Playing the waiting game...

Eager anticipation is the emotion for the week. Delayed by 2 weeks in trekking west to our official placement in the district of Kailali, we find ourselves spinning our wheels while trying to stay both physically and mentally stimulated and active. I’m reading when my mind affords the need for escape, while birding hikes up Mount Polchowki in the southern Kathmandu Valley offer other forms of reprieve (albeit the incline and decline appear to take their toll on my legs/knees for days afterwards ;-?). I’m certainly not as young as I’d like to think I am (and those quick glances in the mirror strikingly reminds me of this fact daily)! Yet alas, as I bounce between fiction and non-fiction during recuperation moments, and when I’m not working on various other pending projects, my mind reflects on the enlightenment afforded by such readings as Dor Bahadur Bista’s Fatalism and Development: Nepal’s Struggle for Modernization.

Written between 1989 and 1990, Bista’s book, I offer, is a must read for any member of the global community who intends to engage the people of Nepal and Nepali lifeways through volunteer service or development work. Even though this perspective is Bista’s vision, and now some 20 years in the past, it offers both crucial insights and inspires critical questions about the state of Nepali politics, economics and its social/cultural system.  Bista’s history describes an understanding that cannot be understated as to the ways of Nepali life and their lens of existence.  Yet, the text begs many questions as to the transition that has occurred in all sectors of society since the pre-revolution and pre-monarchy days of the author's experience. Bista’s own life and mysterious disappearance over a decade ago also brings another layer of questioning on to the book’s reality and relevance for modern Nepal. May all future and current Nepali compatriots expand their knowledge base toward understanding life in Nepal through readings such as Bista’s.

Whether lounging with my new friends....

Or observing the Himalaya's shroud over the Kathmandu valley through the clouds...

Life in Nepal is never dull. Now on to Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead...