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