Deelip Khanal

I almost stopped watching movies at home now. I haven’t return the DVDs that I rented 6 months ago and I’m not sure if I already watched all of them.The old man in DVD store is probably going to kill me or maybe he forget about those DVDs. I seem too busy.

 I don’t understand why do some people work too much. Some people work literally all the time. For instance, this teacher in my school, he teaches there in the morning and then work as a full time software developer in another company. That why they are either too fat or too skinny. Both physically and mentally. Instead of start working at 6 am in the morning they should spend some time reading newspaper or maybe doing some exercise. They’d maybe then realize that its bad to make of joke or every question a student asks. They’d maybe then realize that a teacher actually need to know how to ‘teach’, being expert on the subject isn’t just enough. 

After bashing college education for a long time I’ve started to realize that its not all that bad. Its actually a good thing. 

Well, the second paragraph is about this particular teacher who teaches all sorts of programming language in my school. He never answers a question straight, without ridiculing the student who asks the question. Like: 

Student: Can we do it like this sir? 

Teacher: Who said you can do that? 

I thought I turned 23 until yesterday but I wasn’t sure. So I sat with my sisters to calculate and it turned out I actually turned 24. I felt better because 24 is better than 23:) I almost hate being young. I hate it when people say ‘you’re young’. Sometimes I wish I were like 28 or so. I know it might sound like that little 3 years old daughter of my friend who thinks she is not a kid but ‘ठुलो मान्छे’ but its not like that; 24 is not young. Not that I’m desperate to get married and have kids all that but when I see my friends who are like 28 or so, I feel like I have long way to go. I’ll have to wait 4 more years to be 28 but then they’ll be 32 :) I just envy being older. 

People say, being young is easier than being old, being young means you can get away doing few things, you have few responsibilities and all. I hope they are wrong because I don’t think I can handle anything else. I’m already overused :) 

There are few things I wish to do before I turn 25. I want to grow my company to 8 people. We’re 4 now(going to be 5 next week). I want to fall in love for real once again. I want to get out of college. I was to learn to play flute. I want to get an Iphone. And I want to learn to speak french. Of course I’m not going to be able to do all of these but I’m looking forward to all of these things.

And there are few more things. Like buying all the albums of Kutumba, bungee jumping, getting vintage movie posters of Taxi Driver and Pulp Fiction. I wanted to do these things since I was 22 but I haven’t been able to do them for no reason at all. 

And then there always are those bigger things I want to do in my lifetime. 

I saw my Facebook wall the other day and I was overwhelmed. There were a lot of birthday wishes. My friend said people love everyone on their birthdays but I believe that people love me all the time :)

Appa Sherpa has scaled the Mt. Everest for more times than any other in the world. He once again made it to the summit in his latest adventure just some weeks ago.

Yeah, it’s a matter of pride to reach up to the highest point of the earth’s landmass. Only few can achieve this feat and so far, Sherpas have excelled on this regard. 

Mt. Everest  has been hailed as a national pride and Nepalis boast it as their ‘only identity’ to get them known in the outer world. Mt. Everest along with Buddha  and once a term ‘Heroic Gorkhali’ has long been a symbol of ‘national identity and pride’. After the so called ‘abolition’ of monarchy, Mt. Everest has even replaced the king in the front face of the currencies.

But, I don’t conform to this idea. I believe, only those things that we (can) create, make, invent are our true pride. We didn’t build Mt. Everest, we didn’t invent it, we didn’t create it, we didn’t make it. It’s a thing the nature gave us gratis. Not a single drop of sweat is shed for it. No labour, no wise minds, no technology, no other forms of human excellencies. It’s given us FREE and we Nepalis are ‘exploiting’ it for our advantage. It’s half-witted to boast a thing that we never laboured for, but got gratis. 

France prides itself on Eiffel Tower. Malaysians pride on their economic boom, big cities and structures they constructed in past 20 years, including once the world’s highest twin-tower of Kuala Lumpur. People of Dubai boast ‘Burj Dubai’ and the city itself. America boasts it’s space technology and skyscrapers (most famously decades-old Empire State Building and until 2001, twin WTC towers) in New York. Likewise, Indians see their pride heightened on Taj-Mahal and Bollywood. UK boasts it’s Tower Bridge, Stonehenge and Westminster. Blitzing Bangkok is Thailand’s pride.  And so on…

It’s not that they don’t have any such natural wonders that they really could rely upon to be proud of. But, the thing is that it’s ridiculous to boast natural things that we’ve given ‘free’.

What’ve we made so we, as other aforementioned countries, get ourselves proud on? Nothing. Nothing yet. Beautifully crafted temples and other artistic wonders in Kathmandu have now become a history. We could have boasted our ancient artistic treasures, because, so far, I think we’ve not yet excelled in scientific and technological fronts. But, no such treasures are now intact. They have already turned decrepit.

We couldn’t even save the beauty of ancient Kathmandu. Sprawling suburbs have already cast a blight on the beauty of the once beautiful city.

This is worst that we take things, our ancestors left for us, for granted and that’s why our ancient treasures have fallen into a state of dilapidation or devastation.

Let’s achieve a remarkable feat, like those nations did with theirs, so we could exude our pride. Let’s not make Mt. Everest a ”scapegoat” for our pride. Set this poor thing free and let’s go for a hunt for a feat that could represent our pride. Mt. Everest has been so ”easy and free way” to get ourselves known in the outer world. It’s a matter of gross shame to present Mt. Everest forth to veil our notorious poverty and incompetence.

I know, Mt. Everest is one of the greatest natural wonders but linking it to one’s pride is just absurd and I don’t pounce on it.

Moreover, exact location of Mt. Everest is disputed. Both China and Nepal had been claiming Mt. Everest lies in their territory.

So, I don’t preen myself on the Mt. Everest. Until and unless we Nepalis achieve any remarkable feat, it’s just a thick idea to pride ourselves on such poor thing. For me, it’s just a mountain, no such thing of pride. 

-Copied from a friends blog without his permission.

It was published in his blog on June 7th. Just wanted to share it. Can’t point you to his blog for some reason.

So, I was wondering what have we really made here of which we can be proud of? Literally nothing? I am not a cynic nor I whine all the time. I always fight people who go abroad and talk there-is-nothing-in-nepal things. I even refused to go abroad when my people suggested. I am actually the one who prefers to say “We are yet to make something of which we can be proud of”  rather than to say ” we don’t have anything to be proud of” because the first one sounds less pessimistic. But sometimes I am so hopeless that I can’t take it anymore.

I can no longer be calm saying “we are yet to choose a new prime minister after 5 prime ministerial election” while the fact is “We could not choose the prime minister even after 5 prime ministerial election”. I can not stop laughing at incompetent CPN-UML for their Tatastha drama and I can not stop feeling sorry for Maoist for not being able to win other political parties heart even after being largest party in constitutional assembly with tremendous support from the public. And I can not stop feeling sorry for them for their internal war on the superiority. I am starting to feel that CPN-Maoist is going to be another CPN-UML in next few years.

And above of all, I can not stop feeling sorry for us, Nepalese people, for being fucked up by these so called leaders since last 60 years in the name of democracy. I am not counting thousands of years before that because they never promised anything to the people which is a lot better than not giving anything that is promised.

Firefox is awesome software. I haven’t used any other browser since I came to know about this but it started working differently lately. One of the most important features I like about Firefox is that I can simply type in the search term in the address bar and it takes me to the Google search page. And if I am lucky enough with my search term, it actually takes me to the actual web page I am looking for. But it is taking me to ask.com search result since some days. It’s just too unfair.When I type “yahoo answers” it doesn’t directly takes me to answers.yahoo.com anymore.It rather takes me to a crappy search result page of Ask.com. I am sure I didn’t configure it in that way, I wasn’t even sure that Ask.com still exists until this incident. I remember upgrading Firefox few days ago. Now I suspect that Firefox itself is the culprit. May be they have changed their default search provider. But I wonder why would they want to do that. Do they really think people still use any other search engine than Google? Or does Ask.com pay them more than Google does? I doubt that.

I would rather use Internet Explorer with Google rather than using Firefox with fucking ask.com.

Everything else except Firefox was fair to me last week. Weekend was especially very good. I met some new people and had fun with all of them. Things went unexpectedly/surprisingly good with some of them ;)