THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

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...

IS FEMINISM OUTDATED? By : SUSHMA JOSHI   Photo by :ECS Media March 06, 2012 A cousin of mine met me for the first time in his life, and we had a pleasant time meeting each other. Later in the day, he confessed, “I don’t know what I was expecting when I came to meet you, honestly. Somebody had told me…” here he looked at me with alarmed eyes, and his voice lowered a notch: “A feminist!” The way he said feminist made me wonder what he had been imagining me to be like. How exactly does a feminist appear in the popular imagination? From the tone of his voice, it was almost as if he had expected to meet someone with two horns on her head, breathing fire out of her nostrils. People in Nepal, I find, are particularly misinformed about what a feminist is and what feminism stands for. The dictionary defines feminism as a “collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social ...