplate ahead. Don’t worry. The Facebook provides two simple solutions: a) your account will be deleted permanently based on your family’s request; b) your account will be converted into a memorial profile. The Facebook will change your profile settings, and only friends would be allowed to post on your wall. But, nobody will be allowed to log in your account; not even your family members.

Though digital footprints are extremely difficult to erase, it is still frightful that Facebook will keep your profile active, even if you are no longer here to use it. In other words, Facebook won’t delete your account without notification by your family members. Additionally, not all sites on the Internet have implemented a death policy for their beloved users. 

Therefore, it is solely up to the family members to decide and provide death proof and documentation to these popular sites.Time is ticking, and your online twinkling is limited. Thus, if you have something important in your mind, do it now. You might not get a second chance, after all. Consequently, what happens to my friend’s most prized possession; i.e., the Facebook after she dies? The Facebook will serve as a virtual graveyard to mourn from anywhere, anytime. 

Published: The Himalayan Times

Sunday, September 28, 2014

The Orphan House

SEP 27 - 
Buwa is dead. He was only fifty-five years old. I am not sure what to do with this painful, remorseful life, or the life that I am creating. Buwa’s body might be lying there. He should not be dead. Who will give me all the advice and inspiration for getting out of my own issues and overcoming hurdles? Should I be worried 
that Buwa is dead or should I just look for a job? Shouldn’t I be working or actively looking for work? Shouldn’t I be also doing those cleaning jobs in that Seven Stars Indian Dhaba near Wankenda, Mumbai?
I am young, very young, and feel lonely like many thousand others, and soon I’ll have a family to look after. I’ll be married, and have children, maybe a daughter.
My daughter, Sheela, will be sick, after staying here for too many years, like Buwa, who was sick and is now dead. She might even suffer from cancer or some other severe disease. I might not have money to purchase medicine. Every time I see this seashore and waves that dance along with the wind, I am terrified. I don’t think anyone has a choice in life.
I am just thinking some random thoughts, and these thoughts might not be very appealing to the viewers or readers. You know what they tell you in Painter Uncle’s rule book—that your art must be touching and sensible; it has to speak to the reader, at much greater length, far more than a human’s emotions and feelings.
I don’t know what I will do with my life now, or perhaps, after this moment, in this dark wood, across the sea, near the skyscraper trees that give me these 
feelings that everything is limited, even my time here, or the time of those I loved.
Should I just go to Chitwan and do Buwa’s last rites? I don’t know.
Wait . . . look at that pink sparrow! What?
A pink sparrow? Isn’t it beautiful? But why is her body pink?
Maybe she is just ready to die; or is it because someone coloured her body? Why is that pink sparrow looking at me? Life is difficult for a pink sparrow as well.
“No . . . no this is not the right way to paint a canvas,” Painter Uncle said.
“Then, what is the right way?” asked the child.
“Look what you have drawn. You have drawn a pink sparrow. And do you know that a sparrow is not pink?” the Painter Uncle further said. “Stop delineating antiquated people. They are 
of no use. You cannot make painful art, so very painful that it becomes difficult for the observer. You have to make it ebullient and inspiring. And who is this beautiful doll? But she is also drawn as though she is having a heart attack.”
“She is a cancer patient; she will be my daughter, Daddy”, said the child.
“Am I hearing it right? Did you say ‘Daddy’? Stop calling me daddy. I am not your daddy; I am your uncle, the Painter Uncle. Your daddy is long dead. Don’t you remember?”
“No, I don’t remember,” said the child.
“I don’t know what your problem is. You always paint dead people. What is wrong with you? Are you suffering from some mental issue? I shall take you to Doctor Premji tomorrow. He is a child specialist, also a well-known psychologist, and I hope he will explain your situation in detail. Go home. I’ll throw away this painting. It is of no use,” said Painter Uncle rudely.
“Do you remember the appointment with Doctor Premji?” Painter Uncle asked the following day.
“Doctor who?”
“Doctor Premji,” Painter Uncle repeated loudly.
“He must be a doctor of love. Why do they call him Premji?” said the child.
Painter Uncle was silent.
Ghorle happened to be ready to visit Doctor Premji.
“Doctor Premji, this child is really having some serious mental issues. Could you please check him?” Painter Uncle suggested.
“Okay . . . don’t worry. Please leave us alone for a while, I’ll check him,” Doctor Premji said.
“Your Painter Uncle is saying that you have some serious issues. Are you sure?” Doctor Premji asked the child.
“What issue, Doc?” the child asked.
“Your uncle says that you cannot paint properly. You always paint antiquated pictures, images, scenes and people.”
“What is death and what is life? I only portray what I feel most, from the bottom of my soul. Whatever comes to my mind, I paint that, and yesterday like every other day when he asked me to paint near the seashore, near our house, I closed my eyes for a few minutes, and then I started painting on the canvas what I saw. I saw that my father was lying dead on his deathbed; I saw the sorrow of my future wife who was thinking of getting a divorce, also my future daughter, Sheela, who will be suffering from cancer and so on,” the child said, delineating his symptoms.
“So, I believe you are just normal,” Doctor Premji said reassuringly.
“Who cares what you believe? Painter Uncle never believes 
what I say.”
“I guess, you’re a normal child. You have these visions because of your medical history. I’ll talk with your Painter Uncle soon.
“Ghorle, can you give us a moment please,” Painter 
Uncle said.
“Yeah, sure.”
“This child’s medical history seems very interesting to me. He is suffering from schizophrenia—a rare form of mental disorder, and his mental state is very critical. I wonder why you have stopped giving him those prescribed tablets. I know he will not remember to take his tablets, but it is your duty to give him those,” Doctor Premji said.
“Doctor Premji, you are right, but I don’t have enough money to buy those tablets. I recently lost my day job, and I make enough to put food on my table and this child’s. Besides, I also have to look after the child’s mother, who is married to me,” Painter Uncle said.
“Where is his dad?” asked Doctor Premji
“He is dead.”
“When?”
“Last fall.”
“Where is your wife?”
“I divorced her.”
“And, do you have kids from your previous wife?”
“I have six. But, I left them back in Chitwan. They don’t live with me anymore. They live with my previous wife. My new wife is Ghorle’s mother.”
“This is a little confusing and disturbing for me, Mr Painterji,” said Doctor Premji. “Now, I understand why Ghorle is having such visions. Are you mindful of what goes on inside a child’s brain/mind when his father dies? When his mother marries immediately after her husband’s death? Listen . . . never ask for this child to come back to me. I cannot help him anymore. You and your newly wedded wife are the cause of his psychological issues. If you cannot look after the child, you must take the child to the orphan house,” Doctor Premji angrily said.
My life is filled with buckets of tears; thousands of people shouting in my ears; the humming and chirping of hundreds of Himalayan birds, which are irresistible to hear. I don’t have choices. I feel lost in this bubble of emotions, melodramatic relationships, and chaotic feelings that seem so obscure—as if these black clouds, in my canvas, will never leave the purple sky.

fiction park section
Published: The Kathmandu Post

Posted on: 2014-09-28 10:13 

Friday, September 26, 2014

JUSTICE DENIED

Nanda Prasad Adhikari’s death in pursuit of justice for his murdered son is a dreadful event (‘Adhikari’s cry for justice dies down,’ September 23, Page 1). An innocent old man seeks justice for his cherished son for more than 300 days and nobody cares. Dr Martin Luther King said precisely that “justice long delayed is justice denied” and the justice denied to Nanda Prasad is intolerable. Both our judiciary and political system are non-functioning, as their only motivation is their vested interests. 



This tragic incident shows how ordinary peoples’ voices go unheard against the political elites of this country. This incident also clearly depicts what Vijay Kumar Pandey wrote in Kantipur daily, aptly pointing out that ‘judges see nothing but t-shirts with prints and t-shirts without prints.’ And, if I may assert, politicians see nothing but politics with power and politics without power. Nanda Prasad had no luxury, like our elitist politicians have today. This tragic and painful incident should never have happened.
- Santosh Kalwar, Chitwan
Letter to the Editor
Published: The Kathmandu Post

Posted on: 2014-09-26 10:04

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

A road block

SEP 16 -
Kathmandu city is full of chaos, with horns honking all about, drivers rushing, and people crossing streets haphazardly. Few months ago, I lost a friend in a bike accident, and I kept wondering whose fault it was? Was it the fault of the driver who had been drinking at Kanchhi’s hotel that night and ran over my friend? Or, was it my friend’s fault, who speeding at more than 100 km/h on the highway was trying to stop the bike when he saw a child crossing the street? Or was it the child’s fault, crossing the street without looking sideways first? God knows. Still, for everybody else, it was a common road accident.
We often hear, and sometimes fear, that someone always drives irresponsibly and so it is better for us to drive carefully. We also hear that people should never drink and drive because it puts their lives as well as that of others at risk. What we do not talk enough about are traffic reforms. Thousands of licenses are granted every month to drivers who are unfamiliar with Kathmandu’s busy traffic and its constantly-under-construction roads.
The problem is not that we do not have any rules, but that our drivers do not follow them. Hundreds of people die in road accidents every year because we continue making rules that nobody follows. What if instead of making way too many rules that everyone virtually breaks, we keep only a few and make sure that they are implemented and respected?
The European way
I once happened to visit a European city, where traffic rules for pedestrians are opposite to ours. When I was getting ready to cross the street, I was astounded to see several cars suddenly stopping to let me get across the street. Apparently, a driver is obliged to give way to pedestrians first. Very polite, isn’t it? This never happens in any city in our country. The idea is simple; yet, demands a deep reform of our current traffic system.
Information technology can play a major role in traffic management. Just as we switched from hand-written to machine-readable passports, we could digitise our bus routes and traffic management. The Kathmandu metropolitan city must start to digitise tempo, bus, microbuses, taxis routes in order to allow fellow travellers plan their journey beforehand. The municipality would also save millions if they published roadmaps for city dwellers. This would not only curb traffic jams but also make the flow of passengers from one place to another smooth. For example, people should be able to plan their journey from point A to B (inside and outside the Valley) via an app on their mobile phone.
Tapping young brains
There is no easy solution to the problem of managing a swelling traffic. Nevertheless, universities and colleges could launch ‘code camp’ contests where student ideas could be developed into app prototypes. The best ideas would then be selected for further refinement. An app to plan a journey is an example. Ncell has recently launched a similar initiative, soliciting participants for ideas on mobile phone apps in four different thematic categories. More of such initiatives should follow.
Recently, traffic management is getting stricter with drunk driving, mostly in the Valley. My aspirations are that someday, like in European cities, all vehicles will give way to pedestrians first. More than that, if we do not come up soon with excellent digital solutions to our burgeoning problems of traffic jams, road accidents and traffic management, we will get ourselves in even more serious troubles.
Kalwar holds a PhD in Science from Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland
Published: The Kathmandu Post
Posted on: 2014-09-16 08:54 

Sunday, September 14, 2014

CURE AGAINST DEPRESSION

I appreciate your recent editorial (‘Mind matters,’ September 10, Page 6). Life is not the same for everybody as some people’s minds are too fragile to handle stress, anxiety, and depression. A short time ago, I defended my doctoral thesis, ‘Measuring human anxiety on the Internet’, where I managed to show, for the first time, that certain internet contents cause humans anxiety, irritation, frustration, loneliness and grief. Suicide and mental health problems have no boundaries. 

Lately, a popular Hollywood comedian, Robin Williams, struggled with depression and committed suicide. There are some well-known approaches for assistance, like family support, therapy, medication, yoga, exercise, and to constantly remind distressed people that there are people who love them.
Santosh Kalwar, Chitwan

Published: The Kathmandu Post
Letter to the Editor
Posted on: 2014-09-14 09:08