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.
This is another #LifeEh observation but about other people's lives, not mine. The observation comes from the lives of two gay men from my old school of St. Xavier's Jawalakhel in Kathmandu and their very divergent fates.
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.
Near the end of my academic career at Grinnell College, I wanted to "go see the world" after graduation. However, even until just months before graduation, I had really done nothing towards that goal! And yet, I ended up working, living, traveling the world for 19 years following my graduation from Grinnell in May 1994!
One of the many issues I identified growing up in Nepal, which I believed would be the source of many unwarranted struggles to make something of myself, had been my severe lack of social capital. So, I worked really hard to escape from the country. Succeeding in doing so and spending most of my adult life abroad, I practically ensured I would have even less social capital when I finally returned home! #LifeEh!
Another #LifeEh observation. This one about how I did everything I could to leave behind, "escape" from, and rise above the yoke of the Bhote label...only to return to Nepal as a middle-aged man after spending pretty much all my adult life abroad studying, working, and traveling just to discover I have come full circle!