| Hom Raj |
Posted
on 24-Feb-01 04:47 PM
A thought on elitism: I am a male Bahun, and if someone says to me that Bahuns in my village are more privileged than dalits, and males more privileged than women, this doesn’t offend me. I would agree, and want to change it. I think we all must recognize disastrous problem of elitism/cronyism/old boy network/Englishocracy without taking offense when it applies to us. Which (since this is in English, and anyone reading this has access to computer) it certainly does, though surely to greater or lesser degrees depending on the person.
Some thoughts on NGOs and donor agencies: What does it mean to give and to get? You have to personalize things, and then you can go on macro level. Why does a person give? If you have no care about how you’re recognized you might as well throw money on the street where no one knows you. Believe me, it would make people very happy. However, the giver wants acknowledgment. This is merely human. Imagine you have an old laptop that can’t be upgraded and give it to a friend who could never afford one. You are just being helpful, not manipulative. Yet later if the friend doesn’t acknowledge you, wouldn’t you be offended?
So it is with donor agencies. The giver wants his/her ideas to be considered. When agencies give they are acknowledged by being granted a place at the table. Giving is power. Thus we see the donor agencies/Westerners gaining control over Nepal, and often it is mostly elite who benefit from this because the elite can talk to Westerners. This is distorting, and thus important issues which are not on mental landscape of Nuppies (Nepali Urban Professionals Youth, or Nepali Urban Professional Incipient Elite) -- not for any conscious reason necessarily but because as one Radha/Namita said we don’t come from vacuum – are then ignored. Also because Nuppies depend on donor agencies for dollars and certain issues are more dramatic for fund raising. (When I am in Nepal I will surely fall into Nuppy category, so I am being self-critical here as well, I am not saying this group is “bad”.)
Here is one complicated instance of distortion. Today I saw a talk by an Indian woman based in U.S. who works against dowry violence. Obviously this is horrible, horrible thing. Yet millions more women are living in daily fear of domestic violence than have ever been burned about dowries, yet what attention is given to wife-beating in South Asia? A fire is visible. It is “hot.” It makes for dramatic news and thus donor money. Same with other fashionable issues: child labor, kamaiyas, women trafficking, AIDS. It is like the blemish on the surface of the onion. You may see the blemish on the surface, but if you fail to peel the onion a couple layers down, maybe there is a bug that you couldn’t see that is even worse than that blemish.
But it is more complicated than that also. Because these “hot” issues that attract Nuppy and donor attention, etc, are also truly cases of systematic wrong being done against our sisters and brothers. People have been deprived of their rights. And for sake of purity can we say we don’t care about A because B is worse? Is it worse to do something with mixed motives (and which of us does not have those)? Worse to lure the poison of neocolonialism, or to fail to put well-meaning energy to use for good of some people who truly need it? Worse to have a flawed response to fixing systematic wrongs, or to have no response at all?
Do I have an answer? No, I do not. My only “answer” is that we must question everything we do. We must fight the mental illiteracy of the culture of non-questioning, non-critical thinking, in which we were raised. Before we have answers we must learn to question. Absence of questioning is the existence of slavery.
Homraj.
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