‘The rapist is you’. On October 10th a group of about 20 young women dressed in black took over a street in Kathmandu pointed straight ahead accusingly, and performed the anti-rape song ‘A rapist in your path’. The ‘flash mob’ was protesting what feels like an epidemic of rape in the country. In recent months it seems that every week the media is reporting another violent incident, often against adolescent girls, too often ending in murder. ‘Ajhai kati sahane?’ (How much more must we endure?) is...
Dec 04, 2020•35 min•Season 2Ep. 9
In 2019, 19-year-old girls in Nepal were the third shortest in the world, found a recent study by the journal The Lancet that ranked 200 countries. That’s not simply a genetic thing: ‘Nepalis are short’. A third of adolescent boys and girls in Nepal — 1.8 million — are stunted, or too short for their age. Others are too thin for their age, or wasted. These various forms of undernutrition contribute to 25,000 child deaths in Nepal each year, or 52 per cent of child deaths, more than any other cau...
Nov 12, 2020•39 min•Season 2Ep. 6
This is a shortened version of our episode with filmmaker Deepak Rauniyar, from Season 1. It was a great interview but, admittedly, quite long. We hope this 'bonus' episode will make Deepak's words more accessible to potential listeners. Important : we did retain the original New York City background sirens :-). The original introduction follows below. Deepak Rauniyar still feels queasy when he remembers the racism he faced growing up in Udaypur district in eastern Nepal. As one of few dark-skin...
Oct 29, 2020•43 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Rukshana Kapali is a firebrand. At 21 she is leading efforts to change Nepal’s laws so they include transgender men and women, and spearheading work to develop terminology in Nepali, and Nepal bhasa (or Newa language), that is inclusive of people who identify anywhere along the gender spectrum. She has led campaigns to protect lands of Kathmandu Valley’s Indigenous Newa people and has joined heritage activists to ensure that an ancient, sacred pond in the centre of Nepal’s capital Kathmandu was ...
Oct 20, 2020•37 min•Season 2Ep. 5
I liked Mithila painting the very first time that I saw it. The bright colours and village scenes amid lush jungles and bountiful nature really appealed to me, although nostalgically I now realize. So I was shocked the first time I saw paintings done by today’s guest. Although they featured the same vibrant colours and verdant backdrops, one example showed two women kissing under a tree and another depicted a woman standing and bleeding profusely during her period. But my shock soon wore off and...
Oct 11, 2020•29 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Anyone who lives in Nepal knows about caste and untouchability — the social rules that slot people into rigid groups from which they can rarely escape. At the bottom of the caste hierarchy are the Dalits, previously known as untouchables. Anyone living in Nepal would be aware of the deadly, violent crimes committed against Dalits, almost always with no legal consequences. (Since I recorded this episode at least two Dalit girls have been raped and murdered.) But as you will hear in my introductio...
Oct 01, 2020•35 min•Season 2Ep. 3
I’ve been following the work of Chandan Kumar Mandal carefully during the pandemic. He’s the labour reporter with the Kathmandu Post and has been writing daily about the millions of migrant labourers who leave their families in Nepal — often for years at a time — to work in neighbouring India or overseas. Many of them have undergone horrendous experiences since Covid-19 flipped the world upside down earlier this year, and many remain stuck in some sort of nightmarish limbo between home and famil...
Sep 24, 2020•38 min•Season 2Ep. 2
5 to 6 million Nepalis live outside of Nepal today, excluding India and other South Asian countries. That’s according to the non-resident Nepali association. Nepal’s total population is 28 million. Many emigrants leave for a specific period of time, to either work or study, but others embark for what they hope will be a better life in countries including Australia, the US and the UK. It’s normal that some of those emigres return home at some time in their lives, often with the dream of building ...
Sep 14, 2020•44 min•Season 2Ep. 1
As a developing country Nepal has few resources to devote to climate change. But as of late last year it has started to receive money from something called the Green Climate Fund to both reduce its own emissions and adapt to climate change. So far $73 million has been earmarked from the Fund for two projects. But who decides how that money is spent? Today we’re talking with Tunga Rai from the Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities, or NEFIN. He thinks that climate change projects need to d...
Aug 30, 2020•54 min•Season 1Ep. 6
I obviously don’t know if it’s harder to be a woman in Nepal than in other places, but often it seems like it must be. Around 1,200 women here die each year giving birth, many from a simple post-delivery haemorrhage. (The fact that no one seems to know the exact number speaks volumes about the importance officialdom places on the issue). Tens of thousands of other women endure the condition known as uterine prolapse — where the uterus descends towards or through the vagina, the result of, among ...
Aug 14, 2020•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 5
Deepak Rauniyar still feels queasy when he remembers the racism he faced growing up in Udaypur district in eastern Nepal. As one of few dark-skinned kids in the community, whose mother tongue was not Nepali, he was taunted by children and singled out for beatings by his headmaster. But as a college student looking for part-time work he soon discovered that journalism gave him the power to uncover the discrimination that pervaded life in the southern Madhesh region. He later honed those skills tr...
Aug 03, 2020•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 4
According to one of today’s guests, 1 in 5 working age Nepalis is overseas for employment at any one time. In 2019, the earnings sent home by these workers, known as remittances, totalled about $US8 billion, or 25% of Nepal’s gross domestic product, the economic value of its output. COVID-19 hammered labour migration, and the lives of many Nepalis. Some remain stuck in countries far from home, jobless after being cast aside when local economies tanked and the Nepal government refused to let them...
Jul 19, 2020•58 min•Season 1Ep. 3
There’s no doubt that today COVID-19 is the main issue in Nepal and in most parts of the world, so I decided when I started planning this podcast that it would be the subject of the first episode. But I also knew that I didn’t want to discuss the daily news — case numbers, quarantine centres, equipment shortages, government mismanagement, etc. Instead, because this podcast is all about examining issues in Nepal with an eye to doing things differently and contributing to change, I wanted to focus...
Jun 30, 2020•51 min•Season 1Ep. 2
COVID-19 arrived in Nepal at the end of January, 2020, but it was really only in May when it hit, as tens of thousands of migrant workers started arriving home from neighbouring India. As in many other countries, rich and poor, the pandemic has accentuated Nepal’s fault lines, including its health system, inequality and poor governance. And just as in other countries, the time seems ripe to question the direction that Nepal was taking. That’s where this podcast comes in — to ask, Can things be d...
Jun 30, 2020•4 min•Season 1Ep. 1
