Dasain, the ten-day-long festival of Kali, arrives Oct 13th and it can't get here fast enough. More than a million people will try to take a bus outta Kathmandu to go "home" - takes 3,500 buses to accomplish this feat, and the petrol crisis threatens to derail tithe whole operation. One of the days of dasain is devoted to honoring dogs. This one is named "Moti"
Nepal Cable Channel News: Bollywood has been blocked!
The patriotic cable TV operators of Kathmandu have removed the Indian channels from their stations.
But hey - Nepali dance styles, as well as Nepali music videos, are - Bindass!
Oops, that was Hindi! the correct Nepali word is Nakkali!
Click here for my favorite.
The great Sharuk Khan. Some people say that in his movies he portrays a character very similar to
how I am, in real life. I try to remain humble about it.
And then there's Anushka Sharma - lip-synching the
greatest love song of all time .....
when she's not in a bikini....
They're unlikely to find petrol for that scooter in Kathmandu these days. from the movie "Rab Ni Bane de Jodi" - SRK is famous for eventually crying at some point in his movies. I saw this one on the big screen, and in homage to past tearjerkers, SRK cried within one minute of the beginning. The audience cheered.
Shreya Goshal
And who could ever possibly resist the ethereal Shreya Goshal?
or Kailash Kher?
I do have Nepali favorites - but for now, if you are reading this from Kathmandu, I'm giving you a quick Bollywood fix.
Oh yes, and there's news about the Siege of Kathmandu too! The petrol crisis, and the protests by the Nepalis of the Terai.....
Ganesh, the elephant-headed boy. He is "The Remover of Obstacles" and many taxi drivers have a small Ganesh on their dashboard, to speed them on their way. I told you there would be cute baby elephants in a previous blog - and then forgot to add them. Here he is!
One last
Hindi toe-tapper.
If you click on the "continue reading?" button you will get a reward: a super pic of a kittykat! click below!
Here's your kittycat photo. These are less numerous than formerly. From Kathmandu I once FaceBooked my friends to say a tiger had been seen 400m from my flat. My USA friends replied "OMG!" and I enjoyed the joke for a day until I revealed that I lived near the zoo.
Need a summary of the crisis so far? Here's a two-minute English-language news broadcast that just about sums it up:
https://youtu.be/...
http://myrepublica.com/...
CK Lal is an editorial writer for Republica. Today, he raised the question as to how long this will continue. He is the person who coined the term "PEON" - the Permanent Establishment of Nepal" to describe the clique of influential Kathmandu-based high-caste males who always seem to end up on top.
He wrote:
.... Resilient resistance The PEON families greeted the promulgation of a regressive constitution with firecrackers in Kathmandu. Meanwhile, much of Tarai-Madhesh was mourning the assassination of its dreams with total blackout. Promulgators of the statute had perhaps perceived that their act will become fait accompli and voices of dissent will die down with the passage of time. The decision of the Council of Ministers to amend certain provisions of the constitution within two weeks of its inauguration shows that the assumption was clearly wrong.
Proposed amendments too fail to address Madheshi concerns. To borrow a phrase from CPN-UML stalwart Madhav Nepal, it promises "half-corrected regression" at best, with vague promises of population-based constituencies and proportionate representation. Delineation of Tharuhat and Madhesh provinces is still a contested issue. The phrase of Fijikaran fails to hide racist intentions of citizenship laws. These are contentions that will continue to engage experts for quite a while. The refrain is of comprehensive nature in the streets of Tarai-Madhesh: The fight is for full dignity. - See more at: http://myrepublica.com/...
Read the whole thing for much more nuanced context. You may recall that a mass grave was accidentally discovered last week near Janakpur, the day of the non-violent human chain, and that the report of it and pictures created an immediate reaction in Terai. In the editorial above, Mr. Lal describes an incident in Janakpur in 2002.
A year after the Creeping Coup of King Gyanedra had begun to unfold from October 4, 2002; Sanjiv Kumar Karna, Durgesh Labh, Jitendra Jha, Pramod Narayan Mandal and Shailendra Yadav were taken under control from Janakapur, whisked away to Godar, killed in cold blood, and then buried on the shallow banks of Kamala River on the suspicion of being Maoists. Their remains were later exhumed under the aegis of international agencies such as the International Centre for Transitional Justice and the Barcelona International Peace Resource Center.
Perpetrators were never brought to book...... - See more at: http://myrepublica.com/...
It doesn't matter that the police last week provided a plausible explanation: the new mass grave was a reminder of past oppression and it fit neatly into the narrative.
The Terai Human Rights Defenders Alliance demands an investigation.
Nepali Nationalism
And another opinion piece, titled One Too Many. This week many of the writers are addressing the appeal to Nepali pride. There is a lot of anti-India feeling in Kathmandu, and an amazing aspect is the way India denies any role in a blockade. This official denial in and of itself, causes everyone's head to spin. The writer concludes:
It’s a blockade, sure. And of course it is low, petty – and illegal -- to resort to strangling an already-struggling neighbour because things didn’t go one’s way. But, the blockade is really just the icing on the cake. Even without it, we were in the gutter. The idea that the Madhes problem will go away as soon as the border opens up for supplies is naive.
The political leaders have no choice but to bring the agitators on board and amend the constitution. That would also go a long way in easing the situation that many Madhesi lawmakers in the NC, UML and UCPN(M) find themselves in. They may have signed on to the statute, but they did so with a heavy heart and in the words of one lawmaker, “we closed the door to our constituencies”.
A short editorial to the situation of Women's rights appeared on a web page titled "Madhesi Youth." The editorial is one thing, but even the idea that Madhesi youth would be developing solidarity via a web page would have been unimaginable even ten years ago.
.... the root of gender discrimination often comes from the fact that daughters are not treated as equals from birth and even though we secure rights for women after marriage, the perception instilled from very young age make it socially acceptable to discriminate daughters, which has serious consequences in her welfare as adult women.
Related to this, for my
second book I wanted to focus on the role of women in Nepal. Instead of writing nonfiction about the issues one by one,
I chose the fiction route, and decided to create a female main character that the reader would relate to, and - stuff happens to her. Like all dark-skinned Nepali girls, her nickname growing up is "Kali."
This week's activities
There is no new drama for this week, the shaky status quo will hold. This is because the Kathmandu government is re-forming themselves, shuffling the chairs around to fit the dictates of the new constitution. For these diaries, I stay away from reviewing the list of names in Kathmandu or Terai - in my view this amounts to little more than gossip. Having said that, it's worth noting that the putative Prime Minister was quoted as having referred to the protesters in Terai as "bothersome flies"
बनेपा- नेकपा एमालेका अध्यक्ष केपी शर्मा ओलीले जनता भड्काउनका लागि संविधान विरोधीले संविधानको अपव्याख्या गरिरहेको बताएका छन्।
एमाले काभ्रेले शनिबार आयोजना गरेको कार्यकर्ता भेलामा अध्यक्ष ओलीले भने, 'गाउँ–गाउँमा गएर संविधान घोषणा भएपछि के पायौ भन्दै जनता भाँड्ने काम भइरहेको छ।'आन्दोलनरत संयुक्त लोकतान्त्रिक मधेसी मोर्चाले हुलाकी राजमार्गमा बिहीबार गरेको मानवसाङ्लो प्रदर्शनलाई लक्षित गर्दै उनले भने, 'यो मानवसाङ्लो होइन, माखेसाङ्लो हो। संविधान घोषणा भएपछि विकास गर्नुपर्नेमा अवरोध पार्ने गरी साङ्लो बनाइएको छ।' - See more at: http://nagariknews.com/...
We'd call this an "intemperate remark" in USA.
The Nepalis of Terai have vowed to keep up the pressure. Negotiating committees have been formed.
Chess was invented in India, to teach young princes the arts of war. I am using the term "Siege of Kathmandu" because from the beginning I thought it would be a drawn-out process of attrition. The siege-makers draw the circle around the beleaguered defenders - and wait.
The Guardian
According to The Guardian, the economic impact of the strikes is worse than that of the earthquake.
Strikes, blockades and protests against Nepal’s new constitution have cost the economy more than $1bn, according to the Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FNCCI) – just months after the country was struck by a series of devastating earthquakes.
The president of the FNCCI, Pashupati Murarka, described the crisis as the country’s worst economic disaster. “The economy has been almost completely stalled for the past two months,” Murarka said. “The impact is worse than the earthquake.”
I'll keep writing these until the siege is lifted. Maybe a week - maybe a month - maybe a year?