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.