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I hoard books and I cannot lie. This is the one habit that probably helped keep me sane during the lockdown. However, all my life, I’ve had to deal with inquisitive family members and friends who wondered if I actually read all the books I bought or if I was simply showing off. In my defense, I eventually get around to reading at least 70 percent of the books I buy.

But, really, who, no matter how voracious a reader, reads every single book they buy? That doesn’t mean we buy books to fill up our bookshelves or post pictures with them on Instagram. Readers will agree that when we buy books, we have every intention of reading each one of them. It’s just that invariably we will go out and buy more books before we have finished the previous selections. That’s just how it is.

My habit of hoarding books started during childhood. Now, I will conveniently shift the blame on my dad. While he never let me have more than one chocolate or one toy whenever we went out shopping, my dad never set a limit when it came to buying books. He would let me pick as many as I wanted. Sometimes, I wanted a dozen—comics and books both. And I got them. I don’t ever remember a time we went to a bookstore and I walked out with just a book.

Now that I’m married to a voracious reader, the hoarding has gotten worse—there are two of us doing it. We probably spend a major chunk of our salaries on books, when we travel most of our luggage is filled with books, and we gift each other, and our friends, books at almost every occasion.

Both of us also enjoy sharing what we are reading. We post about our vacay book hauls—piles that are at least two- to three-feet high and weekend reads on social media. The response is almost always along the lines of: “How do you find the time to read all this?”, “Do you actually read them all/really fast or are you just posting to make people jealous?” and an indignant, “No one can read this fast. You were reading something else two days ago.”

The thing is when you love to read, you cannot not read. I always need a story in my head. I’ll go crazy otherwise. Every family has its drama and, to make matters worse, I don’t necessarily like people. Thinking of these fun fictional characters gives my brain the break it needs from the theatrics of daily life. So, I read—compulsively, obsessively. I read on the stationary bike. I read during commutes—when the car’s stalled and I can put the vehicle in neutral. I read during tea breaks when my colleagues are busy ‘catching up’. I read whenever I can, even if it’s just for 10 minutes. 

Sometimes, I read a book in a day, other times it takes me a couple of days and some books I finish in a week or a month. And while I definitely buy more books than I could ever possibly read, every book I haven’t gotten around to reading and is gathering dust on the bookshelf is on my to-read list. And no, I’m not posting photos of one book after another just to get on your nerves—just like you aren’t posting food or cocktail hours photos to get on mine.

If you focus on the errors of others

Constantly finding fault

Your effluents flourish

You’re far from their ending. (Dhammapada, 253)

Thus spake the Buddha. But we keep focusing on others. We keep finding fault in others. The other person is bad. They are unholy. They are evil wrongdoers, robbing us of our rightful privilege. They are blocking our way to heaven. We need to correct them. But the result? Our sufferings grow—we are far from their end.

How many of us have experienced that?

History is proof that we have caused great sufferings because we have found faults in others and have tried to correct or win over them. We have fought gruesome wars. But we have never learned. We are all too keen on ostracizing and marginalizing 'those faulty people' so that we can enjoy ourselves. Others must be somehow sidelined so that we can protect our race, our class, our land, beliefs, scriptures, skin color, the shape of nose, and what not. So our fight is justified. The fights we fight and the wars we wage are right.

But are we ever happy? When we try to correct or defeat others, our miseries grow. As the Buddha says, winning only gives birth to hostility. Losing, one lies down in pain. Killing, you gain your killer. Conquering, you gain one who will conquer you. Insulting, you will gain one who will insult you; harassing, you will get one who will harass you. And so, through the cycle of action, he who has plundered gets plundered in turn, the Buddha adds.

We don’t hear many world leaders speak like that. Quite the contrary, we are constantly taught to teach others a good lesson. We are constantly taught to think us versus them, tit for tat, an eye for an eye. We need to correct others, because we are right and they are wrong.

A plain logic would be that something righteous should be right for all. If it is righteous, it should bring happiness to all. It should unify, not divide. If something brings pain to others, then pain remains in human experience. How can a righteous thing keep pain alive!

Nothing that puts others in pain can ever be righteous. It can't be holy if it teaches that a whole lot of people are evil just because their noses are a little bigger or smaller than ours. After all, who created all those people? Who are we to judge?

From a Buddhist perspective, the thought that we are right and the others wrong stems from a distorted view. It is due to misplaced associations. Instead of fixing others, it is better to fix yourself. Conquering others would not be the righteous way to happiness, but conquering your own imperfections and weaknesses would be. As the Buddha says:

“Though one may conquer

A thousand times a thousand men in battle

Yet he indeed is the noblest victor

Who conquers himself. (Dhammapada, 103)

Political forecasting is a fraught endeavor, as the analysts who based their prognostications on polls ahead of the US presidential elections and Bihar’s state-level elections are finding out. Politics is not hard science, with neat causes and effects. We must perforce exercise caution when talking of the impact on Nepal of the election of Joe Biden as American president or of the BJP’s stellar showing in Bihar. Heck, Biden has not even been legally elected the US president (the Electoral College votes are tallied only on Jan 6). And Bihar’s attitude towards Nepal is as predictable as the course of Koshi River.

Not long ago, people were livid with Prime Minister KP Oli for granting an audience to RAW Chief Samant Goel. The Nepali government head meeting the chief of India’s external intelligence agency generated a lot of hullaballoo. Why were diplomatic protocols being so openly flouted? Why had the Nepali PM descended so low? Personally, I saw nothing wrong. Goel had come to Nepal as PM Modi’s envoy and as such Oli could not have declined to meet him. I would also rather that our top politicians did these meetings out in the open, rather than in hush-hush, as if they had something to hide.

Then, look at the results. Yes, the optics might have looked bad. But soon after Goel, Indian army Chief M.M. Naravane came to Kathmandu. This in turn cleared the way for the visit of Indian foreign secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla. And Shringla’s trip, if we are to go by feelers from New Delhi, could be a precursor for the coming of Indian Home Minister Amit Shah. All these are signs that India-Nepal ties are slowly getting back on track. Yet if you believed some of the commentary in Nepali media following Goel’s visit, Nepal-India ties were doomed.

Nepal-US relations are less complicated than Nepal-India ties. Yet the contours of the former may be even harder to track. The US, after all, is oceans away. Yet we have already started speculating about the Biden administration’s Nepal outlook. I don’t think it will have one. It all depends on how the Biden administration hedges between India and China—and that will be just one variable factoring into US calculations.

Further complicating things these days is the impact of social media and fake news. Without a shred of evidence, over 70 million Americans unquestionably gulped down Trump’s trope on election fraud. After our cable TV provider cut the broadcast of CNN and BBC (which I now see on YouTube), I started watching Turkey’s TRT World and Russia’s RT. The American, Turkish, and Russian broadcasters report on same events and yet with different facts—yes, different facts, whether on US electoral fraud or Nagorno-Karabakh or Syrian refugees. Likewise, the Nepali (social) media landscape has become so crowded and noisy, it’s getting hard to discern fact from fiction.

Nepal-India ties seems to be on better footing than was the case before Dashain. But it will only take one little poke to the nationalist Nepali psyche for the ties to come tumbling down. The MCC compact remains in parliamentary limbo. Our top leaders continue to cuddle up to China. If Nepal was sure about what it wanted from its international friends and if there was broad consensus on Nepal’s foreign policy, perhaps we would not have to rely so much on the crystal ball of international relations.

Directly, Nepal may stand to benefit little economically from the victory of Joe Biden, the US President-Elect. But a reassurance from him that multilateralism, globalization, and liberal trade policies are the fundamentals of our time and will thus be protected will have far-reaching consequences in the shaping of Nepal’s economy.

In more concrete terms, countries like Nepal need strong multilateral organizations that provide financial and technical support for economic development, especially to those at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid. There will be both direct and indirect benefits as multilateralism and globalization will be stronger in the Biden era. More specifically, America’s role in international development will be reshaped as Biden will try to restore his country’s international image by helping developing countries come out of poverty, if only to better protect liberal values and democracy.

Nepal has been hesitant to approve the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) compact due to its connection with the US Indo-Pacific Strategy (IPS), even though the MCC was thought of much before the IPS emerged as an idea. I believe, under Biden, American foreign policy will be more in favor of supporting other countries’ economic growth in good faith than by forcing them to choose between extremes. This new narrative emerging from Washington will help Nepal approve MCC projects that have direct impact on Nepal’s long-term development. With the MCC’s parliamentary approval, Nepal will not only have access to US$ 500 million for critical infrastructure development but also cement the foundation for cross-border electricity trade with India. If the winter session of the parliament makes a headway on the MCC, projects under it will be completed by the time Biden completes his first stint at the Oval Office.

Another area Nepal will benefit in is mitigating the risk of climate change and its impact in agriculture in hilly and mountain regions. Globally, environmentally-vulnerable countries like Nepal will benefit from better international cooperation on climate change as Biden has vowed to implement the Paris climate accord. Having a global leadership working to achieve climate change targets will help Nepal be more effective in safeguarding its own interests in climate change. Nepal suffers high economic cost of climate vulnerabilities and extremes. An estimated direct cost of these impacts is equivalent to 1.5 to two percent of current GDP, rising to five or more percent in more extreme years.

Trade will be another area where Nepal can benefit from the trade-friendly American leadership. The US is third biggest export destination for Nepal after India and the EU. Similarly, the US is the fifth most attractive markets for 12 key goods and services with potential from Nepal, as identified in the Nepal Trade Integration Strategy (NTIS). With Biden, the international trade will be reshaped with more access to American markets for Nepal. Biden’s liberal trade policies will be highly beneficial—if Nepal also works sincerely to optimize its market conditions.

Above all, young Nepalis aspiring to pursue higher education will have greater access to world-class academic institutions as they will get more financial support. Biden as president will certainly increase the size of the pie of the research and development fund. Modern Nepal has benefitted immensely from the American education system with more people being trained in these institutions. That is critical for Nepal, which has been unable to establish even a single quality academic institution.

A fairer and orderly global system with a moderate and centrist leadership is in everyone’s interest. But the challenge is to create opportunities for everyone in a more democratic set up. Although democracy gives us more choices and more ways to work and live, it is also vulnerable to populists and authoritarians. The only way to protect democracy is through economic development that creates opportunities for each citizen to have a diploma. The Biden era could help Nepal in this crucial aspect as well.