Some time ago a friend in the development sector, who had lived for many years in Nepal, offered me his secret for preserving sanity and staying calm. That was to always have a good book readily to hand, given the amount of time that one can spend sitting around outside people's offices. Others can waste your time here with alacrity in what can become a little game of status and power play. So I have decided to use my "spare time" here productively by working through some of the classics of literature. Recent reads have included Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (which provided a template for one of my film favourites of all time, "Apocalypse Now"), Virginia Woolf's "Mrs Dalloway" (that inspired another outstanding film "The Hours") and the one that I finished last evening, F Scott Fitzgerald's staggering book "The Great Gatsby". It is intriguing to note the influence that Conrad's work must have had on early 2oth Century literature. For Conrad (whose first language was Polish) wrote so well and was in style so ahead of his times that there are clear echoes of his writing in the other two novels that I mention.
At the end of Heart of Darkness, the central character, Kurtz, who has been living amidst the surreal savagery (most of which has originated from cruel and exploitative European colonial influences) of the eldritch Congo jungle exclaims in his dying breath "The horror, the horror!" The same cri de coeur could justifiably be uttered in Nepal when you see what those who masquerade as human beings inflict upon others whom they perceive as lesser beings. As an example, I need look no further than today's Himalayan Times newspaper report on how the police have bust a human trafficking ring that was sending vulnerable Nepalese girls into India. There the girls would have a kidney stolen from them, then enter sham marriages with the traffickers only to be subsequently dumped in brothels. Can it get much worse?
The date for our forthcoming circus rescue has been slipping each day but now it's looking good for Wednesday of next week, most likely in Calcutta area. Hopefully we'll be successful in retrieving scores of trafficked Nepalese girls from a different kind of horror.
I must remember to pack a good book.
