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In 1956, Sunar Gurung was return­ing to his hometown of Ngawal in Manang after completing a year-long trading spree that spanned over Nepal, India, Burma and Thailand, among other countries. Although a citizen of Nepal, the government of Nepal hadn't yet allowed its citizens to travel abroad unless they were members of the royal family or of the British Gurkha regiment or were highly influential individuals with travel exemptions granted by the King. In the case of Gurung, he wasn’t any of the above. So the only way a Nepali like him could travel to distant countries was via an Indian passport.In the case of the people of Manang (Manange), there were many inhabitants who had settled in Shillong and parts of Assam in India. This allowed every Manange who visited India to get an Indi­an passport using the address and information of the other Mananges who were already living in India. Gurung was no different and now wielding an Indian passport, he traveled all over South Asia, which a common Nepali citizen in the 1940s could only dream about.

With his total earnings of approxi­mately INRs 2,500 in pocket (equiv­alent to US $625 then), a princely sum in those days, Gurung finally headed back to Ngawal, Manang after being away from home for over a year. While crossing Assam on his journey home, he was con­fronted by a group of traders from another large village of Manang who beat him black and blue and robbed him of everything. After weeks of negotiations and involvement of other parties (read: friends and fam­ily members of the perpetuators) the robber-traders agreed to return a paltry Rs 700!

Unable to come to terms with returning home with an amount that would not be nearly enough to pay off his debts nor to feed his fam­ily of six young children, Gurung made the decision to turn around and try his luck again: He would use that Rs 700 to get to Calcutta.

In Calcutta, Gurung would buy local products and seek arbitrage in selling them on the streets across other South-East Asian countries. This involved (and this was true of other traders from Manang as well) selling herbal products amassed in the hilly regions of Nepal and India. With the earnings, he went to Bur­ma to purchase cheap rubies, jade and other precious stones. He then took those stones across the border into Thailand where he would sell some and make the leftovers into jewelry. The finished products were taken to Hong Kong, Singapore and Brunei and sold at a premium.

As with every Manange of his time, Gurung's childhood was spent in abject poverty: No formal school­ing, one meal a day, one food-bowl, a dirty pair of shoes and ragged clothes on his back. With an infer­tile and rocky soil base where only potatoes and buck-wheat grew and with an inhospitable freezing cli­mate, the Mananges could care  less about education or schooling and focused mainly on taking care of their basic needs.

To provide for their families and secure a bright future for them, the Mananges had to indulge in risks larger than any other Nepali of that era could imagine! Based off that need for survival, the male members of the generation prior to Gurung's left Manang and headed to Kathmandu to seek trading and arbitrage opportunities. There they found a huge demand for products easily available in Manang: Tibetan mastiffs, the scent of musk deer and Himalayan herbs. Armed with these items the next time around, they flooded into Kathmandu and sold the goods for a handsome profit.

As time went by, they brain­stormed further and realized a great­er potential lay in doing the same in a large city like Calcutta. Later, they would spread over to Burma, Thai­land, Singapore, Hong Kong, Brunei and Malaysia, where they sold their Himalayan products, purchased the local products found in each coun­try, and then sold them in another. Incredibly, all this was happening in the 1940s when Nepal was officially a "closed" economy that didn't per­mit its masses to be educated nor allowed its citizens to travel abroad!

Gurung, still distraught over being robbed of his life savings in Assam, ended up in Brunei six months later. One warm evening in 1957, after hawking around his products all day, he and his other trader friends from Manang went to a local park where they partook in physical exercises. That very night, while sleeping on the street as every other Manange trader did in order to save money, Gurung suffered a massive heart attack due to health complications arising from his hard life. He passed away at the tender age of 39 in Band­er Seri Begawan, Brunei.

His body was left abandoned by his petrified friends and relatives who were conducting their business illegally without proper paperwork or visa. Worse, for his family back in Manang, it meant no goodbyes, no tears, and no blood money from the government. Only questions lingered on and so did the sad lives of his six children left to spiral deeper into the web of poverty.

Gurung was my grandfather.

BY KARMA TENZING

Kathmandu: The government is allocating Rs 250 million for the construction of a domes­tic airport at Nagidanda of Kavrepalanchowk district, at a distance of 24 kilometers from the Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) in Kathmandu. The airport is being constructed in order to relieve the growing pressure on the TIA, which is so far the country’s only interna­tional conduit. The money will be spent by the Ministry for Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation on feasibility study and preparing a detained project report.

The new airport, which will handle only domestic flights, is expected to cut air traffic at TIA by up to 31 percent. When the new airport is complete, the bigger international airlines will dock at the TIA, while the smaller planes that ply the domestic routes will dock at the Nagidanda airport.

Minister for Culture, Tourism and Civil Avi­ation Rabindra Adhikari has been emphasiz­ing the urgent need for an airport that could take some pressure off the TIA ever since he assumed office four months ago. He had even set up a technical team to study the project. The team led by Engineer Kamal Kumar KC had concluded that the burden on the TIA would be significantly reduced with a second airport close by.

But yet another team that was set up by Adhikari to study what could be done to improve the overall civil aviation sector in Nepal had come to the conclusion that the country did not need any airport that catered exclusively to domestic passengers for another five years.

Nonetheless, the government is in a mood to endorse the report of KC’s technical team. According to this team, the construction cost of the Nagidanda airport, with a proposed run­away of 1,202 meters, will come to around Rs 8.5 billion. But if the runway is only 800 meters, the cost will drop to Rs 5.5 billion.

The technical team has said that works can begin, at the earliest, only a year after the formal announcement of airport construction; the airport is expected to take around 4-5 years to compete. When it is ready, small aircraft, aircraft flying to Lukla and helicopters will be directed to this new airport.

By Uttam Kapri

The ease with which Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli has been dealing with Nepal’s two all-important neighbors in recent times is indicative of two things. One, it sug­gests a level of diplomatic acumen and strategic vision that is rarely seen in a Nepali prime minister. Oli has been able to take both Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping into confidence, a gargantuan achieve­ment for the prime minister of a country that has always felt itself stretched in that age-old geopolitical tug-of-war. Part of this confidence must come from Oli’s command of a government with a two-thirds majority. Partly, it can be argued, one thing Oli has never lacked is confidence, which he has now carried over in his foreign policy dealings.

Two, PM Oli’s relatively smooth foreign policy ride is also reflective of the recent thawing of relations between India and China. Modi and Xi seems to have developed a rare camaraderie as they see the rationale for greater cooperation in light of the increasingly protectionist tendencies of the US. India is far from assured that the mercantilist America under Donald Trump can be relied on to safeguard its stra­tegic interests, which in turn has brought it closer to China. Perhaps, then, India and China have agreed on greater coop­eration in South Asia, including in Nepal?

On June 20, Chinese President Xi, in his meeting with PM Oli in Beijing, said he was confident the Chinese rail would soon come to Kathmandu. (The feasibility study for the Kath­mandu-Kerung section of the proposed Nepal-China railway is to be completed by August.) On being invited by Oli to come visit Nepal, Xi accepted the invitation, saying that the exact dates would be decided on the basis of bilateral consul­tations. A host of other long-term bilateral agreements were also signed during Oli’s Beijing stay.

And yet the Indian media, which used to blow hot and cold over any kind of rapprochement between Nepal and China, has this time mostly chosen to stay quiet on Oli’s China visit. The Indian media seems to have internalized the not-so-sub­tle message from the South Block that the old anti-China bias be set aside for time being.

Perhaps PM Oli deems himself capable of extracting bene­fits from the recent thaw in India-China ties. He just might but he should tread carefully. Historically, in a battle among big powers for geopolitical supremacy, the interests of smaller countries are often ignored, or badly trampled upon. This has been as true in South Asia as it has been in the South China Sea.

The FIFA World Cup, the world’s biggest sporting event, is a big deal in Nepal. Whole streets have morphed overnight into makeshift Brazils, Argentinas and Spains. People can be seen going about their lives in the jerseys of their favorite teams. With live screenings, restaurants are doing a roaring business. Newspapers and TV channels are filled with endless news of Lionel Messi and Harry Kane.

There are indeed millions of die-hard World Cup aficionados in Nepal. Then there is another group of people who are perhaps even more interested in this quadrennial sporting extravaganza: the gamblers.

Sports betting is an established practice in the developed world but in the Indian subcontinent it is relatively new, and illegal. Nonetheless, thousands of Nepalis have wagered their money on the teams they fancy, despite the Kathmandu Chief District Officer’s clear warning before the World Cup that anyone involved in gambling would be penalized. Nor has the arrests of those involved in the Indian Premiere League bookmaking back in May deterred them. 

APEX reporters visited some suspected “gambling dens” of Kathmandu to find out more. Sports bars, restaurants, pubs and even small coffee shops and tea houses have become meeting points for these gamblers and bookies. On our expedition, we found gamblers staking just Rs 500 a game to high rollers betting hundreds of thousands. The bookies, for their part, came from all walks of lives, some temporarily taking up betting to make quick money, others earring a living out of it.

Full story on Sunday