Among other things, North-American teachers at St. Xavier's induced in me a love for words by teaching us the etymology of words during lessons. I am trying to do the same for Nepalis by offering online classes on words and their meanings.
Nepalis generally make a lot of assumptions about and are judgmental of fellow Nepalis based on their appearance and/or their name and/or surname, a consequence of our social system, the monstrous caste system.
In this blog post I relay a typical incident of a fellow Nepali making assumptions about who I am and what I do based entirely on my facial features -- my ethnicity.
The pronoun you use in Nepali to address a fellow Nepali can be an indicator of the level of closeness to the person. Curiously enough but not really surprisingly I have discovered that I don't really have a single Nepali woman who I can say I am really close to, no one I am very informal in pronoun and/or the language I use.
Life is amazing in many many ways. One way it's amazing is how when all the trouble you go to to consciously -- and quite possibly even unconsciously -- avoid something, you discover much later that life actually ended up giving it to you, as it were! This is one such observation about an aspect of my life.
A blog post about my 7th grade English teacher Bro. Joe Sheehan. The amazing storyteller that he was, he fired my imagination and contributed to my "escape" from Kathmandu to see -- and learn about -- the amazing people and world beyond the borders of Nepal. He had a role to play in who I am today.
As a primary school student, I loved the arts and was good at acting and singing, and did a lot of that. But acting was also an "out," a means to escape my own self, to become someone else, suffering as I had been from a number of personal issues.
Had I been born a different caste or in a different country, I would have probably become a performing artist as an adult.