OUTLOOK
Sinking Into Red and Falling for Nepal By Genisha Chhantel-Kaucha
I
look a little out of the map and I sound a little too much like a broken record. The tongues I can converse in are far too foreign for the ears of yours. I spent 18 years holding onto my green Nepali passport, most of the times forgetting my roots and ignoring the fact that I was not of the same nationality as my best friends. It would be impossible to tell I had once thought my father was the craziest man for bringing me to this place which is clearly falling apart. Cracks by cracks, bricks by bricks and stones by stones, it is falling. We are nothing but a pile of dust; when stepped on, when walked over, when blown over, we cause such unsettlement and we seem to mean business and then we just settle back down, right back to where we were, like nothing ever happened. That is how it is here in Nepal. The bandhs that do not make sense half the time; our bandhs are like dust and so are our politicians, as are the citizens and the roads we tread on. We are a country of dust – literally and figuratively. We are a country of a great magnitude. We have Mount Everest. We have Prabal Gurung and our land is known for lion hearted Sherpas taking the world up the highest mountains. We have Lord Buddha’s birthplace marked here. We have amazing trekking routes and equally amazing people. We have momos, chhyang and sel roti. We have streets full of stray dogs and dangerously hanging wires out in the open with tall, old buses and trucks threatening to rip them apart as the vehicles better fitted to be retired make their way through, almost blindly. We have a funny rule of breaking up what is already broken – the demolition of roads for expansion is baffling enough for me because truth be told, it is just causing more jams than ever. We practically have no system at all. The only systems we have are that the taxi drivers will almost always be a pain especially when in rush and caught in the pouring rain. The traffic is always a killer. We spit everywhere on the roads. The vegetable and biscuit prices differing more than Rs.10 from one shop to another, is such a mindplaying game and a time-consuming effort to remember where to get a cheaper deal. We never get all the good Hollywood movies, just the mainstreams. Now, with the new ban on Hollywood and Bollywood movies in our cinema halls, we have nothing but just Nepali movies. We have micros, inhumanely packed with humans, breathing in each others’ musky evaporating sweat. We do not shower until we have to, once winter is here. We do not even shower during the blistering summer heat. We are the second richest in terms of water resources but load shedding has been haunting us forever, forget water for a shower. We are one of the poorest countries in the world but we also have one of the richest cultures and heritage in the world. The holy Bagmati River does not smell as holy but we are such religious bunches and in bhatti pasals, that is where we spend our day lazing around drinking tea, talking about everything especially politics. We party hard every Friday night, even on Wednesdays, just because
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+977 | Gen-Y, Fashion & Lifestyle | November | 2012
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we are sliding into the weekends. We make every excuse to party. Can you believe the month-long Teej festivity, the ladies singing dohori in screechy voices and dancing in circles again and again? I am up for the joy but I find it all too ridiculous at the entire merriment. And then, Dashain is almost here. Slaughtering of poor khasis has already begun and so have the sales. I have already started setting aside Rs. 5 and Rs. 10 notes to play challi flush. I wonder if I still remember how to play marriage. We are a loud bunch. We love to wear gold and speak of our wealth and our failing health because we eat too much khasi ko masu and we do not really have a good control over our alcohol consumption once we begin with a sip. We have everything – the beautiful sky, the polluted streets, reckless drivers and impossible people. We have worms, nails and