THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

Posted on kantipuronline.com on: 2005-07-24 23:41:53 The Independent of Bangladesh: http://independent-bangladesh.com/news/aug/02/02082005ed.htm#A5 Scandinavian Business on World News Network: http://archive.wn.com/2005/08/02/1400/scandinaviabusiness A conflict doesn’t end overnight. It’s a long, slow process, in which two parties, once they arrive at the table, go from small negotiations to more contentious ones.By Sushma Joshi Mediation is tough business. UN negotiators more accustomed to the traffic gridlock in Manhattan than the environs of downtown Kathmandu may have found that mediating in a civil war is far from a cocktail party in the Big Apple. Nepal’s polite but firm refusal to the UN’s advances is not the first time a nation has greeted the UN with a firm “No.” Since 1949, India has strenuously refused UN intervention in the long-standing Indo-Pak dispute over the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The Indian government sought UN intervention in 1949, accusing Pakistan of interfe...

BUDDHIST NUNNERY AT PEACE VILLAGE China's Maoists destroyed Tibetan Buddhist relics, texts and buildings during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Yet, in the end, that destruction had a boomerang effect. BY SUSHMA JOSHI On July 28, 2005, I attended the consecration of a Tibetan Buddhist nunnery at Lincoln--a small town in rural Vermont, USA. The town is so small that you could miss it, as we did--we drove right past it. The general store, in the middle of the town, had a sign so quaint that we had to drive around several times before we found it. The houses, with sloping gabled roofs, were scattered amongst fields of summer wildflowers. Children's tricycles rested on the overgrown grass outside red, dilapidated barns. The friend who drove me to the event was a young American woman who had experienced the effects of war first-hand: her husband, who she had been married to for eight years, was psychologically traumatized after being posted to Iraq. Their marriage had ended so...

The article was published in EUMAP, a publication of the Soros Foundation, and the newsletter of Forefront: A network of human rights advocates, a non-profit based in New York. Sushma Joshi is a consultant with UNDP's Access to Justice program in Nepal and staff writer at the Nation Weekly magazine in Kathmandu Electronic resources, particularly the Internet, have become a lifeline for many human rights activists around the world who otherwise do not have access to global information networks. Human rights activism centres around two kinds of work: the slow, day-to-day work of fighting for reforms on a larger scale, and a quick response to an emergency. In both cases, the Internet proves its effectiveness by linking people, providing information via reliable institutions and networks, and allowing momentum to build Internet for Human Rights in South Asia The Internet, as a medium of networking and advocacy, had already made important inroads in South Asia as early as in 1996. I saw...

SUSHMA JOSHI IN MUMBAI, MAY 12, 2005 Source : www.kantipuronline.com About 500 Nepalis wait in the Arun Kumar Vaidya Maidan in Gatkopar, Mumbai for a cultural programme featuring Nepali talents to start. The programme expects Usha Mangeshkar, one of the siblings of that famous clan, to be chief guest. The outdoor stage has a large poster of Boudha up and gigantic speakers on either side. Smoke rises up as a man in a Nepali topi escorts an old man on stage. "I met this old man crying by the door," he narrates. "He says he used to have a happy family with sons and daughters, and now he doesn't know where they have gone. He came to search for his son in Bombay." The man in the topi is Badri Pangeni, a well-known folk singer, and the old man is part of an act for his famous song "Jetho chora kaha cha, kaha cha" (I don't know where my eldest son is)." My eldest son is in the Maobadi, my second son is in the Army, the third is in Bombay, and my four...

Here's the Spring 2005 newsletter of Forefront: A Network of Human Rights Advocates , where I worked as an intern during my graduate school years (1999-2002) in New York. Forefront approached the Carter Center to help grassroots activists like Dilli Chowdhary when his office at BASE was attacked during the conflict.

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.