Drunk am I today,
O' you little tender world
with the book of life
open before me
empty handed, blank,
I sit here before you all!
Immersed in myself,
I am seeing
the world's naked form
this garden of roses
where grass has grown.
Yes, drunk am I today.
Today I am drunk
All alone am I
in the Tundikhel,
gilded by artisans
and Himalayan sun.
Impoverished but resilient,
I float between Medieval
and Modern times.
A peanut seller came
with a basket of peanuts
and sat beside me.
"Would you like to have few?"
He uttered in a loud voice.
"Yes, why not, sure,"
I replied him back.
He gave me,
a handful of peanuts
in a colorful piece of paper.
I tossed the peanuts
into the air,
and started reading
the paper instead.
The peanut seller, smiled
and waved me good bye,
saying, "You are drunk,
very drunk today, my friend!
"In remote western Nepal,
people heard the Beatles
on battery powered tape decks
before they saw electric lights,
and helicopters fluttered into their lives
long before the first trucks got there,"
these sentences rose from their slumber
and stirred my heart.
That was a revelation for me
and I was completely
intoxicated by what I read.
"The first airplane landed in Nepal in 1949
but it was seven years later before
the first highway connected Kathmandu
to the outside world.
Within a year of that first landing,
the Rana autocracy was overthrown
with the aid of an airplane."
These sentences came out
from the paper, and grappled my throat..
Ah! My eyes searched the sky.
I stood up, but immediately
fell down on the ground.
The gravity of the revelation
pulled me down.
I was now drunk, dead drunk
with million peg of thoughts.
I sat on the grass for a while,
thinking about old Nepal
and my Grand Father's life then.
Then I shifted my gear
and hovered my thoughts
about the New Nepal
they claim to be building now.
I gradually stood up
with tears in my eyes,
and shouted with a resolute heart,
"Nepal, O' Mother, O' my pride!
You are gripped, you are clutched
by an insidious cancer of patronage
nepotism, favoritism and corruption."
Ah! This is supposed to be
the golden era of change
as well as your renewal, my mother!
But it is turning into an era of decline.
Our democracy, Ah! Our democracy
is functioning in a non- democratic culture.
But yet we haven't asked ourselves,
"What our democratic base is?"
You children, they know not
what their goal is.
There is no constant goal,
the goal is changing evermore.
They know not,
what do they need to do now
in order to take part
in the New Nepal
that is being built.
They don't know,
what kind of society they have
and what kind of society
they wish to construct
Your children's have failed
to understand the consensus of love
- they believe in the vigor of Gun.
Wake up,
Wake up Nepalese sons and daughters!
Wake up, before they spit in our soul.
We have reached a critical time
in our nation's history.
We must access the nature,
and character of our democracy.
Where are the roots
of the new Nepal
we claim to be building?
Where are the roots?
Religion and the caste system
sill permeate Nepalese life.
Nepal's creeds still blend
with animism in a spiritual melange
Let us liberate our mother,
from the paralyzing prejudices
of class and clan.
Let us liberate our mother.
Let us liberate our mother.
I puked,
all my emotions in the wind,
but what followed it
was a deafening silence.
Kathmandu was asleep,
as a city on the earth
which has never slept
with a blanket over her eyes.
Mosquitoes started
swirling above my head
making thousand times more arduous noise
than the American choppers in Iraq.
Ah! With million thoughts in my head,
I finally marched ahead
and headed toward my home
dusting the bare bodies
of the erotic sculptures
on the multitiered pagodas
beneath the eternal
Himalayan snow.
Yes, drunk am I today.
Today I am drunk.
Bhuwan is my name.
The best friend of the light
waiting to be born yet again,
in Nepal, my mother, my pride!
-Bhuwan Thapaliya
source: english.ohmynews.com
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