Book ideas

Idea #1:

Conventional love story. Girl loves guy, guy loves girl. Between them comes the suave aid worker from Kathmandu who also loves the girl. Girl gets confused, boy gets angry, aid worker gets rich. Aid worker's parents are on the boy's side ( the lover boy, not the aid worker boy) because they don't want a gharelu gaunle buhari. The aid worker doesn't really want her either anymore, but he knows he'd be lynched if he let people on to that. The book will feature long philosophical discourses between the girl and the aid worker. They talk from how to use the toilet in the villages (hide all your orifices from other people, and the world's your toilet) to the effect of the Russian Banking Crisis on the village (she admits to him she almost 'ran away' with a Russian, which makes him want her even more). As his tenure finishes, he asks her what she's decided. She tells him she'll stay. The lover guy is long gone by now. She applies for a teaching position in Kathmandu, marries a fellow teacher, and does PostDoc in North Carolina. She meets the aid worker after several years in Maryland and philosophical discourses follow (she didn't really want her first child; he was forced to marry). The book will mostly comprise of dialogs between the aid worker and the girl. They will discuss how things have changed over the years. This book is a great opportunity for writers who don't want to tell stories and want to unload their views and interpretation of Nepali and global politics onto others.

Idea #2:

Kathmandu's sad story. Features two symmetric deaths-- one that happens in the second chapter in the background and the other that happens at the end. The second death will leave the possibility of a second part very open. The protagonist is a seventeen-year old who thinks he's the upper-middle class of Kathmandu. The story is about that assumption -- people will reminisce to him about his parents. His father abandoned the family in the village when he was too young to remember and his mother eloped with an aid worker (yupp. I'm glad you see the common trope.) He was brought up in a boarding school (mine) and adjusted so well he never thought of family. He will realize how vulnerable he is after graduating. However, life will be kind to him, and he will get a really good aid at a really good Liberal Arts College (Grinnell). He will return to Kathmandu in the middle of a semester to attend a family bereavement. In the end, he will be emotionally uprooted from Kathmandu.

Idea #3:

A veteran aid worker figures that Nepal would be a much better place if it were run by him and people like him. Circumstances favor him, and he gets to do things he had always wanted to. As it happens, his ideas about how things are to be done are disastrously misguided. Story ends on the brink of a war.

Idea #4:

The title of the book is "I Love You". Cover features a wide-eyed attractive Newari girl with slight cleavage showing. It's about her travels and travails. She goes to college in Sweden, runs to the United States, almost takes refuge in Cuba, and gets very close to starting a diplomatic incident in Belgium. She is a math genius, has eidetic memory, wants to work as an artist, has affections for communist individuals despite being anti-authoritarian, and has a very popular blog. She uses some posts from the blog to become a columnist at a major daily in Kathmandu. Her sidekicks are various men she meets at various places and two of her closest friends who we hear from on-and-off during the story. The story is open-ended, leaving way for another book, maybe even a series. Readers will never understand the title of the book until they buy the second book (after one's popular enough) which will feature the stories of the men that loved her and the men that she loved. The second book will be a lot more popular among teenage girls than the first book. Also, an aid worker who is also a Maobadi/Mantri is the main villain. Probably, if it were to be anywhere close to real life.


Originally posted on March 25. Backdated to March 17.