What is being a Nepali?

May 5, 2010
2 min read

There was a flood of people pass by my house along with that of my neighbors , along with those living in that street and probably through a quarter of the city. 

As you might know there is a general strike in Nepal.  The city has been frozen for the last 4 days. 

Yet despite all the negative impact of this political stunt, seeing the above flood something rang in me. 

All the people flowing were unknown to me, not in terms of relations or in terms of familiarity but in terms of imagination.  What i mean is that i could not imagine that this humanity walking before by house are like me Nepalese. 

I look at them, their behavior, the decisions that they took by participating in this fiasco, and i just can’t help wonder, what is in common between me and them except that we speak a same language and live in a same space sharing similar social or legal setting? 

I may have met them on my many trips to remote areas of Nepal.  But i never would have seen that side of their existence. 

Spiritually i think that the reason behind the political turmoil in nepal is the necessity for the vastly heterogenous nepalese population to intergrate and re-define what being nepali means. 

I have got people from the furthest place of nepal wokring for me.  But they are not incomprehensible.  These people walking in the street for a cause i can’t understand , might be working in the nearby tea shop but i can’t comprehend them. 

We people in Kathmandu are guilty of ignoring that mass that just passed in front my house.  What common aspirations and values do we share?  We must be sharing something, otherwise we would not be in the same nation. 

A thought passed by.  What if instead of just a majority of brown skinned hindus, Nepal was filled with white skinned christians.  Would the circumstances be different?  Would events have unfolded diffenrently?  What if we were a majority of black africans or yellow skinned chinese? 

For the young generation that has suffered so much because of the political folly, what i am saying might be almost poison, but we’ve got to look at the bright side. 

We as a nation are failing to understand something.  That thing is i think a new consciousness of what it means to be Nepali.