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The Unfinished Lumbini Master Plan!
It took us Kathmanduites more than 30+ years to get the water from Melamchi. It's like a whole generation has to wait for something and when it arrives, they are long gone. It took LKY not even thirty years to make his malaria-infested swamp of a country a developed nation. In contrast, it took our old guards 3 decades to help, or should I say force us 5 million to seek employment opportunities abroad instead of staying home and doing something productive and getting paid enough to pay their bills.
Today, we will talk about the grand old Lumbini, our birthplace of our Lord Buddha and why Dhiraj Rai should win the Nobel Prize for Peace someday! Well, we can talk about Dhiraj bro some other time and give him more space later!
It's been more than 50 years since some guy woke up one day, had his Miso Soup, and decided to sketch a master plan for Lumbini. And what have we done so far? Not much except allow foreign monasteries to build their own buildings inside and use them as guesthouses for their own people, and surround the place with cement factories and other polluting industries.
The so-called Lumbini Master Plan (LMP), was designed by a Japanese architect Kenzo Tange. Japanese names are cool! We should adopt it for our local raksi and sell our Tongba, Chyaang and Aila overseas as a luxury brand, but name it to sound Japanese to get that extra buck! Maybe, Tochimoro Tongba, Shinzogi Chyaanga and Akira Aila. Well, this is not the space to talk about alcohol. It's Buddha Time!
Poor Tange spent more than six years trying to get the master plan right and it was finally approved in 1978 by those in charge of making Lumbini great again! Well, Lumbini is still waiting for better days and we hope our new Balen government will finally make it great again!
The Lumbini Master Plan was supposed to be finished in two decades, but everything seemed to go off-track once the Nepali Congress gained power in 1991. Then began the recruitment of their own loyal cadres to government positions and institutions tasked to look after our culture and stuff!
The Balen government has decided to fire thousands of such political appointees now and hope the new guy who heads the Lumbini Development Trust (LDT) will be an architect instead of a fake religious guru, Mr Lhyarkal Lama, who recently got fired after Balen decided to push the 'delete' button on all political paisa-tira post-liu bhag-banda nataks!
Mr Lama is reported to have citizenship of three countries, while our law allows only one and that too a Nepali one if you want to be a hakim in this land, and is rumored to be worth Rs 500 crores. The man was busted for storing bullets in his bank locker instead of gold and silver. Well, he was not busted because if he had been, then he wouldn't be heading LDT after that incident.
He was appointed to head LDT by our great Comrade Prachanda. It is open knowledge that such positions can be bought when our mili-juli chor sarkars were in town. And we are certain that such a 'position' Dashain sale is now over for good!
So what happened to Lumbini in the past fifty years? Well, let's talk about after 1990 because we can't keep on blaming the old old Panchayati system forever. That would be like blaming dinosaurs for the big hole in your backyard. Well, maybe an asteroid could take a few blame or two, and the poor thing just got flattened in the process.
The Congress UML Maoist (CUM) government should take the blame for why Lumbini is still considered a transit point for most Buddhist pilgrims rather than the main hub. Bodh Gaya receives tens of millions of tourists every year, while we barely cross a million and 80% of them are our own domestic tourists!
For the past thirty-plus years, our media and some of us only whined about corruption and political interference in our institutions, but we really didn't fight the corrupt chors to make it right. Now, with the Balen government running the show like a Formula One driver at 400 mph, we do expect better things for the country and Lumbini as well!
Lumbini is a World Heritage Site, and it should be more than just an hour or two of boating and walking around. Bodh Gaya is cool, but Lumbini is the birthplace of Lord Buddha. It should hold as much importance for us Buddhists and Hindus as well, like Mecca and Jerusalem are for the Muslims and Christians and the Jews.
We have to plan something grand. We seem to have a branding problem. We need to figure out a way to encourage and inspire hundreds of millions of Buddhists, primarily from Asia and the West as well to visit Lumbini once in their lifetime.
We should be getting at least 10 million tourists from Buddhist countries every year. If we can do that, then it will help us generate at least a million jobs in the Lumbini area alone. We could generate enough dough to balance our budget, reduce our trade deficit to zero and even have some left for other development projects as well. Let's get to work and hope to see a Grand Buddha Festival in 2030 with ten million Buddhist pilgrims and tourists and Buddha Fans in Lumbini on Buddha Jayanti alone!
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