THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

Personalities: Walking the World for Peace By Sushma Joshi (Sushma Joshi is a writer based in NYC. She can be reached at: sushma@alumni.brown.edu) The Nepal Digest, Year 14, Volume VIII, Issue 1, Published On Sunday Aug 24, 2003 (Bhadra 07, 2060), New York, USA A year after two airplanes crashed into the Twin Towers, thousands of people gathered on September 11, 2002, to remember the event. In Washington Square Park, New York City, hundreds spoke out against war on an all night vigil. The country was engaged in bombing Afganisthan, and there was talk of war against Iraq. Activists from all ages and backgrounds rallied to the call for peace. As the night progressed, Keika, a friend from Japan, met up with Japanese friends who had walked for a month in a peace march from Albany to New York City. "The oldest person in the march is a Nepali monk, and he is seventy-three years old," she said. "He was one of the most energetic people in the walk." My interest ...

Hundreds of people, young and old, the well-dressed and the fashion-resistant, gathered at the Riverside Church on May 13, 2003, lining up outside the revolving gates to enter that New York institution. And no, it wasn't a rush of new religious awakening that had brought them there - it was a small, petite dark-haired woman, in short cropped hair and a dimpled smile, dressed in a simple white sari. Arundhati Roy, former actor, architect, screenwriter, aerobics instructor, author of the Booker prize-winning bestseller God of Small Things and now a passionate anti-globalization essayist, was the subject of their undivided attention. Howard Zinn, best-selling author of A People's History of the United States, would dialogue with her after her lecture. Three thousand people crammed into the Church, from the pews to the balconies. Two large screens projected the video image of the speaker to the packed balconies. Reverend James A Forbes Jr., senior minister of a Church that has host...

Editorial War in Nepal By Sushma Joshi This piece originally appeared in Samar 15: Summer/Fall, 2002 Nepal, since the start of the People's War in 1996, has seen an unprecedented deterioration of human rights in the civil conflict between the Maoists and the Army. King Birendra's "Zone of Peace" sobriquet for Nepal, while fanciful, had reflected the relative peace it enjoyed within its borders just a short decade ago in comparison to the communal, ethnic and national strife of its neighbours. This image, however, has quickly been washed away in the flood of arbitrary detentions, torture, disappearances, execution style killings and bodily mutilation practiced by both the Maoists and the Army as they fight a bloody civil war -- the Maoists for a idealistic one party state modeled on communist China, and the Army for a restoration of order and stability in a nation already wracked by economic recession, political corruption and massive poverty. The worst backlash has be...

1974 AD A band named 1974 A.D might stump you the first time you hear about them, as they stumped me. But only for a moment. Nirakar, one of the founding members of Nepal’s most cutting edge band, has an explanation: 1974 was the benchmark before really good Seventies acoustic music started giving way to electronic mixes. Calling from Houston, Texas, where his band just finished a performance, he explains: 'We are all very influenced by 70s music, both Western and Nepali. There were a lot of guitar driven bands in the West, and Nepali musicians were also doing great acoustic music in the seventies as well.' Before it all abruptly stopped. Synthesizers started to take over in the mid-Seventies and Eighties, and electronic beats become the order of the day. Acoustics was relegated to the attic as a remnant of the past. And yet for this band of eight musicians, playing everything from bass, guitar, percussions, flutes and even a trumpet, acoustics is more than history - it is what...

Bonded to Labor The Contemporary Situation in Nepal By Sushma Joshi This piece originally appeared in Samar 16 Bonded labor, or debt bondage, is the least known form of slavery that exists today, yet it is the most widely used method of enslaving people. At least 20 million people throughout the world are bonded laborers: whole families of agricultural laborers in India; Togolese girls sold as maids in Gabon; eastern European women tricked into prostitution in western Europe. A complete mixture of people who have one thing in common: a debt they are forced to repay with their labor. On January 13, 2000 the Nepali government, through the Local Self-Governance Act, established a minimum wage for agricultural laborers -- Rs. 74, or just over US$1 per 8-hour workday. On May 1, also International Labor Day, 19 Kamaiya (bonded labor) families filed a petition against their master, ex-minister Shiva Raj Pant, demanding minimum wages in compliance with the new regulation. Shiva Raj Pant paid h...

War in Nepal By Sushma Joshi This piece originally appeared in Samar 15: Summer/Fall, 2002 Nepal, since the start of the People's War in 1996, has seen an unprecedented deterioration of human rights in the civil conflict between the Maoists and the Army. King Birendra's "Zone of Peace" sobriquet for Nepal, while fanciful, had reflected the relative peace it enjoyed within its borders just a short decade ago in comparison to the communal, ethnic and national strife of its neighbours. This image, however, has quickly been washed away in the flood of arbitrary detentions, torture, disappearances, execution style killings and bodily mutilation practiced by both the Maoists and the Army as they fight a bloody civil war -- the Maoists for a idealistic one party state modeled on communist China, and the Army for a restoration of order and stability in a nation already wracked by economic recession, political corruption and massive poverty. The worst backlash has been to the ...

By Sushma Joshi The Kathmandu Post, 24 Feb 2002 A man lies dying on the stairwell of a crumbling tenement house in Bombay. The twisted plot of The Death of Vishnu, mathematics professor Manil Suri’s creation, originates out of that, spiraling like a stairway into social realism and the myths of Bollywood. Drawing from the non-linear genre of Bombay film scripts, and the hyper-linked, multi-plot structure of Hindu mythology, the story works its way slowly but inevitably into the unforgiving politics of religious violence and communalism that dominates the politics of contemporary India. While Vishnu lies delirious, in the throes of his last sexual fantasies before death, two Hindu neighbors play out their day to day rivalries and petty jealousies on his dying body, quarreling over who should pay for the ambulance. This middle class struggle is just another in a long tradition of jealousies and fights in their shared kitchen. Their husbands, meanwhile, ineffectually try to organ...