Things could be worse

The other day my neighborhood was able to recharge the battery on their laptops only for three daylight hours, between 3PM and 6PM – loadshedding had been taken up quite a notch. Most households this week also ordered a truck to deliver water and paid for it out of their pockets – It’s only February, what will it be like in April? they muttered.

The shameless government, inept civil servants and corrupt politicians – all elusive figures - were blamed as always in pointless conversations. What were our ramblings able to accomplish?

From the headlines that scream of “donations”, kidnapping, rape and slaps on red cheeks, it is obvious that Nepal has hit a new low. But, they do say if a post-conflict state can resist returning to conflict for seven or such odd years, it’s in the clear.

So, despite the mushrooming of armed groups, increase of not-exactly petty crimes (the likes of looting and kidnappings, as opposed to murders and bomb blasts) which are the norm for any state emerging from an insurgency, Nepal, I suppose can be congratulated for successfully treading past five years. We need to only hold our breath for two more years before the likelihood of turning into Sierra Leone is no longer a legitimate concern. Or so they say. But, no one seems encouraged by this fact.

Instead everyone is focused on escaping, of trotting over to greener pastures. Nepalis are bent on going overseas – joining their son in Australia, daughter in the UK or cousin in America. There is no shortage of water or electricity bahira-tira. “Overseas-ma” they know how to drive. And uta-tira the roads are clean and the houses are new. So even if the jobs are not so plenty, stamping the now machine readable passport with a visa is high on most people to-do list.

For many of us Nepalis, our world is divided into Nepal and the Western hemisphere. We ooh and aah about life and living overseas, as though the world is better off than we are. And we conveniently forget the plight that more than half of the world is in day in and day out.

A friend has recently moved to Afghanistan and describes the inability to simply take walk – the streets are too dangerous, he says. Another friend, this one actually from Afghanistan, but currently studying in Germany, can hardly focus on her studies as the sixth bomb in three months detonated in Kabul on Valentine’s Day – her family still resides in the capital. It doesn´t help that the plight of women in Nepal is incomparable to that of Afghani women for whom working is not only rebellious but one that can lead to punishment.

A family member recently visited Chad was invited to join an organization working on rural health care. He has been requested to apply the knowledge and experience he acquired working in rural Nepal to the African country. He’s having a difficult time convincing his wife to make a life where the violent dust frequently takes hold of the city. He claims that Nepal’s loadshedding is a non-issue when compared to the two hours of electricity the people of Chad do without for every five minutes the fan does spin.

Listening to them, I realize Nepal could be worse off.

Despite the mushrooming of armed groups, increase of not-exactly petty crimes (the likes of looting and kidnappings, as opposed to murders and bomb blasts) which are the norm for any state emerging from an insurgency, Nepal, I suppose can be congratulated for successfully treading past five years.

As a tenth grader in boarding school, my Korean friend had asked me about the future of Nepal. And I bravely, but oh so naively, told her Nepal had hit rock bottom, that Nepal couldn´t get any lower. I confidently told her we had nowhere to go but up. Our star economics student, she seemed unconvinced and asked me about our infant mortality rate and exchange rate and literacy. Always under the impression Nepal was “one of the poorest countries in the world” she shrugged off our stats and said it didn’t sounds so bad, and that it could get worse.

At the time I too simply perceived the world in black and white – Nepal was poor, the West was rich. Nepal was underdeveloped, the West was development. And in the process, I so easily dismissed the dozens of countries that were also struggling to stand on their own two feet.

In constantly comparing the case of Nepal to the likes of America and France and Singapore, perhaps we are also collectively forgetting the case of countries like Afghanistan and Chad. After all there is a longer list of the latter than the former.

This isn’t to say that Nepalis ought to pat their own backs with a satisfied “shyabash” because, we, for one have actually been able to contain our conflict and reach a peace compromise (“agreement” is just the kinder translation of samjhouta after all). Or because most of us (who are not being threatened anyway) can still take a walk, sip a glass of chiya down the gully and trot back home; or because the number of people who don’t own guns outnumber those who do. We do have our own share of issues.

But, it is to say that in perpetually guilt-tripping ourselves on failing on multiple levels because we are so busy comparing ourselves with the fraction of the world that is in the eyes of most “doing well” is not putting things in perspective.

For the first sixteen meetings which were unable to select a new Prime Minister, the hydro-power projects which even if agreed on today, would still take us over half a decade to appease our power needs and inflation that may very well milk this country dry – it could be worse.

For ours is a country where the people are optimistic, where the land is generous and where the future does not only have to look bleak.

There are more than a handful of countries for whom Nepal – on various accounts ranging from politics to culture to the finance – is doing better. It’s worth considering our attitude towards ourselves. Not everything everywhere outside the border is better off – and while we have a long way to go, it’s still a shorter distance than for some others.

sradda.thapa@gmail.com