The world begins to oblige...

It's raining. That's fantastic.

Mind you, it's not coming down hard, and the sky is giving us fitful volleys of hail along with the rain. But I'm optimistic that it will disperse a bit of the suffocating ABC (Asian Brown Cloud) that's currently choking Nepal, along with most of South Asia. The ABC is a kilometres-thick layer of haze and soot, an unhappy consequence of unregulated vehicles and power plants, burning agricultural waste and literally billions of cookfires fueled by wood or cow dung. It reduces sunlight so much that it's been markedly colder here the last couple of weeks, obscures anything a kilometre away and, incidentally, kills millions of people each year. It's both fascinating and horrifying, and I'm eager for the end of it, which will only really come with the start of full monsoon rains in May or June. Today's short shower is only that, and sadly it's already over. Damn.

In other news, the Nepalese Free Student Union, a student government pervasively aligned with the uncountable, incomprehensible political parties, held its elections this week. Since most of the affected campuses were between me and my office, I skipped work for the day and took photos instead. This being Nepal, it's inconceivable that such an event wouldn't cripple traffic across the entire city. The elections blocked Durbar Marg, the main North-South street in central Kathmandu, for the entire day. Traffic would have a rough time getting through this:



The enthusiasm was remarkable, and occasionally unsettling, given the alignment of the various student parties with larger political groups who cheerfully demonstrate their capacity for violence whenever given the opportunity. There was even a super-fan, with his support painted across his body, leading a marching rally:



Police, either fearing violence or eager for it, kept a careful eye on the whole thing:



Oh, and Nepalese students are still rather like ours, give or take a few years, in some fairly universal ways:



But there's no denying the marked fervour of the whole process, relative to the much-ignored (but nearly as corrupt) process of student politics in Canada.



I spent a few hours there, curious as to whether the zeal would turn to aggression and the relative order to a maelstrom. Most students cheerfully obliged my intrusions with my camera and, satisfied that things might actually remained peaceful, I took off.

Later in the day, riots at polling stations in East Nepal (and the heavy-handed police response) killed one student and injured hundreds, some of whom are not expected to survive their wounds. Pipe bombs went off at university poll about 90 kilometres from here, wounding six students. This is Nepal, after all - can't have things being settled by a free and peaceful election, can we?

I neither know nor care who won the election.

What a change...

It's been a complex week, for a number of reasons. One of the biggies is that it's quite a transition to move from Asia’s armpit to its bustling brain and back again, in the space of 3 days. Hong Kong feels like the centre of the world. Kathmandu… doesn’t. I’m still wrestling with the enormous difficulties of getting anything done here; electricity, despite numerous optimistic promises from the powers that be, has predictably not improved, remaining at a miserly 8 hours per day. The street situation is tense – there are police and military checkpoints left and right, but I don’t have much idea whether they’re specifically looking for someone or just making themselves seen.

Over the last two weeks, much of southern Nepal has been consumed by riots over a classification error that lumped one distinct ethnic group, the Tharus, in with a much larger and thoroughly different one, the Madhesis. In inimitable, illogical Nepali style, the aggrieved responded by burning tires, trashing cars, and beating (occasionally to death) people who disrespected the righteousness of their crusade by (horror of horrors) driving to work. If there was also an attempt to vent in a less vicious, counterproductive fashion, I surely missed it. Though this transpired hours from Kathmandu, the effects were widely visible here, as the stricken region straddles the key trade routes from India. My housekeeper, whose son is severely ill with some form of liver failure, was long unable to visit him at their home in Nepalgunj, far to the west. Petrol lines snake around the city as desperate drivers with dry tanks follow the rumours that a fuel shipment here and there has snuck through the southern blockade. Things have apparently calmed down now, but this isn’t a unique event. There’s always another aggravated group that feels the best (and only) way to make a point is to radically disrupt the lives of millions who have done them no wrong. If there’s a shred of civic responsibility at play in Nepal’s public arena, I haven’t seen it. Painfully few people are out to improve the lot of Nepal as a whole; most seek only enlarge their personal piece of the pie. But Nepal, you have surely inferred, has a very small pie, and most are quite openly indifferent to the fact that taking more for themselves drives others further into poverty.

This is the brutal logic of Nepal, the crushing truth that keeps this place starving and marginal. I’ve heard it said by many Nepalis: “We would rather see everyone suffer equally than see anyone else get ahead”. It may sound egalitarian, but that reasoning destroys a country. I could see it in January, when the small town that hosts Kathmandu’s dump blockaded the trash trucks for three weeks over whatever grievance, leaving this city of 2.5 million to marinate in a sea of rotting garbage, swarming rats and rivers of fermented liquid foulness running along the main streets. Or in February, when the residents of the village nearest one of Nepal’s few functioning power plants padlocked the facility, demanding 24-hour electricity at the expense of the rest of the country. Or this month, as I’ve described above, when militant Tharus decided that depriving a malnourished country of cooking gas furthers the cause of universal justice. The government and their police blithely indulge such political temper tantrums, which mystifies me. Even in Canada, a free society by all but the most absurd ideological measures, no group gets free rein to starve others in order to make a point.

With the exception of Burma, whose vicious tyrants deliberately keep the people on the very margins of survival, Nepal is the worst-governed country I’ve ever seen on the ground. And just about everybody pitches in to make it happen.

Regarding all things afoot...

Life may begin to calm down a bit after this week. I've just concluded the toughest and most important interview of my life (thus far). I'm tolerably confident I succeeded, but it'll be up to two months before I truly know.

Meanwhile, I LOVE Hong Kong! Though it's ridiculously consumeristic and not the least bit friendly, it's kinetic, clean, effective, and full of fascinating sounds and alluring smells. It has reliable electricity, drinkable water, traffic lights (that are consistently obeyed) and enticing food left and right. Most compellingly, not once in the last two days have I felt the need to scream "Why #@$^%$@# bloody @#$@#% doesn't this work the way it's supposed to!!!"

Methinks Kathmandu has lowered the bar for what amazes me. It will be a hard adjustment going back, which I'll be doing in a few minutes.

Pictures to follow, if the electricity ever comes back on again in Nepal.

Argh.