My point is that such a blinking signal cannot suggest two things. If the vehicle ahead of you wants to stop on his left, he must give the left signal. He, instead, does not follow a simple rule and makes a norm out of ignorance. The problem is about signaling in the right direction. We all come across such side light signaling confusions, almost every day in Nepali city streets.
Can you put your fingers on your lips to ask me to speak? Do you swallow a piece of bread when you are thirsty? Do you get mad when you don’t find a fly in your soup? Do you say to your spouse on your wedding night that you have just brushed your teeth? We certainly do not do such things in normal circumstances. I do not turn left to go to the right. If we do, we are becoming dim-witted people. “No, if we do such things, we are Nepali politicians,” corrected my student.
From traffic signals to university spaces, all of us are doing the weird opposite things. Name whatever significant cultural activities happening in Nepal, you will find that most of them happen in bizarre ways. When I want to park on the left, I blink the right light.
A country moves on with promises of progress but without a Prime Minister for weeks, political institutions depend on law but do not know how to write the constitution, politicians do not know their native problems but opt for expensive foreign tours, business institutions run by paying ransoms to unlawful forces, literatures and arts detest criticism and thrive on collective bartering of praise, and university cultures love everything but shun studies.
Can you put your fingers on your lips to ask me to speak? Do you swallow a piece of bread when you are thirsty? We certainly do not do such things in normal circumstances. If we do, we are becoming dim-witted people. “No, if we do such things, we are Nepali politicians,” corrected my student.
What has gone wrong? There is a gross cultural misdirection: You turn left and give the right signal. The surprising thing is that the traffic still rolls on. If the traffic still rolls on based on the wrong signaling, there must be some grave underlying problem with our system. Such a system is based on both contrary and contradiction.
Something is contrary if one feature entails the falsity of the other. That is, if you are turning left you cannot give the right signal if you are not turning right. Furthermore, something is contradictory when one feature is the denial or negation of the other, that is, they cannot both be true and cannot both be false. Turning left cannot be turning right: Turning left is the negation of turning right.
Therefore, the basic signaling system and working of the traffic are based on two problems of contrary and contradiction. The visible system defies logic. But the defiance is not the end. The grave error is the fact that the system still works. There is a serious error in your morning walk if you walk like a drunkard. Since you still walk, there must be some problem in your walk. The traffic signaling rule is the epitome of what we are doing.
We are working, living, walking, and talking, but we are doing them amidst serious mistakes. Such ways of life are very much possible. “How can it be possible?” asked the student once. I replied, “We are making it possible.”
The question again is what has gone wrong and whom we should blame. The same student said with sweeping confidence that we all should be blamed. I do not like his answer. It is because he was trying to be an apologetic idealist. I do not think that all of us commit such pervasive mistakes. Few commit such errors, and a large part of culture faces the consequences of such contraries and contradictions.
I see such grave problems in our political culture. Those who are supposed to guide us are the funniest of people to act in strange ways. I heard that a religious-minded politician, early in the morning, was praying to the rising sun turning west. My student told me that once a minister of, something like, agriculture in a West Asian country tried to drown a fish in his office aquarium. There was a politician in El Salvador who joined a revolutionary group and got injured while throwing a grenade at the army patrol. An army officer pulled the pin and threw it back on him. We have such types of politicians in Nepal – act bizarrely opposite - they signal left to turn right, or kind of climb the glass wall to see what is on the other side.
orungupto@gmail.com
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