I didn't say that: 2009

It’s over!

Hiya fellas!

2009’s ending, and I did not even realize it until we began working for the New Year special issue. Days, weeks, and months have wheezed by, and everything's now a become a blur. I like working for the Post, but things have started getting boring lately, and I have realized I am not as able a writer as I hoped I would be by now. Therefore, I will be leaving the Post pretty soon.

I am leaving for Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand some time in Feb or March, after which I will not go back to work. Working for the last 6 months was a wonderful experience, and I learned a lot of new and interesting stuff. But I never matured enough to satisfy myself with my own writing. They tried, oh god yes they did, but I failed. Amish Sir, Varsha di, and Tiku dai are the talented, nicest people I have known, and yet they could not help me help myself. I need some self-motivation, and I need rest. So buhbye, being published.

I am not sure what I want to do in the New Year, but I want to try new things, go on adventures, and take chances. This year I did some of that, but I am not happy with myself—mostly I just slept and ate.

Have a great New Year!

The Myth of Writers' Block

When writers complain about having writer's block, what they are really saying is that writing is not an easy job. They are wishing they had a friend who would write whatever they need to do, in exchange for something like food or clean socks. Not beer, because their friend does not drink yet, otherwise he would definitely exchange beer for writing assignments.

However, the friend will get tired of writing some day or the other. And he cannot complain about the block, because it is something he likes doing, and has to do, and there's absolutely no way out.

So he writes several hundred words and deletes them. He then tries to write something that would reflect his current state of mind without ranting or complaining too much. He is not sure if that will work, or if the end result will actually be any good than all the bad writing he just deleted, but he wants to give this a shot.

And so it begins. He remembers a piece he recently read in an interview with a popular writer who says writers' block is just an imaginary creature invented by lazy writers who do not want the guilt of not having written upon themselves. Our hero begins his piece with a strong title, and then goes nowhere until the third paragraph where he describes his consciousness stream just before the writing of the article. In the fourth paragraph, he describes what he is thinking as he is writing the piece. The last sentence of the piece, and of the entire piece, describes itself, and forms an infinite loop of self-reference.

Random proverbs by Runil-2

The school of fish was closed that day because most the fishes had been killed and served up in restaurants all around the world
As dusk approached, Evan grew stupider and stupider
She had told him several times she didn’t love him. He was getting creeped-out because he had no idea who she was.
When Robina said she wanted to go home, she meant she loved her boyfriend very much.
As time passed, newborn babies of Italy Chowk in Kathmandu began to develop more and German features.
No one is surprised when a wise man makes a comment on the economic crisis and offers solutions. Bart farted so loud everyone had to close their ears, so they could not hear what the wise man was saying
“Elipha, will you marry me,” said Rahul Karmacharya, to his fraternal twin sister. She said yes.
Most Stars are so far away that even light takes millions of years to reach to us from them. Paris Hilton is actually 92 years old.
The butcher realized he had led a terribly sinful life. So he handed over the drugs business to his cousin, sold away his ‘manpower agency’ to a larger brothel in Nevada and promised to himself he would spend the rest of the life only killing animals mercilessly.
The Manakamana temple is an excellent example of Nepali art and culture. If you are confident and theatrical enough, and can weave intricate stories, the dumb Nepalis will believe anything.
Ningpa’s parents told him they had met for the first time in a ‘bar’ in Thamel. He did not want to know more.
Please let me know when you are going to the Loo.
You should never let the other person wear a checkered shirt if you plan on working with her brother.
The way his eyes looked at me buggered me a lot. So I closed the closet, making sure to cover the head with a towel.
His mother was a Nurse, and his father a lecturer in the University. He was gay, and they were shocked.

Random proverbs by Runil

I was going home when the lightning struck and killed the chickens
Radheshyam was a man of extraordinary taste: he had two tongues
When life gives you lemons, through them really hard at the bad player or the poor performer
Kill me if you want to, but I am not teaching you chess
Let’s make him an offer he cannot refuse
It had been three years since she had eaten the really bad Momo
When he realized that running away was not the solution to any of the problems, he shot the police officer running after him dead
‘Sagarmatha’ is a swear word in Japanese. True story
The romantic tension between the hero and the heroine of the story finally came to a climactic end when the hero, who considered the heroine his trusty friend, revealed to the heroine that he had herpes.
The world was on the brink of disaster, and she was the only person who could save it. She did what every sensible and responsible superhero would do—blackmailed everyone else into paying her 3 billion dollars.
It had been a long, hard day for agent Samson—saving your country from foreign spies was never easy. So he decided to make things easier, and defected to the enemy country.
She was the prettiest girl the world had ever seen: her eyes were said to be a thousand times prettier than a deer’s, her hair in itself seduced thousands of sensible young men and women, her face was said to shine brighter than the full-moon. Every person—man or woman—was in love with her. Until the day everyone found out that she had a really bad case of diarrhea—without anyone telling it. Despite her other awesome qualities, she had a really weak control over her bowel. She had to wash her clothes herself later for the first time in her life.
The Prime Minister knew he was making a decision that would forever alter the course of human history. He barfed and fainted when it was time for him to give his verdict.

I rediscover blogging

I am back with incessant blogging! Hopefully. As anyone who reads this blog (Pratap and Nimesh) knows, I have been doing little of extra-work writing, probably because I have started thinking writing as a job, rather than something I enjoyed writing...

Apart from that, I have been reading lots of Joel Stein, David Sedaris, and Dave Barry recently. And Jerry Seinfeld. Sooo... Bring it On... Haha... Whatever...

Loony theory of Relationships—3

There are only two problems with Life (the real thing, not the magazine): it does not have an ending, and you can never win it—the best you can do is delaying your ultimate defeat (like tetris).

And that is why real-life love stories don’t work well. For every story to work, it must end, and if it’s a romance, have a sweet ending. Love stories don’t end in real life. You fall in love and you get together, leaving all your family and friends. Now what? If you are together, it’s not going to be a perfect story—in fact there’s a very good chance your story will only go downhill.

Arranged marriages (usually) do not have the problem. When you marry someone you hardly know, there’s going to be a lot of time for learning, and exploration (yeah, yeah, that too) and so much mystery.

So if the husband and/or the wife aren’t totally trying to kill one another and act sensibly most of the time, the marriage will probably work out better than an average love story.

But there’s an exception: intercultural love marriages. They bring so much excitement and newness to the marriage, that they are as good as arranged marriages. So, if you love someone from your own culture, don’t marry him or her; if he/she is from a different culture, you are safe, so go right ahead.

Dan Brown. Why does he like to invoke controversy so much?

Starting with The Da Vinci Code and following it up with Angels and Demons, Dan Brown has certainly seemed to have incurred the wrath of the Vatican. Why is he really interested in stirring the dark secrets which he so calls "hidden" by the Vatican? Whatever the reason, the catholic are furious about it.

Charles Lewis gives a detailed account as to how the Catholic reacted to the "brilliant" plots of Brown's books http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/holy-post/archive/2009/05/14/dan-brown-feels-the-wrath-of-catholics.aspx

Some might say Dan Brown is dead serious against the Vatican. This leads to the conclusion that the ongoing virtual war between the two sides is getting deadly serious. Others speculate he is just taunting the Vatican. "It's fiction of course", they say. And who knows the Vatican might be just playing along...right?

PS. Check out the new Dan Brown book, The Lost Symbol. It failed to enthral me as much as The Da Vinci Code did. But still it was a good read. And watch out for the LITERAL meanings of all the clues. I figured out how to decipher the "clues" before Langdon and his new partner did. LOL

Dan Brown. Why does he like to invoke controversy so much?

Loony theory of Relationships—2

...continued from the previous post

Why, you ask. Why should young people not go out as uncommitted partners?

Because you’re wasting your time. If you’re sure you don’t want to spend the next few years with the person, you should be going out with him/her for only one reason, and if that takes a lot of work too, you could probably get a better deal for lesser effort somewhere else. Move on.

It’s all about time, time and time. In all the hours you spend gurgling what your partner wants to hear, you could be out having fun with your real friends, or actually doing something productive. Who knows, in all the time you otherwise spend with your bf/gf, you could have been inventing the cure for cancer, or making significant gains in easing the Arab-Israel relation. Perhaps you would have designed a fabulous new dress, or written and sang a hip new song that’s on every tongue? All the time gone in courting someone you know you won’t be long with is wasted.

And then there’s the easiest road ever. In fact, I consider it the second greatest contribution to mankind the Indo-Nepali culture has made after Momo—arranged marriage. With arranged marriage, you don’t even need to worry about all that stuff; you could be having fun with your friends, doing things you actually enjoy doing with similar people, and then making significant contribution to society, while ultimately marrying someone, like everyone else.

Loony theory of Relationships—1

Lately, a lot of people I know have been involved in some romantic relationship or another. That includes the very people few that read this blog. Some have tried publicizing their relationship as much as they can, some are very cool and casual about it, some have tried hiding it but don’t care if someone finds, and some will let the earth melt into the sun before they let anyone find out (Heh. Sorry there! I found out.)

I feel sorry for those people.

See, you need other people, right? You have friends for that. You need someone who you can share your innermost secrets, you have best friends. You need someone to err—have sexytimes with—you have hookups that never, evurr turn into real relationships. And that is all there is.
Granted, some people feel that they want to spend the rest of their lives with someone else. If the ‘someone else’ feels the same too, they should probably live together or something, but they should definitely not hang out together for long (PS: I detest the words date, boyfriend, and girlfriend, so I’m avoiding them at all cost). If you want him or her, live together, and then share everything in the evenings or weekends or long holidays, ok?

Mumbai Attack, from the eyes of terrorists.Please dont watch this if you dont have a strong heart.

Inspirations you can find in Mission Paisa

This is from 500 rupayinyama angreji farara, a great, and stupid Facebook group. It was originally posted by Spandan Shrestha.

[Update: Apparantly, this has been around in facebook for quite some time. Sorry for the confusion!]

1) RumPum will sponsor everything from fighting competitions to Acting Competitions.

2) Nepali girls in HongKong will not remember their own friend's face and ask if you are that person, even if you are not that person, they will go for coffee with you and.... (you know what I mean)
3) Good Looking gals will chat with you because you have similar profiles in Hi5.
4) Hi5 has chat feature.
5) Hi5 has voice chat feature.
6) When you send pictures using this chat feature, the picture will automatically turn into your screensaver blocking everything else.
7) Good-looking Girls have nothing to do but chat with random guys in "Hi5 Chat".
8) Nepali Girls in HongKong are experts in Kung Fu.
9) All the Dons in HongKong are Nepalis, who answer to Dons in Mainland China.
10) Dons like opening up hotels that are named after them. Case in point: "Hotel Babu-Don" and yeah, Dons have cool names eg, Babu-Don :D (but no Big Hip-hop Don Man Lattu :( )
11) There are fight clubs in HongKong where anyone can go and fight and defeat their winning fighter hitting just one punch.
12) Chinese mafia use Ninja's who attack after the boss has been killed.

13) Modern Ninja's still use swords and spears to fight.

14) When you have your opponent on the floor and a spear, you kill him by kicking him.
15) Sundar Thapa is spelled as Sundar Shrestha.
16) Nepali Banks can be hacked using GUI programs that show the percentage of completed hack.
17) Nepali Heroes can't hold their beer, 5 ppl, 4 beer bottles = very very drunk actors :D, n ya the only beer available is Tuborg.
18) Nepali Mafia Meetings are like regular business meetings with mineral water, the only difference is its conducted in a dark room.
19) When fighting, you should fight until the opponent goes down and then run away. Repeat until you reach a place with available weapons (rods??, sticks??)
20) After you hit your opponent with a rod and he can't move (or so you think), you start a long monologue about how your opponent loved is ball and ask him about his ball(s). :D
21) Make sure the monolouge is said with your back to your opponent.
22) Money should not be hanged, you will forget to pick it up and leave forgetting about it.
23) Nepalis talk like they have just been surprised, really really surprised, (do I also talk like that?)
24) Nepali hands have a mind of their own, voice chat ma ni afai chalchha.
25) Fight Club in Hongkong can also be cultural dance hosting place
26) Nepali heroes can afford postpaid but no webcam

Why eating mangoes will make you impotent and drive you insane

People eating mangoes is the greatest problem our country has had faced in recent times. While the simple act of eating is not terrible in itself, the fact that none of the mango-eaters are aware that eating the fruit will almost certainly make them impotent and/or drive them insane is a serious concern.

Scientists have recently discovered the negative effects of eating mangoes. Apparently, it is not the chemicals in the mangoes that have the negative effects. The very act of eating sets off a chain of events that will ultimately lead to impotency, insanity, cancer, and sometimes even death.

Mangoes can be eaten in several different ways. They can be peeled off and sucked; they can be cut, the flesh be scooped out of the skin and eaten, they can be cut without peeling and eaten, the flesh can be blended with dairy products like milk or curd to make fancy drinks that cost ten times their production cost at restaurants, or they can be taken to factories where they can be processed in thousand of different ways (the most popular being using them to make Mango tart candies and Aap ko achar).

The factory method is the safest—and the probability of anyone getting ill because of the factory-processed Mangoes is almost nil. The problem lies in the home consumption of the fruit.

When mangoes are cut using knives, the metals in the knives react with a chemical in the flesh of the fruit to release an acid that is ten times more powerful than hydrochloric acid. The acid is not harmful it itself though, because of the small concentration and its general harmlessness. However, the acid then reacts with other chemicals inside the mango to produce antibiotic chemicals that are highly-fatal to several different types of living organisms. Fortunately, human beings are not among these organisms. In fact, the antibiotic kills the tiny bacteria that are also harmful(causing stomach ache, diarrhoea and several embarrassing ailments) to humans.

And that is where the problem begins. Several species of sub-microscopic viruses causing several deadly diseases land onto the exposed mango on contact, ready to infect anyone who eats the mango. Thanks to the antibiotic produced inside the mango as described previously, those viruses do not survive for long either and re quickly killed off by the antibiotic. Their brethren who witness the death of their fellow-submicroscopic organisms then want to revenge their death so they attack the mango in droves, hoping to destroy the antibiotic. They are killed too, and in turn are replaced by their loved ones, and the process continues till the mango reaches your gut.

You see what’s happening here? As you cut the slice of mango and take it to your mouth, it becomes a battleground for antibiotic chemical and and several generations of different kinds of viruses and bacteria, one side destroying the other, but the other side unrelentingly trying to exacting revenge. It’s a combat zone full of dead bodies and carcasses, cries, tears, defeat and the pains of war.

You wanna eat that?

Yes, I would not eat it under normal circumstances either, but since I am really hungry, I'll have all. Thank you!

The Khattu Diaries

Khattu was the hub of underground illegal smuggling. Our house didii, supposed to sew our clothes and help us in cleaning was our supplier. Every day, she would bring buttload of Khattu and Laakhamari, and sometimes even noodles. Her profit was 30 percent. We got outside food, she made the money, and no one needed to know anything. It was good business for everyone.

So this was the perfect time for the entrance of The Whistleblower. This one was a staff-child, and though being a staff child rarely made you a whistleblower, this one was different. He ratted house didi, and everyone else out.

She was summoned by the HoH and asked if it was true, but after a week it was back to business. The price of Khattu had risen considerably, as if to make up for the loss incurred during the gap, but we were good to go.

Now that I think of it, it was a good idea even from HoH’s point of view. The only alternate source of outside food would have been the black gate, and if was easy to get into slippery slope, and slope finally into the morass of weed even before you were in grade seven. Thanks to our house didi, it was averted for most by many years.

Whatever happened to writing from your heart?

I ask this question(in the topic) to myself. I have been doing quite a lot of writing lately (last week, it was 14, 303 words of purely work-related writing in Google docs), but most of it is work related, and not at all creative. I am pretty sure rewriting stories like "Baglung parents proud of their kids" are not going to help me in anything. I suspect that instead, they are stunting my creativity.

Of late, I have started treating writing more as work than something I enjoy doing. Because of that, it seems my plan for the novel is going to to be delayed indefinitely, even though now I have ever more ideas and plots for stories. Not only that, my writing here has been less of what I really want to do( Joel Stein, Dave Barry, et al.) and more of a 'A boring Treatise on the very uninteresting objects, which I am writing because I know I have to write, and have nothing better to do' kind. I feel I will get rid of this only after I leave the Post, so there's yet another reason for me to leave the paper.

My travel plans, which I had hoped to be fabulous have not been as great as I had hoped they would be, but they have been pretty good. I have traveled most of western Nepal with baba now, and I think I will be going to other places with the guys sometime next year. Also, there's some possibility I might out of the country, but it's all in planning, so that probably means nothing...

I do love watching the films and writing reviews all the time, but it seems that Am is coming back to the reviews, so I have to leave even that. My reviews(or anyone else's, for that matter) are not very read here anyways, so I don't mind losing the readership(because there is none). What I will miss is going to the movies every Friday, and thanks to the time difference, being one of the first of general public to watch newly-released hindi movies in the world. Thanks to the same phenomena, I have watched some English movies actually earlier than they premiere in the US! Fun! But no more...

The point of this entire thing is, I am seriously considering leaving the Post sometime soon.

Writing for fun--5

He could not describe his feelings in words. Actually, he could, but ‘words’ would have no meaning in the place he was in (or on?) They would exist only inside his head; they would not be received even when he spoke. It was like the classic philosophical question: does a falling tree in the forest make sound if there is no one to listen to it? He had the correct answer: probably not, and even if it did, it would make no difference; so for all intents and purposes, it did not make sound. He was thinking and speaking, but without anyone to even receive his messages, he could as well be a stone.

He was far too stressed out to realize that stones were conscious organisms themselves. They had tried all sorts to communicate with humans using every mode of communication available to them, but the humans wouldn’t just get them. Their signals were sometimes mistaken for background radiation from the big band, sometimes as solar magnetic activities, and sometimes as random error in instruments.

As the human lay there, Zorborkh detected a slight variation in low-frequency mechanical vibrations. He wished the scientists would someday invent detectors to entirely remove random fluctuations in detectors, and just show the real change in the variables being measured. Meanwhile the human was making noises loud enough to deafen an earth Elephant.

Writing for fun--4

The plane was going through some turbulence, but that was only to be expected. That region had always been windy anyway, and it had also been raining heavily the previous day. The passengers were as unconcerned as anyone in a plane could be. The airhostesses were getting nervous, and the cabin crew was strutting around uncomfortably, checking with the pilots if everything was okay, or if they should make an emergency landing. The pilots themselves were not sure—half of them were from a country very far away—but they assured the crew that everything was okay

The plane was ahead of a smaller plane by five minutes. The two aircrafts were going together to a foreign country to get some work done (it is not clear if they were going to get work done for their country, or the one they were going to). The passengers in the bigger plane were considered more important that those in the smaller one, so they had been instructed in detail about flight plan and emergency contingency.

The bigger plane hit a mountain-top shrouded by fog and lost an engine. Miraculously, it rose up, and continued its predestined path. Then, the pilots overcompensated for the missing engine, and the aircraft hit yet another mountain. Two hits within ten minutes were too much even for the hardy and well-tested machine and it gave away, killing all the 118 passengers and 41 flight crew onboard. The second plane, with the journalists, security officers and the bureaucrats, completed the flight without any sort of disturbance.

The entire cabinet, including the PM, was dead. The sixty topmost leaders of the 3 big parties were dead, along with few leaders of the minor fractions. There was no way the nation would ever recover the loss of leadership. Despite all the squabbles they had or pretended to have with each other, those bastards ultimately shared the same grave. The nation and its peoples grieved less than they should have.

Writing for fun--3

I trust him more than anything. We have been friends since we were little kids, and I have asked his advice in every big decision of my life. For tomorrow’s event, I am wearing a gray-blue denim skirt that just covers my knees and a matching top he had gifted me once. I have been told that the dress in unsuitable, but I will do what I want to. Only if it is absolutely necessary will I wear what they want me to wear.

As usual, he will probably wear nothing flashy or gaudy. I really want to wear that top to show that I still care for him and love him, but I am afraid they won’t let me do it. I am not even sure they would not even give him a good seat if it weren’t for me. God, I love him so much!

She is one of the most talented and accomplished women our nation has ever seen, but sometimes she acts like a child. For example, she wanted to wear a denim skirt and some hippie t-shirt during the ceremony. She also wanted her ‘old-friend’ to be able to see her, live. I understand her emotions, but wouldn’t it look bad for an inaugurating President of The United States to take oath in skirt, and one of the highest-security Alcatraz prisoners to be invited into the ceremony and be given VIP seat?

Writing for fun--2

She did not want to go with me. I had to plead, coax, blackmail, and finally beg her to come along. She believed that she would hate it at the party, but after two hours of meeting old friends and dancing with strangers, she was enjoying it a lot more than I was. I would have been jealous of her.

Had she not died that very day due to ‘concussion on the head caused most probably due to falling down and accidently hitting the sharp edge of the stairs’.

It was sad that she died in her wedding party.

Writing for fun--1

This is going to be a short series of my very short writings... I will not name the individual pieces.

Someone has got to pay for all this wrongdoing. We deserve better than this. We have special protection rights, and the usual equality rights, so no one should be able to get through the mesh of law to us.

Thought the thoughtful little fly, sitting on the Samosa I was eating. I attacked it with the fly swatter, and threw its remains along with the Samosa it was on into the dustbin. The poor bastard was dead as a dodo.

Media in Nepal: The right, the wrong, and the messed-up--V

continuation of the series of post on the situation of Nepali media
The Supplement Addition-II

Thankfully, for the readers, the onslaughts stopped. The old TKP went to republica, and CityPost was merged with the main paper as the new team realised there simply was not enough content to fill in the pages.]

The Age of Real Supplements

True competition among the english papers started after Republica started printing. Whereas TKP had had no serious direct competition, Republica rose as a formidable opponent who could take away the readers as well as the advertisers. Those at Republica realised too that simply being a new newspaper was not going to get them readers and advertisers; something new had to be done. So, almost simultaneously, the two papers decided to bring a full-issue weekly supplement heavy on articles, like the NYtimes' Sunday Times. And thus began the age of The Week and On Saturday.

The two supplements mark perhaps the greatest height of English print journalism in Nepal. Despite some minor lapses, both of the papers have maintained a remarkable standards in the quality of write-ups and photographs to be included in the supplements. The Week, which comes out every week, has tried to wade into fashion among urban youths, high-brow photography to neo-natal maternal health care whereas On Saturday has published several exclusive excerpts from recently published books, done a series on eco-friendly lifestyle in Kathmandu, arts, and so much more. Despite getting complaints from some readers that the pieces on the supplements are 'too long', the papers have received considerable good critical response.

Unfortunately, the supplements have apparently failed to gain mass appeal. I know as a fact that On Saturday has not been a marketing coup it was supposed to be, and the management has decided to give the team a year's trial to prove themselves. From what I hear, news at The Week is not so good either: because of all the negative comments that were received from readers complaining about the 'weird' articles published, the team has been making the issue look more and more like the usual one.

I would give them at least one more year to see where it goes, and I hope for the best, but I fear things might not go where I wish they did.

This is the last post of THE SUPPLEMENT ADDITION sub-series. Until now, I have covered only the English print media, but from now onwards I will probably look towards the Nepali media too. Media in Nepal: The right, the wrong, and the messed-up series continues.

Media in Nepal: The right, the wrong, and the messed-up--IV

continuation of the series of post on the situation of Nepali media

The Supplement Addition-I
In this two-part sub-series of posts, I will discuss how adding supplements to English newspapers in Nepal has affected the readership, sales and the overall scenario.

Newspapers supplements have been brought out sporadically ever since the time of the Rising Nepal. However, they got more regular only after THT and TKP started bringing theirs.

THT started bringing its corporate supplement Perspectives first. Printed in a different grade and colour of paper, it was a remarkable contrast over its main paper, and differentiated itself quickly. Encouraged by the success of the supplement, THT then started bringing TGIF(Thank God It's Friday) as a weekly party-oriented success. In addition, it started bringing out the 'Gossip' page, with news of international celebrities.

To counter that, TKP started its own daily supplement, CityPost. It was printed and pressed separately from the main paper, and made it clear it was something different. However, after the King's coup, the paper reduced to pages, and the City Post was all but dead. Somewhere around 2008, the management decided to bring back City Post. It was a bad, bad decision.

The newspaper obviously did not have enough staff and material to bring out a four-page supplement. Most articles in the supplement gad really low standards, were rarely checked for grammatical or spelling error, and it seemed the design was left to the interns. Day after day, week after week, the supplement dragged on, hurting everyone who ever cared proper language and standards.
...to be continued

The story of vegetarian food

As you may be well aware, vegetarian diets are not.

A vegetarian diet should typically consist mainly of plant products, and some animal products, but no meat. Unfortunately, there’s nothing that has no ‘meat’. To rephrase it differently, food, by definition, must have meat.

Grains and peas, milk and eggs are the staple vegetarian food items. Many people do not know that peas are animal meat in granulated form. After all the meat has been extracted from dead animals, the remaining parts are sent to leather factory, and meat refinery. The leather factories use the animals’ hide to make shoes and bags, leaving the rest of the unused animals to meat refinery. The meat refineries cut the remaining animal parts into tiny portions, grind them in industrial grinders, sprinkle lot of organic dye, and let the powder dry for some days. Then they turn the gooey mass into bean-shaped pellets, and send them to the farms to be ‘planted’. A group of workers puts on the granules into a specific kind of plants at night, and the farmers pick up those granules in the morning. They pretend to have grown the ‘beans’ when in reality they are just the middlemen between meat refiners and bean buyers. Then the beans are sent to vegetarian stores and aisles and food market all over the world so that vegetarians can eat them in peace.

The wrongness with Writing

The most awkward part of writing is the beginning. If you have a topic in mind, and you know where you want to conclude, you are good to go. But if you want to do some free-form writing, there are limitless possibilities, both for the beginning and the ending. Out of the innumerable possible pathways, you have to choose the single most suitable path, which will hopefully lead you to somewhere sensible.

Even after you have started, you still have innumerable choices. It does not matter if you talked in the first paragraph about the situation of human rights in the Russian gulags during Stalin’s regime or analyzed the factors affecting the viscosity of snot when you are sick; you can still end the piece by talking about the effect of pH of water on Japanese Trout in Nuwakot district. The only single thing you need to know when writing is the tone the writing will have.

If you are feeling specially rant-y, you could compare a local leader in Nuwakot to Stalin. The piece could conclude by pointing that just as Japanese Trout thrive only in specific pH and will die on other, the area will figuratively die under the leadership of that certain leader, thus arguing the need for new leadership.

My point is, for non-fiction, coherence is important only between sentences and paragraphs. The two ends of a writing could be as different as they could be, and yet the writing as a whole would still make perfect sense. The same is not very true for short fiction writing, where the piece as a whole must be coherent, and every paragraph must related to every other paragraph in some way. That is the reason why my stories (or what I like to call stories, but which are actually lazy pieces of bored writing) totally suck. I do not pay enough attention to what I have already written, and do not bother too much with where the story is going. At one moment, a character is drowning in the river, shouting for help, and in the next he has been saved by a mysterious stranger, lived with him for four years, fallen in love with his sister, and is planning to marry her the following week. The story is not at all linear, so it’s not a good read.

In search of the ultimate truth

When was the last time you stopped to think about where your life is going, what you want to do, and where the heck do all those flies come from? The answer is probably ‘Umm, Never!’, if you are successful, and ‘Heck, I do it all the time!’ if you are a depressed loser who has very little to be feel good about. The responses lead an interesting question—why do happy people never wonder where houseflies come from?

Throughout millennia, philosophers have tried finding the ultimate key to happiness, only to be murdered half-way through or ignored completely. Despite that, we are no closer to discovering the secret to happiness than ancient Egyptians, who believed that drawing images of human beings with faces like cats and vultures on the walls was a great way to gain salvation. Today, thanks to the internet, we don’t even have to draw our own funky drawings—we can just pull it off some site and out our heads in it. But that has not lead us anywhere closer to ultimate happiness. Instead, we tend to get lost looking for pictures of other people in the internet.

Thanks to modern means of transportation, getting from Kathmandu to San Francisco is a matter of days rather than years. We can communicate with one another from any part of the globe. And because of advancement in agriculture, you don’t have to wait for summer to eat mangoes. But again, how have all these so-called signs of progress lead us any closer to our ultimate goal? They have made our lives easier—now we do not have to go village to village looking for mangoes in winter, we can search the web, order the mangoes, and wait for the shipment to arrive. That is where our problems have been compounded. Yes, things have become faster and convenient as ever, but now we spend most of our time waiting for things to happen. We wait an eternity for a youtube page to load, we wait at airports, in the planes, and at skype, for the other party. Instead of using our time productively, we spend it waiting. We are getting dumber and lazier, and are further away from our goal.

But all is not lost. Recent developments in science show that we may, after all gain eternal happiness. The entire problem with our existence is the waiting time, so if we could get rid of it entirely, we would probably be very near to bliss. Recent experiments by physicists show that teleportation could be as near as 100 years from now on. Once a safe and trustworthy means of teleportation is achieved, we will no longer have to wait for anything, and we will have achieved what philosophers have been trying for thousands of years.

And finally, we could teleport all the houseflies and mosquitoes to a place where they cannot bother another human being ever again. That would be the ultimate answer.

Insects and Glasses

Sometimes, I get insects in my mouth and accidently swallow them. Whenever I tell anyone about that, I am told insects are good food, that they are almost pure protein, and that somehow my eyesight will improve because of that.

I have a slight disagreement with that worldview. If eating random insects made people’s eyes better, al the ophthalmologists would actually be insect-catchers, and there would be no need of eyeglasses or corrective lenses. Instead of going to the Ophthalmologists to get their eyes tested, people would go to insect-catchers. They would then try reading the letters on the board, and be prescribed accordingly.

A person with a perfect vision wouldn’t have to ‘accidently’ eat insects. A person with 80 percent vision would be prescribed a few mosquitoes and some ants daily. Someone with really bad vision would be asked to eat whatever insect she finds, but be advised that cockroaches are poisonous when eaten raw so it would be a better idea if they were microwaved for a few minutes first. Even better, the ‘doctors’ would sell entire insect farms from where patients could easily pick up insects and eat them. The bees would be trained ones: when a whistle of certain frequency is blown, they would go to the nearest frying pan, and get ready to be fried. Ants would march their way into the boiling pot, and mosquitoes would swarm around the microwave.

Insect-food and habitat would be all the rage then. There would be magazines on how to grow your own ant farm, and train your band of mosquitoes to recognize your voice. Magazines about food would have detailed articles about the right way to rear and cook you own insects, and sell ‘organic’ food for the insects. Chocolates with insects (which are common in some countries already) will become as common as chocolates with nuts. Nutritionists will discuss and debate over relative benefits of one kinds of insects over another, and biologists will try to make everyone understand that Spiders are NOT insects, they are Arachnids.

Eye glasses would be worn only by eccentrics refusing to go into insectivorous diets, and hippies worried about Insect-rights. PETI(the insects’ right group) would hold demonstration calling for boycott to insect-meat and other insect-related goods. Almost as if taking a cue from that, smugglers would start capturing endangered insects and exporting them, cooking up legends of their ‘mystical powers’ on the way.

The world would not be much different, except a lot less people would be wearing those freaking glasses.

Hand-wrestling and Buddhism

He will not blink. Neither will He. Both the pairs of eyes are watering already, and irreparable damage has already been done to them in form of sharp tiny dust particles cutting through the soft sclera of their eyes. They know it, and will still not blink. They are the warriors.

Competitions like blink flight and hand wrestling have an unwritten rule that is said sometimes by naïve people: if you give up, you are a wussie.

One should never give up in such fights unless he or she is expecting a mild-to-severe heart attack, or really needs to the bathroom. Reasons such as ‘my hand is bleeding’, ‘I broke my bones’, ‘I just found out that I have diarrhoea’ are just lame excuses to get off the fight without conceding defeat. You might think that the last one would come under bathroom break, but then you would be forgetting that having diarrhea is mutually exclusive from going to toilet. You can go to toilet without having diarrhea, and you can have diarrhea and not have to go to toilet. When you have diarrhea, you just want to go to toilet, but when you follow Buddha’s teachings that tell you to get rid of you wants and desires, you realize that want in this case is just a temporary body function you can do without. Of course, if you went the Buddhist way, someone would have to take care of your excretory functions, because one can’t just let go and be free of desires, because if one let go in that case, one would be overcome with the desire to get cleaned up, and take a nice shower using a scented soap and maybe a light nap later. The point is, letting go of bodily functions invites even more desires, so it’s probably not the best way to do Buddhism.

But then, if you were a Buddhist, you would probably not get into hand wrestling in the first place because it can get violent and painful. As everyone knows, they always end either in blood and gore or the two opponents passionately hugging and kissing each other, ultimately making out. The first rule of Buddhism is ‘never literally make love to thy enemy’, so they would not take a chance there. Anyways, Buddha founded Buddhism because he was tired of losing all the hand wrestling matches and having to do whatever other dudes told him to, so he said one day ‘WTF! I am gonna found my own religion, and its soo not supporting hand wrestling or anything like that. Heck, I am not even gonna’ support violence to make it even more kickass brave.’ And that was how Buddhism was founded.

Media in Nepal: The right, the wrong, and the messed-up--III

...continuation of the series of posts on the state of media in Nepal
Full disclosure: I temporarily work for the Kathmandu Post right now. However, my beliefs regarding the media have hardly, changed, strengthened even.
The Poor Papers-3

The youngest of English Newspapers in Nepal is Republica. The papers started about a year and a half ago, after the management of Kantipur publications changed hands. The old management took the entire editorial/design/publishing team with itself and started the Nepali newspaper Nagarik and the English newspaper Republica.

Republica has had a very specific target readership in mind. Just like THT has the corporate world as its target readership, and the Kathmandu post pretty much everyone, Republica targets 'the Nepali youth' as its readership. And that, is a problem.

Republica gets caught in its mission statement just too often, frequently forgetting its journalistic integrity and standards. While I am sure they try to get as near to the truth as possible, their reporting is often shoddy and flawed, the coverage of events incomprehensible. In attempting to reach out to the 'Nepali youth', they cover events that would not deserve them, this taking the importance of real events that need to be covered down with their own standards, The core editorial team seems to be oblivious to the workings of the 'youth team' which shows in the poorly-edited 'youth pages'. Poor grammar, cliched pieces, and shoddy reporting plague this paper and it will have a hard time improving its image if it continues at the current rate.

The situation has gotten even worse after the newspaper expanded to 16 pages recently. The pages are more of a reminder of how wrong unplanned expansion can go rather than a show of Republica's journalistic excellence or its aim to 'reach out to the youth.'

This is the last piece in the series of THE POOR PAPERS sub-series, where I talked about the problems with English newspapers in Nepal. The Media in Nepal: The right, the wrong, and the messed-up series will continue, and I will look other problems with the Nepali media.

The Spoils of War

Wars can be addictive, and no film shows it better than The Hurt Locker. It places you straight into the bomb suit of Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), a bomb expert and squad team leader in Iraq in 2004. The temperature outside is 40 degrees and you are in a 40 kg steel-plated suit that makes you look like an astronaut. In front of you is a cache of powerful explosives that will flatten the entire city block if you fail to defuse it. Red wire, Green wire. Seconds tick by, strangers who are potentially the insurgents that planted the bomb, gather and point towards you, while a local takes a video of the entire ordeal, perhaps to upload on YouTube. That simple binary choice of two colours decides whether you are returning home or not.

A film that neither preaches pacifism, nor justifies military aggression, The Hurt Locker is about the men and women in the battle-zone who are neither “destroying the enemy”, nor protecting the values of liberty, fraternity and equality. They are there to save their buddies, so that all can go back alive, and not in the refrigerated locker, from where the film gets its name. The movie is less about war than the raw emotions of war that fascinate us.

James is recklessly addicted to defusing bombs, and is a genius at it. However, his recklessness puts Sergeant Sanborn and Specialist Elridge, his teammates, at unease. Sanborn is a responsible fellow who wants to go by the book, while Elridge just wants to go home alive. They are good, brave soldiers, but do not share James’ fascination and addiction to work.

The director Kathryn Bigelow, and the writer Mark Boal, have both been to the Middle East in recent times, and therefore have understood the issue very well. The camera angle, typical of the handheld type from the American TV series The Office, gives an air of documentary to the entire experience. The camerawork also successfully portrays mutual distrust between the Iraqis and American soldiers: the Iraqis viewing the soldiers as loathsome necessities, and the soldiers viewing every Iraqi as an assassin or a suicide bomber.

Without a proper storyline till the last half hour, the film follows the soldiers as they move around Baghdad doing their job. The tension that arises from one single wrong choice of wires can be unbearable at times. After all, people watch war films to see soldiers die in the hundreds, or thousands, not to see the hero save the day with his superpowers. The dialogues are what one would expect from a war film: quick and dirty, but cliché-ridden. There are only so many times you can kill the senior-ranking inexperienced desk officer and still expect the audience to be shocked.