tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55486082024-03-12T23:40:53.994-04:00THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCALThe civil wars of the twenty-first century: Sushma Joshi's slightly twisted perspective of the universe.Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.comBlogger348125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-85789946396856503122022-01-25T07:23:00.001-05:002022-01-25T07:23:11.583-05:00Letter to Nepal Medical CouncilJanuary 25, 2022 Dear Medical Council of Nepal: The World Bank is sending 4 million doses of Moderna covid vaccine for Nepali children aged 12-17, although this vaccine is not approved by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) of the USA for this age group. This means the World Bank is sponsoring a very large clinical trial on Nepali children, without getting consent from parents Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-78268638746485528732021-04-19T06:19:00.006-04:002021-04-19T06:27:07.134-04:00Nepal's Ayurvedic MasterplanAyurveda and traditional healing traditions from around the world are dismissed as “pseudo-science.” The justification for this arrogant condescension is: “Herbs haven’t gone though a clinical trial.”This argument is lazy. You can find medical research literature ofherbs like gurjo, hibiscus, and timmur, in the Western scientifictradition, archived online. I have read these research articles Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-39107415926309699682020-07-14T09:46:00.002-04:002020-07-14T09:46:55.144-04:00Decolonizing the planetSushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-50586718228101172722020-06-27T13:48:00.002-04:002020-06-27T13:50:22.752-04:00America's crimes against humanityAnnapurna Express, 17/6/2020
Fifty-four African nations have called on UN Human Rights Council to have an urgent debate on police brutality and racially inspired human rights violations. The letter asks for the debate to be held next week.
The militarization of the police and imprisonment of African-Americans go back to slavery. White supremacy—the notion of white culture being supreme over Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-77432685662356764562020-06-27T13:41:00.003-04:002020-06-27T13:44:02.061-04:00Famine or feast?
Annapurna Express, 31/5/2020
Kathmandu saw its first known starvation death
this week: Surya Bahadur Tamang, who’d spent several decades portering goods in
Kathmandu, was found dead on the sidewalks of Kirtipur. He did not make enough money
to rent a room for himself, so he slept on the streets. On Saturday, May 23,
exactly two months after the lockdown started and all work shut down, Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-59465636070728066952020-05-11T13:56:00.000-04:002020-06-27T13:58:09.701-04:00Nepal's Lockdown Reality CheckAnnapurna Express, 11/5/2020
A few nights ago, I heard a young child talking with a man outside my lane. The voice of the child was rough, like she was from the villages and hadn’t been educated. The man was laughing occasionally in the casual manner of the laborers who still lived in the giant big building that has been constructed in front of our house as an investment property. Built for $Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-42298990648069635802020-04-24T13:52:00.000-04:002020-06-27T13:55:47.755-04:00Cold West, Hot EastAnnapurna Express, 24/04/2020
Despite evidence coronavirus has spread rapidly in rich, developed countries, and left poor countries unscathed, WHO keeps up the official pretense that it will affect all countries equally. This, in fact, has shown not to be the case, after almost 3.5 months of global contagion.
If the scientific establishment was in the service of science (and not in the Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-7255586935499380912020-02-14T09:43:00.000-05:002020-02-14T09:43:07.304-05:00Local heating, not just globalWestern science is lauded as the ultimate
arbiter of knowledge. When it comes to climate change, they are often quoted as
the experts, with people from all fields urging the irrational: “Listen to the
science!”
The only problem: scientists are limited in
their imagination and cannot see beyond the 1.5 degree threshold. Much like Tom
Friedman’s “The World is Flat,” they imagine the planet to beSushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-29298086340615085512020-01-24T10:17:00.002-05:002020-01-24T10:17:34.698-05:00Path to Water Sustainability
It is clear that the city of Kathmandu
cannot depend upon drinking water ferried on fossil fuel tankers, although the
current government has embraced this model as a permanent one. Not only do the
millions of trips made per month foul the already polluted air, it also adds
hugely to poor people’s water and health bills.
Nepal Parliament must pass a resolution
which makes it mandatory for Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-73693544595953828802020-01-10T23:45:00.004-05:002020-01-10T23:45:49.187-05:00 Who is to blame?Annapurna Express, January 10, 2020
Australia is on fire. Who is to blame for
the millions of acres burnt to cinder, the lives lost and properties destroyed,
the almost half billion animals killed?
Australia is a major producer and user of
fossil fuel. Australia Energy Update 2018, from Australian Government’s
Department of Environment and Energy (energy.gov.au), says coal, oil and gas
Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-8175165081503924872019-12-28T07:25:00.001-05:002019-12-28T07:25:52.755-05:00Disband The Fourth WallA few weeks ago, I wrote an op-ed called
“Disband the UN.” A former senior UN official wrote to me and said he disagreed
with my thesis. Had I looked at the possibilities of reform within the UN? I
explained that my reasoning went beyond looking at the possibilities of change
within the UN—the time for that is long past.
What I am asking for is a radical rehaul of
our contemporary financial Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-23218779935815136742019-11-29T09:55:00.001-05:002019-11-29T09:55:59.102-05:00Disband the UN
The Annapurna Express, November 29, 2019
The UN was set up after WWII with good
intentions. Fifty-one countries got together and entered a network whose aim
was “maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly
relations among nations and promoting social progress, better living standards
and human rights” (UN website.) Nobody could disagree with such a mandate.
ButSushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-2754969149428242792019-10-19T08:22:00.000-04:002019-10-19T08:22:07.112-04:00ROMANTICIZING THE JANJATI This article was rejected by the Brahmin-Chettri editors because they were too terrified to challenge PC perceptions of the janjati, and also because most probably they did not want to be branded racists. Hence rather late I decided to run it in my blog instead. The article addresses the violence against women in the name of witchcraft.
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> ROMANTICIZING Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-13772936599903257222019-10-12T11:52:00.003-04:002019-10-12T11:52:22.369-04:00President Xi’s Visit to Nepal: How we should shape our foreign policy
As Nepal gears up for Chinese President Xi’s visit this Saturday afternoon, I thought I’d put forth some thoughts of mine is what is otherwise an entirely male dominated foreign policy environment. All commentators (former and present diplomats, government officials, journalists) in Nepal are male, and this definitely shapes the way we view what international relations between the two countries Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-752087972128630722019-10-04T05:47:00.001-04:002019-10-04T06:29:56.037-04:00How Dare YouAnnapurna Express, October 4th, 2019
“Change is coming, whether you like it or
not.”
Wise words from a sixteen year old that is
lost amongst the clamor of panicking adults who can’t see beyond their own
narrow confines of belief and bank accounts. Greta Thunberg has blown the conch
shell, metaphorically speaking. In Hindu mythology, the conch shell was blown
at the beginning of a battle of Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-42645379799040233742019-09-07T12:40:00.000-04:002019-09-08T00:45:08.523-04:00THE BURNING OF BRAZIL
Sushma Joshi, Annapurna Express, September 6th, 2019
When I was an undergraduate at Brown University, I took a class on Colonial Latin America. An exceptionally brilliant professor, R. Douglas Cope, taught the class. Methodically through the semester, we read texts describing the arrival of the Spanish from Europe, and their gradual takeover of Latin and South America. We went through the Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-22613203588652037472019-08-13T01:14:00.003-04:002019-08-13T01:14:43.078-04:00 THE TIGER’S DESTINY10 August, 2019, Annapurna Express
A friend of mine who used to work for
ICIMOD said to me: “You should write an op-ed about how we always respond to
disasters when they occur, but we never plan for them proactively. An
earthquake cannot be predicted, but floods happen yearly. Why don’t we have
policies and implementation to stop this from happening? It’s a policy of
responding to disasterSushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-33968772007552803032019-07-27T04:27:00.004-04:002019-07-27T04:27:42.821-04:00Drought and Flood
Diagram sourced from this website at ResearchGate:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/a-Schematic-of-a-traditional-water-supply-dhunge-dhara-or-hiti-in-the-Kathmandu-Valley_fig1_277652904
Full article: Traditional Knowledge of Rainwater Harvesting Compared to Five Modern Case Studies
~~~
My article "Drought and Flood" was published in the Annapurna Express on July 27, 2019. Read it Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-69295863036961368252019-07-16T07:07:00.000-04:002019-07-16T09:44:56.862-04:00Conserve water, South Asia!Annapurna Express, July 12, 2019
June 11th is the date for the
arrival of the monsoon in Nepal. This year, there was no sign of rain on the 11th.
The days ticked by as we looked at the skies, increasingly anxious about the
oppressive feeling in the air. A cyclone predicted to hit the coast of Gujarat
moved away to the ocean, and was blamed for sucking rain away from the
mainland. Noone—Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-40298091631419130822019-06-15T12:35:00.001-04:002019-06-29T11:40:18.802-04:00Homo Insapiens
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), an intergovernmental body which assesses the state of biodiversity and the ecosystem services it provides to society, last week released a report stating one million species are at risk of extinction. They estimate there are 5.5 million species of insects, of which 10% are threatened (Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-72313885464465217582019-05-17T10:04:00.003-04:002019-06-29T11:42:28.905-04:00 HARVARD AND ITS TONE DEAFNESS TO THE METOO MOVEMENT
Annapurna Express, May 17, 2019
Harvard has asked Professor Ronald S.
Sullivan Jr., law professor at the Harvard Law Department and first
African-American dean at the college, to step down from his post. The esteemed
Professor announced his intention to defend Harvey Weinstein in January, which
led to months of student protests before Harvard finally made the call to ask
him to step down. Mr. Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-67804782804283117162019-05-11T06:04:00.001-04:002019-06-29T11:44:04.000-04:00THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY IS A MYTH
Annapurna Express, May 3rd, 2019
The world’s waterways—oceans, rivers, Antartic ice sheets, Arctic polar bear habitats, Alpine mountain lakes, Himalayan mountain glaciers—are inundated with plastic. At first, it was just a garbage problem, something we as humans thought we would be able to deal with technological prowess. We could always rely upon recycling.
This thought comforted us with Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-71314506045344750212019-03-15T11:13:00.000-04:002019-05-17T11:14:34.455-04:00FREE THE PRESS
Wikikeaks publisher Julian Assange has been taken into custody by the British Police. After almost 7 years in the Ecuadorian Embassy, he was dragged out, looking haggard and magnificent as Tolstoy with a giant white beard. The Ecuadorian Embassy had given him generous refuge till a change of regime brought an end to his asylum status—who knew asylum could be revoked? Maybe the Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-59737872768514652512018-11-11T11:19:00.005-05:002018-11-11T11:19:57.922-05:00Delhi University's MA in sociology includes my article "Cheli-Beti"
The syllabus of the MA in sociology at Delhi University includes my article Cheli-Beti: Discourses of trafficking, and constructions gender, citizenship and nation in modern Nepal in its reading list.
Happy to be on the same page as Amartya Sen and Foucault!
Course SOC 218: Population and Society
This course takes students through the key concepts, approaches, Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5548608.post-31984343896876740142018-11-11T11:10:00.002-05:002019-05-21T03:43:30.300-04:00British Nepal Academic Council website features "Global Nepalis"
Global Nepalis : Religion, Culture, and Community in a New and Old Diaspora
Edited by David N. Gellner and Edited by Sondra L. Hausner
540 Pages | Various, 10 Figures, 9 Tables
Contributors: Krishna P. Adhikari, Radha Adhikari, Tristan Bruslé, Sienna R. Craig, Florence Gurung, Nawang Tsering Gurung, Susan Hangen, Sushma Joshi, Chandra K. Laksamba, Kelvin E.Y. Low, Kathryn March, Mitra Pariyar,Sushma Joshihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15801489353753793086noreply@blogger.com0