this and that

Today (April 10th), Nepal is having elections unlike any election she has had before. 17.6 million voters are voting to elect a special assembly that will rewrite the constitution, which is very likely to write out the monarchy. Many people see this as a true opportunity for Nepal to start anew. On the other hand, the people running in the elections are the same people who over the past 18 years or so made a mockery of democracy, so unless the system changes radically, one cannot be too sure. It’s them, with the addition of Maoist candidates, who appear to be ready to do more than anything to get people to vote for them. This apparently includes a ridiculous claim that they have a “special telescope which can tell them who has voted for whom.” Also, with an almost religious following of its leaders, helped further by the foreign media’s singular attention on them, I fail to see how a president would be any different from a monarch.

The absence of proxy voting means that people like me living abroad cannot participate, so, to be honest, the election has seemed like a somewhat distant affair to me. Nevertheless, the country is where it is, and one can only hope for the best.

Further reading:

• A flurry of articles from the New York Times, including this op-ed from Manjushree Thapa
• Nepali Times’ live coverage
• Nepal News
• Kantipur

A couple of completely unrelated and slightly old, but interesting pieces of news:

• Now that the Nepalese army (hopefully) doesn’t have anyone to fight at home, some Nepalese special forces have been deployed to Darfur as peacekeeping forces. From the International Herald Tribune:
  

  …Thailand would provide the only non-African battalion out of 18 on the proposed force, while Nepal was the only country to offer special forces. Three Nordic countries — Denmark, Sweden and Norway — had offered an engineering unit.

  I hope they do well and prove useful, but at the very least, it has earned Nepal a rare positive mention in the international press.

• American-born physicist Garrett Lisi has proposed a new possibility for a Theory of Everything, or in other words, a theory that tries to unify the seemingly incompatible worlds of quantum mechanics (the Standard Model in modern physics parlance), and gravity (in effect, general relativity). Most of the media coverage surrounding his paper has centered around the fact that he is not affiliated with any university and that he spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii (he published his paper on arXiv), so if you really want to look into what the paper says and what the reaction has been like so far, you should first head to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia entry on Tihar, the Nepalese festival of lights (and a lot more).

And from the BBC website, “Nepal dogs honored” (thanks to Rosie for the pointer).

I just realized that they could be talking about our politicians (they’re not).

Youth for Nepal is a non-profit organization started recently by a few friends of mine, that I’m also helping out with. From the homepage,

Youth For Nepal aims to encourage social entrepreneurship in the fields of education, environment and health by engaging young adults. We encourage young adults, especially college and high school students, to come up with projects they would like to work on individually or as a team. If approved, we fund these projects and assist with their administration, at the same time, with the expectation that these young adults will own and be responsible for their own projects.

The organization is very much in its infancy, and it’s going to need a lot of support from everyone. A few ways to help:

• Donate
• Search using GoodSearch, a search engine that donates money to a charity of your choosing every time you use it to search the Internet.
• Contact Youth for Nepal and give feedback and suggestions.

Seveal months ago, I wrote about how nice it would be to have a Wikipedia in my mother language Nepal Bhasa. Now, thanks to a medical student from Kathmandu (English Wikipedia user page, Nepal Bhasa Wikipedia user page) there is one. It uses the Devanagari script (Nepal Bhasa has her own scripts but they are not supported by Unicode yet. It sure is nice to be able to contribute to an encyclopedia in your language, and get encyclopedic knowledge in your own language!

As I mentioned in that earlier post, the Nepali wikipedia has already been in existence for some time now. If you know either language and wish to contribute, click here to learn how you can type in Devanagari on a Windows machine. Also, check out this Roman to Unicode Nepali Converter, developed by Deepak Khanal and Carleton alum Sujan Rajbhandary.

The World is a radio production of Public Radio International and everyday, it features a “geo quiz” which poses a question about a location in the world and information about the answer. Today’s question, to my pleasant surprise, was about a “royal park…at the foot of the Himalayas,” “Nepal’s oldest national park.” It was a very short segment but amidst the disheartening lack of coverage of news from Nepal in this part of the world, even a short piece about Nepal’s natural heritage was refreshing to listen to.

This Geo Quiz page has the question. You can also find out the answer and listen to an audio postcard from Nepal, recorded by Australian sound engineer Greg Simmons.

Nepal rebels make peace promise: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6129314.stm

And the actual peace deal [PDF, 36KB]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/08_11_06_nepal_deal.pdf

The problem is that many people will find it hard to simply sweep under the carpet, the thirteen thousand deaths from a decade-long conflict. Nevertheless, with the existing power structure, I am sure this is a positive step forward.

Here is a pretty good, honest and down-to-earth primer to Nepal’s Maoist insurgency by National Geographic, devoid of the usual hyperbole that accompanies Western media reports about Nepal. And two beautiful videos from a documentary on Nepal: Video 1 Video 2 (thanks to Jeshica Baral’s Facebook profile.)

And some others:

• www.blog.com.np: “United We Blog! for a democratic Nepal”: Nepalese journalists blog (mostly from the Kantipur camp)
• nepalnow.blogspot.com: Mostly pro-royal blog from a mysterious, probably American, “blogdai”
• www.samudaya.org: “Pseudo-intellectuals. Just like you” As far as I know, this site cannot be accessed in Nepal, but there is a mirror at everybodybreed.com.

Good stuff. (Nepali featured in Time magazine Global Health issue)

I have been unusually lazy about writing here but I hope to write more from now on. And what better day to start than one of the most auspicious days of the Nepalese calendar. Today is Vijaya Dashami, the most important day of the great Nepalese festival Dashain (called Mohani by Newars). Although primarily a Hindu festival, Nepalese people of all caste, creed and religion take time during Dashain to visit the numerous religious sites around the country, receive blessings from older relatives and relax with friends and families. Vijaya Dashami, also known as Tika (for the vermillion powder-paste put on people’s foreheads by their elders as a symbol of blessing), and called Chaalañ by Newars, is a day symbolic of the triumph of good over evil, the culmination of the fifteen-day Dashain celebration.

For me personally, Dashain has been one of the things I have missed the most since I came to the US. I miss waiting for Ba to finish the almost half-day long rituals, I miss watching Mama nag him to finish quickly so he can take his medicine, I miss having my brother, my sisters and my nephews all around, I miss watching out the window to look at colorful kites dotting the sky and I miss the sense of hubbub and movement that you sense all around you. And although it is probably cliché to say so, I definitely miss the food a lot.

Anyway, in the spirit of the postcards we used exchange among friends during Dashain when we were young, I wish everyone a very Happy Dashain:

This image, from Nepalnews, depicts the Hindu goddess Durga, worshipped during Dashain.

More links:

• Read more about Dashain.
• Story about Vijaya Dashami from Nepalnews.
• “Shopping: The inevitable part of Dashain”