Rubber-band Chungi for the Olympics!
Rubber-band Chungi for the Olympics!
Nepali Times ईspecial 9 - 15 August 2024 #1224
Hey there,
I don’t know about you, but I have been glued to live tv coverage of the Olympics ever since its inauguration ceremony in Paris last month during which Marie Antoinette got decapitated. It was hard to tell whether that was the launch of a global sports event or a fashion show.
Anyway, some Olympics sports categories are, to use a currently fashionable term, ‘weird’. Take the Synchronised Swimming event in which athletes in swimwear, their noses clipped with clothespins, are judged on their aquatic rhumba skills.
If Synchronised Swimming can be an Olympics discipline, then Nepal should stake claim on sporting activities that we excel in such as deep nostril grooming. And our athletes could sweep all gold, silver and bronze medals in the Kathmandu Runs category thanks to our endurance and stamina.
And how about including Rubber-band Chungi at the Brisbane Olympics in 2028? And to prepare for it, the Sports Council should right away put Nepal’s young chungi champs on a supplementary diet of performance-enhancing yarsagumba.
Jokes aside, if Breakdancing is now an Olympics category, we see no reason why mountain trail running is not. As Preeti Khatri argues in the centerfold, Nepali runners would have a good chance of podium finishes. And Vishad Raj Onta profiles Nepal’s top ranking female trail runner, Sunmaya Budha who has come a long way from her Jumla home to participate in the La Palma Island 2024 in Spain.
More than 2.5 million left the country in just the last three years to work and study. Nearly half of Nepal’s male population in the 20-35 age group is abroad. Sonia Awale on her page 1, 5 article ‘Brain gain to brain drain’ presents data to show Australia and Canada have dropped as main destinations for Nepali students, while the numbers going to the US more than doubled in the past year. The article also looks at how most young Nepalis who leave on student visas may be emigrating for good, while migrant workers in the Gulf or Malaysia eventually return.
The dramatic events in Bangladesh last week is the subject of a Guest Editorial titled ‘Selfies on the prime minister’s bed’ by Guna Raj Luitel, Chief Editor of Nagarik Daily newspaper. There are lessons for elected leaders in neighbouring countries and Nepal that being a freedom fighter does not save leaders from public anger if it reaches a tipping point. Luitel also argues that public disenchantment with rulers is magnified by social media algorithms.
Climate change is here, and Nepal’s farmers are not waiting for aid. They are already adapting. On page 10-11 Ben Zimmerman travels to Kaski district to profile farmers who are diversifying crops, saving hardy indigenous seeds and experimenting with organic pesticides as they cope with extreme and erratic weather patterns.
Till next week, take care.
Kunda Dixit