Video of presentation on ‘New forms of journalism in Asia’ at Mediafabric
in November 2011 in Prague organised by Sourcefabric.

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नेपालमा गत ५० बर्षमा जति बाटोघाटो बने, त्यो भन्दा बडि गएको ५ बर्षमा बने । बाटोको कारण किशानलाई आफ्नो बस्तु बजार लान सजिलो भएको  छ। नेपालको मात्रीमृत्यू दर घट्नुको मुख्य कारण पनि बाटोहरुले गर्दा बिरामीलाई अस्पताल पुराउन सजिलो हुनुनै हो । तर जथाभावी बाटो खनिनु, बाटो बजेट कुम्ल्याउन गाभिसहरुमा हुने भ्रष्टाचार, र हचुवाको भरमा  डोजरले खनेको बाटोले ल्याउने बाताबरणिय असन्तुलन र पहिरोले अहिले  देश भरि एक किसिमको  आतंकनै फैलिएको छ। कुनै  गाबिसहरुले त अब डोजरहरुमा प्रतिबन्धनै लाएका छन। बाताबरणमा पर्ने असर बाहेक डोजरले खनेको बाटोले स्थानिय स्थरमा हुने रोजगारको अबसरपनि खोस्छ । यहि कारणले गर्दा अहिले ‘हरित सडक’ को अबधारणा  ल्याइएको हो, ज्सतै भोजपुर, चैनपुर र मध्य पष्चिममा बन्न लागेका बाटो हरु, जस अनुसार बाटोको डिजाइन र निर्माणमा ध्यान दिइन्छ र सकेसम्म धेरै स्थानिय रोजगार सिर्जना गरिन्छ ।

The Road to prosperity, Nepali Times #544

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Some things become more newsworthy when they don’t happen than when they do. That seems to be true for the postponement of Chinese premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to Nepal, which was scheduled for next week.

Foreign Minister Narayan Kaji Shrestha tried to fudge it by saying Tuesday that the dates had never been fixed. The Chinese side played down the cancellation, saying Premier Wen had other plans and that a new date would soon be announced.

The visit, and its cancellation at the last moment, has set off intense speculation about Nepal once more being squeezed by a shift in geopolitical tectonics in the region. There has been a more aggressive US posture following the APEC conclave in Honolulu and the ASEAN Summit in Bali in November. US President Barak Obama’s commitment at both meetings that America would “remain engaged” in the Pacific in the 21st century have been seen by many as a response to China’s growing economic and military clout. Obama’s decision to upgrade US troop presence in Australia and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s reassurances of military ties with the Philippines must have set alarm bells ringing in Beijing.

But even more worrying for Beijing must have been Burma’s ‘defection’ last month after four decades of being a loyal Chinese ally. The first indication that Rangoon was going through a dramatic transformation of its domestic polity and international orientation came with President Thein Sein’s abrupt and unilateral cancellation in September of the $3.6 billion Myitsone dam that the Chinese were building in northern Burma. Since then Burma is purposefully opening up, allowed Clinton to meet Aung San Suu Kyi and British Foreign Secretary William Hague will be visiting Naypyidaw next month.

All this must have come as a shock to China, which had lined up Burma as a strategic corridor to the Indian Ocean as an alternative to the Lombok and Malacca Straits which serve as vulnerable bottlenecks for its oil and mineral supply and exports. When Chinese leaders look at a map of the mainland and see Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Burma, India and Kyrgyzstan, they must have a feeling of being encircled.

Nepal must be sufficiently important in China’s strategic perception to warrant the planned visit by Premier Wen, a trip in which he was also going to attend a conference on the Mekong in Rangoon.

However, it would be stretching the point too thin to be predicting a Sino-Indian ‘cold war’ over Nepal. China is now India’s biggest trading partner, the two countries have deliberately kept their border disputes in deep freeze. The last thing they want is for Nepal to flare up and seriously destabilise the Himalayan rimland.

There is a convergence of interests between Beijing and New Delhi over Nepal: both want the politics to be more stable and predictable.

Premier Wen’s main objective in Kathmandu would have been to reassert his country’s misgivings about Nepal being used as a springboard for free Tibet activities. The Chinese are wary of American and European support for the Tibetan cause, and the pressure they bring to bear on Nepal to go easy on refugees and protests. The Chinese have become even more sensitive after the recent spate of self-immolation of monks in China, and it must have been a fear of a similar burning in Kathmandu during his visit going in full glare of the international media that was a factor in the cancellation of Wen’s visit.

We in Nepal have enough problems to sort out without also being a regional flashpoint over Tibet. It would behoove the Americans and Europeans to understand that Nepal can hardly be expected to stand up to China when they are going to Beijing begging for cash to bail out their economies.

China for its part should realise that Nepal is not the cause but the effect of its crackdowns in Tibet. Addressing the genuine aspirations of the Tibetan people for cultural preservation and autonomy would be a vastly superior strategy than beating and torturing monks and nuns.

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We are dinosaurs dependent on fossil fuels

As world leaders gather at an environment summit in Durban climate change is once more in the headlines. Nepal is there in force with a 30-member delegation. The global recession has thrown the entire Kyoto Protocol process on reducing global warming into doubt.

Developed countries say they can no longer afford to clean up the carbon they have pumped into the atmosphere since the industrial age, backing down from pledges made at Kyoto to help poorer countries mitigate the effects of climate change. Large developing countries like China, India, Brazil and Indonesia see no reason why they should sign binding cutback commitments if the rich countries won’t put their money where their mouth is.

For smaller Asian countries like Nepal, the issue is different. Whether we switch to renewables or not is not going to save the planet, but it can save us. Nepal’s increasing dependence on fossil fuels is certain to take this country down the path of economic ruin. With the world heading for “peak oil” in 2020, after which total global petroleum extraction will start to fall, petrol, diesel, and aviation turbine fuel will not only be scarcer, but dearer.

The queues at gas stations this week should be a dire warning of the disasters to come. Nepal’s petroleum imports from India grew three-fold in the last five years, and we don’t have money to pay for it anymore. As we have argued in this space before, Nepal’s balance of payments gap with India is only going to grow in future making us even more dependent on the southern neighbour.

The solution is right under our noses. Making the switch to a hydropower-based economy is both the short-and long-term solution. We can give speeches until we are blue in the face in Durban about how the western countries should compensate us for our melting glaciers, or to help us adapt and/or mitigate, but if we don’t have a plan to wean this country away from fossil fuels we might as well forget about it.

We don’t expect Nepali politicians to get fired up about global environmental crisis which will start submerging coastal areas in 50 years time. They need a paradigm shift to start thinking of climate change not in ecologicial terms, but economic ones. We need to ensure that future generations of Nepalis (50 million of us by 2030) will inherit a country that is self-sufficient in domestically-generated renewable energy to meet their transportation, industrial and household needs.

Aside from that, there are some environmental steps we can take right away. The ICIMOD report released this week in Durban warns us of the accelerated decline in the mass balance of ice and snow in the Himalaya. As the snowline recedes and glaciers retreat, the Himalaya will be mostly rocks, and we might as well get used to that. However, this is not all caused by global emissions but from the deposits of soot from industries, biomass combustion and windblown dust on snowfields, reducing their albedo effect and accelerating melt. We can start by cleaning up our own smoke stacks and car exhausts.

In the coming years, climate change will exacerbate all other crises that Nepalis already have to cope with: flash floods, droughts, erratic monsoons, lack of irrigation, rivers going dry in summer, forest fires, to name a few. Bolstering their capacity to cope with these crises will better their resilience to climate change as well.

Maybe we should have just sent the minister to Durban to deliver his speech, and the rest of the delegation should have stayed home to plan for the future.

Editorial in Nepali Times, #582

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Al Jazeera documentary humanises the statistics of the peace process

You get hit by statistics all the time in post-conflict Nepal: 16,000 killed in ten years, 1,387 disappeared, tens of thousands wounded, 19,602 ex-Maoists officially in camps, 3,000 not in camps anymore, 6,500 opting for integration.

Then there are the 12,648 Maoist fighters who were disqualified by UNMIN because they were either not fighters at all, did not appear for verification, or were below 18 when they joined the Maoist Army. Of these, 2,973 were minors. After a while, these numbing numbers don’t mean anything anymore.

But by following one former Maoist guerrilla from the time he got “disqualified” by UNMIN to the present, film maker Subina Shrestha has brought the human side of Nepal’s conflict, the sacrifice, pain and loss to an international audience. Shrestha’s documentary, ‘The Disillusioned Soldier’, was aired on Al Jazeera this weekend.

Chandra Bhakta Shrestha was just 12 when he joined the Maoists in his native Gorkha after his sister was among female guerrillas captured by state security, raped and killed. Chandra left his simple farmer parents, and became a Maoist “whole timer”. He took part in the battle of Syangja and the ambush at Krishna Bhir in 2005, losing some close comrades.

The documentary traces Chandra’s life in the Shaktikhor Camp, his involvement in the cultural trope in which he was a flutist, how he met his wife-to-be Rupa. In one poignant scene, Chandra is leaving the camp in January 2010 and bids a camera shy goodbye to his pregnant wife.

Chandra signs up for a UN-sponsored skill training and learns to repair mobile phones, and the return home to his scenic village below Himalchuli is a bit like a boy coming home from boarding school. His favourite goat doesn’t recognize him, he fixes things around the house. Soon, his wife and daughter joins him.

Chandra’s mother recalls how her son often came to her in her dreams to say he was all right. Chandra himself had nightmares of the battles he fought in. “We were confident that our vision of a new Nepal would come true, it is very disappointing that our own party abandoned us,” Chandra says.

Chandra soon has to return to party duties (he has joined the YCL) but gets more and more disillusioned with his party gone “off track” and of sitting around doing nothing.

Chandra’s life now revolves around his family. He says: “We used to want to build the country. But I feel I haven’t even been able to help my family, how can I help my country?”

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Jhamak Ghimire’s ‘Jiban Kanda Ki Phool’ won this year’s prestigious Madan Puraskar. Ghimire has been afflicted with cerebral palsy all her life and can only move her feet. She can hear but not speak and has limited eye sight, yet she not only overcame these disabilities but has written eight books of poetry and essays. In this chapter from Jiban Kanda Ki Phool, Jhamak describes the joy she felt when she first wrote the letter “ka” in the dirt with a stick.

Here is my translation of the chapter from her book with pictures by SITA MADEMBA.

The world of words
JHAMAK GHIMIRE

I still remember that day, and the joy I couldn’t share with anyone. That was the day I wrote my first letter on the ground, and pronounced it in my head.

I was so happy that I wrote the letter ‘ka’ many times, erasing it and writing it again and again. I had practiced with a stick, I had sores in my toes from trying to write the letter on the ground. Sometimes, I dipped my finger in the dew that had collected on leaves and wrote the letter cover and over on a stone until my toe bled.

The reason I put myself through all this was simple: I needed to teach myself to recognise alphabets and write them. I was so happy the first time I wrote ‘ka’ that I threw the dirt in the air and covered myself with dust. I had made my first ‘ka’ really big because I wanted everyone to see it. But instead of noticing my creation, they trampled over it, and soon it was gone.

After all, life is like an alphabet in the dirt. We have to take it as it comes, it is never permanent. I was like the letter on the ground, there was no one to rejoice with me, be sad when I was sad. When shoes trampled my first ‘ka’ it seared my soul. I couldn’t bear it, and let out a scream, outraged at those who had stepped on the writing on the ground. And they thought I was hungry, or afraid of something. They didn’t understand why I was crying out. This was a dramatic period in my life, that I haven’t shared with anyone before. I am telling it for the first time.

It was not as easy for me as it is for people to learn to write with a pen on a copy book. I was surrounded by thorns, and I had to learn to write removing them and practicing on the open earth.

My second letter was ‘u’ and I was really happy when I wrote that too. This time, tears welled up in my eyes, and I wiped them, afraid someone would see me and think I was crying. The third letter was also on that ground, ‘wa’. Writing these alphabets was not easy because my limbs weren’t completely under my control. My fingers would shake. It took me a long time to struggle to write. I had to be patient.

Before I learnt to write, it was difficult for me to communicate. If I was hungry, I couldn’t write or sign it, I just opened my mouth wide and people would understand that I wanted to eat. If I was thirsty, I pointed at the water pot. If I need to go, I just pointed at my behind. To say ‘yes’, I grunted, and to say ‘no’ I shook my leg.

People say: “Wherever there is life, there is also the art of survival.” I had to survive, so I learnt the art of living. I was born like everyone else with a mouth and a stomach, which I had to learn how to deal with hunger, thirst and waste disposal. I had problems going to the bathroom, I had problems cleaning myself afterwards. I was nine-years-old, and when there were no older people around I had to take care of myself.

There aren’t too many moments from my childhood of which I have happy memories. Even after throwing up the dust on myself after writing my first alphabet on the ground, I was sharply reprimanded by my mother. And when I refused to listen to her, I was even spanked. But neither the scolding nor the beating dampened the thrill of knowing I could write.

Even so, it hurt me that there wasn’t anyone to share my joys and sorrows. It would have meant a lot to me if someone would have been there to be happy with me, or to caress my shoulder with warm hands and say: “Don’t worry everything will be all right.” But there was no one, everyone who saw me would mutter “Poor girl” and I could tell they would hope that I would die soon and not have my agony prolonged.

But I have no ill feeling towards anyone, I love them all. They couldn’t help their ignorance and their mistaken outlook on life. Perhaps if I hadn’t been pierced by those thorns early in life, I wouldn’t be the strong person I am today. Life has thorns and flowers, you have to learn to live with both. I picked the flower of happiness of having written my first letter, and I also picked the thorns of my sadness and pain.

The first word I ever wrote was the word ‘kalam’, and that must have been because I had a great need to own a pen. After writing my first letter in the ground, I had laughed and shouted with joy but no one had tried to find out why was suddenly so happy. I started working on words after learning to write alphabets, and life kept flowing drop by drop. Learning to write opened up a world of words, and it made me start looking for the meaning of life.

My father was teaching my sister ‘ka kaa ki kii’, showing her the consonants with his fingers and making her pronounce them. I would sit beside her and look at the letters and copy them on the ground. I used the pages of the copy book that my sister left behind to practice writing the letters I had memorized. I used to write all day long until my father, mother, brother and sisters returned home. I would hide the papers before they entered the house, and pretend to be in the same position I was in when they left in the morning. That is how I learnt all the alphabets and words.

Human beings need to communicate, and even if they are not allowed to they find ways to get across. I was a human being, I wasn’t an animal, I had consciousness and the ability to think, I could hear and could see enough, I still had some strength left in my toes. These were what I had to work with and make the best of to build bridges to the world around me. I had to overcome not just apathy but also negativity. When they saw me writing letters on the floor, they would say: “What is the use, she can’t achieve anything with that knowledge.”

What a culture we Nepalis live in, instead of showing compassion to those who are weak we try to keep them weak. It wasn’t surprising that I was treated like that. But I didn’t let that dishearten me, I followed my destiny.

It wasn’t easy. It was a path with obstacles every step of the way. There were boulders and craters, I would be stung by sharp stones and thorns. But I got to love that path, the path I am still on today. It still isn’t easy. Learning to write made it bearable, the joy of the written word poured bliss into my soul.

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If you flip through the 180 channels on the dish these days in India you can’t distinguish between real news and reality TV.

Journalism is only a narrow segment of the spectrum we call the “mass media”, and that segment is just getting narrower.

Current affairs programmes have turned into voyeuristic entertainment posing as news. There is a raucous reporting of trivia, or there is overkill.

Breathless live coverage of issues with five talking heads on the screen talking at the same time, so you can’t tell what the hell is happening.

The public service role of media has vanished

Recently in a hotel room in India, I flipped through Hindi and English news channels. The main news in all of them was cricket.

Cricket was not just the main news in the sports section; it was the number one item in the main news lineup. This went on for a day or two as long as the tournament lasted.

I teach journalism, and all this makes me wonder whether there is any point training college students in mass communications just so that they can feed the media industry’s voracious appetite for escapist entertainment masquerading as news.

Such content keeps us ignorant of the real state of our countries, the structural problems within our societies. It doesn’t throw the light on social injustice, discrimination and exploitation.

At a time when we need it the most, the public service role of media has vanished.

Journalism and democracy are two sides of the same coin. If one is undermined, the other is also weakened. If one is strong, it protects the other.

But the over-commercialisation of media is governed by an unspoken compact between advertisers and publishers that journalists will not be too controversial so that, in return, advertisers will have access to the widest possible audience.

Censorship by exclusion

We now have to deal with what John Pilger calls “the censorship by exclusion”. Commercialisation of media ownership sanitises the content of what journalists are allowed to report.

Censorship by exclusion is much more insidious because it happens in countries where the press is supposed to be free. Readers and viewers are lulled, and the TV set turns into an anesthesia machine.

Media gatekeepers argue that they are just giving the public what the public wants. But do we really know what the public wants? Do we really care what the public needs?

It is because the mainstream media has abdicated its public service role as a defender of media independence that I think there is new relevance for new media.

Online sites, social networking and citizen journalism complement what the established press can’t, or doesn’t, touch because of state control, commercialisation or sheer laziness and complacency.

So, you see, new media isn’t just a fad. It is a tool that democratises delivery, takes journalism out of the hands of business and government. But it is just a tool. And like any tool it can be used, or misused.

We sometimes tend to get carried away by the medium. It shouldn’t be technology just for the sake of technology.

We shouldn’t be so mesmerized by gadgets and the planned obsolescence of gizmos that we lose track about what that technology is supposed to do.

To turn Marshall McLuhan around: the message is the message.

Wake up calls for traditional press

Online media and citizen journalism are wake up calls for the traditional press to re-invent itself, for journalists to relearn what their profession is all about. We need a paradigm shift in the way we do journalism.

Half the children in South Asia are stunted because they are undernourished, but the covers of our news magazines are about how to lose weight.

In parts of India the maternal mortality rate is at sub-Saharan levels, but our newspapers must have a “tits and ass” section.

Nearly 200,000 Nepali women are trafficked to prostitution in India, yet the only sex our newspapers cover are about adulterous film stars.

The trouble begins with what we define as news.

Journalism schools have set the criteria: for a calamity to make it to the news pages the people who die have to do so in sufficiently large numbers, they should preferably be well-to-do, they have to die suddenly and all at once, in one place.

There have to be good visuals, and the victims should speak English.

Which is why the fact that 150 children in Nepal are killed every day due to preventable diseases isn’t news because they are from poor families, they don’t all die in one place but pass away silently, scattered in homes across the country.

The mainstream media has not sufficiently upheld the citizen’s right to know what is important and relevant to a majority of them. And that is why citizens have become journalists themselves.

Citizen journalists complement traditional journalists

Convergence of technology is making online journalism possible, and it is filling a gap that mainstream media has abandoned.

Just about every media conference I have attended in the last five years has dealt with a debate between old media vs. new media. This subject has been flogged to death.

Let’s not get distracted anymore by the debate between digital vs. analog. After all, it is not an either-or question. We need both. Citizen journalists complement traditional journalists.

What is important is not the platform. What is important is the content. And the delivery is dependent on the content: you choose the medium that best reaches the public that the message is meant for.

Also, just because we have grown tired of talking about the digital divide doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Things are changing fast, but affordability and accessibility because of language and bandwidth keep computers and the internet out of the reach of most citizens.

Actually the digital divide is just the manifestation of structural inequities within and between countries. There is the income divide, there is a school divide, there is a health divide. These are all problems that the mass media should be in the business of finding solutions to by improving governance and making democracies more accountable.

In our enthusiasm for digital media, we have to remember that it tends to be an echo chamber. When you can customize your news feed, subjects or viewpoints that you don’t agree with can be blocked out.

This hardens opinions and works against the politics of compromise that is essential to make democracy work. Instead of being a bridge, therefore, the over-connected Internet fragments and compartmentalizes public opinion.

Virtual thought ghettos then populate cyberspace.

Press freedom is like a rubber band: to make it work you have to stretch it. Media pluralism has to be protected by its constant and maximum application so that journalists (citizen or otherwise) maintain our credibility and protect our agenda-setting role.

Finally, the real challenge for both new and old media is therefore to be relevant, to enhance our credibility, and to protect our freedoms.

This is true for whether our delivery platform is the Internet, broadcast or print, whether we work for a newspaper, we blog, or we tweet. Or we do all of the above.

The above is an edit of a my presentation at the Mediafabric event organized by Sourcefabric in Prague 21 October, 2011. First appeared in http://www.mediahelpingmedia.org/training-resources/advanced-journalism/641-the-importance-of-journalisms-public-service-remit

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