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My best longreads of 2012

Happy New Year 2013. Writers of long-form narrative journalism produced excellent works in the year gone by. Here’s a list of my 10 favorite pieces:

The Defeated, by an anonymous writer, published at The Caravan magazine. The 13-page, meticulously reported reportage chronicles lives of two people caught in the brutal Sri Lankan civil war, which ended in 2009.

The profile of Narendra Modi, by The Caravan deputy editor Vinod K Jose, needs no introduction.

The Story of Suicide, by The New Yorker‘s Ian Parker, is another stellar example of shoe-leather reporting and research. It’s a captivating piece that portrays the grim saga behind the suicide of a gay student.

The Departed, the story of disillusioned Kashmiri militants, who have returned from Pakistan (via Kathmandu) is a finely told and deeply reported tale. Read more stories by The Caravan author Mehboob Jeelani here.

Lagos, the port city of Nigeria, is one of the most densely populated places on earth. Take a tour with the author 0f this fine piece  published at Men’s Journal.

India’s Shot at Gold, a profile of Mary Kom, an Indian female boxer, by novelist Rahul Bhattacharya, is terrific. Read more at More Intelligent Life.

Team of Rivals, is a superb piece on the murky world of espionage, by Krishn Kaushik, a staff writer at The Caravan.

Everything you need to know about Jonah Lehrer, a former New Yorker author who came to symbolize plagiarism.

Mathiew Aikins, the magazine writer based in Afghanistan, goes extra mile to uncover the hidden side of an operation that killed Osama bin Laden. His profile of the doctor who probably helped CIA track down Bin Laden, is a must-read.

This piece at Vanity Fair on an Indian boy lost and found is a heartbreaking story. I nearly cried while reading this.

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The Disillusioned Maoists of Nepal

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Below is my dispatch from Jiri, Dolakha, the erstwhile gateway to Everest. This is second in the series on the Maoist former fighters. The first part is here.

‘Was it worth it?’ ask young Maoist fighters in Nepal

Deepak Adhikari (AFP)

JIRI, Nepal — As youths they were idealistic Maoist soldiers fighting to bring revolution to Nepal but now that their leaders are in power, many say the party has abandoned its faithful.

Among a class of 12 students on an engineering course designed to help them rejoin civilian life after the war ended in 2006, there is deep resentment and a sense of betrayal that the sacrifices they made have been forgotten.

“Party cadres and supporters have begun to question what the party has achieved. What have we got?” said Ratna Kumar Century, a stocky 28-year-old, as he fumbled with a computer mouse.

“The establishment faction has betrayed the people,” he said. “They said we will create a new Nepal which will be inclusive and reformative. But they seem content with the status quo.”

The former rebels at the Jiri Technical Institute in northeast Nepal are among thousands of Maoists offered a new start after living in UN-monitored camps for five years when peace was declared.

They are being taught to design the roads, buildings and canals that will form the future of a state they waged a guerrilla war against for a decade, but it is not a future they look forward to with much hope.

Instead they see their leaders talking politics in mansions in Kathmandu, and they complain that they are an ignored and inconvenient part of the past.

Pushpa Kamal Dahal, the Maoist chief known as Prachanda (“the fierce one”), once inspired devotion among his fighters as they brought the government to a standstill in a civil war that claimed 16,000 lives.

He became prime minister for eight months after the Maoists won elections in 2008 and his party oversaw the abolition of the monarchy, but is now held in little esteem.

“People placed their hopes on Prachanda. But he drifted from his path,” said Century, who was attracted to Maoism’s aim to destroy elite hierarchies such as Nepal’s Hindu caste system.

“If the sacrifices and struggles were just for elevating leaders to power, was it worth it?” he said.

Century was among 19,000 Maoists confined to cantonments because of disagreements between Nepal’s political parties over the future of the former fighters after the war finished.

A deal was reached last year that 6,500 fighters would be integrated into the national army while the rest would be given money or vocational training courses like the one in Jiri.

Their 15-month course, funded by German aid agency GIZ, is divided between on-the-job experience and classroom sessions designed to help them find jobs, but many find it hard to look past their brutal wartime experiences.

Mahesh Bogati was born into a family of poor subsistence farmers in Nepal’s remote Karnali region and spent five years fighting government troops as part of the Maoist “people’s war”.

The 28-year-old traded his textbooks for guns when he was just 17.

“I spent several years as a fighter in the war. During those years, all I learned is how to lay an ambush and make bombs and improvised devices. Because of the war I also missed my studies,” Bogati told AFP.

“My comrades and I are facing the challenge of civilian life. But our leaders are more concerned about remaining in power. They have forgotten us.

“They are enjoying their luxurious life in Kathmandu while we are worried about our future.”

The growing distrust among grassroots activists was fuelled in January when it emerged that Prachanda had moved into a lavish mansion in the capital, a property he has since said he intends to give up.

Two months later party officials were accused of corruption after it was revealed they had offered Prachanda’s son $250,000 to climb Mount Everest.

The Maoists are currently running the country as a “caretaker” government with no parliament and no real mandate after the legislature was dissolved when it failed to agree on a new peacetime constitution.

Worsening the political turmoil, last month a hardline faction of the party broke away, a move that some students suggest could inspire former rebels to take up arms again if another insurgency is launched.

The party leaders insist Nepal is in a “transitional” phase towards achieving social justice and rejects claims that the insurgency achieved little.

“There is no reason to regret the time spent fighting the people’s war,” party spokesman Shakti Basnet told AFP.

With Nepal’s post-war development bogged down and most of the country still desperately impoverished, the difficult task of fostering a more positive attitude among the Jiri students falls to the principal, Ram Hari Khanal.

“There were doubts over this programme. We were not sure whether it would be successful or not. But I am optimistic about their future,” he told AFP.

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Sunrise in Sarangkot: A Memorable Morning

Holding the Sun: Kabita pictured in Sarangkot hill as sun rises in late April 2012

In late April I and my wife Kabita traveled to Pokhara to spend the weekend. It was much anticipated trip to the city by the lake. We enjoyed the scenery, boating at the Phewa
Lake and the sunrise at Sarangkot hill.

Over the years, Pokhara has developed itself as a tourist mecca. We stayed at Third Pole hotel in Lakeside. Like a typical tourist, we hopped from one tourist site to another. All around we saw backpackers–good for the local economy. I think the tourism entrepreneurs have diversified it and learned the lessons along the way. From paragliding to trekking, there are so many packages and offers that you will be overwhelmed. The short hike to Sarangkot hill turned out to be one of the most memorable mornings in my life. Here I am reproducing a poem by Hrishikesh Upadhyay, my former professor at Ratna Rajya Laxmi Campus, Kathmandu.

Sunrise-Sarangkot

I read a poem
To my incurious friend
On the view of Sarangkot.

The colours of nature
Appear in full riot.
The bursts of lights
Shower laser beams.
For once rioting
Looks stunningly captivating
The laser spurs
Stir the slumbering spirit.
The songs of the ages
Reverberate on the air.

Humbled,
The towering Himalayas descend,
For me to scale their peaks.
Elated, the sun-gazer at Sarangkot
I strain myself
From breaking into thin air.
All the world
Transforms itself
To an indulgent elsewhere.

Ever since I live on
With the blessed sunrise
Within me.
the sight, the touch,
The sound awakened
In me
That was asleep.

My incurious friend though
Keeps on asking:
Is that all there is
In the sunrise in Sarangkot?
Yes, I tell him
It’s not as such the view;
It is reflection of
What lies in you.

From In Love of America and Other Observations: A Compilation of Poems by Rhishikesh Upadhyay

Check out my blog on his poems

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How they see us

A bazaar at the edge of Tamakoshi river in Dolakha district. pic by Deepak Adhikari

A sizzler of an afternoon in late June, we stopped for lunch in Tamakoshi bazaar, which lies at the edge of the eponymous river. The small town serves as a gateway to Ramechhap. The previous day, we had crossed the bridge and climbed the hills on our way to Jiri. Ram Hari Khanal, the gregarious principal of Jiri Technical Institute, had recommended to me that we take lunch there. He had told me that Kalu Tamang’s eatery offered the best view of the river as well as delicious fried fish.

My friends wanted to have lunch in the lush green valley of Jiri itself. But I was adamant that we savor the lunch with a view of the raging Tamakoshi at the locally famous Kalu Tamang’s eatery. Back from a reporting trip to Jiri, Dolakha district, we were not expecting a barrage of criticism against media.

As soon as we sat in front of Kalu’s eatery, a woman started to curse a local reporter. According to her, a woman and her two children were found murdered on a shallow stream called Gopikhola. But a reporter with ABC television had reported that it was a suicide. The woman, who said she was in her thirties, said that a local man had murdered her and her children. Seething with anger, she was also cursing the accused, who I later found out, was named Kiran Budhathoki. The woman was joined on the media bashing campaign by another wiry woman. The former was saying that it was because of such mis-information that journalists were routinely attacked in Nepal.

I sat listening to her diatribe. Sensing her growing anger and an unfamiliar locale, I decided not to identify myself as a journalist. Instead, we prodded her to provide the details of the incident. It sounded like a murder but her account was sketchy. And, she was acting on emotions.

After returning to Kathmandu, I followed the news. The slain woman, 35-year-old Bal Kumari Tamang, was a widow. Her husband had died a year ago, leaving her alone to fend for herself and her two kids. According to reports, she didn’t have anything by way of livelihood and the day of the incident, she was on her way to Charikot to be photographed in order to apply for the allowance that the government allocates for widows.

She lived in a mud-hut in an isolated area of the village and taking advantage of her precarious situation, a local man, had raped her. She became pregnant. Media reports also said that a few days before that, the accused had brought her to the district headquarters Charikot for abortion. But the Hospital rejected to perform the abortion citing that the baby was already mature (six months old).

The angry woman at the eatery was suspicious of the police. She suspected that they were in collusion with the accused. “The police will support him because he is an influential and rich person,” she lamented. For her, the police, media and the local authorities all were suspects. She was sure that they would not deliver justice and were apathetic to the victim.

The death of the woman and her children was indeed shocking. But equally shocking to me was the erosion of credibility of media and other sectors in the eyes of rural people.

Republica daily’s coverage of the ‘murder’
A nice piece on hiking from Tamakoshi to Dolakha Bhimsen

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Nepal’s Uneasy Calm

Hope dashed: The Chinese-built building which housed the dissolved Constituent Assembly pic by Deepak

Nepal’s Crisis: Can a Broken Nation Remake Itself?

Deepak Adhikari

After a decade of war and nearly half a decade of political dysfunction, the impoverished Himalayan nation is struggling to refashion itself as a secular, pluralistic republic. Political bickering and factionalism is getting in the way.

Not long ago, a gleaming white edifice in the Baneshwor neighborhood of Kathmandu evoked hope and optimism. The Chinese-built hall for Nepal’s Constituent Assembly, a 601-member body tasked with writing a constitution for the fledgling republic, was supposed to be the site of the country’s remaking after a decade-long Maoist insurgency that ended in 2006.

Instead, after yet another deadline for Nepal’s feuding lawmakers to draft a new constitution passed on May 27, the area has taken on a worn, deserted look. Gone are the thousands of protesters who converged here; so too, the hordes of security forces in riot gear. An eerie silence pervades life in Kathmandu, a capital city that has grown accustomed to political deadlock and dysfunction.

Nepal’s uneasy calm hides crises that are deepening every day. The major dispute centers around how this country of 26.6 million will be reshaped. That question has remained unanswered since the peace process began under U.N. auspices six years ago, marking the end of a nearly three-century-old Hindu monarchy and the awkward beginnings of a secular republic.

Read more at TIME

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The vanishing beauty of Kathmandu

Here’s my piece on the decay of Kathmandu’s greenery, originally published at the English newspaper Republica’s weekend edition The Week.

DEEPAK ADHIKARI

An under construction building looms near a farmland in Lalitpur, Kathmandu Valley, Nepal Pic courtesy Sanjog Manandhar

Madhav Bista looks across the sprawling urban jungle of rapidly expanding Kathmandu Valley, lamenting what he remembers when it was all fields.

But he is not talking about some bygone bucolic idyll slowly suffocated by concrete over decades; the green and pleasant Kathmandu Valley he recalls was a reality just a few years ago.

“Where can you get fertile land such as this now?” the 52-year-old tenant farmer says, pointing at his plot on a rare expanse of lush green land in the shadow of a concrete housing development which encroaches further each year.

“We shouldn’t be destroying nature. Do we want to replace beauty with ugly concrete buildings?” asks the farmer sitting in front of his shed in Dhapakhel of Lalitpur District.

Bista has leased the farmland for Rs 15,000 a month and by selling its produces –mostly green vegetables –he has been able to eke out a living for his family of five. But his very livelihood is under threat.

Known for its deep alluvial soils deposited by a long-vanished lake, the Kathmandu Valley has historically been one of the most productive agricultural regions of South Asia.

But Bista is among hundreds of tenant farmers who face being thrown off their land each year as landowners seek to make fast bucks out of the capital’s unprecedented urbanisation.

The material costs are rising with unemployment among Nepal’s traditional tillers of the land and food prices are inflated as the fruit and vegetable markets of Kathmandu increasingly source their products from India.

But the costs to Kathmandu’s soul may be far greater.

“We need homes. But the real estate developers have blindly sold the fertile land to earn commissions out of it,” he said. “They don’t care about the future generation who will be deprived of the greenery.”

The population of Kathmandu has surged from 400,000 to two million in a little over 20 years, making it one of the world’s fastest growing cities.

Vast new housing developments spring up with alarming regularity on its once-fertile plains, and analysts have warned that the valley will have no arable land left in 25 years.

Mass exodus to the capital began in the early 1990s after the restoration of democracy, with people arriving in their hundreds of thousands each year, seeking education for their children, better healthcare and jobs.

Almost all stayed on, making homes in dozens of new suburbs which sprang up with little regard for planning and encroached on the farmlands stretching out from the surrounding hills.

The urban population was further bolstered by the Maoist insurgency which forced rural families to flee their countryside and seek refuge in the relative safety of the capital.

Urban planner Nirjal Dhakal has called for better policing of current laws and a coherent strategy from the government to ensure that new housing takes place on sites in the hills surrounding Kathmandu rather than on the valley’s farmland.

“Kathmandu severely lacks the basics for adequate living required of a city. Open spaces and courtyards have been converted into public buildings and private properties,” said Dhakal.

“Infrastructure has developed tremendously without taking into consideration the negative impacts of the expansion. Forget farmlands, even the marshes have not been spared, which is against the law,” he said.

According to Dhakal, land prices have increased tenfold in the last decade. Today, a patch of land big enough for a four-room house on the outskirts of the capital costs at least three million Rupees.

The Valley covers an area of 900 square kilometres but is losing more than eight sq km of farmland a year, Dhakal said, warning that if the trend continues, there will be none left by 2037.

More than 50 percent of the Valley has been occupied by concrete buildings, according to Pragun Sundar Sainju, a soil expert at Nepal Agricultural Research Council (NARC).

He noted another worrying trend, that of landowners selling to brick factories that is further eroding the quality of whatever soil that remains.

“There is huge demand for housing plots, and farmers have been lured into selling their land at astronomical prices,” he said.

“Back in the 1980s, the Valley’s farmers produced enough vegetable and rice for its people. But now, on the one hand the population has grown and as a result the land has shrunk significantly.

“I come from a farming family and it’s disheartening to see this. But we’re unable to do anything,” he said.