THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

By Sushma Joshi São Paolo is the third largest city in the world – after Mexico City and Bombay, according to some commentators. São Paolo is also the city with the largest population of Japanese outside Japan. Immigrants usually come from poorer countries, in my experience. Urban metropolis from New York to London have neighbourhoods named Chinatown and little Italy and little India – countries where large number of residents faced poverty and fled to a better land. So it was a surprise to see a neighborhood of immigrants composed of people normally considered wealthy and privileged – in this case, the Japanese. Liberdade, a neighborhood in central São Paolo, hums with the Sunday fair common to Brazilian cities – except these stalls are full of paper origami, t-shirts with kanji calligraphy, red banners with Katakana and Portuguese signs. The stalls are manned by elderly Japanese, who sell their wares in jerky Portuguese. Stalls sell a sizzling yakissoba. The Japanese in Brazil...

The Nation Weekly magazine was started by a team of journalists in conjunction with a publishing house on January 1, 2004. The magazine aimed to publish analysis and news of the current political situation in Nepal. Due to differences between the editorial and marketing team, the magazine shut down on February 1, 2005 - a year and a month after it began. The archive is now off the server. About 150 articles I wrote as staff writer are archived on this site.

Sushma Joshi, Porto Alegre, Brazil Americans traveling to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, were in for a rude surprise. Brazil, reacting to new US policy which required Brazilians to be fingerprinted at the US border points, had instituted the same rules for Americans. Global tables had been turned - Iraqis and Libyans, the favorite whipping boys of the Western world, could walk across like respected nationals of sovereign nations, while Americans, used to waltzing across international boundaries without visas, found themselves in the "Have you taken part in any terrorist activities?" fingerprint line. Brazil may be the only country to dare stand up to the Bush administration, and not just in small tit-for-tat reciprocity of nasty behavior to nationals. Brazil remains a vocal opponent of US policies in the WTO, calling for an end to subsidies to big transnational corporations that disadvantage small farmers and businesses in the South. Its been the first to flo...

Hamilton’s understanding and curiosity of the people and cultures makes him the one of the first proto-anthropologists to enter the country and take stock—literally—of Nepal BY SUSHMA JOSHI There is a reason why the English ruled over an empire where the sun never set. The English colonists knew the value of knowledge. Take “An Account of the Kingdom of Nepal, and of the Territories Annexed to this Dominion by the House of Gorkha,” written by Francis Buchanan Hamilton and published in 1819. Written by a man who spent only 14 months in Kathmandu, between 1802 and 1803, and two more years on the frontier, it is an extensive documentation of everything from the genealogies of the rajas of small principalities of Nepal to listings of natural resources, from the minutest details of how metal was subdivided between different parties to the exact decimal point of grain measurements. Classifications of medicinal herbs, trees, animals, birds and ethnic groups ...

December 15 2004, Nation Weekly Magazine Sushma Joshi Morang District Court is crowded at 3pm on a Friday afternoon. Police with guns take a breather in the open air as they escort detainees into the courtroom. Upstairs, a tiny woman braves the all-male crowd and rushes in breathlessly as a hearing is just about to start in the civil bench. She sits down and covers her head with her sari’s pallu. This is Alkadevi Shah (38). She is here to find out if she will finally get property from her estranged husband. A complicated case involving two lawsuits are about to be heard. Judge Mahesh Prasad Pudasaini reads his “misil” as the lawyers arrive. Advocate Ram Lal Sutihar, of Nepal Bar Association, Morang, addresses the judge. “Sriman,” he says. “My client is a victim of domestic violence. She was thrown out of her house. A woman has a right to maintenance. My client is entitled to her husband’s property. But her husband has taken an imaginary loan from another man, and put a counter lawsuit ...

So many goods, but noone to buy it : A typical Bandh day.

The state of conflict has become, for the nation, a state of mind Nation Weekly Magazine, 2004 BY SUSHMA JOSHI IN NEPALGUNJ Nepalgunj has palm trees. It has good sekuwa, thought to be perfected with MSG. It has a “New Road” that is being constructed; massive concrete buildings going up within the space of a few years, occupied by people fleeing the conflict in the mid- and far-western districts. It has mosques with elaborate minarets next to gurudwaras and temples. It has businesses, from law firms to tire stores, named after Bageshwori, the patron goddess. It has a list of ethnic groups, not all of whom drink water from the homes of other groups. It has Abadi speakers and Urdu speakers. It has a pluralistic, multi-lingual, vibrant border culture that does not, by any stretch of the imagination, fit the confines of Nepal’s limited Constitution. For a city that is so close and yet so excluded from the presently limited imaginings of the Nepali nation, Nepalgunj has a special fondn...