Tripping through India Bhattarai Style
Nabaraj and Narayan Bhattarai are two young fellows who claim a certain notoriety in their home country Nepal. They took a walk through the length and breadth of the country’s 75 districts between October 2008 and 2010. The jaunt that started with some 350 Nepali rupees in their pocket, pens , paper, a digicam and a handycam, yielded a 98 minute documentary and 508 page book on their 750 day experience. They describe themselves as village yokels with an interest in journalism, and are members of the Lalitpur chapter of the Nepali Federation of Journalists. Coming from rural Nepal to Kathmandu as undergraduate students, they met, clicked and began to ‘live together’. (This could have gotten interesting, only, they are really evasive about that part of their ‘bio-data’, but body language says a lot, boys!)
They were rather non-committal about events in Nepal, but one got the distinct impression that they weren't too pleased about the 'secular constitution'. A chance statement that Narayan let slip was telling, "Nepalis in Gujarat and some northern states admired Modi and the BJP for winning the election and Hindus in Nepal were very pleased about this." Probably reading the expression on my face, Nabaraj quickly stepped in to say, 'Many Hindus in Nepal support Modi and the BJP, not everyone'.
“Our visit to Bihar comes at the end of our year long travel through India, that started when we crossed the border to Sikkim on the 22nd of July,” says Nabaraj. “Our main purpose is to look at the Nepali diaspora, observe how they live, what are the changes and adaptations in culture, and to bring back that learning to Nepal. Real life stories of Nepalese people all over the world could inspire our own young people back in Nepal,” he says.
The two operate their tour on the ‘modern fakir system’: donations, crowd funding via facebook, and a lot of dependence on the local Nepali population. They accept the hospitality of local Nepalese usually belonging to Nepali cultural organizations within the city they visit. This has helped them gain insight as to how different strata of the diaspora live. However, when I interacted with them for over an hour, what I got was a lot of froth and very little beer.
What did they learn from their four day visit? After making the usual touristy noises about how impressive Bodh Gaya and Nalanda were (they spent two days sight-seeing and met only one Nepalese person there), they got down to the basics: “We haven’t met many Nepali people, but generally Bihari Nepalese are not doing as well as those in Assam or Mumbai. They aren’t many Nepali speaking people who are in good positions or in the media in Bihar. They are mainly labourers in restaurants and so on. The teenagers that we met did not know Nepali well and preferred to speak in English or Hindi. The irony is that they were the kids of a local man who is a community leader of sorts. Somehow we get the impression that the youngsters are a bit ashamed of being recognized as Nepalese,” says Narayan, the elder of the two. That’s a journalistic statement from the two travellers!
“We get a sense of disunity and squabbling among the local Nepali population in Bihar, which could be because of lack of higher education. For example in Mumbai, there are two Nepali dailies being published, and in Gujarat we met a highly successful Nepali businessman in the hospitality industry. Where there are well educated Nepalese, we have seen strong and vibrant diaspora associations,” says Nabaraj .
The two look forward to meeting the Nepalese ambassador in Delhi and hope to gain an audience with the President and Prime Minister of India. Another ‘book’ and a documentary are in the offing!
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