From hunters and gatherers to pastoral cultures had to conform to the constraints of light and darkness during day and night. Seasons are important elements of agricultural civilizations.[break]
Industrial societies flourished with the invention of mass transport, electricity and multiple shifts to keep massive machines running.
In what has been called the information society, businesses work round the clock. Services have to function at all hours.
Assignments span over several time zones. People have to worry even in their sleep about issues over which they have little or no control. Floods in Thailand raise the price of hard disks.
Devaluation of Indian currency would make outsourcing even more attractive to utility companies in the United States of America.
Decline of the European Union has the potential to alter the global power balance. Politicians have to be on their toes at all times to make sense of the confusion that keeps getting even more chaotic. They would not be able to do so for too long if people who incubate ideas were to fall asleep.
A city where citizens are in command realizes that the past needs to be reinterpreted on a regular basis and future needs constant imagining.
Theoretically, artistes, litterateurs and thinkers would function better in solitude. That is what scriptures have made us believe. Buddhist monks had their isolated monasteries.
Hindu seers agonized over questions of life after death in the silence of forests. Great gurus accepted limited number of disciples.
All that worked perfectly well during the feudal era when priests and their patrons functioned in tandem to keep everyone else in bondage. Preceptors claimed to be in direct communion with gods and they passed divine messages to the laity.
Modern visionaries do not receive messages of nature in the receptacle of their minds atop a mountain. They prepare themselves constantly for the moment of revelation in the energetic and overflowing settlements.
Bright lights of cities create an irresistible allusion of warmth while they hustle and wait for the moment of discovery to arrive.
The agonizing wait for the moment of truth and beauty consumes many seekers. The unanimity of the city saves an artiste from the ridicule and humiliation that would have been his or her lot in peripheral societies.
Cities allow freedom to entertain seemingly preposterous thoughts. And where would the society be without outlandish ideas? It would certainly have been difficult for humanity to take wings.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh once imagined of a South Asian unity where it would be possible to indulge in something like breakfast in Colombo, lunch in Kolkata, high tea in Kabul and be at the dinner table in Kathmandu.
It would entail a lot of air travel of course, and carbon footprints would be suicidal, but it was an intellectual speaking who had taken a short leave of absence from the discipline of economics and compulsions of politics. Scholarly latitude is no less generous than poetic license.
Evidently, even Premier Singh needed an urbane setting to utter such idealistic—or outlandish, depending upon one’s inclination—words.
Paris has been at the forefront of playing with ideas at least since the French Revolution. It is not just fashion designers, filmmakers, artistes and poets that are fascinated by the ambience of its streets.
Revolutionaries love the city of Lady Guillotine (An apparatus of the French Revolution that claimed the lives of nobles and rebels alike) while inventors are inspired by the soaring tower erected to display the industrial might of the French economy.
It would be extremely naïve to believe that these things have happened in a vacuum. Cultivation of ideas has always been an obsession with the French bourgeoisie.
There is a legend that Charles de Gaulle was once suggested that Jean-Paul Sartre be taken into custody over his inflammatory observations.
Gaullism is as far from sentimentalism as possible, but the iconic strongman of pragmatic politics is said to have exclaimed that France would not imagine imprisoning its Voltaire.
French nationalism borders on extremism. It can be chauvinistic and xenophobic. But what redeems French society is its openness to ideas of the world.
Granted that its revolutions these days are mostly for export, but Paris has this strange tradition of identifying and nurturing thoughts from the margins.
That could be the reason Paris is more than a city; it is a metropolis in the most expansive sense of the term.
It is not just happenstance that when an eccentric leftist leader like Mohan Bikram Singh decided to come out of his self-imposed and half-underground political isolation, he chose some French chroniclers to open up and was the guest of a French research institute in what was perhaps his first visit abroad other than India.
One of the reasons French institutions can afford to examine as esoteric issues as speech of Himalayan Shamans for example is that they are funded by the government.
In what can best be termed as laboratories to gestate and test ideas, research institutes in Paris function more or less like studios of painters or studies of scholars where scientists become artistes and seekers.
Fallow fields
There are several reasons why underdeveloped economies remain so despite decades of developmental planning, foreign aid and models of growth that had been tried in as far off places as Chile, Indonesia and Uganda.
Just as no two rice fields are same despite a complete absence of visible differences, every society responds to its own kind of seeds. One of the problems Nepal has to grapple with is that she is being told that Monsanto would release her farmers from a life of debt and uncertainties.
It just might—miracles do happen—but results of failure would be devastating. Living on ideas borrowed wholesale, with little or no adaptation, is more dangerous than experimenting with seeds and crop yield.
It is not just in agriculture, animal husbandry, education, health or industrial development that post-1960s Nepal never tried to improvise upon solutions derived elsewhere for societies at different levels of consciousness.
In the realm of ideas, Kathmandu was once fertile with inventive architecture and innovative crafts during the Malla period. Shahs and Ranas killed that tradition by building monstrosities that reeked of slavery in splendor.
In pursuit of modernity, even that sense of false grandeur disappeared. If monuments are testaments of creativity of a society, Nepal seems to have become a fallow field in the post-1960 period.
The rate of deterioration became even faster once the liberalization, privatization and globalization (LPG) began to sweep Nepal from the mid-1980s. Tribhuvan University had once held some promise.
It became an accreditation agency with little or no control over quality of teaching at far-flung campuses. Even though designed by Ford Foundation consultants to be an intellectual outpost of extending US hegemony, Center of Economic Development and Administration (CEDA) had functioned as an agency of critical thinking.
Center of Nepal and Asian Studies (CNAS) commanded respect in the field of social sciences. After the 1990s, most of their scholars became consultants, entrepreneurs of education businesses, lackeys of powerful politicos or operators of NGOs doing the bidding of donor agencies.
Private universities are doing useful work. But they have little incentive to conduct researches that have almost no commercial value in the marketplace.
Rituals of marriage in Dusadh community or the festival of Laban when new rice grains are brought into houses in Mithila in a reverential manner do not interest youngsters who want to get a degree in ‘so-so-logy’ so that they can be hired by NGOs.
Anyone studying mating habits of rabbits would be considered a nutcase by parents and peers alike. But a society needs such persons as much as it requires artistes that paint horses or poets that sing of roses in myriad of ways.
Private think-tanks are unlikely to back pure thought and fiercely free ideas. It is more profitable for them to promote favorite artistes and befriend senior government officials.
Academic NGOs have some potential to foster a culture of research and ruminations, but they cannot afford to step outside the log-frame boxes of donor agencies. That leads us back to the Tribhuvan University—a holy cow that stopped giving milk a long time ago.
However, it still provides enough organic manure to make fallow fields fertile.
Nepal’s ivory towers are almost empty and nobody has time to think about it. Not just Rome, no city or country in history has been built in a day; builders of civilization probably worked by night too.
Academics and scholars held the lamp aloft even when darkness of conflicts and wars temporarily engulfed forward-looking societies.
It is good to prioritize foreign investment, but Nepal would have to do its own thinking.
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