Nepal is emerging from a very strange situation despite a number of adverse conditions. Political power-sharing has not entirely become horse-trading, nor has the post-quake condition become a total human disaster. Corruption has not become irreversible nor has education become a failed project. Medical tsunami has not entirely eroded people’s age-old faith in one’s self-healing ability. But in totality all the above factors have made up the zeitgeist of contemporary Nepali times.

Still, there are people who are working with positive thoughts. One such occasion was the discussions on a book entitled Nepalma Bipad meaning calamities in Nepal, written by Ajaya Dixit, who has long remained my favourite water philosopher, and whose studies have always kept pace with town planning dreamers, architects and good-hearted planners. Dixit in his previous works has shown how Nepal can turn water into culture and river currents into constructions. This time around, he has discussed the semantics of calamity in Nepali and English. The panel discussion moderated by economist Ashutosh Tiwari featured scholars and activists like Yamuna Ghale, Hiramani Ghimire and Arpita Nepal. I too was invited to participate as a literary writer. Fair enough. It was an eloquent session.

An important debate

The difficulties of tackling calamities naturally require a great deal of effort and resources. But by drawing a picture of Bipad and ways of tackling it, Dixit draws the reader’s attention to those issues that are in a state of going down in memories. The book has nuances of semantics in clear terms. We are talking about a society that has not come out of the feudal system yet; but the methods and perceptions are guided by postmodernist modes of operation. Dixit is very conscious of the fact that the guiding principles in Nepal vary from fatalism and Marxism to liberal democracy and related economic principles.

The book raises a number of other issues such as developing a sense of perceiving calamity and putting it semantically in cogent forms. The book has nuances of tangible factors and empirical contents. The semantics of catastrophes dwells on the nuances of perils and their variations. Dixit discusses what is called theorising the Bipad management and observation. But in the times of catastrophes reported everywhere, the Nepali natural perils generate some rhetoric and metaphors. In the post-quake times, many literary observations were made using different genres. Some of the works were simply trash; others were somewhat better. But in the context of the recent debates about catastrophes in the world, Dixit’s semantic categories show that this is part of an important debate in Nepal today.

Not unique

We can ask—do the calamities engender a sense of weakening the capacity to resist life’s hardships in Nepal? We know little about how people in the past coped with disasters. But the process of recovery was not in any sense reliant on authority. But today the world comes to help and big discussions take place, which people become familiar with through the media. But there is one paradox. The combination of information, expectations and helplessness may further weaken people’s resolve to fight Bipad. It generates the question: Does the present inaction of the main actors, for example, make the people believe that they live in a broken world? In this world, normal life practices have become worse. To some extent people know that they have uncannily become the resource in the negative sense to generate capital and aid. For example, rice sent by Bangladesh is left to rot; aid is not delivered, or worse still, it is misused. On the first anniversary of the earthquake, the media outside and inside Nepal and some sceptical foreign writers and journalists said nothing is done yet in terms of meeting the needs of the victims.

In a world regularly stricken by hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters, suffering a similar calamity is not a unique experience for us. This book is not a daunting bluster like other papers and tomes published in this area. It is simple and expressive, with a literary flavour. But by locating the areas of Bipad and organising it in a structure with clear visual illustrations—in some cases even evoking poetic joy in catastrophic shape—this book has become an important text

The other aspect is resistance on the part of the victims. The actual victims have little voice except in the form of complaints. Their jeremiads are personal and people have been making some attempts. Dixit’s book, I guess, has done some of that, if on a small scale. However, the ongoing debates are positive signs.

Amorphous questions

The Nepali world is undergoing a tremendous process of change involving buoyant moments in terms of political transformation but grim and broken moments in terms of the hardships caused by natural calamities, inefficient governments, widespread corruption and surprising indifference shown by Nepal’s immediate neighbours. A debate on the subject of ethics and fairness dominates every expanding sphere of life. Such questions are amorphous, with no fixed boundaries, especially when what a Bangladeshi English professor and colleague in a phone call to us after the Dhaka horror, quoting WB Yeats’s apocalyptic poem said, ‘the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’. The worrying matter from my point of view is the declining capacity of people to cope with Bipad. We are fighting only with the scarcity of necessary objects for life. That may have weakening effect on our ability to move forward.

It is a cognitive phenomenon that links us to nature, human managers, capitalist actions and above all the dialectics between human and non-human factors that need to be addressed to tackle any problem of this nature.

The overall nature of Nepalma Bipad is simplicity reminiscent of the Japanese Haiku poems that put even the catastrophe into a simple, cogent language, which is the best way to find satori. The best way to fight calamity is not to become more calamity savvy but simple and optimistic. That is precisely what Ajaya Dixit’s book has done.