THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

November 13, 2012 You can read my article on "Paris and Style" in the special Dashain edition of ECS Living (Number 70) magazine. Here's the PDF of the magazine, uploaded on ISSUU : http://issuu.com/sansarmedia/docs/living_70

              I became the latest “unwilling beneficiary” of development as Nepal’s road-building program, which has been ongoing since September 2011, recently came and bulldozed my wall. Along with the wall, we also lost one dozen old growth trees that my grandfather had planted about a century ago. The wall had to go in order to widen the lane from its existing width, the road-builders insisted-even though the lane allowed for water tankers, ambulances etc to pass by at its current width. No matter that the area was a historic area where jatras/festivals had been held for centuries, and which would have benefited from a more rational cultural heritage preservation policy. The lane widening was for these few feet-the new wall is on the left. For this, the historic neighbourhood lost around 2 dozen old growth trees. Axing down Kathmandu's ecological heritage. Old growth jackaranda that took over ...

Sushma Joshi In the past few months, the Maoist government decided to start a road-widening program in Kathmandu. Interestingly, they have taken their road-widening program precisely through all the most historic neighborhoods of Kathmandu. From Baluwatar, where the Prime Minister’s office is located, they intend to blast through the old neighborhoods of Bhatbhateni, which is already heavily congested with traffic. Wider roads, it appears, is not conducive to better traffic flow or better neighborhoods. From Bhatbhateni, the road would curve down to Handigaon.  Handigaon is the oldest known settlement of the Kathmandu Valley, and archeologists have discovered temples and treasures dating back to ancient times. It should be closed off to traffic, like the Patan Durbar Square, and the government should be giving funds to restore its old temples and buildings. Instead, they are appropriating land from the people in the neighborhood so they can have a smooth SUV ride. Despite ...

A two-day workshop considering the lives and movements of Nepalis in all parts of the world was held in Oxford as part of the AHRC project Vernacular Religion: Varieties of Religiosity in the Nepali Diaspora, co-directed by David Gellner and Sondra Hausner. The discussion circled the globe: the panel discussions started in India, continued east to Southeast Asia (Thailand, Burma, and Singapore), west to the Gulf, and across the earth to North America and Europe (UK and Belgium), in order both to draw out patterns of similarity among Nepali populations across the world and identify possible differences between locations. One overarching similarity was the strength of the associational life of Nepalis everywhere in the world (although there were apparent differences in the kinds of organizations that had the most popularity and momentum). And one paradoxical problem that emerged everywhere—but had seemingly different responses in different places—was whether Nepalis thought of themselve...

In Nepal, the government has supported a community forestry model that has been very successful in giving rights to local communities to manage their own forests. This, however, doesn’t protect the community from private companies, especially giant Indian companies which sell herbal medicines, from entering their forests and simply picking and leaving with kilograms of precious herbs and medicinal botanical materials which they are not compensated for. “People come and pick jari-buti (medicinal herbs) in the forests and leave with basketloads-we have no idea what they are taking,” one woman told me. The other trend has been for private companies to enter communities and offer a token amount of money, for which the community then sells its entire forest for timber, or for furniture industries. A case like this was reported from the Terai, in Southern Nepal, which is close to the Indian border and whose forests have dec...

I’ve lived in Kathmandu since i was born  in 1973. It has  gone from a small city of about 300,000 to about 3 million people.  With the upsurge of population has come unregulated growth of huge housing complexes and apartment buildings, much of it rumored to be backed by Maoists. The sight of giant "modern" buildings rising out of the broken and crushed historical neighborhoods, bulldozed by Baburam Bhattarai's determined march towards modernity, is an odd one. These neighbourhoods would be protected heritage neighborhoods in Spain or Italy, but in Nepal are mere "old" and "feudal" areas to be destroyed as quickly as possible. Baburam Bhattarai, who's gone on record saying: "Give me five years and I will turn Nepal into Bihar", seems to be on track to completely ruin and destroy the historical nature of Kathmandu for some imagined Bihari wonderland of skyscrapers and multi-lane highways which he imagines will turn the switch to prosperi...

Sushma Joshi March 15, 2012 Recent attempts to by-pass regulation include the hasty and secretive way in which the government gave the go-ahead to the Three Gorges Company of China without any competitive bidding to build a dam in Western Nepal, giving itself 25% while China took 75% of the deal. The 1.8 billion dollar West Seti would generate 750 megawatts of energy.  A   parliamentary probe   was held around Three Gorges' contract in Nepal. With public inquiry, the deal was changed to 49% for Nepal Government and 51% for the Three Gorges Company. And yet, the way in which this deal was structured and the way in which it was initially passed should have all of us asking questions on whether this electricity will ever be delivered--especially with the way this company has already tried to defraud the Nepal Government with an absurdly unfair deal from the start. The lack of environmental assessments, including issues of sustainability, is another troubling...