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.