THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

Nation Weekly magazine, June 28-June 4, 2004 Nepali parents find their children living a life of servitude in an Indian circus. But they also find out that trying to extract their own children from the circus can be dangerous BY SUSHMA JOSHI When four parents from Bijauna village in Makwanpur left for India on June 13 in an attempt to rescue their children from The Great Roman Circus near Lucknow, they did not know they were going to end up in jail. The raid organized by the Nepal Child Welfare Foundation (NCWF) and the South Asian Coalition Against Child Servitude (SACCS) turned violent as circus employees attacked the activists and journalists present. Of the estimated 35 Nepali children working in the circus, only one of them, Nita Lama, escaped with her parents. She too found herself held in custody at the magistrate’s office in Karnailganj, Uttar Pradesh. The story illustrates how international and national mechanisms that protect children are strongly determined by local conditio...

PINK URINALS AND BROKEN PLATES June 27, 2004, Nation Weekly Magazine Sushma Joshi Life intersected with art as your critic came down with food poisoning on her way to Bhaktapur to see the first international arts workshop in Nepal. As I rushed past an inexplicable brick wall in the middle of the square and entered the bathroom, there it was! An urinal in that peculiar shade of pink so beloved to middle class Nepal. When Marcel Duchamp first took that profane object, the urinal, and put it into a sacred space, the gallery, and signed it: “R.Mutt”, he was not just being perverse. He was going against centuries of history of representational Western art that insisted that the mode of realism, which sadly still rules over Nepal’s gallery scene, was the only true art. Duchamp’s contempt of the art market and its machinations, which took art objects and turned them into commodities, was another reason for his brash, in-your-face display. If the idea of urinals as Art churns your stoma...

MIDDLE CLASS RACE Sushma Joshi My nephew had his pasni (rice-eating) ceremony a few days ago. The five-month old got, amongst other presents, eight racing cars. The brightly colored, glittering toys were inscribed with words such as: “super”, “powerful”, “top driver”, “Police”, “prowl car” and my personal favorite: “conquest”. Racing cars are not particularly indigenous to the Kathmandu Valley, so when they started to pile up I started to wonder why this automobile had taken such a special hold on the Nepali imagination. You couldn’t trace it back to the influence of television. There are plenty of popular TV shows on boxing and cricket, but there were almost no little cricket bat toys, and no little boxing glove toys. So why the racing car? Since children play not only for fun, but also to acquire skills useful in later life, I wondered if the racing car symbolized by nephew’s future of mobility in the Kathmandu Valley. This is a valley congested with station wagons, cars and m...

Pink Urinals and Broken Plates Nation Weekly, 21-June 27, 2004

Nation Weekly magazine, Sushma Joshi Firas Al-Bakwa, a 29 year old Iraqi refugee, has been in Nepal for the last four years. He left Baghdad in 1999. The police fired into a large crowd that was demonstrating against the assassination of Ayatollah Al-Sadar, a Shia leader. Firas, who carried a wounded friend to safety, fled after he heard Saddam’s police were gunning for him. After Firas Al-Bakwa spending some time in Jordan, Firas was on his way to New Zealand when the immigration authorities in Hongkong detected his fake passport, and sent him back to his last port of arrival, Kathmandu. Firas has UNHCR status as a refugee but is unable to leave because the Nepali government insists he must pay the monthly $180 visitor visa fee that has accumulated for four years, along with fines. Firas talked with Sushma Joshi of the Nation Weekly magazine about his feelings of being unable to leave a country which has become his prison. Why did you leave? I was taking part in the protest against th...

Nation Weekly, June 14-June 20, 2004 Oliver Twist Finds A New Home A group of orphans rescued from an abusive orphanage finally see better days. For residents of the Light for Nation children’s home, this Dickensenian scenario was not just stories out of a 19th century novel, but daily reality until now BY SUSHMA JOSHI What happens when a children’s home becomes a place of abuse, where children get no food to eat and are beaten and kept in a state of acute fear? For residents of the Light for Nation children’s home, this Dickensenian scenario was not just stories out of a 19th century novel, but daily reality. “K.B. Khadga’s( Light for Nation’s founder) wife beat me and shut me in the bathroom,” says Aarati Thapa, pointing to a scar on the side of her face. Aarati, a bouncy little girl in a pink frock, insists she is 10 but looks about seven. She is one of the many children now rescued from the orphanage. Salvation for the children at Light for Nation like Arati came in the form of nin...

ZNet Top More South Asia ......... by Sushma Joshi June 10, 2004 (Nepal) Nation Weekly Printer Friendly Version EMail Article to a Friend The buzz of excitement around Nepal’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), its 147th member, has been tempered by a school of thought that warns of the dangers posed to Nepal’s economy by the new international membership. Will the WTO membership harm or benefit Nepal? This depends upon who is asking the question, and who is answering it. “It’s a question of interpretation,” says Dr. Gopi Sedai, who is with Pro-Public, an organization that, among others, lobbies for small farmers. “Not all countries are on the same playing field. Some are stronger than others.” The basic problem, says Sedai, is that the WTO is a spin-off of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), an international organization whose rules were designed for industrialized countries. The least-developed countries were only allowed entry much later. The rules an...