The Word Madisey

English: Abhishek Pratap Shah is a Nepalese politician, belonging to the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

(published in Vishwa Sandesh)

The Word Madisey
By Paramendra Bhagat
www.paramendra.com

The word madisey is like the word nigger. It is hate speech. There is no nice way to say it. There is no tone of voice that is right. You can call someone a Teraiwasi. You can call someone a Madhesi. There is a Madhesi Janadhikar Forum, there is no Madisey Janadhikar Forum. Someone from Mithila is a Maithil. I take great pride in my heritage. But hate speech is inexcusable. You can call me Indian, I am half Indian. But hate speech is a whole different paradigm.

Suman Timilsina was national president of the Non Resident Nepali Association when he said the m-word, in a public speech too. I took great exception to it. My blog post taking offense is still in the archives online. Timilsina is nowhere to be seen anywhere in the public space. He does not belong.

I was at the Woodside Café with some friends a few months ago. Someone at an adjacent table but within hearing distance kept saying the m-word. He also used the “dhoti” term quite liberally. He was not anyone I knew or who knew me. He was not talking to me. The guy was using the hate terms to talk about his Indian boss in the city. Obviously he would not say that to the boss’ face. This was not racism that was coming out of any claim to superiority. I did not speak a word of protest. But I arranged to have tea with my friend a week or two later. And I asked about that guy. Who was that “namak haram,” I asked. The underwear that guy is wearing he must have bought with the money his boss gives him, I guessed out loud. But look at the racist way he was talking about his boss.

Some of the poorest white folks in the deep South are some of the most racist white folks in America today. White folks in the northeast and along the West Coast look down upon them, so they look for people to look down upon too. They look in the direction of Africa. Poor Nepalis talking racist about Indians fall in some similar weird category. That is like low income senior citizens in my homevillage in Nepal thinking white Christians are lower than the so-called untouchables. It is a fabricated superiority mindset that might not go away anytime soon but it has absolutely no basis in reality. The socio-economic indicators provide no leverage to that way of thinking.

The word madisey is like the word nigger. The word Madhesi is like the word Negro. The word Teraiwasi is akin to the term African American. Teraiwasi is a respectable term. But the word Madhesi has cultural connotations. 40% of the Teraiwasis today are of hill origin. They are not culturally Madhesi. The word Madhesi encompasses the Maithili, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Tharu, Urdu, Hindi and Marwari speakers.

Madisey, bhote, and jyapu are not nice terms. I hear in Britain Paki is a similar derogatory term for all South Asians. The respectable term of course would be Desi. Many Nepalis protest the use of that word. To me that is like saying a Nepali is not South Asian. Of course a Nepali is a South Asian. Of course a Nepali is a Desi.

The term Bahadur and pakhey are also derogatory. I disapprove of the use of the word Bahadur in India. It is hate speech. But that use does not justify the use of the word madisey. I support the idea of a Gorkhaland state in India and all peaceful action that will lead to its creation.

There is some major work to be done to create a positive pan South Asian identity in Jackson Heights. The community is at peace and the crime rate is low, but it is too fragmented. Most people stay within their comfort zones socially. There are the country groups, and there are the various ethnic groups within those country groups. The right to peaceful assembly is a basic human right and rightly so. So I am not going to protest the various pretexts people find to come together. But I think effort has to be made to create a larger tent.

At one end you are an individual and you need your personal space and dignity. At the other end you are part of the humanity at large. And there are many groups in between, all of which deserve to co-exist peacefully.

You can make a practical case to simply ignore some Neanderthals making peaceful use of hate speech. The positive change might not come fast enough. But I think it is a fairly simple proposition to say hate speech should meet social ostracism. A community that makes the effort towards positive interactions will be a more productive community.

There are practical implications. Hate speech gets in the way of the riches. A community that tolerates hate speech will not cut all possible business deals and will lag behind. New, higher levels of cooperation will not be an option for a Nepali community that is okay with the use of the word madisey. That word creates roadblocks and gets in the way of wealth creation.

Jackson Heights is only a few blocks of India but it is the most famous Indian neighborhood in all of North America. For a Nepali to talk hate speech against Indians in a place like Jackson Heights has got to be one of the less wise things. Don’t do it.

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The For Profit Sector

Mother Teresa of Calcutta (26.8.1919-5.9.1997); at a pro-life meeting in 1986 in Bonn, Germany (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

(published in Vishwa Sandesh)

The For Profit Sector
By Paramendra Bhagat (www.paramendra.com)

More than 80% of the people in America work for private companies. That is how they put food on the table. Another 15% or so work for the government. This economy requires 5% of the people to stay unemployed if it is to have a robust labor market. As in, a 100% employment rate is highly undesirable. That is why governments deem it worth it to issue out unemployment benefits: keeps the labor market fluid. The non profit sector steps in for those who don’t receive unemployment benefits or welfare checks. And then there are the uncared for untouched by the private, public and non profit sectors. Those seek Mother Teresa. Sadly, that still leaves a segment of the population that is truly uncared for, especially so in the global context.

In poor countries the private sector might be weak, the public sector might be relatively too dominant and getting in the way, the non profit sector might be overly strained or barely existent. But even there most people work private sector jobs to put food on the table for their families. That includes the informal sector in countries like India. The informal sector of the Indian economy comprised of businesses that don’t hold licenses and don’t pay taxes is rather large. And then there is the mafia that also largely revolves around money making. In some countries of Latin America the drug mafia is so large it functions as a parallel government. The Mumbai origin Dawood Ibrahim is listed as one of the 40 richest people in the world.

In the scheme of things I think the royal throne goes to the entrepreneurs in their multitudes. Entrepreneurs are not rich, greedy people lording over the hapless. They are people who create wealth and jobs. They pay taxes with which governments invest in people’s education, health and infrastructure. Entrepreneurs literally create wealth out of thin air. Bill Gates’ 50 billion dollars is not money he stole from someone. Those 50 billion dollars simply did not exist before he came along. And good thing he is putting that money to good use through his foundation. He has been fighting poverty like he were some kind of a Maoist.

The corporation is one of the greatest inventions ever. And entrepreneurship makes sense for people in all income brackets. I am a huge fan of micro lending. Everyone deserves access to not only education and health but also credit.

Abraham Lincoln did what no entrepreneur could have: he ended slavery. And someone like Gandhi is both Lincoln and Mother Teresa. Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh ran his enterprise like a non profit. There is no denying the role of the leaders of various sectors. But as a country like Nepal moves towards a decided economic focus, I think appreciation for entrepreneurship will have to take deep root in the culture.

A country like Nepal that has numerous communist parties and it looks like most of the major non communist parties also call themselves socialist, I think interesting concoctions can be imagined. You can have companies that are partly owned by the government, you can have companies that are majority owned by the government. But for the most part it is best if the government stays out.

A left leaning country runs the danger of wanting to kill the hen that lays the golden egg. Nehru was key to India’s independence, but he also gave the country his gift of socialism, which was well meaning, and perhaps made Cold War sense to him, but that has also meant the legacy of too much red tape and misallocated resources with India ending up with the much derided “Hindu rate of growth” for decades.

Unleashing the entrepreneurship potential of the new generation in Nepal is partly a policy challenge. Some warning signs are the mindless, xenophobic rhetoric against Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) that seems to have a permanent place among a segment of the Nepali political spectrum. The choice is clear. You can bring in foreign capital, or you can send away your workers to Dubai and Malaysia to labor in uncertain circumstances. After Baburam Bhattarai signed BIPPA, a pro FDI agreement, his own Deputy Prime Minister stood up against it to score cheap, misguided political points. I was perplexed. Hostility to FDI is a sure recipe to a perpetuation of poverty in Nepal. Is poverty what Nepali nationalism all about? As in, to lose poverty is to lose the essence of what Nepal is all about? Beats me.

China never tires of pointing out how much more FDI it attracts year after year as compared to India. FDI is not only a good thing, it is something any sensible country competes for. That includes the rich economies.

I would hope that the Maoists would learn to respect entrepreneurs the way they have worked hard to accept other political parties. Their pro poor origins would be best reflected in the resources they should be able to marshal for education, health and infrastructure. Get the literacy rate up dramatically, up the vaccination rates. Train tens of thousands of health care workers and send them out to the villages, Mao style. But do not kill the hen that lays the golden egg. Let entrepreneurs run full speed.

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1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1997, 2007

English: Saraswoti temple at Budhanilkantha School (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Budhanilkantha School was founded and cultivated as the national school of Nepal. I got in after sitting through nationwide exams and was the top student in my class year in year out until 1989. The people who ran the place - the Bahuns, the British - took it all away from me that year. I was made to waken up to the social gravity of racism and ethnic prejudice. One administrative decision by the people who ran the show at the school took it all away.

I was not just good academically. I also won a Best Actor award in middle school. I was the school's mental arithmetic champion one year. If there was one other thing besides academics I excelled at, it was leadership. There was this guy Bishwa Limbu two years senior to me who was also top of his class year in year out, otherwise in batches before and after there was no one such person like him and me. But Limbu did not shine out on other fronts, he was missing in action on leadership, completely. I was not a star in sports but I did win a Division A pentathlon in 1989. One of my lingering regrets is I wish I had been better trained at soccer skills.

1989 stood out. I gave the best year any boarding house had ever had in that school's history. We won every single championship, academic, sports and otherwise. Everyone's grades started going up. There was this one guy Lojok a year junior to me. I took him under my personal wings for being the lowest performing student in the entire house - Kanchenjunga - and he went up something like 20 points.

I was to see this drama all over again at college many years later in Kentucky. Precisely because I was doing so very well, the people who ran the place would come after me. The Bahuns had gotten to where they were by marginalizing people of my background in the Nepali context. The only reason the British were running the show was because they had pushed India behind. And my excelling reminded them of their unfair advantages over their lifetimes. And, by God, they were going to snuff me out.

When people two and three times your age while you are not yet an adult all gang up on you, when you are one person, and they are the dozen people running the entire institution, there is a rude awakening to the social gravity. I had not yet acquired the political consciousness as a Madhesi. I had read up plenty on Gandhi and MLK and Lincoln, but I thought racism was stuff of the history books. I was living in the present day, way past all that history. I was wrong.

It all started on the soccer field. Some Nilgiri guys started a fight. That was no news. Something like that happened sometimes after soccer matches. It spilled over. Then it kind of quietened down. I moved on. But apparently it was not over. Jiwan Wagle, the Nilgiri housemaster urged his students to "do what you need to do outside the school compounds." This most sickly of figures (maranchyanse madharchod), the guy looked like he had been bullied at high school, at college, and nobody gave a shit about him now - then - suddenly gave out a mafia siren call. Who would have thought?

Under any normal circumstances the guy should have been fired from his job immediately. But that is not what happened. One of his students who got excited was Rajesh Shrestha. That guy Shrestha, and Wagle's son would sometimes organize study sessions with me only a few years back, at Wagle's apartment of all places. I should not have done that. I regret. Wagle could not stand why his son was not doing as well as I, so the father in him lashed out. It was ethnic prejudice but it was also a jealousy thing. Excellence was to be snuffed out at a self proclaimed "center of excellence."

Some Nilgiri guys sent some of their non BNKS student cousins at the city bus park a few weeks later when it was time to go home for the Dashain vacation. A Class 7 Kanchenjunga guy Suneel got humiliated. The experience was bad enough for him, he lost his mind. They chased around my Sports Captain Gyaneshwar Mahato, a Siraha guy. I was sitting in the cabin of the night bus when they came for me. One of them tapped on my shoulder, the window was open. I had my sweater stylishly resting on my shoulders. Can you step outside for a minute, he said. I did not recognize the person. I had no idea what had happened to Suneel or Gyaneshwar. Why, I asked. He repeated himself. Then he got angry. Then he pulled away my sweater. By then I sensed something was wrong. I urged the bus driver to move the bus. The bus driver looked the other way. He moved the bus five minutes later when it was time to move the bus.

These guys were cousins of Rajesh Shrestha. If it was just my personal experience, 50% of the responsibility rested with Jiwan Raj Wagle, the Nilgiri housemaster, and 50% of the responsibility rested with his student, my Nilgiri classmate Rajesh Shrestha. I regret ever having gotten to know the two. I regret being "close" to both only a few years prior. These are/were snakes.

I had no context for the incident until I came back to school weeks later. The Nilgiri guys wrote an apology letter to the school. That was them admitting they had been behind the bus park incident. Students at the school had been expelled for smaller scuffles. This was ground for expulsion. Did not happen.

I had moved on though. I was actively thinking in terms of the year end exams. I was winding down my year as House Captain. I was not affected by the sweater incident at the bus park, at all. They feared me. Or they would have showed up themselves. They did not. I was too busy mentally about what was about to happen - exams - to do things like protest, or go visit the authorities about the incident. They had been informed. The ball was in their court. I trusted them to do what was routine and right.

And then the roof collapsed. They suspended me! They suspended Gyaneshwar. In retrospect I wish NP Sharma had not shared with me the gory details of what happened at the meeting. I might have skipped the trauma.

To this day I want every motherfucker who sat on that committee to inform me as to why exactly they suspended me. What was the allegation? What had I done?

Do what? Suspend me? Why? You got reprimanded for not wearing your socks. I always wore my socks. You got suspended for smoking. The thought did not cross my mind. You could get suspended for getting into fights. I was not the fighting kind. By that time of the year all I was focused on was studying for the exams.

The second part of the double whammy happened in 1991. They nominated me for School Captain for being too obvious the choice. And then they took away the nomination. No, I did not walk away. They took it away. I had needed the emotional boost of that school captaincy, to go on the upswing again. And they took it away. I said I wanted a team of 12 school prefects. They said eight. I thought we were talking, negotiating. From being top of the class in 1989, my grades nosedived. The 1991 incident was another blow.

They gave me a warning letter in 1992, an academic warming letter, just the week before I came up with the top SAT score in class.

My projected grades for the A Levels exams were BCC. The day before the exams started, Andrew Wild - the one voice who argued against my immediate expulsion in 1989 (expel me for what? motherfuckers) - shouted at me so loud (I was just stepping out of the bathroom, it was time to run for breakfast) people asleep one stairs up woke up. I was not late, people who were still asleep were. I graduated with EEE. Thank God for the book I wrote on national politics in the year after BNKS, I got myself accepted to the University of Chicago, the top Economics department in America. Five seats and two scholarships were extended. Basanta Shrestha went. Two guys bowed out. Rabin Koirala wanted to go to India to do MBBS. So now it was one scholarship and two students, me and Manav Bhattarai, the Board First dude from the batch after mine, an all academic no nothing else guy. That Bahun had already made up his mind to go to India for a MBBS like Rabin Koirala. Instead he took a detour. He went to Chicago and then flew back to India and wasted my scholarship in the process. I was accepted "not for your numbers, but your actions and words."

I get excited about MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). I don't get excited about BNKS. BNKS was a Bahun-British nexus that worked to destroy a Madhesi/Indian like me. They failed, but trying was a social crime. And there are about a dozen faces I never do want to see. Brian Garton is not innocent. Sudarshan Rijal is not innocent.

Sometime in 1993 Robert Shrubsall, by then working in Bangladesh, arranged a get together for me and Wild in Thamel. I guess word had spread.

"Don't you miss it when we used to rule India?" Wild asked Shrubsall.

People like Wagle and Vaidya were very comfortable with their use of the word "madisey." That is like saying nigger.

BNKS ended for me in 1989, towards the end of that year. Berea ended for me in 1997. I saw the devil himself. I saw institutional racism. I saw racist demonization. The whole system ran on it.

I was Barack Obama's first full time volunteer in all of New York City. The richest Briton is an Indian. When Upendra Yadav landed in Los Angeles in 2007, the first thing he said was "Where is Paramendra Bhagat?" They took him to his hotel. He again asked, "Where is Paramendra Bhagat?"

When they had the Bahun Madhav Nepal under house arrest early in 2006, when he managed to come online a month later, the first person he chatted with was me.

Until 1989 my ambition was to become a medical doctor. Then I slowly realized the germs I need to see I see with my open eyes. I don't need a microscope.