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Technology and time have modernized even the most sacred of rituals. For many Hindus, the electric crematorium has now replaced the traditional funeral pyre, offering a cleaner and more pleasant experience in the process.

In sharp contrast, another tradition remains resolutely untouched by technology and the passage of time. Located in the heart of Kathmandu, the manufacturing unit of Singha Durbar Vaidyakhana Vikas Samiti (SDVKVS), a government-owned entity, continues to bellow thick-black-pungent smoke as it produces ayurvedic and herbal formations.

Located in a dense urban locality beside Singha Durbar, Vaidyakhana’s manufacturing unit employs traditional mud-baked cook stoves fed by firewood. When Vaidyakhana states that “medical formulas at SDVKVS are an inherited legacy from the ancients who were pioneers of ayurvedic knowledge and practices,” maybe they misunderstood the traditional cook stoves as part of the inherited legacy. Vaidyakhana should be a modern-day museum, not a four-century-old production facility.

Vaidyakhana claims that its medicines and concoctions make people healthier. Maybe they do. But its production process is also slowly killing those that live around the facility.

Every year the kitchens of Vaidyakhana emit large volumes of smoke that is hazardous to inhabitants of the area, especially young children and the elderly. In the winter months, the soot hangs in the fog, turning the already bad air to almost toxic. The chimney (there are no smokestacks) are of short height, which conveniently hides the facility from public view but also dramatically concentrates pollution within a small radius.

How is it that a pungent smoke bellowing production facility still reliant on technology from four-centuries ago and directly impairing the health of those that live in the area is still allowed to operate in a dense urban locality? The story of the black smoke that spews from the chimneys of Vaidyakhana is a despairing tale of apathy, inequality, and vested interest.

For many years, residents around Vaidyakhana have filed complaints with local authorities, and Vaidyakhana’s management. These complaints have multiplied over the years, particularly as the density of people living in the area has increased. But these complaints have been met largely by disdain. How dare anyone complain against the “inherited legacy” of four centuries?

These complaints have also been easy to ignore because those most affected consist largely of poorer, lower middleclass or transitory residents (like students). They lack the ability to organize, mobilize or rope in other outside support. Most of their complaints have consisted of letters or brief meetings without the ability to follow up or draw attention to the issue.

The smoke bellowing from the chimneys of Vaidyakhana is an illustration of the fact that localized pollution is disproportionately borne by the poorest without the means to build pressure for corrective action. If all the vehicles in Kathmandu were replaced with electric ones, would that be environmental justice for those living under Vaidyakhana’s toxic umbrella? 

The kitchen and manufacturing facilities are a picture of a stunning travel back in time. The factory lacks any mechanised equipment, health and safety records are extremely poor and the production processes still relies on traditional inefficient methods. Vaidyakhana is a classic government-owned enterprise that has outlived its utility. It is hard to imagine the institution ever being profitable. More importantly, it is ironic that with such poor health and safety standards, and a production process that is poisoning its neighbours, Vaidyakhana is producing concoctions that is aiming to enhance the health of its customers. Really, who are we fooling?

Vaidyakhana is an opaque institution. It offers very little information about itself or its products. Its website is barely functional and expresses an air of complete and thorough indifference. Why does such a relic, doing more disservice than good, continue to receive government patronage and pollute with impunity? Greed.

The term “inherited legacy” is nothing more than a euphuism for vested interest. The land where the manufacturing unit is located is several times more valuable than the factory. A complex set of long-held contracts for raw materials granted invariably to the same set of contractors drives the incentives. Judging from the smoke and soot that it emits, even the firewood that they use is third rate.

Toxic smoke cannot be the only exhibition of how we are utilizing “four centuries of experience in the science of ayurveda and herbal formation.” Nepal needs cleaner, safer, and modern facilities to take advantage of its “inherited legacy.”   

Views are personal. [email protected]

“Nothing is written”, concludes Fareed Zakaria’s new book ‘Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World’. As the Covid-19 pandemic tightened its noose on the world over the past year or so, the countries, instead of pooling resources and collectively fighting it, became more divided. The Trump administration said the ‘China virus’ was nothing Americans needed to fear, even as it repeatedly insinuated that the Middle Kingdom deliberately spread the virus to weaken Western countries. China, meanwhile, saw this as a cynical attempt to deflect attention from the Americans’ woeful handling of the pandemic.

As the virus spread, borders were closed even among the single-visa Schengen countries, the most integrated region on the planet. Everywhere, the suspicion of ‘germ-carrying’ foreigners heightened. When the Covid-19 virus was first detected in Nepal in January 2020, among the first demands in the country was that the open border with India be shut. All domestic and international flights were suspended later. Free flow of goods and people, the epitome of globalization, screeched to a halt.

Yet Zakaria says it’s impossible to reverse globalization and free movements of goods, people and ideas. Americans may want more goods to be produced locally to reduce their reliance on the Chinese. But, then, argues Zakaria, the manufacturing will shift from China not to Indiana but to India, another low-cost manufacturing option. Moreover, it’s also not so much a case of the Chinese taking away millions of American jobs as automation rendering them useless.  

Zakaria also plays down the idea that autocracies are better at dealing with pandemics than democracies. If so, the likes of South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan would not have handled the Covid-19 pandemic better than China. It is not the ‘quality of the government’ that matters but its ‘quality’. Nepal’s own dreadful Covid-19 response owed largely to its dysfunctional government.

The other big lesson of the pandemic was that markets are not enough to solve our most pressing problems. Amid the pandemic, without government help, hundreds of millions of people would have been left to fend for themselves and inequality would have exploded. Again, we saw both incompetence and ill-will of the Nepali private sector that wanted to import PPEs into Nepal. Also, evidence suggests that had the government not made Covid jabs free, most Nepalis would have opted out of vaccination.

And oh, remember the daily Ministry of Health Covid-19 bulletins? A dour-faced person reading out hard numbers did not inspire much confidence in people. They were rather angry at the pedantic tone. This is why as important as it is for people to trust experts, if the message is to get through, it is also incumbent upon these experts not to treat non-experts with condensation.

The other great pandemic-time transformation in Nepal was the switch to the digital. During the pandemic even the middle-aged and elderly started using their mobiles to pay their phone and electricity bills. Without Covid-19, such digitization would have taken much longer. At the same time, the forced isolation and the anxiety and depression it induced made us realize our inherent social nature: connecting over Zoom, we discovered, pales in comparison to a face-to-face meeting.

Zakaria expects the liberal international order, which has “bettered the lives of more people than any previous system humans lived in”, to endure in the post-pandemic world. For there is no alternative. He thus ends on a positive note: “The soldiers who died during World War II gave up all a chance to build a better and more peaceful world. So, too, in our times, this ugly pandemic has created the possibility for change and reform”. Yes, nothing is written. If only we learn to heed sound advice.

The other day a friend asked me ‘so what is Buddhism?’ For me it is like opening a can of worms or the opening of the Pandora’s Box. Prince Siddhartha, who went on to become the Buddha, on attaining enlightenment, explained the first noble truth as the truth of suffering. He meant that whatever we like or are attached to, will make us unhappy and bring suffering, with hundred percent certainty. That is why it feels like a can of worms or a Pandora’s Box when you set out to explain what is Buddhism.

Although our attachment brings suffering, it is not the original cause of suffering. It is important for us to understand this. The original cause of suffering is the ‘I-ness’ or the ego that we are deeply attached to. These are in our thoughts and ideas and in the people, places and things that we are connected to. So if this ‘I’ is absent, where is the question of attachment?

Attachment essentially causes suffering in bewildering ways. Take the case of an impoverished yogi who is presented with a new loincloth. He begins to worry that the mice running around his hut could bite holes into it and therefore keeps a cat; to feed the cat with milk, he has to keep a cow; to protect the cow from wild beasts while grazing in the forest, he himself has to keep watch over the cow; and so eventually his attachment to his brand new loincloth robs him of the time for yogic practices. So attachment arising from our ‘I-ness' can be a huge distraction.

If desire, attachment, greed form one side of the coin, the other side is anger, aversion, fear. Whatever we desire deeply or pine for greedily has a shelf life after we have got it. There is the law of diminishing returns. There is also entropy and deterioration. So when ‘the time comes’ for us to lose it or part from it we get into negative moods and behaviors. Losing becomes very painful and we suffer.

So getting separated from what we like, becomes a cause of suffering. In his second noble truth, the Buddha says there is cause of suffering. Once there was a lady who was very distraught when her son passed away. She came to the Buddha with hopes that he would make him alive again. In Greek mythology, we have Orpheus, who tried to bring his wife Eurydice back from the dead with his enchanting music. We basically want to enchant, bribe, cajole, and beg that the status quo of our attachments prevail beyond all else, realizing little that our ability to ‘play enchanting music’ diminishes over time. The reaper threshes all asunder, irrespective of our worldly resources, pretensions, and the masks we adorn.

Gautama Buddha advised that we could actually get out of this loop of suffering. This was his third noble truth. In the fourth noble truth he elucidated a path that one could travel on, to free ourselves from pain, anguish and suffering, caused by attachment to the idea of self and the objects of desires that we incessantly and relentless craves and pine for.

According to him, there was a misunderstanding on how we see ourselves and perceived our ‘I-ness’. It was not about negating or disowning the ‘I’ but to know how the ‘I’ actually exists.

However, the manner in which we usually live our lives with loads of attachments only feeds our current sense of ego. it is not really possible to explore who we actually are or how we really exist. It is as though we are moving in the wrong direction and we first need to stop, before we can begin our journey on the right pat again.

Our customary proclivities, passions, dreams and desires are like gusts of breeze that keeps the flame of our consciousness fluttering in all directions. When we try to look within to know who we are with the help of superficial ‘spiritual’ practices that we pick up in the bazaar, they only allow us to see flickering glimpses of distorted images of our self. If we are really serious to find our true self, the first stage is to attain calm abiding or samatha. It requires us to distance ourselves from all materialism, expressly those of the religious and ‘spiritual’ kind.

The steady flame of consciousness resulting from distancing ourselves from distracting thoughts, and getting immersed in the practice of meditations such as samatha or vipassana allows a special clarity to dawn on our consciousness. This clarity provides special insights into how we really exist. We then get answers to who we are, how we exist and how the cosmos exists.

We also know then how to connect meaningfully with one another, respect the spaces we dwell in, and fortify our own bodies and minds. We become capable then to want to sustain all things both within and without. When we realize the essence of living, our ‘I-ness’, attachments and desires do not affect us. 

The author is a master trainer of NLP and faculty at Srishti Institute of Design, Bangalore

BP, in his Atmavritanta, rates the Kathmandu intellectuals very low. They are, according to him, 'making hue and cry over senseless issues, creating problems where there are none and hardly of any help for the cause.' He was talking about the Kathmandu society of the late forties. But his observation is as true today when it comes to what the neo-elites of the valley have to offer.

At a time when national politics has disappointed us badly, once again, how the intelligentsia has behaved should be of great concern. Caught in a pitiful yet laughable quagmire of power struggles and backstabbing, the course taken by our first parliament after the promulgation of the constitution is unfortunate. Hopes of stable government, connected to the future of 30 million people, have been washed away. But the intellectuals are either in deep slumber or deeply invested in the power equation already to even have an iota of critical and independent outlook.

Who is shaping opinions today in Nepal for the future? And, how are they behaving? These are important questions. Of course, times are different than in the forties, and the privilege that comes with access to even basic information about state and politics is no more exclusive to the intellectuals. But away from the cheap click-bait pop feeds in YouTube and social media, a large section of the society still looks up to the intelligentsia to make sense of things. And these elite Kathmandu intellectuals, sadly, are way off the mark when it comes to sensing the pulse of our society and identifying its real problems. Even the newer generation is already showing disappointing symptoms.

Recently, a young activist called leaders like KP Oli and Sher Bahadur Deuba lwade 'ल्वाँदे'. She wrote in her social media post: 'Who is a ल्वाँदे? The entitled mediocre men who take the space and power way bigger than their share. Ambition not fueled by purpose but unbounded greed. Their rise not powered by competence but a total lack of self-awareness. And they do rise, in a country such as Nepal, as our whole system of power has been mediocre, entitled men puffing up other mediocre entitled men. This lineup of clueless ल्वाँदेs would have looked hilarious had it not been so tragic and dangerous. Thus the need to identify these dangerous ल्वाँदेs.'

The language and the intonation suggests the mindset of a frustrated youth. But Dovan Rai is not just any frustrated youth from the streets. She is a PhD in Computer Science from the US, and is actively involved in public discourse, ironically, as a political expert.

Rai is a representative of a new breed of young and sad to say—'entitled'—youth in the public discourse who not only display a lack of understanding of the complex Nepali society and politics, but also have no penchant for learning about it. They do not want to learn about the layered power equations at different levels that form the superstructure of our society, nor do they even consider it important to travel their own nation, outside Kathmandu, to make sense of the politics at the top. They can simply make tall claims with a sense of entitlement that emanates from their 'western degree'. Craving for a sanitized 'meritocracy' of their own preference, rooted in their basic western orientation, they forget that to complain without a commitment to fight for the change that's needed in our society and politics, borders hypocrisy.

Anyone with a basic understanding of politics in our society would know that the politicians who have managed to rise in power are not stupid. But, by calling names that suggest that our society, and politics in general, rewards stupid people, youths like Rai can walk away with a sense of gratification without doing much to change the reality. The reality is grimmer. The politics is in control of shrewd manipulators who are not 'Lwade' or stupid, but masterminds of the political game. Accepting that they are what they are also adds an onus on the avant-garde youth of the society to build an army to fight against them. But such denial is the easier option that these privileged youths have fallen for.

The comfort of collective negligence, and easy complaining without a deep commitment to fight for justice is being taken as an easy route by many talented, privileged, and capable young intellectuals in Nepal. Sadly, the leaders who are at the forefront of the fight for establishing an alternative to the criminal gangs that are misruling the country today are equally naive. They believe a sense of entitled puritan moral pitch will be enough to wrestle power from these established politicians. What BP said about the Kathmandu of the forties still holds.