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A band has to only start its set in a random bar or pub in Thamel and within minutes into their performance, someone from the audience has had requested a song already. And as the night continues with a bit of drunkenness in the air, the ‘requests’ start getting harassingly loud and the poor band on stage is clearly confused and embarrassed; it is impossible for a group of musicians to cover almost everything under the sun.

And the problem is not limited to Thamel or Kathmandu. Musicians playing live at venues all over the country complain about the same thing: a nightmare when a group of drunkards disrupt their performance, dismiss their music, and disrespect their job. All because they think they own the artists and their art when they’re paying for the cover charge at the venue or their restaurant bill.

For a musician, or any other artist who’s up on stage, it is most disrespectful to be interrupted by the audience for no apparent reason. For Nepali musicians playing live in all kinds of venues, interruption has been so normalized that sometimes it’s a surprise when they get to complete a set without hassles. But most of them are not so fortunate most of the times.

Ask any musician for a story on a bar fight that disrupted the show; a police raid which ended in calling the night too early; a group of drunks who harassed the musicians with requests to the level they couldn’t play on stage—you’ll hear many different versions of their experiences and the details could be both shocking and surprising.

As the audience is paying at the bar, one may argue, they have the right to order performing artists to play music of their choice, but is that how it really works for all professions? No matter how much you pay, you won’t ask a urologist to check your eyes, would you? And ask a pilot on a Kathmandu-Pokhara flight to take a detour to Chitwan in between because your friends want to see elephants?

So, similarly, you’re agreeing to pay for a service when you enter a bar and seat yourselves down. Now it’d be really considerate of you to let the professionals do their work without interfering with them time and again. Instead of showboating money and clout at the venues, you could showboat chivalry, empathy, and good taste. 

Having said that, some bands and venues do accept requests, but there are limits to what a band can perform. If you see a jazz band performing at a bar, you DON’T pester them to play Narayan Gopal just because ‘the band members are Nepalis, and every Nepali musician should know how to play Narayan Gopal.’ When you see a rock band on stage, you DON’T shout to them to play Nepali film songs, because that’s most probably not in their repertoire. To make things clearer, if you have no idea of the genre that a band is performing, you either listen to them if you enjoy their music or go to a different venue. Plenty of options out there.

The biggest NO for requests though is when artists with original music are performing on stage. Requesting a musician playing their own music at their concert to cover another musician’s songs is the biggest disrespect there is, not only of the artists, but of music as an art too.

There have been plenty of incidents when a bunch of unthinking audiences have spoilt the mood of a performer by requesting them to play someone else’s song. It’s like going to a Metallica show and asking them to perform Eminem, just because you’re paying for the tickets. See the problem here? If you wouldn’t do that to international artists, why would you even think of doing that to the Nepali artists?

Don’t ask Albatross to play Bipul Chhetri or vice versa. But no, seems like our audience will never learn. Because on a recent Facebook live by Albatross singer Sirish Dali, there were requests for him to perform covers of other Nepali artists. The audience here had the option to shut down the page and move to other things on the internet if they didn’t like his music. But they chose to be arrogant, or ignorant maybe.

This write-up might sound a bit harsh, but this comes out of genuine frustration of being undervalued by our own audience—many of whose members do not know the basic etiquettes of attending a concert. So when the Covid-19 pandemic is over and live music starts making it back to our favorite venues, we request you audience, be more thoughtful and let the artists—who have worked hard on creating a playlist for you—perform in peace.

The author is one of the suffering musicians

If you are an outsider in Nepal, the handout your outpost provides you must have elaborately covered the seismic dangers. But it probably needs a complimentary explainer about this equally volatile realpolitik zone. This is my attempt.

For the sake of clarity, let’s cover it in three bullet points: do not trust the elites; forget everything that you know about political and ideological categorization; and, federalism as a political experiment, so far, has misfired.

Let’s tackle them one by one.

As all forces, internal or external, needed the elites of Kathmandu to manage the country, these forces danced to the tunes of the powerful. But the vice versa was also true, up to an extent. These forces helped King Mahendra overthrow an elected government and have consistently been partners in crime in every plunder that has taken place in this country. As a result, one can observe with some discretion that Nepal has become a country run by selfish elites without devotion or dignity.

Writers experienced in statecraft, like Rishikesh Shah and Lokraj Baral, have hinted about the parasitic and disgraceful nature of the elites of Kathmandu and how this has proliferated all the state machineries. (‘Essays on the practice of governance in Nepal’ by Shah; ‘Nation state in Wilderness’ by Baral).

By showing neither the gumption nor the determination to be the pathfinders, the elites have betrayed the nation. They have been the silent observers in every political change but have jumped in the fray to benefit the most after every transition.

Strangely, this nature of the Kathmandu elites hasn’t changed even after the democratic movements and the mainstreaming of the Maoists. The revolutionaries took the place of the elites, but borrowed their character too and got sucked into the bandwagon of shameless skullduggery. 

The servitude to influential powers has increased and the attitude to always look for the low-hanging fruits is more evident than ever. For example, the finance minister of the Nepal Communist Party recently said that the government would encourage the youths to go abroad.

Connected to this is our second point: forget everything you learnt about political ideological categorization. It’s confusing in Nepal.

The Maoists, who launched a decade-long armed struggle, came to mainstream politics aligned with the other democratic forces to overthrow the king. In the past seven decades, Nepal hasn’t really seen a revolution. It has always creeped from one change to another, without truly delinking itself from the past, and yet pretending to have adopted some newness.

The three milestones in the journey towards progress in the past 70 years—1950, 1990 and 2006—are significant as a whole but not revolutionary on their own. The 1950 overthrowing of the Rana regime came as a compromise that left room for the coup. The 1990 people’s movement came merely as a score settling of the 1959-60 coup, and the feudal and Kathmandu centric equilibrium made the Maoist war possible.

The overthrowing of monarchy came out of the blue, but the elites failed in institutionalizing the change. The constitution was a result of a compromise between descendants of different ideological interest groups and the lines were blurred beyond distinction over the long years of transition politics. The state hasn’t yet come out clean on war crimes and justice, nor has the issues of institutional discriminations been fully addressed. In fact, the polity has been on a downward spiral since being hit by a worldwide wave of populism.

So, this lack of an ideological commitment lies at the center of the political decay in Nepal today. Nepal has become a nation ruined by crony capitalism with words like ‘socialism’ used for cosmetic purposes in the constitution.

As Nepal lacks an elite class that can stand for its dignity, and political forces deeply committed to their ideologies, all the political experiments here have backfired. Our latest attempt at finding the ‘One Cure’ for all the ailments led us to federalism. But the indicators suggest it is turning out to be a disaster.

Local governments are not running any better than in the earlier set up. The constitution has put the governments of the three levels on an equal footing with coexistence and collaboration as the binding principle, but in practice the center controls the resources.

This paradox has turned federalism into a costly misadventure. State governments everywhere are jobless and purposeless, adding to the financial burden without making an iota of difference in people’s lives or nation building. This federal government, with a huge mandate, had the historic responsibility to institutionalize the change and stabilize politics. Sadly, it has failed its people, many times over.

When we connect the dots, we see a grim picture. Nepal seems to be in an endless downward spiral of political decay that is accentuated by a head of government who seems to have no control over his faculties.

If you are an outsider in Nepal, this for you is grim but probably not heart-wrenching. But for those in this country, it’s a different story.

We need to find the dignity and the devotion to tackle it.

The Black Lives Matter movement has brought to the fore the need to decolonize spaces dominated by Eurocentric economics, philosophy, and epistemology. Nowhere is the need for this more urgent, in the era of locust attacks and imminent famine, than in the soil. I’m talking about the dirt beneath our feet that has become the next frontier in the life and death battle between the colonizers and the colonized.

When we talk about land being exploited—drilled, covered with chemical fertilizers and pesticides, dried out and blown away in extreme storms—we are talking about the dirt that we step on every day. The mud we are covering up, inch by inch, with asphalt is the mother earth, which gives us life. Without soil there would be no basis to grow food, no foundation to break down the cells of organic life when they die, no way to recreate the eco-cycle of water.

Yet Western science and technology has created a world in which the only rational way to live is to cover all of the life-giving, breathing skin of the planet with impermeable tar. Anything else is poverty.

As to where this astonishing conclusion came from, we’d probably have to go back to the history of the automobile. Automobiles require surfaces hard enough to withstand weight of thousands of tons of steel, and wear and tear on rubber tires. This then became our benchmark of human urbanity—the ability to cover every centimeter of breathing soil with black tar.

A 8 July, 2020 Guardian article ‘Spreading rock dust on fields could remove vast amounts of CO2 from air,’ by Damien Carrington, the paper’s environment editor, made the strange argument that pulverized basalt, a rock by-product of cement factories, would not only improve soil by adding minerals, but indeed was essential to add to agricultural soil as it absorbs emissions and halts climate change. Anyone dealing with industrial cement in their garden, as I have done in the past decade, knows that nothing will grow once you cover the soil with ingredients of concrete.

The casual way in which they assumed that this was the next logical step—cover last remaining landmass of living topsoil still exposed to the cycle of wind and weather with a by-product of cement—is proof of how easy it is for a big industry to tip the scales of entire ecosystems of nature with one money-hungry, self-enriching fix.

It also shows how human civilization has ended up with so much rubbish passed off as enlightened must-have goods. From plastic sneakers to pesticide-sprayed food, from bitumen highways to sealed concrete skyscrapers, we’ve been schooled to think of these giant follies of human capital and engineering as the acme of cognitive brilliance. People in the US and the UK are now facing the consequences of these foolish actions as hundreds of thousands die in a pandemic that remains under control in the Third World.

But who can tell this boastful, ego-bloated, uber-wealthy civilization that inhabiting a sealed concrete skyscraper, where the viruses of respiratory pandemics circulate through air conditioners, is in fact an appallingly stupid way to live?

Despite all evidence, the WHO will continue to insist that the vaccine is the only answer to the pandemic and keep collecting funds from poor countries to give to Bill Gates’ pet GAVI project. They will not examine the evidence of indoor air flow and how that could be the perfect conduit for viruses to go from one floor to the next, rather like the collapse of the World Trade Towers, which kept falling down in a perfect sequence, floor above crushing floor below. To do so would mean questioning the basis of their most cherished architectural edifice, the sealed concrete tomb of the skyscraper. The skyscraper is the 20^th century architectural model of urbane perfection, and the only model for how all buildings, including hospitals, should be built.

Nepali communists, inspired by dizzying spaghetti highways Chinese Communists proudly boast of, have also started to smash up our fragile mountains to build “pakki” roads that last a monsoon before washing away, taking hillsides with them. While consulting for World Bank in 2009, I took part in a discussion in which one official admitted the costs of repairing Nepal’s roads were like pouring water in sand. Any “pakki” blacktop road lasts only a few monsoons. Yet this is the only solution that is heavily funded with loans each year, including $450 million this year from the World Bank. Sustainable ropeways, horse and donkey trails, easily repaired pedestrian paved stone paths, and wire bridges get no funding.

Decolonizing the planet would require removing all bitumen and asphalt that now cover the earth. It would mean bringing down all skyscrapers that are ticking time bombs of epidemic contagion. It would mean treating the earth with respect, and fertilizing the soil with organic manure and hummus, not chemicals that now dry them out to moon dust. It would mean a complete halt to spraying of toxic pesticides that originated in labs as weapons of war. It would mean a global ban on all forms of plastic.

It would mean a return to our roots as creatures of nature, where survival depended on syncretic symbiosis with all of life, not a cyborg embrace and enslavement to digital technology. Decolonizing the planet would require a decolonizing of the mind. 

The face of rural Nepal is changing, and one of the major drivers in this process has been the growing number of roads. The government led by Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli claims to have been constructing black-topped roads at a rate of 5.7 km per day for the past two years. In recent years, both the government and people’s representatives have shown greater interest in transport infrastructure development.

The government is mainly guided by our new constitution, which emphasizes the decentralization of power and economy and includes a mandate that roads be built to remote settlements. Likewise, political actors are guided by the notion that promising roads to rural households can win them elections. Consequently, the roads are being promised and built everywhere—in the hills, along the mountains, across the rivers, and through the jungles.

Poorly built roads and excessive road digging along the mountain slopes have triggered a higher risk of flood, landslides and other natural disasters not only in the hilly region but also in the Tarai. As Nepal is going to see some of the heaviest rainfall across the nation this monsoon, daily landslides and flash floods will make our rural communities more vulnerable, even as the risk of the coronavirus pandemic is upon us. Poor farmers in food-deficit rural areas were already struggling. Disastrous floods resulting from poor road construction will be a straight punch in their gut, adding injury to their insult.

Connectivity is key for lifting the economic status of people and can have a direct impact on global effort to fight poverty by opening rural access. But the severe biophysical effects of the road boom cannot be neglected. The road construction spree in Nepal, with poor planning, incapable contractors, excessive corruption, and fragile geography can mean more vulnerability for rural families and cause more devastation. Unplanned and improper roads will result in more accidents and obstructed transport instead of enabling better connectivity.

Environmental impact

Despite being among the poorest and least developed countries in the world, Nepal is still a model for biodiversity conservation. Nepal’s success is largely attributed to an approach that combines community support and stable government policies. But in recent years, policymakers seem to have been neglecting the environmental aspect.

According to a report of the World Health Organization (WHO), the maximum level of particulate matter in the urban areas of Nepal is 10 times  the desirable standard value. The ancient city of temples has now become one of the most polluted in Asia. Unmanaged road extensions in Kathmandu Valley pose a severe threat to the health of its inhabitants as air pollution escalates to alarming levels. In a worsening scenario, the annual premature death, by poor outdoor quality in Nepal is expected to reach 24,000 by 2030.

Road and highway construction and transport infrastructure have enormous impact on our ecosystems. The expanding network of roads can quickly change the landscape and affect wildlife in several ways. Stretching highways through forest areas will impose a threat to the animal populations, not only by vehicular obstruction, noise and habitat fragmentation, but also by exposing them to human settlements and allowing easier access to poachers.

Economic impact

The roads have high economic values and are crucial in bringing the desired social change. The newly opened roads will ease transport and develop the nation’s economy – no doubt. For a landlocked country like Nepal, the proposed road projects will be the key to facilitate domestic as well as international trade, helping Nepal continue with its current economic progress.

Recent studies have shown that improving rural road access will aid local farming, increase average income, boost regional gross domestic product, and help with food security. Right rural roads will allow farmers to export their products to markets faster, fresher, and at much-reduced costs. It will also enable local cropland expansion, lower the farm input prices, and improve farming technologies.

Better rural access will enhance education in the rural areas as kids will not have to walk for hours to get to their schools. Better roads will also mean swift health service for the remote communities that are still hours of walk away from a basic health check-up facility. Roads and transport will thereby promote social engagement and social inclusiveness. Building safe, affordable, and reliable roads will also help us achieve our sustainable development goals by tackling poverty, facilitating economic growth, and building sustainable cities and communities. 

Build for the future

Nepal needs better road connectivity to support its own socio-economic goals—improvements in access to economic centers and social services for the people. But development shouldn't come at the cost of nature. Moreover, for a developing country like Nepal, which is vulnerable to natural hazards, physical structures should be built to withstand the future climate and seismic vulnerabilities. 

The local units should carry out environmental impact assessment surveys before finalizing road construction projects. The road planners should carefully examine road-environment issues at both the project planning level and the execution level.

Road-building decisions should come along with the decisions about forest and wildlife conservation, community design, public transport, and other modern planning features such as disability access, and walking and cycling space for people. In the program stage of construction, it is important to study whether a road should be built in the first place on a particular route. In the development stage, the effects of the road project on the local environment, local communities and individuals should be evaluated. After completion of the project, the local units should closely monitor the effects of older transport decisions and take corrective measures whenever required. We must ensure every project component fits with technical and scientific goals of sustainability.

 The author is pursuing a B.S. degree in Construction Management/ Risk Management and Insurance at the University of Louisiana Monroe