Red Nepal

I found this somewhere on the internets. Interesting.

Recall this shell-shocked face?
went mortally embarrassed today
hope's taken a thundering smack down,
As this city of five-fold million woke up
a ruthless mob of five-fold hundred cracked down,
held hostage to this city of lost souls,
their blades sharpened with our cowardice,
their seething passion fueled from our hollow despairs.

As this sheep wanders aimlessly
down the bare streets of Kathmandu
am left red faced by her nakedness,
spikes after spikes of anguish shoot up,
as herds of poker faced zombies march past about,
fear imprinted on their drained faces
stamped by a mere couple hundred wolf pack.

The age of the wolves has finally arrived
ruthless rulers of a kingdom of a million sheep
a land where dues are paid with fear
where despair is the only currency.

Us, 'poor, waylaid' sheep
what will is there left to rise?
or do we bend again to the flutes of these mad pipers,
while them wolves lick
our fear off their paws
do we sheep slowly march to their tunes
onto a cliff and the abyss beyond...

Perhaps some God will pity us,
perhaps.
Perhaps, God is just one of us cowards
perhaps.
till then, here's to remember us by,
a bloody long line of placid, little
fear-struck sheep
of five-fold million.

Source: DIE Nepal Bandh DIE group on facebook. Click here to join it.

Aah…Three Idiots! Not exactly a story of idiots. Raju (Sharman Joshi) and Farhan (R. Madhavan) might look like idiots at the beginning, but the philosophy of Rancho (Amir Khan) give their idiocy a comedic look. The story shows the lives of engineering college students who have been taught by their parents and teachers that life is a race, those who can’t run fast will be trampled by the world. Reminds me of the serpentine lines of “aspiring” students who just get done with their high schools and gear up to get into medical and engineering schools back in Nepal. After nothing else works, a lot of them end up going abroad. Seriously, how many of these students really want to be engineers and doctors?

Rajkumar Hirani, the creator of the much-acclaimed Munna Bhai series, brings this rib-tickling comedy with his own and Abhijat Joshi’s screenplay who also wrote the screenplay for Munna Bhai. Hirani himself couldn’t get into engineering or medical college and ended up listening to his heart-making films. This might have inspired to make this film where he repeatedly gives the message “follow your heart, follow your heart” through shrewd Rancho. The film mixes philosophy and engineering to give a message to the student populace. “Be photographers, filmmakers, politicians, businessmen but be passionate. “ The film also shows how family financial problems can affect the lives of the children who end up taking subjects that don’t interest them at all. Some even quit through suicides. Along with that, the film slams the Nepali and Indian education system for which students are just “machines,” rather than beings. The teachers bestow a lot of lot of stress to students, but no engineer has ever made a machine to gauge this stress. I remember the class requirements of a lot of colleges, especially in liberal arts colleges, which have to be taken by every student in order to graduate. Pity on my biology major college friends for whom politics, ancient Greek history or catholic studies don’t make sense but they are to be taken.

Rancho’s first encounter with Raju and Farhan shows his cunning character while responding the ragging culture of the senior students to the freshman in Indian and Nepali colleges. Then the audience goes on a roller coaster ride of emotions -- at times about to sob and at times praising the shrewdness of Rancho and chortle. The film gets a turn when Rancho turns out to be going to college for someone else not for being graduating but for knowledge. It seems Rancho has been influenced by Socrates’ theory of specialization, but not exactly talking about his ideal society.

The story, told in flashback by Raju and Farhan, has some idiot scenes like the delivery of the baby using the vacuum machine built by Rancho in no time; however, it embraces no boring scenes or dialogues and keeps the audience glued back in their seats. The plot also shows the reality of some teachers whose classes are founded by definitions rather than the applicability of the study material, whose meager salary makes them to ride bike to come to college to teach and who are ill-treated by their students for their nature. Just like the shrewd dialogues of Munna Bhai, Hirani brings yet another heart touching film, this time with another well-known actor Amir Khan, and his evergreen risible plot.

All in all, the movie is Aal Izz Well just like Rancho's mantra. Released on the day of Christmas, the movie has no relationship with that. But I would like to say this loud although I’m not a philosopher--If you don’t listen to your heart now, after decades when you’ll be looking at the stars, you will realize that you did a mistake for you weren’t courageous enough to speak out your heart now. So follow your heart. The world gives no second chance, you know.

Aah... an idyllic film.

The author is a Princeton University student who went on a leave to Nepal for a year at the beginning of 2009. He is coming back on January 16 to resume his studies.

Ganja. I still remember taking it for the first time. Little did I know at the moment, where it would take me.

My reason for doing it was simple - everyone else was doing it. I was just curious how smoke could make people happier, funnier, and more interesting. And I got the same effect after taking it. My year off before college was the best year of my life, partly because of weed. It made everything funny. I loved being high with friends and laughing at the most random things. I also enjoyed being high and talking about life and its meaning. I felt it opened my "doors of perception". No matter what happened later, I will always thank weed for opening my mind.

After going to Princeton, I started doing a lot more weed than before. It became a part of daily routine. I know a lot of people who do it more than me, but it affected me much more probably because of the way my brain is wired. I started thinking a lot. I even had weird visions at times.

It was still fun at first, but it started getting worse. I became paranoid-schizophrenic. I thought everyone was trying to kill me. I felt everyone was reading my thoughts. I would look at photos in facebook and it seemed like everyone was looking at me. I felt everyone laughing at me. I could hear people talking about me behind my back and even in front of me. I lost my frame of reference completely. When I was talking to people, every subject would somehow relate to me.

And, I started seeing weird connections. I started seeing my thoughts broadcast on the television. Every TV show started seeming like a satire on me. Once I thought I was a part of a huge psychiatric experiment and everyone was reading my thought. It seemed like everyone was part of a group conspiring against me. I felt like I was in a chessboard and every other piece was against me.

I could not handle it anymore. I knew something was wrong with me. I got scared and I decided to take a year off. After I came back to Nepal, I stopped smoking weed and the symptoms started fading away and my reasoning came back. Then I thought to myself "I am not that important. I can't be that important for everyone to be conspiring against me. It is illogical that people more important than me would waste their time reading my thoughts and trying to kill me. I am not that important."

I am not that important. With that single statement, I got out of the hold of paranoid schizophrenia. But, it replaced paranoia with something similar- depression. As I kept saying to myself "I am not important", I started feeling unimportant. I thought about the whole universe and how unimportant I was. I got a hallucinatory vision of the whole universe transforming along the time scale and realized how insignificant my life is. I thought my life is insignificant and it won't matter if i exist or not, so why bother? I thought that in the universal scale of things, my life never existed because of its insignificance. So, why not die?

If I have never existed, I should choose life or death logically. Then, I asked myself why choose life? Is there a reason to exist? I thought and thought and couldn't find one. So, I concluded there is no reason to exist.

This made the choice of life and death equal. There is no reason to live and there is none to die. But, I had to make a decision. Then, I thought in life we are bound by things. Everything is determined. So, we are bound by chain of events. Death is an escape from that. Death seemed like freedom to me.

So, I decided to die. But, I could not bring myself to do it. So, I suffered from depression for almost 3 months constantly thinking about death. Since I was unable to kill myself, I realized there is something in me that wants to live. There is a will to live. And maybe that will (although indescribable) is the reason to exist. Or maybe not? But, I started to favor life a little bit.

I realized, then, that my vision of the universal scale of space and time is just imagination. My life is insignificant in that scale, but I can never really perceive that scale. My perception of space and time will be based on my life. So, for the conscious being that is me, my life is not just significant it is infinitely and the only significant thing.

So, life is significant. But, is there a reason to exist? As for me there is a reason to exist. Even when I thought life and death were equal, I couldn't kill myself, which means my mind thinks there is a reason to exist. Otherwise I would have killed myself. I don't know what that reason to exist is, but the fact that I am not dead means I have a reason to exist. Also, the fact that there is not a single undeniable reason to exist doesn't mean that we can't create our own reasons to exist. As individuals we have the choice to choose our own reasons to exist.

But, death is freedom. How can I choose life? Then I remembered quantum physics, where things have probability of being at infinite states. So, in life we have infinite possibilities and infinite freedom. Death has a unitary state of non existence.

And, the whole question of life and death is bullshit anyways. We all existed during big bang and we will always exist as matter or energy. Let us just enjoy the fact that all of us were one before big bang.

OMG!!! Did you actually read this bullshit?

Story published with the author's permission.

Nepal holds historic high-altitude Cabinet meeting in Everest: December 04, 2009 NST

SYANGBOCHE (SOLUKHUMBU), DEC 04 - The much-hyped Cabinet meeting took place in Kalapatthar plateau near Mt. Everest Base Camp at an altitude of 5,242 metres (17,192 feet)on Friday.

Twenty-four Cabinet ministers, including Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal, reached Lukla Airport in Solukhumbu district on Thursday to take part in the historic meeting.

The government will make public the decisions of the Cabinet at a press meet in Syangboche (3,780 m) at 10:30 am . Twenty-three ministers flew to Lukla from the Capital, whereas Prime Minister Nepal arrived here after attending a programme in Ilam.

The ministers had stayed in Lukla on Thursday. They arrived in Syangboche this morning in MI 17 and Shree Air helicopters. Four ministers will be missing the meeting. Defence Minister Bidhya Bhandari and Health Minister Umakanta Chaudhary cant make it due to health reasons whereas Minister for Commerce and Supplies Rajendra Mahato is currently on a foreign visit. Minister of State for Science and Technology Indra Prasad Dhungel will also be absent.

On the eve of the UN climate change summit to be held in Copenhagen, the government decided to hold a Cabinet meeting near the Everest base camp to draw global attention to the threat of climate change in the country.

A large number of national and foreign journalists, doctors and government officials have arrived in Syangboche to cover the event.

The ministerial team flew to Kalapatthar along with 30 mountaineers and six medicos after health check-up in Syangboche this morning. They were taken to the region a day before the meeting for acclimatisation. Today's Cabinet will declare Banke National Park as new national park and Api-Nampa and Gauri-Shankar as conservation areas. Minister for Forest and Soil Conservation Dipak Bohara said the Cabinet would also endorse the agenda prepared for the Copenhagen summit.

Sources: Star News, ekantipur, Nepalnews