Kolkata makes a person inefficient, which seems impossible when one looks at the people working in the streets, but a look at the babu-class, the petty bourgeois proves my point: sluggish, self-enamored, plodding.
I am productive on days when I hole in, yesterday with a bottle of very cheap Maharastra wine--and by cheap I mean the taste of it not, the price--and I made some decisions, like adding a mad man to the story, and so on.
Went to Dhapa, a village on the land-fill/wetlands east of Kolkata. The village survives by picking through the metropolis' landfill. The smell of shit is a sharp, almost sweet fragrance, spiced by unknowable strains of Coliform.
This is all time I have today, in Sudder Street, the Thamel of Kolkata: a picture of what tourism in Nepal would look like under communism.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Kolkata
It must be the sweet Khasi platter that I ate in Taj Hotel in Jaynagar--incidentally, a shithole near the border--that has my stomach running. So far, there hasn't been any major incident, but I think there is some in the making, something big, a spicy dhamaka.
Starting this evening, I sit down to complete the assignment. I can't discuss it here, but the idea is to have you people [those that are in Kathmandu] to come and buy a ticket or four at a theater near you come September.
I will update every few days, and possibly tomorrow.
In the meantime, here is the article I maied off to TKP, hoping it will be published tomorrow.
-----
FOG AND LIGHT
http://kantipuronline.com/kolnews.php?&nid=177038
It is an old photograph taken along a road that winds through the Shivapuri jungles and through memories shared by two boys, both equally gaunt and dreamy in the picture. But it is also a startling encapsulation of a youth and innocence long since lost. That was a different world before divisions and multiplication of identity, when the dominant ideology was unity rather than faction. One of the boys had indulged in a prank, a frank misdemeanor the night before that hike and had kept it a secret from the other boy. In the absence of discovery and its consequent accusations, the two boys in the photograph look simple and youthful , looking straight into the camera as if in anticipation of the moment when the picture would be rediscovered, held up fondly against the illumination of a compact fluorescent lamp drawing its parting burst of light from an overtaxed inverter.
Like the fog outside the window, memory spreads thin over a recalled territory and makes indistinct the particulars, swallows entire shapes and creates believable threats out of benign ghosts. Janakpur slowly awakes, as if insisted upon by the yearning search of eyes and minds that want a firm grip over things made wispy by others. The boy in the picture is the same idea as the invisible rickshaw puller who navigates through thick fog by following the flicker of tea-stall fires and the cries of babies coming from huts that ring the cold, silent ponds of the city. In each case, it is a similar journey towards a familiar and necessary destination, while groping in the dark for familiar and necessary signs by which to guide the progress ahead. The efforts of the deceived boy in the picture and the rickshaw puller running an old route are fated to similar disappointing ends, revealing a place that loses its allure with each new visit, forced to retreat laden with disappointment that the encounter with the destination is, after all, only quotidian.
Then Bikram pulls out a photograph of a girl we were both crazy about in high school but never had the courage to approach. His daughters, Khushi and Roshni, burst into the room, giggling to catch my attention and hiding behind their father because, at three and five, they are not fond of chin-stubble rubbing against their faces. I pinch Khushi's nose but it is Roshani who starts to cry, perhaps because her infant mind can not separate her older sister's nose from her own, or because she can empathize with herself well into the next five minutes, where she finds herself ambushed by my coarse chin. I make up my mind to steal the photograph on my way out of Janakpur because Bikram won't let me have it. In the photograph, the girl for whom I wrote my first poems looks exactly like I remember dreaming of her during those feverish years of adolescence. I slip the picture into a book I am carrying for the train, not because I want to possess her picture, but because I want to free her from the confines of his recollections: a place which, in my jealousy, I picture as unfit for her, and for him, now that he has Khushi and Roshni in his life.
The theft is swift and gleeful, and to my mind, a noble tribute to the boy I was once, unkempt, disarrayed by the frenzies of puppy love. Thus justified and gloating inwardly, I step outside to the alleyway and blow on the blanket swirl of fog, as if to part through it a channel to clarity with nothing but my gentle breath for weapons. Then I remember a constant second and menacing face of Janakpur--this city is also the murder capital of the terai, a place where they sent fifteen violent men with khukuris to kill and silence a woman sitting in her house. The fog is dense and white and it bleaches the color away from every surface, but even this fog must have in it a pool of crimson and a moving veil of thirty tainted hands that can not hide forever. The tinny tickle of a cycle rickshaw's bells is heard coming around a corner. I step backwards into a barber shop before the rickshaw emerges into sight.
Back in the house, as her father follows the priest's instructions and offers thanks for a newborn son, Khushi climbs into my lap. I am lost in thoughts, still unable to decide why I want to steal the photograph, why I should want to be thought of fondly by a girl from what was my childhood. Although Khushi wants my attention and starts a conversation in Hindi, she wearily eyes my cheeks and chin. I take her hand and run it over a freshly shaved and moisturized face. She likes how it feels. She tuns her tiny hand over my chin and calls to her sister and laughs, as if discovering a few face to a familiar old mystery.
Starting this evening, I sit down to complete the assignment. I can't discuss it here, but the idea is to have you people [those that are in Kathmandu] to come and buy a ticket or four at a theater near you come September.
I will update every few days, and possibly tomorrow.
In the meantime, here is the article I maied off to TKP, hoping it will be published tomorrow.
-----
FOG AND LIGHT
http://kantipuronline.com/kolnews.php?&nid=177038
It is an old photograph taken along a road that winds through the Shivapuri jungles and through memories shared by two boys, both equally gaunt and dreamy in the picture. But it is also a startling encapsulation of a youth and innocence long since lost. That was a different world before divisions and multiplication of identity, when the dominant ideology was unity rather than faction. One of the boys had indulged in a prank, a frank misdemeanor the night before that hike and had kept it a secret from the other boy. In the absence of discovery and its consequent accusations, the two boys in the photograph look simple and youthful , looking straight into the camera as if in anticipation of the moment when the picture would be rediscovered, held up fondly against the illumination of a compact fluorescent lamp drawing its parting burst of light from an overtaxed inverter.
Like the fog outside the window, memory spreads thin over a recalled territory and makes indistinct the particulars, swallows entire shapes and creates believable threats out of benign ghosts. Janakpur slowly awakes, as if insisted upon by the yearning search of eyes and minds that want a firm grip over things made wispy by others. The boy in the picture is the same idea as the invisible rickshaw puller who navigates through thick fog by following the flicker of tea-stall fires and the cries of babies coming from huts that ring the cold, silent ponds of the city. In each case, it is a similar journey towards a familiar and necessary destination, while groping in the dark for familiar and necessary signs by which to guide the progress ahead. The efforts of the deceived boy in the picture and the rickshaw puller running an old route are fated to similar disappointing ends, revealing a place that loses its allure with each new visit, forced to retreat laden with disappointment that the encounter with the destination is, after all, only quotidian.
Then Bikram pulls out a photograph of a girl we were both crazy about in high school but never had the courage to approach. His daughters, Khushi and Roshni, burst into the room, giggling to catch my attention and hiding behind their father because, at three and five, they are not fond of chin-stubble rubbing against their faces. I pinch Khushi's nose but it is Roshani who starts to cry, perhaps because her infant mind can not separate her older sister's nose from her own, or because she can empathize with herself well into the next five minutes, where she finds herself ambushed by my coarse chin. I make up my mind to steal the photograph on my way out of Janakpur because Bikram won't let me have it. In the photograph, the girl for whom I wrote my first poems looks exactly like I remember dreaming of her during those feverish years of adolescence. I slip the picture into a book I am carrying for the train, not because I want to possess her picture, but because I want to free her from the confines of his recollections: a place which, in my jealousy, I picture as unfit for her, and for him, now that he has Khushi and Roshni in his life.
The theft is swift and gleeful, and to my mind, a noble tribute to the boy I was once, unkempt, disarrayed by the frenzies of puppy love. Thus justified and gloating inwardly, I step outside to the alleyway and blow on the blanket swirl of fog, as if to part through it a channel to clarity with nothing but my gentle breath for weapons. Then I remember a constant second and menacing face of Janakpur--this city is also the murder capital of the terai, a place where they sent fifteen violent men with khukuris to kill and silence a woman sitting in her house. The fog is dense and white and it bleaches the color away from every surface, but even this fog must have in it a pool of crimson and a moving veil of thirty tainted hands that can not hide forever. The tinny tickle of a cycle rickshaw's bells is heard coming around a corner. I step backwards into a barber shop before the rickshaw emerges into sight.
Back in the house, as her father follows the priest's instructions and offers thanks for a newborn son, Khushi climbs into my lap. I am lost in thoughts, still unable to decide why I want to steal the photograph, why I should want to be thought of fondly by a girl from what was my childhood. Although Khushi wants my attention and starts a conversation in Hindi, she wearily eyes my cheeks and chin. I take her hand and run it over a freshly shaved and moisturized face. She likes how it feels. She tuns her tiny hand over my chin and calls to her sister and laughs, as if discovering a few face to a familiar old mystery.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Arrgh!
Just when I am about to get out, they pull me right back in!
I was all set to leave for Kolkata, but the contract papers weren't ready, and won't be before Monday. When I thought I could leave on Monday, I was informed that I have a meeting scheduled late Tuesday. When I thought of leaving on Wednesday, I realized I have to go to Janakpur on Thursday, if I am going to be in the area anyway--it is a big day of celebration for Bikram. So, I think that is what is going to happen: I am going to be in Janakpur on Thursday, which means I can reach Kolkata Saturday at the earliest , possibly Sunday...
On the other hand, I think Huyen's package for me has reached here, which means I will have a couple of good books to read while on the train... And it was a real surprise to get a hand-typed, colorfully signed X-mas card from Matt. From Seattle, WA, so I am hoping he is having a great time.
I was all set to leave for Kolkata, but the contract papers weren't ready, and won't be before Monday. When I thought I could leave on Monday, I was informed that I have a meeting scheduled late Tuesday. When I thought of leaving on Wednesday, I realized I have to go to Janakpur on Thursday, if I am going to be in the area anyway--it is a big day of celebration for Bikram. So, I think that is what is going to happen: I am going to be in Janakpur on Thursday, which means I can reach Kolkata Saturday at the earliest , possibly Sunday...
On the other hand, I think Huyen's package for me has reached here, which means I will have a couple of good books to read while on the train... And it was a real surprise to get a hand-typed, colorfully signed X-mas card from Matt. From Seattle, WA, so I am hoping he is having a great time.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
One Word at a Time
I finally finished translating the book of short stories: a total of 26,000 words, it is almost 6,000 words less than a short story I wrote my first summer in Walla Walla, with a badly infected ear and Lea making too much noise with [Black] Jason in the next room throughout each night, just driving me nuts with sleeplessness.
I am done with this one for the time being. I am expecting a round of feedback before second edits. I don't know if that will happen for sure.
Throughout the work, I wasn't feeling very rewarded. On the last day, the last page, the penultimate paragraph, I wrote the following paragraph, a rather loose translation of the Nepali original, which I have included for y'all, the two of you who can read Nepali.
Now I spend a few days intensely writing a year-book for an INGO, after which, I am going underground for a month to write a script.
"The anguish in my heart had risen until it was glued to the mind itself, building a thick bridge between the two places with which I was in the habit of seeing the world."
---Nepali original:
"Mero chhati bhitra ko dukhai tibra bhayera dimag mai tappakka tasiyeko thiyo-- yeuta anautho, mayabi chumbakiya pakad!!"
I am done with this one for the time being. I am expecting a round of feedback before second edits. I don't know if that will happen for sure.
Throughout the work, I wasn't feeling very rewarded. On the last day, the last page, the penultimate paragraph, I wrote the following paragraph, a rather loose translation of the Nepali original, which I have included for y'all, the two of you who can read Nepali.
Now I spend a few days intensely writing a year-book for an INGO, after which, I am going underground for a month to write a script.
"The anguish in my heart had risen until it was glued to the mind itself, building a thick bridge between the two places with which I was in the habit of seeing the world."
---Nepali original:
"Mero chhati bhitra ko dukhai tibra bhayera dimag mai tappakka tasiyeko thiyo-- yeuta anautho, mayabi chumbakiya pakad!!"
Picture Time!
I am listening to Allah Ho! by Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Saheb, and trying to finish some very long overdue translation work [late by 6 months, can you believe?]...
Today, incidentally, marks the completion of 10 whole months [300 days?] of my return to Kathmandu. Not much to show for it, I sometimes think, but then again, I am about to finish translating a book of short stories [although the book will be rather short itself: with 16 stories, it is still shorter than some stories I have written in the past]; I did help write and assisted with a 20-minute short film; and I am about to sign a contract to write a feature film, have the old project still creeping towards completion, and recently agreed to write yet another movie by April. In the meantime, I had one story publish in an anthology, getting bad reviews for my story initially, but slowly people seem to have accepted the story for what it is, instead of trying to pigeonhole it to suit their expectations.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Saturday, January 3, 2009
A Pox on You, and Your Goat, Too!
People--I seriously doubt if you have noticed this at all, but the adsense bar along the right side of this page has changed into Google's public service ads. That is because a] I am averaging 5 visitors a day, and b] because nobody was clicking on the ads. I mean, nobody.
My plans to retire on Adsense money have been indefinitely postponed, given the fresh development.
And you are to blame, for not being more numerous, more loyal, more interested [in me! me!], and most importantly, totally failing to appreciate the effort I put into this blog, as reflected in the articles I post, and the occasional, but brilliant, series of photographs, even if they are mostly of my nephew. I have nobody else to photograph, what is a man to do?
Well, bitches, I am no longer making the average of US$0.02/day. Thanks to you.
My plans to retire on Adsense money have been indefinitely postponed, given the fresh development.
And you are to blame, for not being more numerous, more loyal, more interested [in me! me!], and most importantly, totally failing to appreciate the effort I put into this blog, as reflected in the articles I post, and the occasional, but brilliant, series of photographs, even if they are mostly of my nephew. I have nobody else to photograph, what is a man to do?
Well, bitches, I am no longer making the average of US$0.02/day. Thanks to you.
The World Out There
Lily and Alex's blog This Ridiculous World, included in my blog roll, won third place
in the "general blogs" section in a Chinese blogs listing. Nice work, Weed & Weed!
Students at Budhanilkantha started a blog of their own, called We Are BNKS They also posted a link to this page, but misspelled the link. Good for me. Sometimes I tend to write stuff I worry young adults shouldn't read. I tend be profane, and worse, self-engrossed. Better they don't read my posts.
And, below, I am preempting TKP and posting the article I submitted for tomorrow's paper. Very high chances of it not being published: writing this was harder than pushing a four-day turd, the kind that wanted to come out two days ago, but you forgot because you were running between places or errands, and two dehydrated days later, it has solidified in the rectal cavity into a nugget of such regal stubbornness that you'll forever after argue with a woman that yes, you do too know what it feels like to give birth. And you can't even coo at it afterwards like you can when you make a mini-you. In any case, writing this was just as forced, and full of self-loathing.
In any case, here it is:
----------
Throw Out the Driver
--Prawin Adhikari
Sometimes, a knowing smile is the best answer one can give oneself. “What is that rattling noise?” a man sitting in a bus asks nobody in general. The khalasi knows what rattles so: “Spare tire,” he says. Something inexplicable, perhaps a mistimed affability or a hiccup of casual honesty, prompts him to add: “Waiting for a tire to go bust.”
What? I turn around. He is serious. No cheap wit plastered on his face. The person who asked the original question seems not to require any further explanation. I cannot understand why a tire must go bust mid-journey before it can be replaced. “An hour or two, at most, then it'll go bust. It is not a problem. Takes maybe ten minutes to change.” Nobody else on the bus seems to mind. It doesn't worry me to trust my physical wellbeing to a driver-khalasi pair that finds perfect logic in waiting for a tire to burst while traveling at high speed. After all, they are in the same bus, the same figurative boat of a common mechanical fate.
As predicted, the tire goes bust with a sharp crack and a long hiss. Passengers look relieved at the opportunity to step out and relieve themselves, stretch their limbs, crouch to watch the khalasi worm his way under the bus to change the tire. It is shocking how little he had been hiding about the defective tire: it has been ripped apart, a gash guts half of its circumference into a goofy, outsized smile directed at itself, and the frills of its dark innards seem disappointed at the whimper with which they had to let go of so much air.
How comfortable we are as a people to let such driver-khalasi combinations steer our lives to the edge of disaster. But, politicians are never in the same figurative boat as the rest of us. They have exits where we fall to rot. They have hordes of mindless servants whom we feed and clothe and provide with drug money. They have the bombastic vehicle of rhetoric and threats while we have the dismayed, betrayed look of the generically weak and faceless. When our prime minister reminds us that there is never any fuss to be made about a scuffle where nobody dies, we almost agree, our heads already in half-nod without our bidding. We can wait for the tire to go bust before we replace it. We must wait, those in power tell us, and we half-nod, “Of course, we must.”
Soon, the bus gets rolling. As terai ends and the ribbon of a highway finds another ribbon of a river, a clear sun shines through the dim fog that had blanketed over the terai. People and their small, messy lives along the highway look exactly the same as I have always seen them. There is no register on faces that approach the bus at stops along the route of the new erosion of peace that is spreading through the country. Their concern was more quotidian. They voices were for selling and soliciting, not for protesting, asking, condemning.
But, my expectation of meekness is ill-founded. A young man enters the bus with a platter of roasted maize ears. An old woman abuses him for the price he quotes. The young man turns to look at her, but says nothing. A pahadi man laughs, joins in with the old woman in abusing the dark young man, taunting him with a voice that mocks a plainsman's accent. The young man turns back and replies in a tongue more pahadi, more rustic and colorful than they expected. He wins by the dint of accent, and his is a unique victory. They lashed at the color of his skin, the station of his labor by windows of passing buses, his lifelong wares of coconut and cucumber slices, peas and grams in plastic packets. He retaliated with the decidedly superior token of local accent, proving himself more of the soil and soot than these passengers whose claim to nativity, in that locale, came from shared geography. They forgot he is the lord over his small kingdom of bus-aisles and half-slid windows, transacting in the salt and water comforts of weary travelers, and that they buy passage from him to their barbaric lives in the backward corners hidden under highland mist.
The politics of place is once more a playground for the silver-tongued and wily, greedy and divisive, deceptive politicians. They argue that a place belongs to a particular people. It doesn't. It doesn't belong to the past. It belongs to a future for which they have no right to articulate a vision, but every duty to prepare optimal conditions for future citizens to inherit a civilized discourse. The pahad doesn't belong to hills-people any more than the terai belongs to the plains-people. It is already a tragedy that there are arbitrary political boundaries. There are to be tribal boundaries added to this mess? Who does the addition and subtraction, making vital decisions that affect each of us? Not the dark young man selling corn, but the driver-khalasi combination that wants to wait for the tire to go bust before replacing it. It seems we have a driver now who wants to wait for a fatality before considering anything news. We can't be two-times lucky in epoch-making revolutions. The limits of trust must be constantly examined, to see if we do, indeed, share a common fate with the driver-khalasi nexus that drives our destiny.
in the "general blogs" section in a Chinese blogs listing. Nice work, Weed & Weed!
Students at Budhanilkantha started a blog of their own, called We Are BNKS They also posted a link to this page, but misspelled the link. Good for me. Sometimes I tend to write stuff I worry young adults shouldn't read. I tend be profane, and worse, self-engrossed. Better they don't read my posts.
And, below, I am preempting TKP and posting the article I submitted for tomorrow's paper. Very high chances of it not being published: writing this was harder than pushing a four-day turd, the kind that wanted to come out two days ago, but you forgot because you were running between places or errands, and two dehydrated days later, it has solidified in the rectal cavity into a nugget of such regal stubbornness that you'll forever after argue with a woman that yes, you do too know what it feels like to give birth. And you can't even coo at it afterwards like you can when you make a mini-you. In any case, writing this was just as forced, and full of self-loathing.
In any case, here it is:
----------
Throw Out the Driver
--Prawin Adhikari
Sometimes, a knowing smile is the best answer one can give oneself. “What is that rattling noise?” a man sitting in a bus asks nobody in general. The khalasi knows what rattles so: “Spare tire,” he says. Something inexplicable, perhaps a mistimed affability or a hiccup of casual honesty, prompts him to add: “Waiting for a tire to go bust.”
What? I turn around. He is serious. No cheap wit plastered on his face. The person who asked the original question seems not to require any further explanation. I cannot understand why a tire must go bust mid-journey before it can be replaced. “An hour or two, at most, then it'll go bust. It is not a problem. Takes maybe ten minutes to change.” Nobody else on the bus seems to mind. It doesn't worry me to trust my physical wellbeing to a driver-khalasi pair that finds perfect logic in waiting for a tire to burst while traveling at high speed. After all, they are in the same bus, the same figurative boat of a common mechanical fate.
As predicted, the tire goes bust with a sharp crack and a long hiss. Passengers look relieved at the opportunity to step out and relieve themselves, stretch their limbs, crouch to watch the khalasi worm his way under the bus to change the tire. It is shocking how little he had been hiding about the defective tire: it has been ripped apart, a gash guts half of its circumference into a goofy, outsized smile directed at itself, and the frills of its dark innards seem disappointed at the whimper with which they had to let go of so much air.
How comfortable we are as a people to let such driver-khalasi combinations steer our lives to the edge of disaster. But, politicians are never in the same figurative boat as the rest of us. They have exits where we fall to rot. They have hordes of mindless servants whom we feed and clothe and provide with drug money. They have the bombastic vehicle of rhetoric and threats while we have the dismayed, betrayed look of the generically weak and faceless. When our prime minister reminds us that there is never any fuss to be made about a scuffle where nobody dies, we almost agree, our heads already in half-nod without our bidding. We can wait for the tire to go bust before we replace it. We must wait, those in power tell us, and we half-nod, “Of course, we must.”
Soon, the bus gets rolling. As terai ends and the ribbon of a highway finds another ribbon of a river, a clear sun shines through the dim fog that had blanketed over the terai. People and their small, messy lives along the highway look exactly the same as I have always seen them. There is no register on faces that approach the bus at stops along the route of the new erosion of peace that is spreading through the country. Their concern was more quotidian. They voices were for selling and soliciting, not for protesting, asking, condemning.
But, my expectation of meekness is ill-founded. A young man enters the bus with a platter of roasted maize ears. An old woman abuses him for the price he quotes. The young man turns to look at her, but says nothing. A pahadi man laughs, joins in with the old woman in abusing the dark young man, taunting him with a voice that mocks a plainsman's accent. The young man turns back and replies in a tongue more pahadi, more rustic and colorful than they expected. He wins by the dint of accent, and his is a unique victory. They lashed at the color of his skin, the station of his labor by windows of passing buses, his lifelong wares of coconut and cucumber slices, peas and grams in plastic packets. He retaliated with the decidedly superior token of local accent, proving himself more of the soil and soot than these passengers whose claim to nativity, in that locale, came from shared geography. They forgot he is the lord over his small kingdom of bus-aisles and half-slid windows, transacting in the salt and water comforts of weary travelers, and that they buy passage from him to their barbaric lives in the backward corners hidden under highland mist.
The politics of place is once more a playground for the silver-tongued and wily, greedy and divisive, deceptive politicians. They argue that a place belongs to a particular people. It doesn't. It doesn't belong to the past. It belongs to a future for which they have no right to articulate a vision, but every duty to prepare optimal conditions for future citizens to inherit a civilized discourse. The pahad doesn't belong to hills-people any more than the terai belongs to the plains-people. It is already a tragedy that there are arbitrary political boundaries. There are to be tribal boundaries added to this mess? Who does the addition and subtraction, making vital decisions that affect each of us? Not the dark young man selling corn, but the driver-khalasi combination that wants to wait for the tire to go bust before replacing it. It seems we have a driver now who wants to wait for a fatality before considering anything news. We can't be two-times lucky in epoch-making revolutions. The limits of trust must be constantly examined, to see if we do, indeed, share a common fate with the driver-khalasi nexus that drives our destiny.
Wish me luck!
I have to make a script pitch this evening. Wish me luck. I am not feeling super-creative, but I have a good feeling about myself lately. Still, need some luck.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Load Shedding is a Capital Bitch
The load-shedding schedule for my area looks like this:
Sunday Monday Tuesday
04:00-10:00 08:00-14:00 08:00-14:00
17:00-23:00 20:00-02:00 20:00-2:00
Wednesday Thursday Friday
08:00-14:00 04:00-08:00 02:00-08:00
20:00-02:00 14:00-20:00 14:00-20:00
Saturday
02:00-08:00
14:00-20:00
These are each 6-hour blocks, twice every day, for a total of a staggering 84 hours every week. Of these, hours falling between 9AM and 6PM are: S:2; M:5; T:5; W:5; Th:4; F:4; S:4. If we exclude Saturday and Sunday, that is still 23 hours of a work week of 40/45 that is without electricity: more than 50% of the time we twiddle our thumbs, if we happen to work from our home. If we happen to be a lowly writer, for instance, who must depend upon deadlines met to earn a living. We are a sorry lot in Kathmandu at the moment.
Nepal is no place for enterprise anymore. I am told a lot of businesses are fleeing to India. Banks are considering cutting down on weekdays: that is a serious indicator of how serious is the problem. Himalayan Bank, one of bigger, more successful banks in the country, says it saves upwards of Rs 200,000/- if it can close shop for one day every week.
I guess people like me can go back to improving their handwriting, perhaps benefiting from their new acquaintance with the page. But it is a different aesthetic of composition between typing and forming alphabets with the hand, and there is usually a subtle shift away from a set style or mood. Sentences do change their length, their flow, to adapt to each form. Expression does become affected, whether one likes it or not.
In any case, I have until 2AM to write something useful for a meeting tomorrow.
Sunday Monday Tuesday
04:00-10:00 08:00-14:00 08:00-14:00
17:00-23:00 20:00-02:00 20:00-2:00
Wednesday Thursday Friday
08:00-14:00 04:00-08:00 02:00-08:00
20:00-02:00 14:00-20:00 14:00-20:00
Saturday
02:00-08:00
14:00-20:00
These are each 6-hour blocks, twice every day, for a total of a staggering 84 hours every week. Of these, hours falling between 9AM and 6PM are: S:2; M:5; T:5; W:5; Th:4; F:4; S:4. If we exclude Saturday and Sunday, that is still 23 hours of a work week of 40/45 that is without electricity: more than 50% of the time we twiddle our thumbs, if we happen to work from our home. If we happen to be a lowly writer, for instance, who must depend upon deadlines met to earn a living. We are a sorry lot in Kathmandu at the moment.
Nepal is no place for enterprise anymore. I am told a lot of businesses are fleeing to India. Banks are considering cutting down on weekdays: that is a serious indicator of how serious is the problem. Himalayan Bank, one of bigger, more successful banks in the country, says it saves upwards of Rs 200,000/- if it can close shop for one day every week.
I guess people like me can go back to improving their handwriting, perhaps benefiting from their new acquaintance with the page. But it is a different aesthetic of composition between typing and forming alphabets with the hand, and there is usually a subtle shift away from a set style or mood. Sentences do change their length, their flow, to adapt to each form. Expression does become affected, whether one likes it or not.
In any case, I have until 2AM to write something useful for a meeting tomorrow.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
I am Back!
After a long, long absence, I am back in Kathmandu. I took the train to Kolkata, didn't really see all of it, but covered pretty much most of the range there was to cover... Many indelible images set in the mind now--a stack of paperwork fluttering in the afternoon rush, a one-eyed man pulling miles of goat-guts, a fifty-year old man who knows his death is at the door, and therefore looks at his mother and says "that woman gave birth to me, she brought me up," and cries before a couple of strangers...
I wrote something for last Sunday, at Shiv's parents' house in Kolkata, where I went for lunch. Below is the text. I can't find a link to the article.
----
Toll and Fatigues
--Prawin Adhikari
“After an overnight rain,” my fellow traveler in a Tata Sumo headed for Hetaunda speaks slowly, “imagine watching the sun rise on those mountains.” When he looks at the indistinct northern horizon, smoked by smog rising above Kathmandu, he begets an air of thoughtfulness. He seems to be talking about something else than the mountains or the golden light of a December sunrise. “What is that?” he asks as I thumb a crumpled ball of a pink ticket.
We are at the top of a pass: Kathmandu is behind us, and to our south are the mountains of Makwanpur. A dirt track snakes through mountain-folds. Bright scars of new roads can be seen as far as the eye cares to search. Some scars are the white of sandstone and flint, and some scars are the ochre and red of freshly dug earth, but they look auspicious instead of offensive as they dissect the landscape, like the signs of a long awaited healing. Pink tickets scattered on the dirt of the road are no more colorful than the fresh red of earth and the eternal blue of the sky. I pass the ticket to him. He takes a look, wants to pass it back, and throws it away instead. It is nothing important, just a ticket given to vehicles passing through.
I hadn’t picked the pink ticket because the ticket interested me as much as the person who handed them to drivers. Nobody questioned the small toll: drivers seemed unfazed by any number of colorful chits thrust into their hands by young men wearing combat fatigues. What is the tariff for? Why was the collector wearing a PLA uniform? I look at the man in combat fatigues to see if he carries a sidearm. He doesn’t even have the PLA insignia on his uniform. He strolls over, cocks his head to a side as if to examine a particularly peculiar specimen of a class enemy. He stands beside a carpenter who is finishing a window frame. They look at me after looking at each other. I realize that the carpenter is wearing similar trousers. “What is this for?” I ask.
Perhaps I have become too sensitive to the details of this moment that I perceive as a confrontation: I sense a ripple of heads turning or lifting up to look at me. The treble of my voice rings in my ears and I realize I could have spoken in a softer tone. The man in combat fatigues comes closer, looks at me as if he can’t understand the question, spits the stalk of grass that had been hanging from the side of his mouth. I know what the pink chit says. It is just a receipt for road tolls, collected for the district of Makwanpur by a local contractor. The young man is just an employee with the contractor.
It takes me a long time to decipher that moment on the mountain. It is only in Birgunj, watching rag-picking children attempt to kill marsh hens that I realize a small truth about the young toll-collector’s combat fatigues: those are the only warm clothes he possesses, and trying to eke out a living outside of a UMIN-monitored PLA cantonment, he wears them to work through the winter.
Immediately, I chide myself for being self-indulgent, pretending to see through a man whose history and motives I have no access to. There are many disparate things I shouldn’t conflate. A two-year-old girl squirts a thin, insistent trickle of diarrhea outside her house, behind Sri Ram Cinema in Birgunj, while her mother pumps water a few feet away to wash vegetables. There are graffiti asking the bold but statistically mundane question: “Do you have a vagina?” A business proposition and a phone number follows. Somewhere close by, a group of women from Maiti Nepal keep vigil over the border, pulling aside young women to brief them on the dangers of being sold into brothels. There is unrest around Ghantaghar Chowk, where the head of a man killed by a blow delivered to the head, allegedly by Maoist cadres, is the focus of a spontaneous protest. The driver of the tanga taking me away from there looks at me with pity.
“You look like a righteous man,” he startles me with an accusation I do not face very fondly. “But this is the Terai,” he says. “If you see a dead man, if you see a dying man, walk away. Don’t get involved. Or, before you know anything, they’ll accuse you of murder.”
The toll-collector’s fatigues returns to my mind. What has happened of his revolution? If I am right in my conjecture about that being his only pair of warm clothes, how has the newly imagined nation rewarded him for his toil? If he wears it as signal of affiliation to a force with the will to power, how have his toils rewarded us? How is the pink ticket ever really uncoupled from his combat fatigues?
How is the sick child’s stomach uncoupled from her mother’s ignorance about waterborne diseases? How is the fate of our women uncoupled from the graffiti on Birgunj walls? I am ashamed of the man who sees righteousness in me, but also suggests in the same breath that I abandon all pretences to it. Perhaps he did not see me as an equal, as coupled to him by a mutual chain of fear and worthlessness, and was eager to cut me to his size.
I wanted to give up all pretences to ignorance, for a change, and let the toll-collector know what I thought of the pink ticket and its subtext about his combat fatigues. I wanted to shake the tanga-wallah by his neck and rub his face into the ground where an unjustly slain man slept. I wanted to catch the man who wrote the mundane question, and show him the scars on women who have returned from the sexual slavery in Indian brothels.
I wanted to see meaning into the moment on the mountain, looking forward and back, conscious of the road that links an old, fatigued city and new scars on old mountains. I want to see a gesture complete and prophetic through the window frame just finished by a carpenter wearing fatigues. I want to call the phone number to tell the person that, no, I am sorry, but I do not have a vagina, and thus trivialize his malice. But I am also tired of what I don’t understand and what I can’t know.
I wrote something for last Sunday, at Shiv's parents' house in Kolkata, where I went for lunch. Below is the text. I can't find a link to the article.
----
Toll and Fatigues
--Prawin Adhikari
“After an overnight rain,” my fellow traveler in a Tata Sumo headed for Hetaunda speaks slowly, “imagine watching the sun rise on those mountains.” When he looks at the indistinct northern horizon, smoked by smog rising above Kathmandu, he begets an air of thoughtfulness. He seems to be talking about something else than the mountains or the golden light of a December sunrise. “What is that?” he asks as I thumb a crumpled ball of a pink ticket.
We are at the top of a pass: Kathmandu is behind us, and to our south are the mountains of Makwanpur. A dirt track snakes through mountain-folds. Bright scars of new roads can be seen as far as the eye cares to search. Some scars are the white of sandstone and flint, and some scars are the ochre and red of freshly dug earth, but they look auspicious instead of offensive as they dissect the landscape, like the signs of a long awaited healing. Pink tickets scattered on the dirt of the road are no more colorful than the fresh red of earth and the eternal blue of the sky. I pass the ticket to him. He takes a look, wants to pass it back, and throws it away instead. It is nothing important, just a ticket given to vehicles passing through.
I hadn’t picked the pink ticket because the ticket interested me as much as the person who handed them to drivers. Nobody questioned the small toll: drivers seemed unfazed by any number of colorful chits thrust into their hands by young men wearing combat fatigues. What is the tariff for? Why was the collector wearing a PLA uniform? I look at the man in combat fatigues to see if he carries a sidearm. He doesn’t even have the PLA insignia on his uniform. He strolls over, cocks his head to a side as if to examine a particularly peculiar specimen of a class enemy. He stands beside a carpenter who is finishing a window frame. They look at me after looking at each other. I realize that the carpenter is wearing similar trousers. “What is this for?” I ask.
Perhaps I have become too sensitive to the details of this moment that I perceive as a confrontation: I sense a ripple of heads turning or lifting up to look at me. The treble of my voice rings in my ears and I realize I could have spoken in a softer tone. The man in combat fatigues comes closer, looks at me as if he can’t understand the question, spits the stalk of grass that had been hanging from the side of his mouth. I know what the pink chit says. It is just a receipt for road tolls, collected for the district of Makwanpur by a local contractor. The young man is just an employee with the contractor.
It takes me a long time to decipher that moment on the mountain. It is only in Birgunj, watching rag-picking children attempt to kill marsh hens that I realize a small truth about the young toll-collector’s combat fatigues: those are the only warm clothes he possesses, and trying to eke out a living outside of a UMIN-monitored PLA cantonment, he wears them to work through the winter.
Immediately, I chide myself for being self-indulgent, pretending to see through a man whose history and motives I have no access to. There are many disparate things I shouldn’t conflate. A two-year-old girl squirts a thin, insistent trickle of diarrhea outside her house, behind Sri Ram Cinema in Birgunj, while her mother pumps water a few feet away to wash vegetables. There are graffiti asking the bold but statistically mundane question: “Do you have a vagina?” A business proposition and a phone number follows. Somewhere close by, a group of women from Maiti Nepal keep vigil over the border, pulling aside young women to brief them on the dangers of being sold into brothels. There is unrest around Ghantaghar Chowk, where the head of a man killed by a blow delivered to the head, allegedly by Maoist cadres, is the focus of a spontaneous protest. The driver of the tanga taking me away from there looks at me with pity.
“You look like a righteous man,” he startles me with an accusation I do not face very fondly. “But this is the Terai,” he says. “If you see a dead man, if you see a dying man, walk away. Don’t get involved. Or, before you know anything, they’ll accuse you of murder.”
The toll-collector’s fatigues returns to my mind. What has happened of his revolution? If I am right in my conjecture about that being his only pair of warm clothes, how has the newly imagined nation rewarded him for his toil? If he wears it as signal of affiliation to a force with the will to power, how have his toils rewarded us? How is the pink ticket ever really uncoupled from his combat fatigues?
How is the sick child’s stomach uncoupled from her mother’s ignorance about waterborne diseases? How is the fate of our women uncoupled from the graffiti on Birgunj walls? I am ashamed of the man who sees righteousness in me, but also suggests in the same breath that I abandon all pretences to it. Perhaps he did not see me as an equal, as coupled to him by a mutual chain of fear and worthlessness, and was eager to cut me to his size.
I wanted to give up all pretences to ignorance, for a change, and let the toll-collector know what I thought of the pink ticket and its subtext about his combat fatigues. I wanted to shake the tanga-wallah by his neck and rub his face into the ground where an unjustly slain man slept. I wanted to catch the man who wrote the mundane question, and show him the scars on women who have returned from the sexual slavery in Indian brothels.
I wanted to see meaning into the moment on the mountain, looking forward and back, conscious of the road that links an old, fatigued city and new scars on old mountains. I want to see a gesture complete and prophetic through the window frame just finished by a carpenter wearing fatigues. I want to call the phone number to tell the person that, no, I am sorry, but I do not have a vagina, and thus trivialize his malice. But I am also tired of what I don’t understand and what I can’t know.
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