THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

 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...