Category: Just Stories

{{This article was originally posted on December 5, 2018. Lost and found, it is reposted here.}}

When I hear or see a Pipal Bot, the first thought occurs to me is a group of carrier men playing a game of Baagchaal. Even today in most Pipal bot one can see the board drawn with red stones all around.

Pipalbot is though way more than that for most people who have gone through the culture.

For some it is a resting place for those tired legs and weary eyes. Pipal provides both shade and cool breeze to create the perfect doozing place. For some it is a place of conversation — where friends gather in the morning or during the day with cups of tea and talk about everything and anything under the sun with anyone who wants to get involved, even if the person is total stranger. For some it is a debate club, where politics and other matters of national and local importance can be debated about. For some it is music stage and theatre where dramas can be performed and music can be played. Ready audience are most often available.

In short, Pipal bot was and still is gossip, messaging and social media platform of Nepal. Most Nepali, either living in the rural areas, or past 30-35 years of age have been a part of the Pipal bot culture and think with it.

For them it is about strategy, discussions, debate, idea formation and realizations. It is about being part of a group, yet being individual enough to give own opinions and views. It is also about have a view on anything and everything under the sun.

This genetic build determines how people work and go about their everyday lives in Nepal.

Note :
Pipal Bot : shade of the Banyan tree, most often used as resting places in rural Nepal. Now slowly going out of fashion.

Baagchal : a Nepali strategy game played for a rapidly drawn board with little pieces of stones. Baagchaal translates to “Tiger movement” in English. The game starts with 4 tigers on cornerr of the board and 20 goats that player can put at random locations on a board. The game ends with either all goats being eaten by tiger or all tigers being cornered so that they cannot move anymore. Unlike chess, this game is played very rapidly.

{{This article was posted on December 5, 2018. Lost and found, it is reposted here.}}

12 years ago when some people bought the land next to my house they built a really big wall along the border.

While standing of my roof, mainly during the sunbathing winter months, I got to staring at the wall.

The wall had a quite a few gaps in the bricks and slowly sparrows starting living in them. It reached a point where every gap was occupied and lots of lots of sparrows could be seen. then the bredding season came and most gaps had chicks. But crows from the trees nearby started attacking and taking away the chicks. I witnessed, pretty much helplessly, quite a few struggles between crows and sparrows. Most often the crows got better of the sparrows and took chicks away.

Slowly many of the gaps got empty as sparrows started moving out due to the danger. It got to a point where most of the gaps were empty, except for a few. Some of the sparrows struggled on and during the course of years the population started to blossom pretty well.

While gazing at the wall, I noticed that many chicks started hatching and population became pretty big. Most amazing was no crows were attacking the nests anymore.

Being the curious kind I went looking around to what had happened. How things were working out for the sparrows, inspite of all the crows still living in the trees nearby.

I started by looking at the gaps and number of sparrows. Noticeable change was that the number of gaps occupied had decreased to quite a few. Gaps, there were near the ground not occupied previously, were now occupied. Gaps that were near power lines were occupied more, where the power lines would work as deterrants to the sparrows.

On closer observation I found the structure of the gaps occupied were different. All the gaps that were straight inside were unoccupied. All gaps that had some sort of brick pieces jutting out on the inside were occupied more and more and the most precious gaps were ones with jutting inside with plant growing on the outside and power lines very close to the wall. I could see that the biggest fighters among the sparrows occupied these premium sites. The gaps occupied were only the ones that crows could not absolutely put their beaks inside.

Clever birds!!!… Evolution at work.

{{This article was originally posted on December 5, 2018. Lost and found, it is reposted here.}}

Few days back I visited a school (SetiDevi School) in Sindhupalchowk on the banks of the river Indrawati. It was as part of the “One Day in a school” program of Teach for Nepal.
I got to talk for a little over an hour with students in classes 6,7 and 8 – a total of 40 kids.

Among other things, one question I asked was “What do you want to become in your lives?” About 90% of the boys wanted to become Diver (Nepali localized pronounciation of Driver) and almost all the girls wanted to become teachers. Girls wanted to have a secure, well respected career that did not have the hardship of agriculture. Also they wanted to express what they had learned. So it was reasonable for them to say that.

But Boys! Why Diver? Why not farmer, why not engineer, why not even going aboard for work? To put into topic, one the boys said he wanted to be a farmer. I tried giving his various options, he was hell bent on farming and didn’t listen to anything I had to say.
But others! Not only did they want to be divers, they has already dressing up and appearing like one.

Few answers I got from boys on why be a driver included easy job, get to go around to places and the financial success they have seen in the villages of drivers. This sounded very logical to me as this is the best they have seen and heard.

On the return journey, I expressed this to others who had travelled with me and most had had the same experience.

Few personal thoughts on possibly why they wanted to become drivers:
— lack of Heros to dream about
— concentrated on their views of only what they see
— Nepali folk music and Dohari’s romantisization of the relation of drivers and girls
— drivers being the epitome of success in their villages

When I ended the classes, some of the students got together and wrote a Thank you card and handed to me. One of the boys that really interacted with me had written “I want to be like you”.

Maybe they just have not had the exposure to people’s life stories?

This lock down my daughter and I felt a project to do was to document all flowers in our home.

Lots of plants all around the home, but we had never taken the time to look around and see what we had. This was a perfect opportunity to look at the plants as well as try out and provide some data to plantnet.org plant recognition app.

We used the Android version of the app we it would allow direct upload of images from camera. So made the whole process a lot easier.

Overall it was able to recognize about 80% of the plants in our home. the rest 20% we uploaded data and coordinates. The reason for non-recognition could be these plants are found more in South-east Asia (mainly around Nepal and India). Data maybe sparse on the plantnet.org platform from this region.