THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

OCT 23, 2010 - The Kathmandu Post Close to the blue serenity of the Begnas Lake, walking down a winding path towards a neat new temple, I noticed a gathering. The temple is the Deurali temple, and the gathering is debating an age-old dilemma in Nepali society. A young girl, around 13, has been possessed by the goddess. She has been shaking and trembling for the past few days. The goddess within her demands sacrifice. The temple, however, has been built a few decades ago under the blessing of a Guruji—under one condition. The temple was to be free of blood sacrifices. This dilemma—whether to sacrifice or not sacrifice—continues to arise in Nepali homes each Dashain. In our own family, we no longer give sacrifices. A rather interesting incident allows for this to happen. According to my mother, about a decade ago, she took three goats and left it with a family who could feed the goats some fresh grass till the day of sacrifice. While taking the animals to them, she had this thought: ...

A house divided | Oped | :: The Kathmandu Post :: A house divided The global and the local Sushma Joshi SEP 25, 2010 - Yesterday, as I watched live on television President Obama give his speech in front of the UN General Assembly, one thing struck me: this man knows how to create consensus. Unlike his predecessor ex-President Bush, who seemed to specialise in dividing the world and creating mass panic (Muslims versus non-Muslims, Terrorists versus the Good Guys, Green Coded Time versus Orange Coded Time etc), President Obama creates a sense of a world united for the same peaceful purpose. In his speech, Obama went back to human rights, the foundation that created the United Nations. He talked about how each nation on earth could aspire towards this ideal of democracy by protecting human rights. He talked about nations’ willingness to engage with open government and open society—from India, the biggest democracy on earth, to North Korea, which remained an imprisoned island. ...

 SUSHMA JOSHI 29 Aug 2010--The Kathmandu Post As the rivers rose this monsoon, I thought about a trip I’d taken last year in the spring. I was going from Dharan to a village in Saptari. I had been told the bus trip would take two hours. As the bus started to bump and grind through a white expanse of sand, I realised I was crossing the breach in the Koshi barrage. Here and there, there were desultory detritus of life from the past—a tree half buried in sand, a home sunk into the morass. We’d already been in the crowded bus for four hours. The last hour we crossed a desert that had appeared in the middle of Nepal’s fertile Tarai. The village was nowhere in sight.   As the bus started to slowly grind across the pure white expanse of sand, I had one of those moments of complete disorientation and loss that I’d felt only a few times before. I’d felt that going deeper and deeper into Bombay’s red-light district with two British journalists once on an investigative jo...

Guava leaf cure Sushma Joshi AUG 14 - The Kathmandu Post Last Tuesday, Kalpana Dhimal (28), hung herself after she couldn’t afford health care for her infant daughter. The baby died a day later. “Poverty-stricken mom hangs self,” was the headline of a national daily. According to the same report, the child was running a 105 degree fever. The nursing home demanded Rs.1,700 per day. Like many women, she didn’t ask her husband or family for the money. She chose to die instead. A family of three—a father, mother and adult daughter—hung themselves on a tree after the family was unable to afford treatment for the daughter’s epilepsy a few months ago. The family was Brahmin, showing that despite popular belief, poverty crosses caste boundaries. The nation should hang its head in shame when suicide becomes a form of protest, which it has started to be, increasingly, in New Nepal. In April, UML cadre Dikendra Rajbanshi hung himself in the premises of the party headquarters. The caus...

SUSHMA JOSHI 12 Sep 2010, The Kathmandu Post Two weeks ago, I wrote an article titled “Guava Cure.” In it, I discussed the soaring costs of allopathic healthcare, and suggested traditional medicine (TM) may provide an alternative to hospital and doctor care. That evening, I got two responses. The first one said: “You are an incurable romantic! A believer in magic! All those leaves and herbs that you believe in—I know I can’t convince you that there is a reason why science is science, and has led to the incredible advance of human knowledge. Magic can’t do that. Those stories of so-and-so being cured of this or that with special leaves, herbs, potions, etc., are just observational, which means they are not grounded on real, solid evidence. They are just anecdotes. All the leaves and herbs in the world cannot cure a person with a serious bacterial infection, like TB, for example. It’s like those religious fanatics in the US (Christian Scientists, usually, and t...

Sushma Joshi JUL 24, 2010 - The Kathmandu Post São Paolo is the third largest city in the world—after Mexico City and Bombay, according to some commentators. São Paolo is also the city with the largest population of Japanese outside Japan. Immigrants usually come from poorer countries, in my experience. Urban metropolis from New York to London have neighbourhoods named Chinatown and little Italy and little India—countries where large number of residents faced poverty and fled to a better land. So it was a surprise to see a neighborhood of immigrants composed of people normally considered wealthy and privileged—in this case, the Japanese. Liberdade, a neighborhood in central São Paolo, hums with the Sunday fair common to Brazilian cities—except these stalls are full of paper origami, t-shirts with kanji calligraphy, red banners with Katakana and Portuguese signs. The stalls are manned by elderly Japanese, who sell their wares in jerky Portuguese. Stalls sell a sizzling yakiss...

SUSHMA JOSHI, Kathmandu Post, 18 July 2010 A young Nepali friend of mine, who spends most of his time in a rather charming coffee shop and who seems to mysteriously make lots of money in “marketing consulting” gigs that he gets through referrals and the Internet, told me recently that the time had come to outsource Nepal’s government to the experts. I laughed. I said: “Outsource the government? But you can’t do that!” “Why not?” he said, deadly serious. “We’ve tried with the monarchy. We’ve tried with the democrats. We’ve tried with Maoists. We gave them all a fair shot. They all failed. Now its time to bring in the experts.” All we needed, he said, is about 50 of Asia’s top leaders and managers who’ve put other countries on track. Water system falling apart? Let’s bring in Singapore’s water managers. Airline falling apart? Let’s bring in Thailand’s airline managers. “Nepal Rastra Bank,” he says, “loses millions of rupees each year from a few rupees being taken here and there by employ...