All of the five friends I met in Kathmandu, each one of them, is either in the process of heading out of the country, or has it in their sights for the near future. Oh wait there's one friend who doesn't, a former reader of this blog I found out, but she's a government employee now who's two years away from getting a government SUV with a driver so not really an apples to apples.
I was meant to meet friends in Surkhet, that plan was shelved after I discovered how absurdly expensive it'd be to get there...Since only 18-seater planes fly there. Flying to Nepalgunj and taking a 3-hour busride would have been cheaper, that didn't end up working out either because I was so busy with the weddings and everything.
Friends seem to have much clearer ideas about what they want to do and what they want from life, guess that's called growing up. Things would be stabilizing if these were normal circumstances, if Nepal was a normal country and Kathmandu was a normal city. Without that, even as people are clearer and confident about their lives as ever, there's still chaos motion and instability. It can't go on like this forever, right? Every time I'm in Kathmandu I make the same observations and voice the same complaints, in my defence this keeps on happening. If there was an expectation that the out-migration from the cities was going to stabilise any time soon, it has been proven wrong, not a bad thing really. Rather, the lower middle class now aspires to do what the upper middles been doing for the last two decades, the long term outcome of this trend is only going to be good. Even as the extractive industries in Kathmandu get richer and richer, the city gets gradually less unequal as people escape to richer places to make themselves.
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