| Username |
Post |
| Biswo |
Posted
on 06-Oct-01 11:12 AM
He knew his hometown was changed so drastically when he saw it more when he
spent four months there between his undergraduate days and his graduate days.
----------********************--------------------------------****************
First few days were exciting. He visited his few friends, and enjoyed drinking and
furtive smoking in the tourism area of Chitwan. Chitwan changed a lot in those six
years of his post highschool days. Western Chitwan boasted a medical college, an
eye hospital, one cancer hospital , in addition to a few multiple campuses and one
real good agriculture institute. East Chitwan was always a tourism center. Though
people waxed hedonist in those days of prosperity, there were growing number of
visiters in the pacific thought-provoking religious sanctuary called Devighat.
He visited all those places in a few weeks, and pretty soon, got saturated with
such visits. Again, the towns looked to him like the same place, people playing card
and quarelling with each others, people discussing politics, discussing vile sides of
fine people,gossips about ladies of the towns etc etc.
**********---------------------------*****************-------------------------
Goes to movie house. Movie house are no longer crowded.Nine years ago, he had
paid Rs 5.00 for the ticket of Re 1.00 to watch movie "Santaan". Movies specially
Nepali movies were recieved enthusiasticall among viewers. No more. He goes to
movie theater. Even in the matinee show, there were very few people. The fried
bean sellers roam with dreary face in those claustrophobian halls. There are so
many theaters, and there are so few viewers.Welcome to cable operator's era!
Cable operators have taken over the cities, districts and whole country, he later
found. People glue to the TV sets in their house, and watch those infinite
sequences of serials and movies and songs. They no longer yawn in the hot days
waiting in the houses for the sun to set, or a cold air to come. One theater owner
was planning to close the theater in the pretext of revamping it. He saw the last
show there, which was a B-class Hindi movie. "Better movie costs much", the owner
apologized.
***********---------------------------*****************-------------------------
Even before Dashain, he felt the syndrome of eternal ennui. He tried to preach
people about how to ameliorate the situation of village. People gathered around
him, participated in the talks enthusiastically, talked good things, and they went
back, put on their old hat, and the village was same again.Small Libraries of former
youth clubs remain infested with bugs. The majority of the donated books there
were cheap Indian novels, which were so unsuitably arrayed together with the
greatest novels of Russian writers. Not a single person was willing to become the
member of the library by paying Rs 10.00 as an annual fee.
One day, he drove with one of his friends to the northern villages where he never
been to before, which he basically never thought to be in Chitwan. The more he
drove, the more sad features arrived. He crossed the village of Pithuwa, the
village of Jutpaani, and then he went to the old venerable Kalika Mandir. Then,
from very far, a shining corruaged steel plate was beckoning.
"What's that?" He asked.
"A school, made for local Chepang population. By some NGOs." His friend replied.
Chepangs were poor tribes, who used to frequent to his villages in his childhood to
sell Chiuri, a fruit only found in those hills. In a village near the Chepang's
village, he stopped his motorbike, and entered a local restaurant. "I am hungry",
he said to his friend.
"You make Taas?" His friend asked the restaurant.
The restaurateur looked at their face with awe.It looked like only few people could
afford Taas in the restaurant. "Cold drinks also" he added. Yea, he had a fridge
too. It's oxymoron. They live in the village adjacent to the one where one of the
world's last isolated tribes live, and yet, they have electricity, a beaten road, and
even a nice refridgerator.
Then, a few ragamuffins started to cross the small riverine next to the restaurant.
Their hair was unkempt, their face was rough, and they were carrying children in
their backs and children were outnumbering adults by 3:1 ration in the crowd. They
were the tribes.
The older one came near to the restaurant. The restaurateur gave them a look of
contempt. "What do you want to buy?"
The older one hesitated. He wanted one cigarette. The cheapest one.
Deurali. "Everybody smokes. Even the naked children also" the restaurateur said.
Then the Taas was prepared. The customers were sitting in a rough table, made up
of sissau timber. There were some names inscribed in the table, and there were
innumerable scratches. When he started to eat, all the children sorrounded the
table. They stared at his food, and him. Even the elder ones did that. The children
has goo incessantly coming out of their nose. Even flies were sitting in those gooey
excretions, but nobody cared to fly or swat them away. The path of goo from nose
to lips is visible,bloody and scarred in some. They were living in synergy with the
flies.
How can you eat when such people are sorrounding you and staring at you when
you want to eat something? He feels awkward.
The restaurateur feels his uneasiness. He tries to shoo them away. He feels more
uneasiness.
------------------*****************--------------------------**************
He doesn't go up any further. He had seen them enough.
When he comes back, he feels that he had seen through the core of the
development of Chitwan. The Coke factory, the San Miguel Factory, the Marlboro
factory, the top notch colleges and hospitals, the rich Pajero-driving people,
the owners of milk factories, theaters, big poultry farms and the hotel owners of
Sauraha.
"Yes, there are some NGOs working to improve the life conditions of those tribes."
His friend says. Why NGOs ? Why not we? Why can we fell down the trees of
those villages, why can we make shooting range in those hills and why can't we
payfor these activities to those tribals? OK, those hills and timbers are national
properties, but why can't the tribes sell them? If the tribals can't sell them,then we
are we to sell them?
Dashain comes and goes.
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| P |
Posted
on 07-Oct-01 12:25 AM
Biswo,
i have been a frequent visitor of this site for the last couple of months and have enjoyed reading your postings along with few others. what a true picture you’ve portrayed about nepal and its so called road to development.
Here is another story from “she”
She is from kathmandu, goes back home, thinking that not a whole lot can be changed since the time she left because it never did when she was there or at least she felt so. The flight from hongkong to kathmandu in RNAC reminded her where she is really from. Standing in a line to board the plane where almost all the people were either “lahures” or their wives, loaded with gold and watches, literally running to the plane after the gate opened, an old gentlemen who had to put his carry-on right in the overhead compartment above his seat because he was scared somebody might steal it, a woman with an infant wrapped in a small piece of cloth who later on asked the previous gentlemen to take that piece of cloth full with a kid’s “discharge” to the bathroom, which he did with no problems but left it right in front of the bathroom door, since he couldn’t figure out how to open the bathroom door, everyone taking advantage of the free alcohol and in addition, she felt like everyone smelt. However, she kept on reminding herself that these are her people, nepal is where her roots are, felt almost guilty for thinking “otherwise” and blamed herself because she thought she had changed.
All her family members were there to receive her, little kids had changed into young adults, one 8 years old was there with bouquet, hands it to her, gives her a kiss and says welcome home. She was taken back with a surprise, a good surprise, but couldn’t help wondering whether she was like that when she was 8 years old. Ok one kid had changed………but the ride back home was same like before, roads hadn’t changed, and oh yeah……she was feeling better now, there used to be a garbage pile pretty close to her house and her mom had complained about that to the authorities but nothing was done, but these days there were garbage piles in front of everyone’s house……she feels better, at least the garbage problem was still the same. After four days, there was a reunion at her college, where she graduated from, so she went there with bunch of her friends. Needless to say that all the faces were new, so it was good to see some familiar faces of the seniors. Mini skirts and tank tops seemed to be the uniform of the college. The music started and everyone was on the dance floor and all of a sudden she felt like she was in some dance club in the united states. She thought about her times in that very same school, when there were social functions, girls used to sit in one row, guys in another, no one on the dance floor in the beginning, and by the time everyone warms up, feels comfortable with each other and starts having a good time, its time to go home. Ok one other thing has changed.
Spending few days with her family who tried to feed her american breakfast and lunch and dinner with hardly any grease and spices, she decided to spend some time with her friends. All her friends, like herself, were visiting home from different parts of the world. They decided to get together and do those “fun” things that they used to do before, like going to the nirula’s and savoring the pizza that had ketchup instead of pizza sauce, walking around newroad, shopping at thamel, watching nepali movies in the cinema halls and feeling like a richest person in the world if you have Rs100 in your pocket. Those ideas were laughed at…..how can you have fun without going to sun and moon (or the other way around, she doesn’t care), or to the exxon, how can you have get-togethers without having alcohol, how come the party starts before 10 pm, why do you need to get home so soon, and don’t you have a car of your own or borrow your parents? How come? All this time, she was worried she had changed………….
But she had some how come questions too. How come no one drinks the soda in front of “ranjana hall” anymore, how come ticket to any kind of function was not less than Rs1500 and yet all the functions were packed, how come people can pay 29 lakhs in cash for a car, how come no one pays any attention to manisha koirala in one of the christmas eve parties, even though she was trying very hard to catch the attention (or at least she felt so……… isn’t she the celebrity, isn’t she beautiful? “She” had admired manisha from the time “she” saw manisha in megawool commercial, when "she" didn’t even know manisha’s name and used to call manisha, a megawool girl, “pheri bhetaula” was a disappointment but not enough for her to stop admiring manisha), how come a decent school for your kid costs Rs5000 and YES HOW COME, THE REGULAR SALARY OF AN INDIVIDUAL WITH A STRONG ACADEMIC AND EXPERIENCE BACKGROUND IS STILL LESS THAN RS5000 IF YOU ARE LUCKY. yeah..........nepal is a poor country with rich people like someone said and true nepal is not in kathmandu, its outside kathamndu.
And yes biswo dashain comes and goes specially if you have to run around the street looking for a taxi in your brand new kurta surwal and pencil hill and bunch of your friends pass you by and wave at you in their parents’ cars….if you have a mom who loves to feed others and worries about how much “amilo”, “piro” and “noon” every guest in your house takes and no one serves themselves the food sitting on a table right in front of their nose.
Dashain was fun when she was a kid when only thing she worried about was getting a dress that came along with a purse so that she can put all her “dakchina” in it and putting tika on people younger than her wasn’t too much fun since she had to give the money away (although it was actually her parents’ money that she was giving away)
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| Biswo |
Posted
on 07-Oct-01 11:47 AM
Dear Pji
I enjoyed reading your posting, and thanks for reading my posting and making
complimentary observation.I learned a lot from your posting, and it gave me a
new perspective of the same thing I was trying to address.
In another note, it is interesting to find your observation about HKG-KTM flight
similar to my own too. In the past,I have found hundreds of other people trying to
decently travel in RNAC planes, but being victim of some strange mentality of our
flight attendants, and some drunkard passengers.
I don't have problem with Lahure travellers, since they are our own fellow
countrymen and you can't expect everybody to be acadamic or whatever you
say. But I think there is a sizable number of Nepali travellers who revel in the
alcohol provided in gratis in the plane. It is really sad to see people drinking and
speaking loudly, tottering and hurrying to the lavatory frequently without caring
much about fellow passengers. I still think they are minority, but they cause
such a trouble.
I think we must limit alcohol consumption in the plane, and cigarette consumption
also shouldn't be allowed .
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| amina |
Posted
on 07-Oct-01 12:06 PM
Thanks Biswo and P, those articles really made me smile...made me miss home too.
Things have changed quite a bit, for the better or worse, I am not sure. Life style has changed a great deal in Ktm. The sun moon thing and partying after 10 pm..I thought I was the only one who was laughed at :-) In the good old days, it used to be a great adventure when I stayed out till 10 pm. which was quite worthwhile despite the not so adventurous confrontation at the door when I got home.
But the thing that amused me most was the looks I got from people when I spoke in Nepali..what ? they expected to me to speak with an accent ? or forget Nepali altogether ? That, I didn't understand.
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