THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

ECS Magazine, October 2018 What struck me about the Taleju Bhawani myth was the dream. According to oral mythology, much retold, King Jaya Prakash Malla used to play dice with the Taleju Bhawani. This goddess was an incarnation of Goddess Durga who appeared before the monarch in human form. She discussed affairs of state and advised him while they played their nightly game. The monarch angered the goddess, however, by lusting after her. The Goddess vanished, predicting the end of his reign. The King begged for forgiveness. The Goddess relented and appeared before him in a dream. She would only appear before him in the form of a virgin child who has not yet undergone her menarche henceforth, she told him. He was to worship this form. There is a second version of this story. According to this version, it was the Goddess who lusted after the King. The queen followed the King to see where he vanished during the nights. One night she saw them together. The Goddess had made the ...

April 25, 2018 My Republica (http://www.myrepublica.com/news/40504/) We should broaden our minds to alternative concepts of disease and healing, not rely exclusively on big pharmacological solutions A few days ago, The Guardian ran an article about Prince Charles and his belief in homeopathy. The writer expressed scorn at the Prince’s beliefs in homeopathy. The tone of the article struck me with its scientific smugness and condescension—an attitude which has been very effective in blocking inquiry into broader conceptions of disease and healing. In this op-ed, I want to share my own experience with homeopathy. I was also healed by a homeopathic doctor—rather to my surprise. I share the story with you so you can make up your mind about the intangibles that make up the process of healing. In 2007, I attended the Berlinale Film Festival. I was part of a contingent of filmmakers which had been accepted to the Talent Campus. The campus aimed to bring together young filmmake...

April 16th, 2018  My Republica (http://www.myrepublica.com/news/39954/)  In a culture of patriarchy where the girl or woman belongs to the family unit, the “ownership” of the girl by the family can often be lethal A little girl who loved grazing her ponies was raped and killed in the Indian state of Jammu in January. She belonged to the tribe of nomadic Bakerwals, Muslims who grazed their horses and moved around, possibly across state and national boundaries. Who wasn’t moved by the photograph of the lively little girl with the big eyes in the little purple outfit—the same purple outfit her corpse is shown wearing at the moment of death? Who wasn’t sickened by the story of the drugging, the rapes and the murder? Who didn’t feel a sense of loss hearing the story of how she loved to graze her ponies in the forest, how she was the light of her community? We know a lot about the case from various news sources. That Asifa Bano had been adopted by her family, b...

ECS Magazine, January 26, 2018  Shivaratri, or the night of Shiva, in my mind, is always associated with the Pashupatinath Temple. The temple was set away from human settlement for a reason—in the midst of the forest, amongst the slightly dilapidated buildings and gently ruined structures of the past, the most perfect followers of Shiva, the sadhus, had an ideal sanctuary. Sadhus, ascetics who’d left behind the material world for more spiritual and transcendental concerns, seemed at home here, with the firewood they received gratis from the king, burning away the night in the flicker of bonfires and ash. They started to arrive a fortnight before Shivaratri, and they piled up amongst the muths and the small shrines, smoking their ganja in blissful torpor, joking with the tourists in their own languages (one Shivaratri I chatted with an elderly and jovial French speaking Baba), holding up rocks with their penises, and in general adding to the madcap ambience of the already othe...

A bibliography of the late Saubhagya Shah's academic writings have been compiled by Pratyoush Onta (with help from his Martin Chautari colleagues). Saubhagya Shah, a sociologist/anthropologist trained at Tribhuvan University, Nepal (MA in Sociology, 1991) and Harvard University, US (PhD in Anthropology, 2004) died suddenly on 16 December 2009 from a suspected heart attack. At the time of his death, he was a Reader in Sociology at Tribhuvan University (TU) and the Program Coordinator of TU’s Central Department of Conflict, Peace and Development Studies (CPDS). A moving tribute to Saubhagya has been penned by the writer Sushma Joshi (2017).  You can find that tribute online at Setopati: http://archive.setopati.net/blog/22684/

Published in ECS Magazine , 2017 Recently the young woman who was helping me to cook and clean started to receive a spate of phone calls at work. “Come over immediately, your work is nothing, your son is everything,” the relatives at the other end would announce. This went on for a while, and she herself said to me: “What is this? I get more phonecalls than the Prime Minister.” I tried to contain my irritation at these very loud phonecalls, but eventually at one point I had to ask her to put her phone on silent. She couldn’t do that, she announced, because a very serious medical emergency was going on at her house. Her son, she said, had “deuta lagyo.” The gods have gotten hold of him.   I asked her what was going on with her son. She said that she did not know the specifics because it never happened while she was around, but her relatives had told her had had several episodes in which her son had started to talk deliriously by himself, and also shown symptoms of a phy...

May 10, 2016 Prashant Jha, noted journalist who spends most of his time in Delhi, is often suspected by Nepali readers to be too close to India’s RAW, India’s external intelligence agency. This is not based on suspicion and paranoia but from intelligence gleaned from some of his columns, in which he’s written about the change of guards at RAW and shown an all too close familiarity with its upper echelons. Mr. Jha, who regularly makes appearances at Nepali events in the USA, was a fellow at the Asia Society of New York, a visiting fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India (UPenn), and is a 2016 Poynter Fellow at Yale, recently put out an op-ed from the esteemed Hindusthan Times , in which he claimed several Chinamen were seen approaching various members of the Nepali political world, including Maoist leader Prachanda, telling them to desist from regime change, and to support Oli’s government. His May 10, 2016 article, titled “ Chinese advice behind Prachanda’s U-turn on...