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Rabies in Nepal (Satis Shroff)
Related to country: Nepal

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

FATAL DECISION (Satis Shroff) Rural Nepal (c) Art by satisshroff freiburg 2007

‘Give me a glass of water,’ said the London-trained Nepalese physician, as he came into the room, where a group of Nepalese people with Mongolian and Caucasian features were gathered, either pitying or wondering what the strange illness could be.

With the glass of water in his hand, the swarthy, thick-set, bespectacled doctor approached the thin, emaciated girl, who'd retreated to a corner of the apartment like a cornered cat, and was having fits. A brown froth oozed out of her thin mouth.

As soon as she caught sight of the stranger with the water, she let out a chilling scream that seemed to echo in the Himalayas.

The physician turned to the girl's father and said, "I'm sorry Mr. Rana, I cannot do anything for your daughter. She has hydrophobia," And with that he packed his black medical bag and left.
Mr. Rana was stunned. The shock of the doctor's poker face, and dry diagnosis hit him with such a vehemence that he reeled mentally.

"But there must be some hope or solution for Sudha, my daughter," he uttered.
He told his wife what the doctor has said, adding that their daughter had no hope of surviving the dog-bite, for Maya Devi spoke only Nepali and no English.

The doctor had spoken in English, as all educated Nepalese did, even among each other.
Sudha was dying and there was no help at hand. Even modern medicine, with all its antibiotics, cortisones, antiferons wouldn't be able to help their child.

"Oh, Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva! Please don't let us down", cried Maya Devi, summoning the Hindu Trinity, with a mixture of fear and worry. And she decided to send for the local shaman, a jhakri, and dispatched a female relative of hers with the nickname 'Bhunti’, which means a fat person, not that she was pregnant or had a pot belly, but because she had a hollow back, with the result that she went through life preceded by her belly.

Mr.Rana had faith in allopathic medicine and didn't trust the traditional medicine or that which passed for traditional medicine, especially the jhakris, dhamis, bijuwas, lamas and others who took to what he called "phuk-phak" methods, which literally meant 'blowing-and-throwing.'

He preferred the old western school-medicine for himself and his family. That was because his brother and grandfather were physicians, having studied at the Grant Medical College in Bombay in the days of the British Raj.

It had almost become a family tradition, and he was contemplating to send his eldest son to this college, despite the astronomical sums that the medical colleges demanded in India in general. They called these criminal sums open-donations, and was a rather done thing.

His wife, being a traditional Tamang tribes-woman, didn't think much of modern medicine and went back to the traditional healers that she knew through her parents and grandparents for they'd lived in the foothills of the Himalayas and had heard only hair-raising stories of the practitioners of modern medicine. Whereas a local shaman was happy with a dozen eggs or a small goat, you had to pay in currency notes to the modern doctor. And currency notes were scarce in the hills of Nepal, where people bartered with natural products.

Maya Devi had seen a sick neighbour receiving a glucose injection with an outsized hypodermic syringe, and that had scared the wits out of her. She didn't know what the thing was, but it certainly looked frightening. The patient, a diabetic, had died soon after.

After that experience she'd decided that she'd definitely not go to a modern doctor.

Her grandpa, who had been a village shaman, had treated and cured the whole village, sometime or other, ever since she knew him. And what's more, he was her grandpa and that meant a lot to her and she had confidence in him, because he'd never do any harm or inflict injury, as was expected of true shamans.

She remembered once asking him how he'd become a shaman, and he'd told her that he'd been picked up in his childhood by the ban-jhakri, a wild, wise man who lived in the jungle in a cave, and who became his guru and had taught him the secrets of the healing plants and profession. Her grandpa had long hair, like that of the Hindu God Shiva of the Snows: unkempt but braided, and it gave him an extraordinary appearance as he'd sit near his house altar, where he had his ritual objects. To her he was Shiva reincarnated.

Maya Devi's husband, an educated civil servant of His Majesty's government, sneered at times about her faith in the jari-buti, as the medicinal roots-and-stems were called.

After what seemed like ages, Bhunti turned up with a lean man, who had Mongolian features. He was thought to be a 'knowing' practitioner of his blow-and-throw trade. He was half Tamang and half Bhotay, as people of Tibetan origin are called, and looked as though he, himself, was suffering from consumption. He was untidily dressed, had blood-shot eyes and stuck his thin black hair under his monkey-cap, and had a pair of drooping moustaches. He was left alone and Bhunti catered to his needs and demands.

First of all, he demanded rice grains to be brought for the blowing part of the ceremony, and then alcohol, since he belonged to the matwali-jat, which means the 'caste-that-drinks-alcohol.'

In the high-caste, ritual purity-pollution thinking Hindu society, it is regarded as a direct affront when one is offered alcohol. But since this was an emergency situation, a matter of life and death in the family, there were no protests. Neither from her otherwise orthodox Hindu husband, not from the relatives and neighbours.
Meanwhile, after gulping some of the raksi (alcohol) as though he was drinking lemon juice, he began the treatment by raising his voice and reciting a mantra and counting the rice grains on a copper plate. After each chant he drew a deep breath and blew his breath thrice in quick succession.

His first intention was to find out whether the child, who was letting out screams intermittently, was seized by a witch in the neighbourhood or a distant demon (bhut), for only then could he apparently begin treatment. After more swigs of the Gurkha raksi, his mantras became unintelligible and he seemed to withdraw within himself.

After a great deal of time, he began shaking and said in staccato bursts, "It's the demon from the othay-khola". A rivulet in the vicinity of the town. 'Othay' means a 'lip' in Nepali.

The diagnosis having been completed, a blood-sacrifice had to be made to appease the concerned river-demon along with a prayer to the Mahaguru: Shiva. It had to be a little red rooster.

Bhunti organised a red rooster in no time, and the jhakri prepared his ritual.

Although Mr. Rana showed respect this time for the traditional methods despite his distrust, he just couldn't help feeling irritated by this particular species of his sort, especially his preference for alcohol at a critical moment in someone's life.

"Perhaps he's just an alcoholic and practised traditional medicine as a quack, a dabbler who could in effect do nothing," he thought. There was nothing he could do at the moment. He had to try it out with this quack too. It was faith healing at its best. Either you believed in someone or not. Take it or leave it. There was no choice. And when you're in a desperate situation, you had to take all the chances that were available to soothe your conscience."

Meanwhile, the thin girl had started seeing double, because her optic nerve was affected, and her brain stem was assaulted by the rabies-virus and she had problems with her swallowing reflex.

Her mother had tried to give her water not knowing the medical implications and her daughter had a spasm of panicky angst and screamed again.
"Oh God, my poor Sudha, what's become of you?" cried Maya Devi as she held her daughter wrapped in a brown blanket. It was pathetic to see a pretty daughter, a girl who was only eight years old, with beautiful black hair and an olive complexion turn virtually into a skeleton, so that even the teeth seemed to jut out, the body growing thin, dehydrating and the psyche a chaos, for she was no longer able to take in the world as it had been.

There was a mighty struggle going on in her nervous system, and it registered through her brown and frothy saliva and her screams of angst and terror, which had seized her. She was evidently losing the fight.

A neighbour suggested that the patient should be immediately transported to Kathmandu for "further treatment." Another thought it would be better to try out a local dhami, a traditional healer, and yet another an ayurvedic practitioner from the town, who wore spectacles and a turban and was from the Punjab. A well-meaning Lepcha neighbour said, "Ranaji, you should call a Lepcha Bongthing who is a mediator between humans and the Spirits. If that doesn't help we could engage a Limbu Yeba exorcist.

Mr.Rana had often seen the Limbu Yeba males going about wearing their ridiculous creased white skirts and turbans, with long feathers, cauri and rudraksha garlands.

"Why not try homeopathy?" said another.

In this lost and helpless state there was nothing to do but to try everything, like a drowning person clinging to the last straw, and so began an odysee of 'treatments' carried out in the hope of saving a child whose body and mind were rebelling and running out of control.

Mrs. Rana's thought wandered to the day when her daughter Sudha had returned with a neighbour's daughter after the bhai-tika ceremony from a distant part of the town. Bhai-tika, the festival during which the sisters proffered various honours on their brothers after a ritual puja, whereby the brothers are blessed with prosperity and protection against the adversities of human existence and unseen evils. And who could think that evil would strike on such an auspicious day?

As is the custom in Nepal, the people have their chicken, dogs, yaks and goats outside the courtyard. The dog, which was a bitch, had let out a few snarls and barks to warn passers-by that they were trespassing her marked territory. The children had been scared by the angry barks and had emitted shrieks of fear, and the bitch had made for the two scared children in a frenzy and had bitten them on their legs after a short pursuit.

The two girls had returned home crying and told their parents about the fierce dog that had bitten them. However, the parents who were entertaining guests in the afternoon hadn't thought anything worse about the consequences of a dog-bite and Mr. Rana had only used the zinc oxide and eucalyptus salve that you find in every household. He had faith it would heal the wound, as in the past against other bites and wounds.

And that had been a terrible mistake.

Whereas the other girl Chitra was immediately sent to a local doctor, who gave her anti-rabies injections, Mr. Rana's daughter was treated with only a smear salve.

"That ought to do the trick," Mr. Rana had thought. "Why spend more money unnecessarily on the doctor? Injections were expensive. And after all, if the salve had the same effect, why not save the money for another purpose?"

Only last Monday the Nepalese Brahmin from Dhankuta had visited them and had predicted something inauspicious in the near future in the family. But in order to counteract that he had suggested making an amulet for his two daughters, with vedic mantras inscribed in them, which were thought to have preventive and protective effects against the bad planets (grahas) that had changed their constellations. The Brahmin was a jotisi, a learned Benaras-returned astrologer, with the ability to interpret and analyse the astrological data of Hindus, for every Hindu possessed a long scroll (janai-patra), which bears all the lucky and unlucky, the auspicious and inauspicious days in one's lifetime, noted according to the constellation of one's zodiac sign, and starting from the date of one's birth.

In the Nepal of yore, this scroll of paper was an important document, and it still is, in the Middle Mountains of Nepal where the Chettris and Brahmins live.

Mr.Rana though a Chettri from birth, didn't think much of the jotisis and other wandering brahmins. As far as he was concerned, they were slimy, garrulous, cunning fellows who went from house to Hindu house talking fancy Sanskrit with the married women who were unfailingly always at home, and departing with a handsome dakshina (offering) in the form of: rice, currency notes and coins, and sometimes even a whole cow. The Hindu religion allowed it, and the priests and astrologers made the best of this belief.

The doctor's words had struck Mr. Rana like a guillotine. It was a death sentence.

A dark, monsoon-like cloud hung over the family. A feeling of mourning, depression and helplessness spread, even though the daughter was breathing, shrieking and struggling with death. Their daughter had developed a hoarse throat and her whole frail body was shaking.

Mr. Rana had heard that it took at least 15 injections to treat the rabies virus. In these days it was even possible to do it with three shots, but what was the use of knowledge? Or when a medical therapy is refused due to the ignorance on the part of the parents who have the money, and therefore the power to decide whether a member of the family should be medically treated or not, through traditional or western healing methods.

The way Mr. Rana saw it, it had been a blatant misuse of power. And he had a terribly guilty conscience regarding his daughter. It had been a fatal decision. One part of his mind accused him and the other seemed to rationalise and shift the blame to the uselessness of medicine, even though man had set foot on the moon and the skies were studded with satellites belonging to the western world.

And Sudha died that night.

ENDS

About the Author: Satis Shroff is a writer and poet based in Freiburg (poems, fiction, non-fiction) who also writes on ethno-medical, culture-ethnological themes. He has studied Zoology and Botany in Nepal, Medicine and Social Science in Germany and Creative Writing in Freiburg and Manchester. He describes himself as a mediator between western and eastern cultures and sees his future as a writer and poet. Satis Shroff was awarded the German Academic Exchange Prize. Please read his poems and articles in www.google & www.yahoo under search: satis shroff Nepal

Satis Shroff’s bicultural perspective makes his prose and poems rich, full of awe, and at the same time heartbreakingly sad. In writing ‘home,’ he not only returns to his country of origin time and again, he also carries the fate of his people to readers in the West, and his task of writing is a very important one in political terms. His true gift is to invent Nepalese metaphors and make them accessible to the West through his prose and poetry. (Sandra Siegel, poetess, Germany)

November 30, 2007 | 2:01 AM Comments  0 comments



Lyric on Love (Satis Shroff)
Related to country: Nepal

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Love Songs On a Misty Morning (Satis Shroff)

Do You Remember?
On a misty morning at Pokhara,
We sat in a dugout canoe
With our college friends.

The misty veil slowly disappeared.
Mirrored on the torquoise waters
Of the lake Phewa
Were the virgin white peaks
Crowned by Machhapuchare,
The fish-tailed one.
Placid, serene, majestic,
A moment of magic.

Do you remember?
The love songs I sang from our canoe,
Strumming on my guitar
Were meant for you.
For you alone.
Even the Himalayan birds
Stopped chirping
To eavesdrop at our wondrous melodies,
Like at a Rodighar.

Our friends sang in chorus:
Nepalese folk-songs,
Bollywood and English lyrics
On that misty morning.

Songs sung in chorus
To share our feelings
Of the beauty of Nature
And human attachments.
Breaking the tranquillity
Of the misty morning in the Lake Phewa.
A motley symphony in the morning.

The elderly Phewa-fisher smiled,
As he rowed the long canoe.
A knowing smile,
For he too had sung love lyrics
When he was young.
A frugal life in the Annapurna hills,
Trying hard to make ends meet.

He had his life behind him,
We had ours before us.
Life was cruel,
But love was everywhere.

November 29, 2007 | 5:26 AM Comments  0 comments



Miteinander, Togetherness, One Nation, One World
Related to country: Nepal

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Eva Gerhards, Satis Shroff and Toni Hagen in a Freiburger tavern

Let’s Live Together, Despite the Differences (Satis Shroff, Freiburg)

I met Toni Hagen ages ago in Freiburg where he’d come to give a talk about Nepal, and I must say he made a jolly good impression. As a long-time Freiburger, I went with him to a local tavern near the Schwabentor for a swig of German beer. ‘I’ve travelled 14,000 km on foot in Nepal’ said Toni Hagen, a soft-spoken, silvery-haired Swiss-geologist who would be 89 years now, hadn’t Yamaraj beckoned him earlier. He had that typical Schwyzerdeutsch accent, and he liked to think of his days in Nepal in the early fifties as his ‘wandering years,’ for as is the custom in Switzerland and Germany, when you’re through with learning your trade you embark upon an adventurous trip seeking expertise in as many cities and countries as possible before you settle down some place. His poor wife had to remain in Lenzerheide with the children.

In the case of Toni Hagen, however, he seemed to be a wandering soul, even in the winter of his life, spending half of his time in the Swiss Alps and the other half in the Himalayas. He was one of the last living witnesses of a secretive Nepal of the Middle Ages. He entered the Kingdom at a time when it was a “forbidden land” in the early fifties. As the first foreigner who had the freedom of travelling in Nepal as he pleased, Hagen visited areas which are still forbidden to most people even today. Most Toni Hagen admirers can view his life and experiences in the film ‘The Ring of Buddha.’ It is a melange of original film material from the fifties, colour transparencies from his book on the geology of Nepal, and the viewer gets an idea of the Kingdom of Nepal and its peoples. When I saw the film, I had the uneasy feeling that he was saying goodbye to us all.

With the passage of time, Toni Hagen changed his profession from geology to development-work, and he was deeply concerned about the problems of development aid, its successes and failures not only in Nepal but also in many other countries. The people interested him more than the stratigraphic formations. In a book published by the Unesco, dealing with the ‘socio-economic problems of Nepal’ he mentioned the development projects in Nepal and said that the ‘ecological catastrophe prophesy’ that he made in the early fifties ‘has come true’ and talked about the pioneer work in the geological survey of Nepal from 1960 till 1970, and wrote about his new edition of ‘Nepal’ and proudly mentioned that it was a fourth edition ‘without any changes’, and called it a standard work on Nepal, which indeed it is.

He took delight in the fact that the World Bank stopped the Arun III project in Nepal thanks to his efforts and the united lobbying on the part of the ecological organisation Urgewalt, Dr. Hermann Warth, and the political fractions from the SPD, Bündnis 90, the Greens and the PDS in influencing the German government, in addition to the decision of the new World Bank president James Wolfensohn and the assertion of the then prime minister Adhikary. After the World Bank decision not to finance the dam project, it was taken for granted that the 235 million marks from the German side would be set aside for other smaller projects. The Arun III was observed in Germany as development-politics gone haywire.

‘What Nepal needs,’ he stressed, ‘is not road-building projects but genuine and effective help in the agricultural sector. What Nepal needs are not atomic plants but water-works.’ And he wasn’t tired of mentioning, with a sense of pride, that His Majesty King Birendra had read his old reports and had asked him for his opinion regarding Nepal’s optimal development.

‘Is it too late for my country?’ was the question asked by King Birendra, he said, and in the same breath he expressed his admiration for the Nepalese King. He was of the opinion that ‘constitutional monarchy and continuity are essential for Nepal’s survival,’ and praised the advantages of decentralisation, which according to him, is a central characteristic of democracy and is important for every case involving planning whether it’s hydroelectric plants or tourism. In those days, the only pressure that Nepal had as a sovereign state was from India in connection with the trade and transit disagreements. Times have changed and the threat is from within, in the form of maoists, and not from without.

Toni Hagen said, ‘Development must come from the grassroots.’ He was awarded the title of ‘Distinguished Person of Kathmandu City’ on 15th of June 1995 by the mayor of Kathmandu Mr. P.L. Singh, who also presented him a key to the city. On this occasion Toni Hagen went on record as saying ‘Despite the failure of some politicians and parties, freedom of speech, press-freedom, multiparty system and the role of the opposition in the parliament remain the most important trait of the new system in Nepale­se politics.

Nepal can be divided into seven zones: the Terai, the Siwalik Hills, the Mahabharat Mountains (Lekh), the Nepal Midlands, the Himalayas, the Inner Himalayas and the Tibetan marginal mountains. And according to Toni Hagen the river system existed before the Nepal Himalayas came into existence. The Himalayan rivers carved gigantic gorges. According to him it would be appropriate if the Midlands were not ignored today. Almost lamentably he said that the terai urwald, primeval forest, did not exist anymore and talked about the World Bank and the Nepalese government’s project of settling people from the hills to the terai.

From the terai to the hills you have in ascending order of crop cultivation: rice, wheat, maize, millet, potatoes and grassland. Wheat is a relatively new crop in Nepal. He found the soft green revolution in Kathmandu welcome, but at the same time he pointed to the fact that the population had risen in the last decade at an alarming tempo, and called it ‘schlimm’ and bad enough. Nepal, in comparison to other Asian countries, has five persons per hectre of land’, he said and ‘possesses the biggest concentration of population density’.

And then he started to talk about the soil erosion. From the terai at the gangetic-level upto a height of 1800m you have rice terraces and from there up to 3000m you have the Kampf­zone (battle-zone) for existence and above that you have, till an elevation of 3500m, forests with increasing erosion and then grasslands in the Himalaya regions. He pointed out that the steep terraces resulted in soil erosion caused by human beings. The yield per hectre had been decreasing and the land for cultivation had also been decreasing.

As far as the terai was concerned, his prognosis was that it would produce surplus food for a decade, and mentioned that most of the food went to India, because the traders in the plains offered better prices and the transport infrastructure was already there in form of good railways and roads.

In the terai the ground water can be reached at a depth of 2 metres. The terai, with its rich alluvial soil, could be developed into the corn-chamber of Nepal, much like the Punjab in India. And Nepal should not export its rice to India but keep it for domestic demands in the Kingdom. He shook his head and said, ‘It’s easy, but it doesn’t function. We may have a surplus at the moment but the question is whether we can keep up this production or not?’

The farmers must be helped was his argument. Toni Hagen admitted he didn’t have a patent recipe for the problems of Nepal. The farmers had been ignored in Nepal according to Toni Hagen (not so in Taiwan and Niger). He complained that the Foreign Aid until 1976 invested money mostly in road-construction projects which was a grave mistake, for it sucked up the last reserves of Nepal.

Nepal is like a very sick patient. Multilateral and bilateral aid agencies at the governmental and non-governmental level have injected foreign cash and material into Nepal, and the result is that the very economic structure has been weakened. A sum of US 552.8 million was transferred to Nepal without any visible changes in the economic structure of the country and has created an aid-industry in which the corrupt middlemen earn a good living. The country’s masses suffer stoically, as they have done throughout the centuries at the hands of other rulers. Chakari, nepotism and corruption are just as rampant in the post-democratic era as in the past.

It must be noted, he said, that above 90% of the Nepalese population lives on agriculture. The first priority was given to transport, then agriculture and lastly energy. The other way round would have been better on the long run.

He held a pedagogic finger and reminded one Nepal is a country with the biggest hydro-electric potential in the world. ‘Even back in the fifties I suggested to the government to develop energy. Some officials regarded him as ‘backward in his thinking,’ and according to him foreign ex­change was wasted on useless thermal energy projects.

Whereas the population of Nepal in 1950 was 8 million, in 1988 it was 17,5 million. Today it’s 27 million. And whereas the mean life expectancy in 1950 was 26 years, a Nepalese now can live to be 40 to 50 years old if not more. Malaria was rampant in 1950 with 3 million cases, and in the eighties malaria, which was thought to have been eradicated, has made a comeback because the ‘mosquitoes are immune’. Whereas there were 2,5 million domestic animals in 1962, there are over 3,2 million these days. And whereas there were 6,4 million hectares of forest in 1950, it was reduced to half, namely 3,2 hectares in 1982. And whereas the illiteracy in 1950 was 98%, by 1976 almost 77% of the boys (and 25% girls) had gone through compulsory primary school. And as for the medical aspects, 50% more Nepalese doctors are concentrated in Kathmandu Valley than anywhere else in the Kingdom. Due to the war between the Maoists and the government troops and police there has been a steady decline (38%) in the tourist since 1998. And more than 13 000 Nepalese have died in the struggle for power. This would have appeared like a nightmare to Toni Hagen, who had another picture of Nepal in his mind—corrupt, but peaceful and tolerant. Live and let live was the life philosophy. Today it’s live and let die.

The rate of people leaving the rural areas was 3% in 1951 in comparison to 12% in 1982. The crop production figures and prospects according to the Swiss expert look gloomy with a deficit in the year 2000, beginning already in the early with a downward trend.

To a question about the Swiss road in Jiri, which had been praised in German TV as an ecological and technical masterpiece, he said: ‘It’s well built, but wrongly laid (falsch Angelegt). Neither did he have words of praise for the Nepal-India road, nor for the Kathmandu-Lhasa highway, which were great engineering feats. The Tribhuvan Rajpath connecting Nepal with India (built in 1956) was very bad because of erosion along the sides of the road. He called it a ‘terrible construction’. In the meantime the road is open for traffic.

‘In development aid there’s always a wrong investment. The aid-donors wanted to do too much in Nepal. That was the problem’, says Toni Hagen.

On the 11th of April 1996 there was a two-day ‘Nepal Aid Group’ conference in Paris, the first of its kind since 1992. The participating 13 donor nations were: Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Holland, Norway, the Saudi Development Fond, Switzerland, U.K., USA, in addition to various international finance organisations. The summit granted for the period 1996-97 assistance worth US$ 993 million to Nepal.

The then Nepalese finance minister Dr. Ram Sharan Mahat said, ‘The meeting in Paris has proved that the donor-nations show a cooperative attitude towards Nepal. The main points that these countries complained about were: the constant posting of the government employees, their sinking morale and the delay in the posting and transfers of the civil servants engaged in the development works. The aid-donors suggested that the prices of the public service should be oriented to the actual costs and emphasised the necessity of controlling the rampant corruption’.

Another current trend in development aid from Europe is this ‘Help to Self-Help’ especi­ally from the Germans. In 1995 Nepal received 29.3 million German marks for the projects and programmes of the financial and technical cooperation (FZ & TZ). The financial cooperation involves family-planning, a road infrastructure and a biogas project.

Toni Hagen said, ‘The Nepalese, for instance, should plant trees and care for them for five years. Integral projects would be good for Nepal’ and went on to talk about big projects with the motto: ‘No money, no water’ in other countries. The big organisations of rich countries have lots of money for development projects but how the money was invested was another matter. In his book on development problems he analysed 230 development projects, and according to him in rural areas only small projects have a chance to survive.

He quoted the villager who said, ‘My village has survived so many development projects’. Does it do good to bring the villages in developing countries to modern levels?

Even Swiss villages have come into being through laborious processes of development over long periods of history. Nepal is trying to catch up with the developed world within a few decades. There’s also the question of loss of identity due to development aid. Toni Hagen’s world existed during the Hippie-happy and Flower-power days, for there were no signs of militant maoists in those days. I remember a visitor from England, who was travelling with his side-kick from south India, who said, ‘In Nepal even children can walk around the countryside without fear of being molested or abducted. The Nepalese are such a wonderful people.’ Today, the parents would think twice before they let their children roam about in Nepal.

During my Tri Chandra College days, the communist students came from Doti, Silgadi and Dharan and had stacks of literature penned by Kim Il Sung, Lenin, Marx and Mao’s red books, all made available by the respective cultural centres of these communist countries in Kathmandu. Nobody raised an eyebrow, for these books were available every, even at the Sajha shops of Kathmandu and elsewhere. Today the maoists have spread from Rukum and the Far West but also in Kathmandu. An educated working mother from Kathmandu, with a PhD from Germany, wrote recently to me, ‘Imagine how life in Kathmandu is, due to the corrupt politicians. Right now there are street blockades, actually economic blockades around Kathmandu imposed by the Maoists, The market-price of food commodities have gone pretty high. Sugar, kerosine and other fuels are not available. The businessmen are also responsible for the artificial scarcity. One has to be prepared to pay thrice the price for these commodities and you will get these. Life has become insecure for us Nepalese these days. Once you leave your house, you will never know what might happen. A bomb on the roadside might blow you up.’

Toni Hagen would have thought differently were he living these days, for Nepal has been undergoing a political and military turmoil and Nepal’s face has changed a lot. But let’s talk about our ageing Swiss friend. Toni Hagen’s eyes twinkled when he spoke about the humorous and sunny nature of the Nepalese soul. He called it ‘die Heiterkeit der Seele’ in German, which means the joyousness of the soul.

‘The Nepalese don’t take anything seriously, and themselves the least,’ he said with a smile. And then he switched over to an anecdote about one of the first DC-3 landings in Pokhara in 1950, which was quite a feat then. There was a big crowd of Gurung, Thakali and Tamang farmers gathered to watch the propeller-driven Dakota- aircraft. Out of the DC-3 came a jeep along the ramp and an astonished Nepali farmer said: “It’s like a birth. The small vehicle will learn to fly soon!” In his film he also mentioned his early porters who’d thrown his geological data, namely rocks from the Himalayas, because they’d though rocks are everywhere, so why carry them. It was a hilarious situation in the film, but such a thing wouldn’t have happened if he’d taken the trouble to talk with his porters in their lingo about the importance of the specimens they were carrying behind their backs.

‘Nepal hasn’t changed since the last 45 years in the hills,’ he said, with a twinge of nostalgia and talked about Pokhara with its backdrop of the gigantic Annapurna and Dhaulagiri mountains. He liked to call the Machapuchare the ‘Nepalese Matterhorn’ in his exquisite Swiss accent and said the Swiss Matterhorn looked so insignificant when compared with the Fish-Tail Mountain. And then he expressed his praise and admiration for the ‘precisely laid rice terraces in Nepal, a wonderful innovation of the Nepali people.’ The terrace farming is a several 100 year old tradition in Nepal. Speaking English as a Swiss geologist from Lenzerheide is one thing, but learning the Nepali language and speaking it is another. Most visitors to Nepal have the attitude that the Nepalese speak English, and they should learn German, Japanese which easier and more convenient for visitors than the other way around.

‘Rice is regarded noble and millet as of lesser quality,’ said Toni Hagen and spoke of the golden yellow millet fields below the Machapuchare. Below the 2000m Dhaulagiri you have the red ‘kodo’ millet-fields and kodo is protein-rich. He was also all-praise for the Nepali farmers with their diversification of products. There was no monoculture in Nepal (except in the tea-plantations of Ilam and Darjeeling). The farmers planted rice, wheat, potatoes and varied them.

The Rara lake at 3000m reminded him of the Swiss lakes in the Alps. And Langtang at 3,500m had lush meadows, with hundreds of edelweiss flowers like in the Alps. He said: ‘When I was in Langtang for the first time, I thought we could make cheese here with yak-milk and that’s how the Swiss-idea of setting up a dozen cheese factories in the Nepal Himalayas began. The cheese is transported on the backs of the Tamang and Sherpa porters from a height of 5,800m to Kathmandu. The Tibetans, Sherpas, Tamangs and other Nepalese ethnic groups knew only churpi, the Nepalese hard-cheese, which is pure casein.

I told him, ‘We, Nepalese, call it Nepali chewing-gum’ and he laughed. Toni Hagen appreciated the Swiss-aided Himalayan cheese and said they tasted just as good as the Swiss ones.

‘And some even have Swiss-holes in the cheese,’ he said with a laugh. This scribe remembers eating cheese and drinking yak-milk during his Amrit Science College days with his Nepalese Ascolite friends at the milk-shop in Thamel. It can happen that some have no enzyme called lactase in their intestine flora and cannot digest the milk-products and suffer from Kathmandu-quicksteps. The Swiss-idea was also a boon to the tourists, foreign residents and western-oriented Nepalese.

Recalling his surveys in the Khumbu area: Ama Damlam, Makalu and Mt. Everest he said, like a boarding-school boy who had gone out of bounds, “ In 1956 I managed to go to Tibet, to the north of Everest without permission. The Chinese were then in Tibet.” And talked about the dangerous and treacherous glaciers: “You’re never sure when water flows under the glacier.”

According to him there was an increasing population mobility in Nepal, but the racial schemes still exist. Then he was ecstatic about the incomparable harmonious religious tolerance in Nepal.

‘Take Swayambhunath for instance, which is for all Hindus and Buddhists. The Nepalese live near each other, mingle with each other: nebeneinander, durcheinander.’ he said. Today it`s more durcheinander due to the war in Nepal. But he certainly wasn’t thinking about Nepal’s political problems with the Maoists. What Nepal needs is a culture of tolerance between the warring political parties, for after battling with each other, the Maoists, democratic parties and the monarch should realise that what all in the end desire is peace. Peace and tolerance is a better path than violence. Aggressive behaviour and politics has only lead to destruction of all involved in Nepal’s struggle. Like old Hagen said, “Let us live together, despite the differences.”

Toni Hagen is dead, but my memories of him remain. His ashes were strewn over the Khumbu Himalayas at an altitude of 5500m by his daughter Katrin from a Karnali Air helicopter. I still see him with his blue glassy eyes, as he raised his beer glass, and said with a tinge of nostalgia, ‘Auf Nepal .’ I followed it up with ‘Auf die Schweiz!’ He’d invited me to Lenzerheide, but I never made it.



Satis Shroff describes himself as a mediator between western and eastern cultures and sees his future as a writer and poet. He lives in Germany according to the motto: once a journalist, always a journalist and has written over a period of three decades, what the Germans would call a “Landesumschau,” for his Nepalese readers with impressions from Freiburg, Venice, Rottweil, Prague, Paris, London, Frankfurt, Basel and Grindelwald. Satis Shroff has worked with The Rising Nepal (Gorkhapatra Corporation), where he wrote a weekly Science Spot and editorials and commentaries on Nepal’s development, health, wildlife, politics and culture. He also wrote weekly commentaries for Radio Nepal. He has studied Zoology and Geology in Kathmandu, Medicine and Social Science in Freiburg and Creative Writing under Associate Prof. Bruce Dobler, MFA, Iowa University and with Writers Bureau (Manchester). He was awarded the German Academic Prize.

Writing experience: Satis Shroff’s anthology ‘Katmandu, Katmandu’ published by www.Lulu.com is about a writer caught between upheavals in two countries, Nepal and Germany, where maoists and skin-heads are respectively trying to undermine democratic values, religious and cultural life. Satis Shroff writes political poetry, in German and English, about the war in Nepal (My Nepal, Quo vadis?), the sad fate of the Nepalese people (My Nightmare, Only Sagarmatha Knows), the emergence of neo-fascism in Germany (Mental Molotovs, The Last Tram to Littenweiler) and love (An Dich, The Broken Poet, Without Words, About You), women’s woes (Nirmala, Bombay Brothel). His bicultural perspective makes his poems rich, full of awe and at the same time heartbreakingly sad. In writing ‘home,’ he not only returns to his country of origin time and again, he also carries the fate of his people to readers in the West, and his task of writing is a very important one in political and social terms. His true gift is to invent Nepalese metaphors and make them accessible to the West through his poetry. Read his poems, articles and essays on www.google & www.yahoo under search: satis shroff

November 28, 2007 | 4:43 AM Comments  0 comments



The Japanese Garden, East Bloc Kid Goes West (Satis Shroff, Freiburg)
Related to country: Germany

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

The Japanese Garden (Satis Shroff)

Nine Hauptschule kids in their teens,
Sit on benches in the Japanese Garden,
Near the placid, torquoise lake.

The homework is done sloppily.
Who cares?
The boys are bursting with hormones,
As they tease the only blonde from Siberia.

A fat guy named Heino likes the blonde,
But she doesn’t fancy him.
Annäherung, Vermeidung:
A conflict develops.

The teacher tells him in no uncertain terms:
“Lass Sie bitte in Ruhe!”
But Heino with the MP3 doesn’t care
And carries on:
Grasping her breasts,
Caressing her groin.
She puts up a fight to no avail.

Heino is stronger, impertinent,
And full of street rhetoric.
Meanwhile, the other teenies
Are climbing, kicking the Japanese pavilion,
Spitting, cursing shouting
At all and sundry in German.

The grey-haired gardener in charge comes,
Tells the boys to behave
And goes.
Boredom in the afternoon.
The boys don’t want to play soccer,
Handball or basketball.
Sitting around, criticising, irritating each other,
Is cool.

Creative workshops: music, songs, essays, own movies?
Nothing interests them.
Killing time together,
Cursing at each other,
Getting a kick provoking passersby,
This is the Hauptschule in Germany today.

The clever kids go to the Gymnasium,
After the fourth class.
The trouble-makers, aggressive alpha-wolves
And clowns remain in the Hauptschule.
An ironical name for a school,
For Haupt means the ‘main’
Comprising the lower class of the society:
Kids of foreigners, ethnic Germans from the east Bloc,
Who hope to make it somehow,
As apprentices for hair salons, car repair garages,
Kebab shops, Italian restaurants, Balkan kitchens,
Roofers and masons.

The Japanese Garden, a present from Matsuyama
To the people of Freiburg,
With truncated shrubs and rounded trees.
A waterfall and quiet niches,
A place for contemplation and solitude.

For the Hauptschule kids,
A place to get together,
Be loud, grunt, fight with fists, shove, scratch,
Slap, spit everywhere,
And play the gangsta.
“At night they throw empty alcohol bottles
Where ever they like,” says an elderly lady
From the neighbourhood.
Wonder how the kids are in Matsuyama?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Miscarriage and Sonderschule (Satis Shroff)

“Halt’s Maul, Du Missgeburt!”
Says one to the other.
‘Halt dein Mund, Du Jude!
Ich hasse Juden, Mann!’ barks an obese Hauptschuler.

The others play football in the classroom.
The teacher says emphatically,
‘It’s forbidden to play soccer here!’
They reply in chorus:
‘It doesn’t disturb anybody.’
A grey-blonde teacher barges into the room and says:
‘Leben Sie hier noch?’ to his colleague.
Are you still alive?

Boris has an appointment with the police.
They nabbed him stealing a car.
Nicky quips to Suleika:
‘Du hast einen fetten Arsch!
Gebärfreudige Hintern.’

Albin runs helter skelter,
Settles down on a table,
Chewing gum between his yellow teeth,
Doesn’t like authority.
Hans, Fritz and Bruno do their extra homework,
Meted out as a punishment by the English teacher.

Vitaly throws scissors in the classroom,
Which land with a thud on the cork wall.
Heino is doing his best to disturb the group,
With his loud MP3 music.
‘Ha! Ha! Ha! Du Hurensohn!’ he says,
To a fellow classmate.

A Kosovo-kid who’s hyperactive,
Steals and fights at school.
The Germans send him to a Sonderschule.
His father’s proud for ‘sonder’ means ‘special.’
His son is attending an elite school, he thinks,
Only to realise later,
It was a school for difficult children.
A dead-end.


East Bloc Kid Goes West (Satis Shroff)

A pair of heavy scissors fly
In a dark Hauptschule classroom,
Thrown by an Aussiedler school-kid,
Near Freiburg’s Japanese Garden.

The scissors can slash your face,
Or mine.
You can be maimed for life,
Like Scarface,
If the sharp ends
Bury in your eyes,
Or mine.

Let there be light.
Vitaly, a boy from the former east Bloc
Comes to the West,
In search of ancestors and heritage.
What he gets is rejection but freedom.
Freedom to do as he pleases,
With pleasant negative sanctions.
‘Even in jail they have TV,’ he says with a laugh.

He grows up in a ghetto,
And his anger burns.
Anger at his ageing parents,
Who forced him to come to the West,
But who are themselves lost in this new world
Of democratic, liberal values,
Luxurious and electronic consumer delights,
Where everyone cares for himself or herself,
Where the old structures of the society
They clung to in the east Bloc days
Don’t exist.

A brave new world,
A Schlaraffenland,
Where economy and commerce flourishes,
Where the individual’s view is important,
To himself,
To herself
And to others.

The East Bloc boy learns
To assert himself in the West,
Not with solid arguments and rhetoric
But with his two fists.
He fancies cars and their contents,
Breaks open the windows,
Takes all he wants.
Brushes with the police
At an early age.

English, Latin and French at school,
Irritates him,
He prefers to play the clown:
To dance on the table,
Make suggestive moves with his groin,
High on designer drugs,
High all the time.
Opens the classroom door,
Sees a girl from the seventh grade,
And yells at her:
‘Nach der Schule fick ich Dich.’
‘Screw you after school.’

His behaviour brings laughter
But he turns off the girls he admires.
He grins and insults his peers.
Rejected by youngsters,
Admonished by grown-ups.
He watches the society.

Chic clothes, streamlined cars, plastic money,
But he forgets that there’s personal performance
Behind these worldly riches.
‘The rich German drives his BMW
With his head in the air.
What does he care?
What does he care?’ thinks Vitaly.

A pair of scissors fly
In a dark classroom.
His pent-up emotions,
Let loose in a German Hauptschool,
Near the Japanese Garden.

His classmate from Croatia
Throws chairs at the another.
‘Aus Spass’ he says.
Just for fun.
He shouts at the Putzfrau,
Who cleans the classrooms:
‘Sie Geistesgestörte!’
You mad woman.
‚My French-cap is XXX’ he sings
And jerks his pelvis at her.

Is the school-system to blame?
Is western culture, tradition
Social, liberal values and norms to blame?
Are his parents who speak a conserved Deutsch to blame?
Is his Russian mother-tongue
And his great Russian soul to blame?

Nobody answers his questions,
Nobody cares,
Out in the West.
“Verdammt, I want to be heard!” screams Vitaly.
The people shake their heads,
Mutter, ‘Ein Spinner!’
And walk away.

A pair of sharp, long scissors
Fly in a dark classroom.
The scissors can slash your face,
Or mine.

November 26, 2007 | 5:49 AM Comments  0 comments



Through Nepalese Eyes (Satis Shroff)
Related to country: Germany

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic


‘Through Nepalese Eyes’ is about the journey of a young Nepalese woman to Germany to meet her brother, who lives with his German wife and daughter in an allemanic town named Freiburg. It is a travelogue written by a sensitive, modern British public-school educated man. He describes the two worlds: Asia and Europe and the people he meets. There is a touch of sadness when his sister returns to her home in the foothills of the Himalayas.
(205 Seiten) Paperback: €12.00 Download: €6.25

It cries to be written because there are seldom books written by Nepalese writers about themselves. It’s always the casual foreign traveller, trekker or climber who writes about the people in the developing and least-developed countries of the so-called Third World.

The likely readers are the increasing male and female tourists, trekkers, climbers from the whole world who make their way to the Himalayas, each seeking something indefinable, perhaps peace, tranquillity, spiritual experience or a much-needed monologue with oneself in the heights of the Himalayas. The book is aimed at all Nepalophile and South Asian readers irrespective of their origin, and seeks to contribute towards understanding the Nepalese psyche, the world that the Nepalese live in, and the fact that it has to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of modernisation and innovations from the western world, amid the thoughts and beliefs, cultures and religions of the Himalayan world.

The book is divided according to the iterinary of the protagonist’s travels, her sojourn in Freiburg (Germany) and her excursions to Switzerland (Basle and Grindelwald) and France (Alsace and Paris-Versailles) and ends with the chapter ‘Return to the Himalayas’. It deals with the ‘Begegnungen’ or encounters with friendly Germans, the circle of her brother’s friends and the intercultural and inter-religious questions that she is confronted with during these conversations and the encouraging intercultural work being performed by Germans and foreigners specifically in Freiburg and Germany in general in creating a multicultural society, where a foreigner doesn’t have to fear deportation, persecution and xenophobia.

As my friend Satish Shroff requested me to write some introductory words to this book, I decided to start a very unusual way, by congratulating the author for the theme chosen: life, people, mentalities in East and West, with all inherent similarities (alas! few enough) and differences (quite a number). How right the late Rudyard Kipling was when expressing the essence of this subject: “East is East and West is West: Never the twins shall meet”! But by describing the two worlds as twins, he also hints at existing and possibly developing similarities.

Today’s world and way of life shortens the physical and mental distances, tending towards globalisation. Let us hope that one day, the only remaining differences will be of the geographic, artistic and cultural kind. Because there are elements which are common to both worlds and, therefore, they bring them together. Human nature, with all its emotions, love, sympathy, sorrow, hatred and a multitude of other feelings, is the same and the common element of both Eastern and Western people. The writer successfully brings out these points, clearly delineating each character.

This work is a window wherefrom one can peep to the East from the West and vice-versa. One can make out the geographical distributions, the cultural distinctions and the historic development of East and West separately. But if someone ponders on it, he finds the same basic human sentiments and values that hold mankind together since times immemorial.

Personally, I think that this and other works of this kind will prove instrumental in creating a good understanding between the two worlds, by describing the respective natures, cultures, traditions, art, social life and thus contributing towards a better knowledge and appreciation of each other, which will hopefully result into creating a new, more human world for the whole mankind sharing the same earth and sky. This world should be like a great family, and we, its members, should be constantly striving for maintaining its unity.

So, my friend Satish, as you see, I consider you one of the architects of this new world, this ideal, this Shangri-La of the whole mankind. In spite of many private and global setbacks, I am sure we are approaching it, with little steps, it is true, but we are coming nearer with every smile, with each gesture of tolerance and understanding between the two still different worlds.

I congratulate you, my dear friend, on your efforts to close the gap. May everyone read your book with open eyes, mind and heart.

Bonn, the 26th of May 2007
(Dr. Novel K. Rai)
Former Nepalese Ambassador to Germany

What others have said about the author:
„Die Schilderungen von Satis Shroff in ‘Through Nepalese Eyes’ sind faszinierend und geben uns die Möglichkeit, unsere Welt mit neuen Augen zu sehen.“ (Alice Grünfelder von Unionsverlag / Limmat Verlag, Zürich).

Since 1974 I have been living on and off in Nepal, writing articles and publishing books about Nepal-- this beautiful Himalayan country. Even before I knew Satis Shroff personally (later) I was deeply impressed by his articles, which helped me very much to deepen my knowledge about Nepal.Satis Shroff is one of the very few Nepalese writers being able to compare ecology, development and modernisation in the ‘Third’ and ‘First’ World. He is doing this with great enthusiasm, competence and intelligence, showing his great concern for the development of his own country. (Ludmilla Tüting, journalist and publisher, Berlin).

Due to his very pleasant personality and in-depth experience in both South Asian, as well as Western workstyles and living, Satis Shroff brings with him a cultural sensitivity that is refined. His writings have always reflected the positive attributes of optimism, tolerance, and a need to explain and to describe without looking down on either his subject or his reader. (Kanak Mani Dixit, Himal Southasia, Kathmandu)

Satis Shroff writes with intelligence, wit and grace. (Bruce Dobler, Associate Professor in Creative Writing MFA, University of IOWA).

November 24, 2007 | 6:34 AM Comments  0 comments

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