पेहली नजरमे हि जो दो दिलोंमे हो हर वह करार अजूबा है! – JA, Jeans
Songs sometime make you travel back in time. The song ‘tiriri murali bajyo banaima’ just played in my playlist. This song strongly associates with the day when I was done with my Grade 5 exams. I returned from school, all happy that the exams were done. The house next to ours had a large front yard (this house used to be our rented house for a long time before my father finally built us a house of our own). I would usually play with my friends Sunil, Sushil, Sudeep, Suraj, Sandeep, Vivek, and others in this front yard. Today was the day when the exam got over. I spent no time putting down the bags loaded with exam ‘kut’/question paper and quickly changed my dress. I was all excited to assemble all my friends and play cricket. The day was windy and cloudy – final exams are usually scheduled in Chaitra and we get a lot of windy/cloudy days in Chitwan during this month. For some reason, the song kept playing in my head while I was having fun wicketkeeping/bowling.
I had not seen my father after returning from school. He came to our playground and asked me how my exams were. ‘Ramro bhayo bua’, I replied. He said some treats were waiting for me after I was done with my game. He later treated me with mango juice and some money to spend to my liking (thank you bua for all the little positive reinforcements, and negative ones too, growing up). I don’t like cloudy days much but love windy ones. This day was good despite the clouds.
So apparently this tune has been around for 20 some years. I only happened to run into it last year. An in-the-zone work time at office and this beauty appeared in autoplay. I have just grown further into loving this song. Recommender systems out there, instead of suggesting me the same songs again and again (which I still appreciate though), how about exploring a bit off the rail and pulling off something like this that has never been christened in my browser tabs. Would not hurt to have that done even if it means that I skip some of your shenanigans once in a while, because you got it wrong. For now, this is the song I am talking about. Alkaji all the way!! (I compartmentalize eras, and this fandom is true to fullest for the pre-Shreya era).
And a bonus track (different story for this. Let ‘s leave it for some other time okay).
“What do you want to become when you grow up?”, I asked. “A government officer”, Jeetendra replied while charging his spinning top and getting elated that he got a big mark on his friends spinning top placed inside the circle (spinning top was one of the most popular kids game in Nepal back then, besides marbles I guess).
Jeetendra’s family lived right across the street from our house. The Regmi family in our village had three houses, one belonging to each of the three Regmi brothers. The middle house was the one where Jeetendra’s family lived; the whole house rented to themselves – it was not a big house anyway. This house has been rented by different families during the course of my childhood. Jeetendra and his family must have been the one who occupied it for most of the time while I was growing up. Jeetendra’s father was an entrepreneur, dabbling in multiple businesses and succeeding in quite a few. However, the scale of the business would only be sufficient to sustain the family needs, as far as I could see. Since I do not recall Jeetendra’s father name now, I will call him Dharmendra for the sake of this post. Before I describe Dharmendra’s job, let me briefly introduce other family members in the Jeetendra’s family. Jeetendra’s mother was a housewife and I do not recall her name too. I do remember Jeetendra’s sibling though. Jeetendra had an elder brother Baidyanath and an elder sister Manju. Baidyanath was about my age, Manju maybe 2-3 years younger, and Jeetendra was maybe 7 years younger or so.
Jeetendra’s family was a small and a smooth-functioning family. I believe they did not own a house anywhere and I do not know where their ancestry was. I saw Dharmendra, Jeetendra’s father, wear different hats as a businessman. For the most part, he was a recycler of old kitchen utensils. He and his colleagues would collect old and non-usable utensils from around the villages. They would then use it (not sure if they did the whole reprocessing – melting and recasting – by themselves or just sourced it to third-parties) to create brand new utensils. Dharmendra and Baidyanath would then travel around in bicycles across neighboring towns and villages to sell the utensils. It was a routine that Dharmendra and Baidyanath religiously followed everyday. I remember when Baidynath would be getting his bicycle ready to head to his ‘job’, I, of similar age as Baidynath, would also be ready, neatly dressed and properly combed, to go to my school. The grudge I had that my father could not afford to get me a football the other day was not justified after all, was it?
I did understand that it would take both Baidyanath’s and Dharmendra’s effort to get their family going. Fortunately, both Manju and Jeetendra got to go to the school. They attended a nearby public school (and if you are aware of the plight of the most public schools in Nepal, you would also know that people generally have to attend a public school because that is the only one their parents can afford to). Manju was a very well-mannered girl: a little shy but kind-spoken and very helpful to her mother/family. Jeetendra was a bit mischievous one.
Maybe it was Jeetendra’s age to fault for his increasing mischievousness but in the few years that I recall of Jeetendra’s life, he did not seem to be headed in the right direction. He dreamed of being a government officer. I am not in touch with the family since they moved out of our village long time back but I do sincerely hope that he ended up in the right place, closer to and beyond his dreams. In this post, with a long pretext of the family, I wanted to briefly touch on how one is pre-disposed to diminishing chances of success (in conventional sense) depending upon where one gets born to. Not everyone are resilient to adversity, and it would not be fair to put such expectations too. Jeetendra wanted to become a government officer, one that would require him to study well at least to a university level and then do well in very competitive public service exams. Too bad, only few of the Jeetendras would make it, for no fault of their own. Instead a higher proportions of Rameshes and Manojes, who got to grow in a well-to-do family that could afford a boarding school and got more groomings, would make the cut. One should never look down on Jeetendra for not making the best of what he had. Given how little attention his brother and father could give to him to make sure his education was on track, the sort of social circle he would be a part of, the kind of education he would have access to, it seems there was a large chasm inbuilt between Jeetendra and his dream.
I once encountered Jeetendra nearby our ‘Laurighol‘ river playing cards with his friends. He should have been at school. I felt a bit sorry for him rather than sad. I told him to get to home and there was little more I could do, I myself was just little older than a kid. Now that it has been many years, is there anything that I think could be done. This is a complex topic to discuss and ponder upon. To start with, what I hope is that the state of public education would significantly improve, and I hope to continue to contribute from my end towards that cause. All of us should also identify the Jeetendras in our society and do our part to support and guide them. That’s the least we could be doing. Everyone should have a fair shot at their dreams.
Change is always difficult. If you have experienced and lived through a lot of changes in life, it is not that changes start to bring less disruptions over the years. Changes by definition are disruptive and sometimes difficult ones. However experience enamors one to deal better with the challenge of change. Change, either intentional or not, is always good for one thing. Growth. A seed grows to a sapling and later to a tree. It just bore well through the changes. Life is a sum total of all experiences amassed. Change brings a large delta to the cumulative function of life experiences. That is sweet!
Actually there are way too many update-worthy items going on. Hopefully I can re-prioritize things well to have time to write about things here once in a while.
Just on top of my head on what I could write here since I am here anyway: I recently came across a twitter channel https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice. Sensationalization goes strictly against the benefit of science and research. Nonetheless, general public needs to be kept interested on all new advancements and findings. Unfortunately the balance seems to tilt sometimes towards sensationalization. This twitter channel does its part in highlighting the reality behind some of the attention-grabbing news headlines of scientific research.
Read this for the context: https://www.onlinekhabar.com/2019/01/732659
Nepal Oil Corporation (NOC) is one of the most troubled (financially at least) corporations in Nepal. Given all the problems they have been facing, rampant corruption from the person at the helm was the least needed to add to their woes. NOC is a failing corporation with no good recovery in sight. The investigations on corruption at NOC are yet to be concluded and all the charges yet to be brought about, but what the investigators have dug out so far clearly shows the extent of corruption from the previous managing director at NOC. Major corruption scandals are not new for Nepal. We hardly have any accountability from the person chosen to lead a corporation (and the country also by the way). My two cents to improve things moving forward: get the hell away from the political appointments, embrace meritocracy; and let’s be open on how technology can be used to enable transparent governance. The latter is much needed for a country like Nepal which has historically lacked open and transparent government/bureaucracy. Is somebody already looking into open ledger (blockchain) for managing government auctions and transactions?
“Nevertheless, it is obviously a quite open question whether the information we acquired of the laws describing atomic phenomena provides us with a sufficient basis for tackling the problem of living organisms, or whether, hidden behind the riddle of life, there lie yet unexplored aspects of epistemology” -Bohr in Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature.
I recently came across some writings from Bohr on biology again. Looking at some of his arguments and descriptions, now not as a novice who only knew some physics back then but rather as someone who know a bit more of biology also (and only little more of the physics though, sadly), the best way forward is to remain optimistic with our current approaches and tools of acquiring understanding of the body-subsystems while at the same time remaining open to complete newness for re-constructing the pieces together obtained from the reductions.
Also, why is it not as easy to re-visit the books that one has read than it is to re-visit your favorites shows or movies.
I had read this somewhere. As I juggle between different writing assignments, I could not agree more. Writing and communicating one’s ideas and results are maybe even more important (and sometimes difficult) than generating those ideas and results in the first place.
It’s holiday season. When I showed up to an almost empty office at work today, the greetings from an empty agenda were warm. These two weeks with scant meetings are going to be a good time to push a bit harder on the writing part. A little bit of catch-up and winding-off remains to be done during the off-days, but I should be able to find a pretty good chunk of time for the writing research.
We have had a great summer this year. I do not mind the cold and the snow of the winter as long as we get a proper summer. The summer is proper when it does not rain every other day. It is proper when you can plan for an outing over the weekend and you can be assured that the weather is going to remain great. When most of the days show up with great weather, there is a lot of football, cricket, running, outing, travels and stuffs that can fit in a season. And this season actually a lot of these fitted in. Two cricket tournaments, weekend cricket in the Dutch cricket league, practice sessions, Thursday and weekend footballs, running ( once at 6 in the morning when you have gone to sleep at 3), weekend trips, and lot more perfectly squeezed into the summer. And Mondays and Tuesdays were always there with the swimming.
After the routine Monday grind (most of my regular meetings tend to happen on Monday), an evening spent in the pool was a good start to the week. I would get all my swimming gears to work and then head off straight to the pool in the evening. It all worked perfectly fine over summer until the start of new session at the pool, beginning September. I do not understand why but the opening hours on Monday at the pool are now at night. I mean real night “night”, from 10 PM to 11 PM. Should I be swimming or rather sleeping then? The previous timings in evening from 5-6:30 worked so well. They must have had a good reason to decide and let 10:00 – 11:00 in the night be the better time to swim. I need to check why this was done. Anyways, after skipping the Mondays in September, I decided to try the night swimming session this week. I am not sure if I would be regular though. Night swimming means first I would have to have dinner at dutch time. And still with a relatively early dinner, I felt I was swimming with bloated stomach this Monday. Also, I cannot get myself too tired as I would have to somehow get to sleep immediately after getting back home. This time I just did 450 m.
On the other hand, if I just get used to night swimming then Wednesday opens up as a swimming day too. Wednesday timings are 9:30 PM onward. A tougher challenge for scheduling dinner optimally. Let’s see….
A New Moment, A New Start 