THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

January 25, 2022   Dear Medical Council of Nepal:   The World Bank is sending 4 million doses of Moderna covid vaccine for Nepali children aged 12-17, although this vaccine is not approved by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) of the USA for this age group.   This means the World Bank is sponsoring a very large clinical trial on Nepali children, without getting consent from parents or informing authorities about their intentions. This is not just deceptive but also illegal, according to the Nuremberg code on medical trials.   Please request the health minister to open a debate about this in Parliament.   These are the 10 points of the Nuremberg code:   The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, o...

Ayurveda and traditional healing traditions from around the world are dismissed as “pseudo-science.” The justification for this arrogant condescension is: “Herbs haven’t gone though a clinical trial.” This argument is lazy. You can find medical research literature of herbs like gurjo, hibiscus, and timmur, in the Western scientific tradition, archived online. I have read these research articles via the US National Library of Medicine at the National Institute of Health. People do not bother to read this research, although they are only a click away. The Kathmandu Post ran an article about Kathmandu traffic police planting tinospora cordifolia or gurjo at the Tinkune Park. Gurjo is thought to prevent coronavirus. The traffic police, one of our most vulnerable frontline workers, were grateful to have this healing herb. This article called it an “untested herb.” There are over 300 scientific research articles about the herb and its usages, including for osteo-arthritis to HIV/AIDS, from r...

Annapurna Express, 17/6/2020 Fifty-four African nations have called on UN Human Rights Council to have an urgent debate on police brutality and racially inspired human rights violations. The letter asks for the debate to be held next week. The militarization of the police and imprisonment of African-Americans go back to slavery. White supremacy—the notion of white culture being supreme over others—is part of the hegemonic cultural narrative of the USA. This narrative has enabled militarized violence over minority groups, including Native Americans and Latinos. Black Lives Matter has opened the door. The UN should now open an extended investigation into America’s crimes against humanity. Since the end of the Second World War, the deep state and military-industrial complex of the USA has terrorized the globe. From Afghanistan to Iraq, Cambodia to Laos, the same logic of white supremacy and economic and technological domination has led to the deaths of millions. Cuba, Iran and North...

Annapurna Express,  31/5/2020 Kathmandu saw its first known starvation death this week: Surya Bahadur Tamang, who’d spent several decades portering goods in Kathmandu, was found dead on the sidewalks of Kirtipur. He did not make enough money to rent a room for himself, so he slept on the streets. On Saturday, May 23, exactly two months after the lockdown started and all work shut down, he was found dead, still clutching the woven jute strap he used to carry loads on his back. The locals said he had no family. He’d been eating free food offered by local organizations. Yet that wasn’t enough to ward off starvation. How many people have died already is up for debate: on Twitter, there was news of at least one other man who had died of hunger in the Terai, news which went unreported in the national media. These are not isolated incidents but a systematic failure of justice. As time passes and the lockdown continues, there will be more starvation deaths. In a 2017 report b...

Annapurna Express, 11/5/2020 A few nights ago, I heard a young child talking with a man outside my lane. The voice of the child was rough, like she was from the villages and hadn’t been educated. The man was laughing occasionally in the casual manner of the laborers who still lived in the giant big building that has been constructed in front of our house as an investment property. Built for $600,000, it is now empty, with no renters coming forward to pay the rumored 10 lakh per room. But a group of young male workers are still living there, no doubt guarding the property. Every evening, I hear beautiful flute music from the same building. But this evening, I heard the voice of an angry young woman who was coercing the child to do something she didn’t want to do. The child start to cry hysterically. The man laughed. Then they left. I have done research in Mumbai and I know child prostitution runs beneath the layers of Nepali society, where family members and guardians often become t...

Annapurna Express, 24/04/2020 Despite evidence coronavirus has spread rapidly in rich, developed countries, and left poor countries unscathed, WHO keeps up the official pretense that it will affect all countries equally. This, in fact, has shown not to be the case, after almost 3.5 months of global contagion. If the scientific establishment was in the service of science (and not in the business of pushing forth the notion of European hegemony and supremacy, or marketing Big Pharma drugs), it would be asking the question: why? What are the factors which are enabling the spread of this pulmonary disease in developed economies? Several things stand out to me. First, the evidence that the coronavirus can survive 72 hours on plastic. All economies devastated by the virus are plastic economies. People use plastic credit cards to pay for goods and services, they eat their takeout meals out of plastic food containers, they buy their food from plastic bowls which have been touched by mult...

Western science is lauded as the ultimate arbiter of knowledge. When it comes to climate change, they are often quoted as the experts, with people from all fields urging the irrational: “Listen to the science!” The only problem: scientists are limited in their imagination and cannot see beyond the 1.5 degree threshold. Much like Tom Friedman’s “The World is Flat,” they imagine the planet to be flat, warming at an even rate all over like a nice tortilla, from mountains to Himalayan glaciers, from Antartica to the Gulf. But the world is not shaped like a tortilla. It has immense geographical, environmental, social, political and policy variations, even a few kilometers apart. In some parts of India, peak summer temperatures already reach 50 degree centigrades. This is unsustainable for human habitation. Some of this heating is caused by global climate change, but other reasons for warming and drought is local deforestation, extraction of water without rain recharge, and indus...

It is clear that the city of Kathmandu cannot depend upon drinking water ferried on fossil fuel tankers, although the current government has embraced this model as a permanent one. Not only do the millions of trips made per month foul the already polluted air, it also adds hugely to poor people’s water and health bills. Nepal Parliament must pass a resolution which makes it mandatory for landlords to provide water to residents before they rent a room. In Kathmandu, landlords are rapidly putting up buildings with no running water, kitchen, toilets or electricity provided. These rooms are rented from Rs.5000 to Rs.10,000 each. The women renting them are often single mothers whose husbands are in the Gulf. The women manage their finances and run their household by holding down small jobs. They do domestic work, construction, laundry and other part-time work while taking care of school-going children. Trying to source water from tankers or plastic canisters can be a serious burden o...

Annapurna Express, January 10, 2020 Australia is on fire. Who is to blame for the millions of acres burnt to cinder, the lives lost and properties destroyed, the almost half billion animals killed? Australia is a major producer and user of fossil fuel. Australia Energy Update 2018, from Australian Government’s Department of Environment and Energy (energy.gov.au), says coal, oil and gas accounted for 94 per cent of Australia's primary energy mix in 2016–17. Sixty-three percent of electricity was generated from coal. Out of this, 11% was from brown coal, a source of energy environmental activists have long opposed due to its harmful health and ecological effects. Coal mining releases methane, a potent greehouse gas which is one of the main causes of global heating. Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia, brought a lump of coal to Parliament in 2017. He sang the virtues of coal and its links to Australian prosperity, and said: “those opposite have an ideological, ...

A few weeks ago, I wrote an op-ed called “Disband the UN.” A former senior UN official wrote to me and said he disagreed with my thesis. Had I looked at the possibilities of reform within the UN? I explained that my reasoning went beyond looking at the possibilities of change within the UN—the time for that is long past. What I am asking for is a radical rehaul of our contemporary financial system. This system is based on colonial underpinnings of Western countries exploiting the economies of the East, and forms a complex, invisible mesh of international financial modalities which underpins the present inequality of nations. This drama of inequality is kept in place by a “Fourth Wall” which maintains the illusion, rather than a theatrical play, of a just international system. This play is embodied by the UN (“the actors on the stage”), and the reality of twenty-first century poverty (“the spectators”). Much like a play, it is funded by benefactors which have political leverage an...

The Annapurna Express, November 29, 2019 The UN was set up after WWII with good intentions. Fifty-one countries got together and entered a network whose aim was “maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations and promoting social progress, better living standards and human rights” (UN website.) Nobody could disagree with such a  mandate. But then cracks began to show in this ideal utopian vision. While the rhetoric assured the world that the unique international character of the UN meant it was open to all 193 member nations, it also stated: “The Organization can take action on a wide range of issues, and provide a forum for its 193 Member States to express their views, through the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council and other bodies and committees.” The Security Council is made up of 15 wealthy countries which have used their muscle power to dominate and invade small countries. They also...

 This article was rejected by the Brahmin-Chettri editors because they were too terrified to challenge PC perceptions of the janjati, and also because most probably they did not want to be branded racists. Hence rather late I decided to run it in my blog instead. The article addresses the violence against women in the name of witchcraft.  ROMANTICIZING THE JANJATI Ten-year old Suman Nepali’s harrowing eyewitness account of how his mother was killed by his teacher Hira Lama and Hira’s mother Kailimaya Tamang, who tortured her and fed her human feces, was published in NepalKhabar recently. Urban readers were sickened by this account, in which the social science teacher hurled abuse at the young Dalit woman and accusations of being a witch, tied her to a volleyball post in the schoolyard, hit her on the head, tied her legs when she resisted forcible feeding of human feces, and forced it down her throat, and beat her so savagely on her head she succumbed to her injuries two ...

As Nepal gears up for Chinese President Xi’s visit this Saturday afternoon, I thought I’d put forth some thoughts of mine is what is otherwise an entirely male dominated foreign policy environment. All commentators (former and present diplomats, government officials, journalists) in Nepal are male, and this definitely shapes the way we view what international relations between the two countries should be. There is a lot of talk of infrastructure, of course. There’s the trans-Himalayan railway, a much desired infrastructural project after India’s blockade on Nepal. There’s hydropower projects of mega-scope, billions of dollars and thousands of megawatts in the pipeline. China has always been a big builder of roads in Nepal, and with the BRI this is definitely in the equation. Investment in cement factories is also a big one. My views on this has been clear on Twitter. As we invest billions of dollars every year on roads that wash away each monsoon, the viability of roads in mountai...