The end of a calendar year is an occasion to take stock of everything that has gone before and look forward to a new timeframe where things will hopefully be better. It is a wishful exercise, a belief that we as humans must always strive to be better than we were. The calendar year might be an arbitrary marker in time but it provides people with a moment of respite, a slice of time when you are neither here nor there, seemingly floating in limbo between the past and the future. And thus, the ideal time to decide where we were and where we would like to go. Most often, this manifests in new year’s resolutions that the lot of us will never keep beyond the first month. 

But as I write this, my first column for the year 2016, I feel very little hope and much, much helplessness. This past year has been a terrible one, personally and otherwise too. I lost a close family member to disease and foolishness and a best friend to human cruelty. But personal tragedy, though devastating, can be dealt with. It concerns emotions and a coming to terms with the fact that things change, people die and friends leave. Personal perseverance can be drawn on to steel oneself against hurt and though we be bent and bruised, we can come through unbroken.

Public tragedies, though, are a different thing. They concern events and incidents that are often wholly beyond the control of one individual. This is especially true in a country like Nepal, where democracy is as hollow as the proverbial empty vessels that make the most noise. 

The April earthquake reduced us to trembling fearful shells of ourselves, cowering under tents and tarpaulin while the ground quaked underneath us. The weeks following the first big quake on April 25 were spent in terror at every little jolt, hoping that nothing else would come crumbling down. This was helplessness in the face of something immense and insurmountable, which can result in stasis in even the most stalwart of beings. For, how will you challenge the earth? How will you thumb your nose at this great blue marble that follows no laws except its own and respects no life but its own? The only thing we could do was wait and hope we don’t die, which is no hope at all. 

Then, another occasion ripe for hope was made cruelly into a sham. Nepal’s new constitution, so full of promise in its interim avatar, was put through the shredder of Panchayat-era values and forced through. Protests leading up to, and after, the promulgation were crushed brutally, with the security forces raining batons on Dalits in Kathmandu and bullets on Madhesis in the Tarai. The aspirations of an entire generation that had grown up in the shadow of the Maoist insurgency were crushed under the boot heels of a government led by KP Oli, who has always been too eager for what he has always seen as his rightful turn at the till. The protests turned violent and then snowballed into a blockade, by Madhesis and by big brother India. And meanwhile, PM Oli, that fork-tongued charmer of snakes, added more ministers to his massive Cabinet, distributing the ill-gotten spoils of an internal war. 

Faced with such fecklessness, one would’ve expected protests, riots even. But Kathmandu carries on, adopting the black market and making do with wood fires for cooking. A real democratic uprising against this sham of a government, which has done absolutely nothing to deal with the current morass, seems all but impossible. The student wings of the political parties, once so quick to torch tyres and call shutdowns, have all but disappeared, no doubt on orders from high up. If all the parties and their cadres get a share of the loot, who gives a single damn about victims of the quake freezing to death in the hills and mountains?

The resilience of the Nepali people has become something of a joke. Whatever you throw at these folk, they always seem to come through on the other side. What is it about us that breeds equanimity? Maybe it is because we are attuned to change. Maybe we know that what is now need not be what is tomorrow. The wind blows and the river flows and the world is always and always turning. Change is the only constant, so why not learn to live with it? The bad times cannot last, can they? Maybe this is what we know, in our heart of hearts. 

Me, I’m not resilient. I am not positive and I am not optimistic. I am choosing resignation, for I am a coward, for I am easily distressed and I choose to quit. Let the world perish in a hail of fire and brimstone and let Oli rule over his fiefdom of corpses. This year has been one of hopelessness and there is very little that would have me believe that next year will be better. But it must, no? 

So as we mourn the thousands we lost this year and the many more we might lose yet to the blockade and the government, as we cower under blankets in the cold and cook over fires made from wood harvested from 

precious trees, let us plaster smiles on our faces and look to the new year. After all, what could be worse than this?

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