Attempt to address Poverty in Nepal
From the Nepali Times this week! Requires Comment: SN
At the Osho Tapoban settlement last week, in the midst of forested hills, devotees of Osho were not talking about bliss but about economic development.
In a setting that is more suited to sermons of the transcendental the discussion last week centered on day-to-day temporal issues of economic survival. Swami Anand Arun sat cross-legged listening in the front row, to speakers holding forth on Nepal’s political economy.
“If country is stagnating, we can’t remain chanting only om,” Arun told the congregation.
Tapoban has started taking an interest not just in the afterlife but in the here and now with this discussion series every Saturday on politics and the economy. Among those present in last week’s edition were powerful Chief Secretary Lila Mani Paudel and billionaire Russian of Nepali descent, Upendra Mahato. Minister of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs Narahari Acharya, and many prominent personalities from parliament to government agencies to entrepreneurs.
Mahato had flown from Europe, attended the event, and went straight back to the airport after it to fly out. The NRN businessman underlined the fact that no one can build the country but us, no one is going to do it for us.
He cited his own example: the same village school in the Tarai which educated him also educated hundreds of other children. “Now, I am a successful businessman,” he said, “many Nepalis are successful abroad, why can’t we be successful in our own country?”
Mahato believes wealth cannot be amassed at the expense of fellow-citizens – all the boats must rise together. He is worried about Nepal’s growing income gap - and feels it could trigger a future conflict. He urged the government and civil society to protect middle and lower-income traders because they help spread the wealth around.
In addition, there should be law that can prevent monopolies. Power is built on power, powerful people have the access to loans and political connections to build their empires, but they don’t think of the others. “This is right time to devolve economic power,” Mahato said.
Then, Chief Secretary Paudel waxed eloquent about Eastern philosophy and modern value systems. We are educated in the Western way but our mindset and values are Eastern, he said, leading to paradoxes and contradictions in dealing with development.
Paudel cited the example of a school boy he met recently. “What do you want to be in future, babu?” he said he asked the boy. “His answer: I’ll do whatever earns me more money.”
“What do you do with that money?” was the follow-up question from the government’s senior-most bureaucrat. “Moj garne ni (have fun),” the boy answered.
The conclave lamented the materialistic values that have overtaken more spiritual pursuits in society. Earning money at any cost to have fun is the new credo, not just among the young but also among senior politicians where greed and selfishness are now entrenched.
Parents are impatient to pack their children off to the US or Australia whatever it takes, and Paudel has met some of them who tell him they would gladly have stayed back in Nepal if it was more developed. “So, who will build this country?” Paudel asked. “Is this country underdeveloped only because the leaders are not accountable, or is there a deeper malaise in society?”
This was a rhetorical question. We cannot import leaders, and citizens have become cynical. Maoist Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal once criticised Kathmandu’s “sukila-mukila” (prim and proper) for littering the sidewalks outside their homes. He was partly right. We blame our government for underdevelopment, and never analyse our own behaviour.
“We have people who study aeronautical engineering, but they still sacrifice a goat in front of a jet to appease the gods so there won’t be an accident,” he said, hinting at fatalism in society.
A three hour long program concluded with Swami Arun’s summation. He lamented the poor state of the country and how shabbily Nepalis are treated abroad. His parting words: “Just chanting om is not enough, we have to work individually and as a society for our country’s economic prosperity. It is vital for our self-esteem.”
Paudel cited the example of a schoolboy he met recently. “What do you want to be in future, babu?” he said he asked the boy. His answer: “I’ll do whatever earns me more money.”
“What do you do with that money?” was the follow-up question from the government’s senior-most bureaucrat. “Moj garne ni (have fun),” the boy answered.
I would be interested to hear what this gentleman Paudel would have had to say if he’d been asked the same question when he himself was a boy. Probably Mr Paudel was doing social work from his first breath.
Good to know that Swami Arun is doing all this for his vitality!
When I visited Nepal in 1969 the economy was quite robust. The likes of the Eden Hash Centre were doing a roaring trade, selling hashish supposedly cultivated at 20,000 feet – impossible, but it was a good sales pitch during those halycon times when everyone was so mashed-up they would believe anything delivered with an eastern smile.
The cafes and bars were also doing well. The Flying Pig cafe sold great apple pie, tasted delicious and was loaded with enough nasty bacteria to fuel a biological weapon. The streets were choc-a-bloc with hordes of hippies undergoing a mass gastronomical psychosis called ‘The Munchies’, which the smiling Nepalis were only too happy to cater to.
Then the American government put pressure on the Nepalese government to close the hash shops and criminalise marijuana. The hippies left town and the economy began to slide.
I suggest decriminalisation of all recreational drugs could fuel an economic boom and attract stoners from all over the world to good old Kathmandu. Then people could start chanting OM again, have their cake and eat it too, even though chronic dysentery will be the outcome as Kathmandu has gotten more filthy and polluted as the decades have rolled by. Some things never change.
Ah,the inmates of the Orange Sunshine Retirement home have been wheeled out for their monthly trip down memory lane again…Nice.
Kathmandu…that really was/is? the dirtiest place on Earth. I remember staying in a place in ’77, one rupee a night, in a tiny street opposite a small abbatoir. Every morning I had to make my way past a mass of blood-stained buffalo skins piled up high outside with a plague of flies buzzing around.
It was early in the rainy season. I made my way gingerly past, with the slightly-too-red mud squelching up between my toes. There would usually be a couple of guys squatting nearby, vacantly picking their teeth with a stick and having a shit, whilst a beefy-looking guy with an extremely large stick kept watch on the excited, mangy-looking pye-dogs that were hovering around trying to get a piece of the action.
It was something like out of a Hieronymous Bosch painting.
I imagine that the scene will have been compounded with a carbon monoxide-rich traffic-jam by now.
I agree with Arun.
Clearing up that mess is probably a better bet than chanting Om.
Yeah, Frank, Arun’s true colours are coming out now. First he flirts with Modi, who, according to Private Eye this week, told an audience of doctos and scientists in Mumbai that plastic surgery, genetic science and stem cell study existed in India thousands of years ago.
Modi is reported to have said that was how the Hindu God Ganesha’s elephant head was attached to a human body and how the warrior god Katikeya was born outside of his mother’s womb.
Next, Arun, with his best football jumper on, turns into a prosperity guru with that famous home-side stand chant: “We hate being poor and we hate being poor…ohhhh, we hate (etc.)…we are the poverty-haters!”
Modi says that plastic surgery was invented thousands of years ago in mighty Bharat.
He has a point, Ganesha does look a lot like a face-job gone badly wrong. A kind of Vedic Michael Jackson.
And Santa Claus is from Jullundur,
Hanuman was the original superhero,
Superman, Spiderman and Batman were all rip-offs…
For sure….
I have a friend who is the headmaster of a fee-paying school in Kathmandhu. According to him it may well one of the filthiest cities on Earth.
Keeping Mister Natural’s great spiritual heritage alive.
I always liked this one.
Now in Youtube form.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJBV4pBUmuk
Not forgetting.
Really! You two old f**ts!
Agree with Frank. Let Mr Arun clean the place up and forget all about doing dynamic or Om’s.
If growth and development in China is anything to go by, we in the UK will be living like the Nepalese soon, whilst they will be lording it over us. Guess thats karma, eh?
“Then there are Marxists, Communists, Socialists: they say it is the social structure, the economic system, that makes people miserable. Then there are Freudians, psychoanalysts: they say it is the child and mother relationship. But it is always something else – it is never you. It is never you in the present.
And I would like to tell you: It is you. If you are miserable, you and only you are responsible. Neither the past nor the social structure nor the economic system – nothing is going to help.”
Osho, ‘A Sudden Clash of Thunder’, Chapter #5
Samarpan and Arpana can have a competition: Who choses the most unfitting quotation.
Because of so many rapes happening in India, many patriarchal minds are saying, “It is the girl´s fault.” If you are raped, it is your responsibility and nobody else’s. Don´t blame the western cinema and porn.
Samarpan, you can provide above-mentioned words to them.
Likening the effect on your life of whatever’s going on at the Pune ashram to being raped is nothing but an obscenely grandiose delusion, Shantam.
What next – ‘Shantam the oppressed Palestinian’? Or, ‘Shantam the Holocaust victim’?
My view is that you’re pretty damn fortunate to still be allowed space here for churning out such repetitious, increasingly pathological, self-serving rants.
Did Osho not talk about the need to erase poverty and that he wanted everyone to be wealthy and healthy and that only with a firm material foundation could people develop true spirituality?
(MOD: THIS IS A CONSIDERABLY EDITED POST)
Heeren,
I have met men who were ‘poor’, and actually very rich in consciousness.
And I have met men who were ‘rich’, and actually very poor and weak in consciousness.