Nepalis on average are a closed and inward looking people. And because of that, when the proverbial mirror is held in front of them, offended, disappointed, or not liking what is reflected back, they generally shatter the mirror. In this blog post, I document one such example from Twitter.
I have been tracking the Coronavirus pandemic in Nepal by keeping tracking of data about and related to it. Based on my analysis of those data, I have come to conclude that the Government of Nepal was really just pretending to fight the pandemic. Sadly, in the last few days, they appear to have given up the fight. They appear to have collapsed.
The Government of Nepal has NOT had a strategy the entire period they have been attempting to tackle the Coronavirus pandemic. Most of what they did was to pretend to be doing something. But for the last three months, they have even abandoned that and, as far as I can tell, have been leaving the population to fight it on their own. In spite of these trying and potentially deadly times of the pandemic, there are few thing you can do.
Over the course of two months, from July 21 to September 26, the number of cases in the country doubled every month. A close study of the change in the proportion and number of cases representing gender and age demographics that were not represented as much in the July cohort shows that we are on Stage 3 of the pandemic. Given that there's little to no measures in place to mitigate the spread of the virus, Stage 4 looks likely.
Cases in Kathmandu have been rising pretty steadily since after a week of the end of the first lockdown. As a matter of fact, they have been rising so much that the last several days they have account for about 50% of the cases in the entire country when the population of the district is less than 10%! That of course, does not bode well!
There are many many consequences of Nepali society being highly patriarchal and stratified. The Bhramanical patriarchal system stratified along caste lines, for example, has resulted in high caste Hindu men having a monopoly over in position of power and influence. Being there for as long as they have been, they have established a culture that works for them, a culture based, among other things, their arrogance. In blog post, I share one example of how that arrogance translates into what otherwise would be a professional relationship and professional interactions.