THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

BLACKOUT Fear hangs like a low-grade fever over the villages. Soon darkness will follow. October 21, 2004, Nation Weekly magazine BY SUSHMA JOSHI IN HETAUDA Kathmandu, I am told, is the most dangerous place in Nepal at the moment. Anywhere else is much better, as long as you don’t get caught in crossfire. And indeed as we drive from Bharatpur to Hetauda, past sunny fields of rice and cows ambling lazily past rivulets of water, the conflict seems far from this idyllic land. Except for a few stray Army units, the road is free of any signs of militarization. A red flag stuck on a bicycle on the side of the road did not belong to any revolutionary, but to a worker from the Road Department whose gear, on closer inspection, also included a yellow helmet. “Where is the conflict?” my friend said. We had come expecting to find war but found only bucolic peace. “Just wait till you get off the highway,” somebody said. Well-seasoned fellow travelers entertained us with stories of almost-a...

BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE SUSHMA JOSHI Sunday October 17, 2004 Source : NATION WEEKLY MAGAZINE, Archived at South Asian Media Net Devi Sunwar, 36, cries as she tells her story. Her daughter Maina was 15. “She would have gone to class 9,” she sobs. After witnessing an extra-judicial execution of a relative Reena Rasaili on February 17, 2004, Devi, who had also been sexually harassed by the police, went back to her village. The police arrived at her home at 6 a.m. the next day to search for her. They could not find her, so they took her daughter with them. After the disappearance of the girl, the parents launched a search, going to the army and police barracks and putting in an application with the National Human Rights Commission. The body was found yesterday. Devi worries about going to the police barracks by herself to get the body. “Can somebody come with me?” she asks the lawyers from Advocacy Forum who are present and who are providing legal aid to her. The paradox of ...

That Big Bhoot America, in spite of its limitations, welcomes people into its fold with its original myth—everybody is a pioneer in a new continent. My own story with America is a mythic one. BY SUSHMA JOSHI Another of our children has been taken by the bhoot of America,” my mother complains every time she hears about a young cousin who makes off to that continent. “What is there? Kay cha tya?” she asks. “I couldn't live there with all those ugly buildings.” Skyscrapers and fast cars, chain stores and mega-malls. These are the outward manifestations of a culture that fascinates and draws hundreds of thousands of students from all parts of the world to America every year. But contrary to popular understanding, people go not just for the amount of money they can earn, or the pile of things they can buy. If money were everything, then all those foreign students would have ended up in Saudi Arabia, or Japan. But they end up in rural Alaska and in the inner city neighborhoods of...