THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

Three Rupees Worth of Democracy Nation Weekly, July 26-August1, 2004 What keeps America, in spite of its flaws, still a functioning democracy are its in-built checks and balances to authority BY SUSHMA JOSHI In Nepal there is a lot of talk—one might almost say too much—about “democracy.” Newspapers devote entire columns so theorists can pontificate on it (look at how much space Nation is giving to this pontificator!), international non-profits with money to burn fund seminars and workshops to discuss how to do it, people burn tires on the streets as a means to get it. If we had a self-help publishing industry, “How to Instill (and nurture) Democracy: And see if it can flourish in a semi-feudal society” might be on Nepal’s best-seller list. (Oops: our non-existent bestseller list.) In America, the word “democracy” also raises passions and hackles. It gets people to give up their jobs and join the election campaign. It gets Congress to pass billions of dollars in funding to start wa...

THE REIGNING STORYTELLER SUSHMA JOSHI Nation Weekly magazine, July 12, 2004 Americans like their heros to be lean and mean – not fat and shaggy, shambling and unshaven as Michael Moore, who won the best film award for “Fahrenheit 9/11” in the Cannes Film Festival, tends to be. Farenehit 9/11 asks questions that many of us have been asking post 9/11. How come the Bin Laden family were flown out of the US before they could be questioned? Both the Bush family and the Bin Laden family have cosy business connections with the Carlyle Group, an investment company with deep investments in defense and aerospace industries – how was this linkage never investigated? How come Haliburton, a defense company which has gotten multiple, non-competitive contracts for the war in Iraq, had Dick Cheney, current vice-president of the USA, as its former CEO? Moore is a polemic documentary-maker and author well-known for taking on big business head-on, and he does this unapologetically and with his trad...

Nation Weekly magazine, July 12-July 18, 2004 The presidential election in November will be the mother of all election battles. Democrats sound confident of victory but it may be too early to celebrate BY SUSHMA JOSHI July 4th is an American holiday that doesn’t mean much to a Nepali passing by. But this year, as I watched fireworks explode over Lake Champlain near the Canadian border, I felt it. July 4, 1776 was the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Drafted by Thomas Jefferson, it laid out reasons why the Americans were finally sick and tired of the British king. As America goes through “extraordinary times” with a president who often seems more nominated than elected, that document takes on special significance. I have been in and out of America for a dozen years, and have clear memories of only two 4th of Julies, giving a hint about how important the Declaration of Independence was in my scheme of things. One is the time when I was sitting in a bar in Juneau, A...

KHULA MANCH Milan Rai is the author of “War Plan Iraq,” and a longtime British anti-war and anti-nuclear activist of Nepali origins. Voices in the Wilderness, an UK-based organization with which he is affiliated, has strongly opposed the American occupation of Iraq. He talked with Sushma Joshi of the Nation Weekly about his work on Iraq, and his impressions of the similarity of the situation in Nepal. What changes have you seen since the last time you came to Nepal? I was last here four years ago. There’s a lot more militarization and urbanization. The atmosphere is very brittle. What do you think of the recent bombing in Thamel? It’s a military action coming into the tourist zone. It’s a taboo being broken. My impression is that people in the Kathmandu Valley, to a certain extent, are living in a bubble, and the tourists are living inside another bubble inside the bubble. I have a sense of impending loss. I don’t know how much longer this bubble can continue. You’ve advocated non-viol...

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...