If you are struggling with mental health issues—especially when those issues are fueled by the bleakness of the world around you—one coping mechanism is to look for the funny side of things. Doing so allows you to laugh when you might otherwise spend all your time crying.
This is an account of a coping mechanism I adopted while in Nepal and how, in the process, I ended up documenting the shocking level of patriarchy and sexism that exists there.
Since the formation of the modern Nepalese state via the expansion of the Gorkha kingdom approximately 250 years ago, the country has been internally colonized by hill-origin, so-called high-caste Hindu men through the poor, minimal, and selective education of the population. Consequently, all four pillars of democracy have remained monopolized by this demographic, even throughout the nation's thirty-year democratic experimentation. This data-driven analysis details their continued hegemony over the Executive branch. Until the population attains a significantly higher level of education, these entrenched power structures are unlikely to yield.
Breakdown of 419 applications for 14 positions at an NGO (non-profit) along gender, caste, qualification lines expose the structural issues inherent in the Brahmanical and highly patriarchal Nepali society.
I avoided being part of Nepali associations and organizations all the years I lived abroad. Luckily, that wasn't too difficult most of the time because most places I lived in neither had any sizeable Nepali population nor organizations.
One reason behind the avoidance was a discovery I made about many Nepali men -- you can take them out of Nepal, but you can't take Nepal out of them!
What in numbers are producers in an ecosystem to the number of apex predators, casual sexism is to sexual predators in rape culture. How? Read on.
A reproduction of an Instagram post about a family in Nepal pressuring their young professional adult medical doctor daughter based in Australia to accept an arranged marriage proposal from a complete stranger. In spite of her "No" the day the post was published, it had been three weeks of constant pressure from the family to accept the proposal, completely ignoring her wishes and thus putting her through a lot of mental and emotional agony!
