Petrol Pumps don’t sell us petrol on credit. Each one has to pay money before filling their tanks but still..
Nepal Oil Corporation owns 1.2 Billion NPR to Indian Oil Corporation
Why?
Nepal is suppoed to be Number 1 in Asia in terms of Fresh Water Resources
but still Kathmandu relies of expensive Water Tankers and Mineral Water Bottles.
Why?
Nepal has physical capacity of generating 84,000 Mega Watt of Hydro Electricity
but still we live in 11 Hours a day load-shedding
Why?
Mr. PM BRB got back from India and with him brought tons of controvery. Tons of people support him and many are just after him like they do for most people who talk a litle sense in context of Nepal. Yes, PM BRB has a postive vibe with him and dreams of changing Nepal but the people around him aren’t planning to do that anytime soon.
I am not a economic analyst nor i have read much about BIPA so i am not going to comment whats in it. All i know about BIPA is that it is some kind of aggrement which provides security to any Indian company that invests in Nepal.
Well, when it comes to India any tom dick and harry in Nepal start commenting how about it is that we are dealing with India, we have sold our souls to India and are almost colonised by India but forgets the same thing when he goes to watch the latest SRK flix in swanky mall in KTM and eats popcorns which were probably imported from India.
I have a problem with this herd mentality of we Nepalese. We talk more than we do and almost all of the time that talk ends in negativity.
Coming back to BIPA, if you ask my thought on it, well, i support it. Frankly, speaking Indian companies have been investing in Nepal for decades now. I am not talking about big money investors but small time mom and pop business. What do you think all those Thakur dai’s who cut your hair, where do they come from, the folks who sell suntala-kera on streets. Yes, now you might say they come from Terai areas but majority of them come from across the border. Ask them nicely and the will say. These people don’t care whether Nepal does BIPA with India or not. They were here since long time and will be here for long time.
But as Nepal moves from agricultural based economy to a a industialized nation, we will need more than mom and pop business. We will need huge amount of capital to be invested in Nepal. Do you really think the newar sahuji’s of kathmandu are going to open their wallet and say go take my money and build a industry and neither they are going to do it on your own. A country which is obsessed with rent-seeking mentality does not sees the benefits in investing money in a business which they have to run day in and day out. They are happy to build a house and live on its rent.
We will need huge amount of FDI to develop Nepal. Even India which opened itself to forgein investment only in 1993 didnt build itself only depending on TATAs and Ambanis. It was the FDI that helped India get out of its debt and walk on development path. So, why do we have that reservation for inviting FDI into our own country? It’s not like businesses who invest 10s or millions of $$$s into Nepal will shut down their business abruptly and ask for compensation with Nepal Gov. Any business which invests that much money will want to maximize its profits by doing actual business and not go after the Gov.
It is we who have the problem, we don’t have the guts because we know we are going to create problem for them and we just can’t except the reality. Although MR, PM did the BIPA with India but it is his party which sees that as a problem because his party knows their main source of income is from harassing these big business and extorting money from them and what else than harassing Indian businesses in name of saving the Sovereignty of Nepal. His party knows with BIPA their main source of income will be lost and they might to resort to other tactics of extorting money.
MR. BRB needs to mend fences within his own party first then only can he move forward in completing the peace process and finally building the official constitution of Nepal. Until then Good luck, MR. BRB
“I wrote this post around January 2006 but somehow didn’t publish it. It was in my Blog’s Draft ever since and i never checked what was written in it. Today, somehow i stumbled upon it. Yes, this post was written in 2006 and is getting published in 2011. Yeah, i know, i can get lazy sometimes…
“
———
I still remember those days of 1996. Those were the early days when we ot first chance of watching private television on our TV. Those were the days when i was in school without any tension and fear , the only fear i can remember was of my teachers beacuse i could never get by heart those long multiplication tables . uff i still remember those days. I can still remmeber those days but now in 2006 it even doesnot feels like a decade has past. I had not even seen a computer in 1996 let alone internet but i was much eager even in those days if i heard anything about technology. Watching indian news channel were the only source of news in those days since there were no other television channesl in Nepal except state owned Nepal TV which did brodcasts only 8 hrs a day in those days.
Today i can feel that Technology was the only thing which motivated me all the time. My friends used to talk of movies and all other stuff but i got boar hearing them. In those days i had no such friend who would like Techno things but even i was also to confused about new tech gizmos which i used to get those days but i did liked them. In ‘96 i could not understand why i was affected to technology it was just like an infactuation which one feels when he is in Love but whenever i used to hear something that happened in America always used to make me shiver. So i even started watching Dennis the Mennace so that i could get some Western accent in my life. But i think watching those serial really brought a change in my life. My whole mentality was chabged watchning them.
Now here comes 2006 and my carrer is just getting started . I am in a new job and i have lots of plans for future. Lets see where i will be in 2016. A decade after 2006.
Ok, folks blog time, I know, I know you are pissed, I didn’t write for months and suddenly here am I writing again.. bear with me.. as I don’t really get words or (time) or motivation to jot down what I feel but today I thought like I should write a word or two.
Today I went to a sort of meeting/conference of Entrepreneurs For Nepal (e4nepal). Well, I liked the way people met there, everyone was kind of cozy with other, talking things that actually made sense, dreaming ideas and motivated enough to change their fate along with Nepal’s.
But there was something which really did baffle me for a moment. I had been to a bootcamp organized by same organization e4Nepal about a year ago and the same thing I witnessed there as well.
Today, in the event i was given a book where I had to add my details along with organization or company I was affiliated with, I left the affiliation field blank because currently I am not affiliated with any organization to say officially but I gave a quick glance to other names listed there and organizations they were affiliated with. Sadly, over 90% of the name had listed some sort of NGOs as their affiliation. I mean seriously! Once again, really! An NGO.
NGO, For God sake! You are in a meeting of entrepreneurs and you list your affiliation to a NGO.
By definition, a entrepreneur is meant as:
A person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on financial risk to do so.
What risk are you taking by being affiliated to a NGO. Yeap, you do deal with tons of moolah that you get as donations but there isn’t risk involved with it. That ain’t your money, neither it is your investors. You get donation, you spend it, if your money makes any changes then good for you but 90% of time I have seen those money don’t create any change. You write a report paying more money to some consultant and say that your NGO has done great work. But there’s no risk involved in it. Sorry to break your heart but you are not a Entrepreneur. Stop, calling yourself with that name.
There is nothing called Social Entrepreneurs. That’s a vogue term you made up to tell yourself that you are doing something meaningful. I can sense from far that you are into it just because you can’t take any risk. You fear of failing and fear of being ashamed when you fail.
Entrepreneurship is all about failing and getting up. If you haven’t failed and haven’t experienced the heat that comes with failure, then you are not an entrepreneur. Do yourself a favor, stop following the herd mentality that you can’t get a job in Nepal. If you can’t get yourself a job, create the god damned job for yourself. There are gazillions of niches all wide open in Nepal that anyone of you can easily tap. Leverage the technology, bootstrap, eye for ramen profit for the first year of your operation. Do some actual business which actually makes you money. Stop going to NGO, INGOs and stop thinking how you can give back to the community.
First make your position in the community and then think giving back to it. I even saw some students who still being in their college are affiliated to some sort of NGO. I was highly baffled by that. Aren’t student supposed to be thinking about how they are going to stand up in the society or has our country’s education gone so advanced that it produces student who directly make their presence felt in society and as soon as they get out of school they starting giving back to society. I don’t think so.
Take my point you college and school going student, yes you don’t have much option in today’s Nepal but that does not mean you can’t create your own options.
Get over it. Stop trying to make yourself glamours by joining some NGO. Do some real shit. Make some actual money. Stop thinking about uplifting society and people. First get yourself up on your feet, make moolah and lastly as Gary Vaynerchuk famously says:
Get off the bitch train.
Nepal is seeing some great new startups coming around with some decent progress. e.g harilo.com, esewa.com, foodmandu.com
These aren’t exactly Web Company but provide services from there website.
Like Harilo bring US shopping to Nepal
Esewa. Online Payment
Foodmandu.com – Online Food Ordering
Likewise, there are many more vertical completely open in Nepal right now without any competition. No one is trying to do anything yet.
Online Book Shop (like amazon)
Tickets Booking
Online Music store
But biggest of them might be Credit Card Processing
Here’s how
Almost 90% of Nepali Banks offer SCT Debit Cards which is developed by only one company SmartChoice Techology and these cards do not work online yet.
Yes, The Central Bank of Nepal does not allows Credit Cards or debit Cards to be used for Foreign Exchange but how about Domestic Payment.
For an example, like in India, you can use your VISA Debit card to pay on a Indian website like indiatimes.com or Makemytrip.com but they wont work on International site like amazon or ebay
Likewise, someone can collaborate with SCT and make those cards work with at-least Nepali website. A Payment Gateway kind of thing. This way you aren’t doing Foreign Exchange.
Now, you might say, SCT could do this themselves, but they aren’t doing it yet. Maybe they are too busy just handling the bank and debit cards locally so aren’t really focusing on taking their cards online.
Someone could chip in.
Just me 2 Cents.
I have been working online for about 5 years now! First started working for a company that made website then I moved on to do my own things from home, sort of freelancing. When you read about freelancers in west they tend to solely work for local clients in their area. Few only think about working with overseas clients as they do not see the profit in it. But for me since I started working alone, I probably have worked only with 2 or 3 local clients. Majority of clients that I work with are from US, UK and other western countries. Last year I had written a blog post describing what it is to freelance from a third world country, all the benefits and advantages of doing so, but what I hadn’t written was the experience of doing it.
You start to feel lonely after sometime, you don’t see your clients face, maybe sometime talk on phone but that’s with it. All you see is their mail in your Inbox and occasionally some chat messages. You can find tons of articles and posts about how you can talk with people of Twitter, Facebook and IM but nothing beats face to face conversation and that’s one thing I miss most.
Yes, now you might say that you could organize Tweetups and Meetups in your town or city but that’s out of question because i haven’t found anyone in this city who works on internet and shares the same experience.
Today after living 22 years in this city and doing my whole school and college here when I walk out on streets there’s hardly a face I can recognize let alone call someone friend. Any why is so? The Brain Drain and probably me being way too much introvert!
Almost 70% of my school mates have left the country and rest of them just disappeared after we graduated from school. I hardly know anyone in the city where I grew up. Yes, I do have couple of friends still left here and they are the ones who are stopping me from going completely insane. Luckily!
As per insanity, well I have done some really insane things in past when I got really bored. Once I travelled 600 Miles to Delhi just to go and eat in Karim’s and sometime last year i had travelled 280 Kms to watch a movie in a Multiplex. Go beat that with insanity. I have no idea why I did that but probably that must have been the toil of working alone which got onto me. I get crazy and do crazy things just to keep my mind occupied.
I can’t believe I just wrote these things, probably because I am feeling way too much alone right now. 
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhqZ0RU95d4&w=610&h=385]
If you are following Gary Vaynerchuk on Twitter and have watched his keynotes and speeches then you know what hustle actually means. I am a big fan of Gary and try to follow what he says. If you do not know what hustling is then go follow him on Twitter and see how he engages with his followers and learn the way he puts himself up in front of the crowd.
He is not a robot neither he hires assistants to tweet for him. He responds to most his @replies on twitter but still runs two different companies and makes millions of dollars each year. That is by no means a small feat. He has worked hard and so can you.
2011 has just started so make a New Year resolution well, in fact don’t make a resolution rather make a revolution in your life. Go work hard, work smart, hustle in your life, make changes and spread smile.
Wishing you a very Happy and prosperous New Year!
Good Luck and Keep Hustling!
I wasn’t born in 70′s and 80′s but i don’t know why i have so much fondness for the hippie and pop culture of that era. I guess being born in Kathmandu might be one reason, no idea but time and again i go on Wikipedia and read as many articles i can find out about that age and especially about the Magic Bus and the Hippie Trail.
Many of you who were born after 1980s won’t have heard about it. In fact you might not even have heard about Hippies and what kind of people they were and even if you heard about them chances are that all you know about them was that they were drug peddlers who lived in groups, created ruckus wherever they went and were devotee of Lord Krishna (Hare Rama Hare Krishna).
But there’s more to that…
Hippies were not only cheap backpackers or people who lived on drugs, rather they were the once who started the movement of Nirvana, the thing that still today sounds exotic and cool to many westerners. I will leave up to you how you want to define hippies, if you want to know more about them go check their Wikipedia page. What interests me more is the Hippie Trail and the Magic Bus, the bus that crossed continents, a journey that transcends cultures and bullshit political boundaries and transformed the world as one single country for entire human being.
Their journey used to start from major western cities like London and Amsterdam and many even crossed Atlantic to join the herd. Starting the journey from UK, they used to travel up to Turkey crossing major European Nations. From Turkey they used to hop across Asia via Iran. From Iran to Afghanistan, then to Pakistan, India and finally into Nepal and end their journey in hidden Shangri-La of their time, The Kathmandu. Kathmandu still has a road, Jochen Tole, nicknamed Freak Street in memory of the many thousands of hippies who passed through.
Kathmandu was the epitome of this hippie movement. Since Drugs like Hashish and Cannabis were almost like legal back then, it was major attraction for hippies who crossed continents in search of these drugs. Now the major part of this story is not what hippies did while they came to Kathmandu but the way they came here.
They used to travel overland, no planes, no ships and no bullshits. They used to hire hatchbacks, buses and Lorries and drive all the way across the Eurasia to reach their destination. Just see the number of countries they crossed and what has happened to those countries in modern times. Afghanistan bombed, Iran is crazy, Pakistan on a turmoil, India on it path of glory and Nepal lost its virginity long ago.
The trail which once was considered a path to Nirvana is now a nothing less than Shithole.
I won’t go too deep into the current status of these countries right now as you probably now lot better about them, but just give a thought in your mind, how much has times changed since the 60′s and 70′s. Do you think the time when hippies could freely embark on a journey from London to Kathmandu back them can do it today? Can we even cross one country overland without going to kind pain and frustration we have to experience when crossing border overland.
Is this time to good or was that time good, when political bullshit was far from Asia and all we knew what how to live a happy life.
Think about it?
Here are the some images from the Afghanistan, Iran and the era we have lost now:
The top three images are from Afghanistan? Can you imagine that today? Will you please change your views on Afghanistan now?
The recent “allegations” over the three Pakistani Cricketers for match fixing is a shame for Pakistan but above that it is shame for whole cricketing world. I am a crazy cricket fan, more so because my whole childhood passed playing cricket, almost 24 years i must say to be exact. I have been watching news a lot lately just because of these scandals going on (else, i don’t watch news, my belief on News was shaken badly after India TV came into existence ).
Today while watching news i heard that Ricky Ponting, Matthew Hayden and one other English whose name i don’t remember said that, Match Fixing and Corruption in cricket is more so in the sub-continent because our Culture is deep rooted with Corruption and we are taught to be corrupt while growing up. May be true for them, in some sense because the 8 countries in South Asia rank way below in Transparency International Report.
But, that does not mean everyone is corrupt here. I don’t know much about International Cricket before the 1996 world cup but after that the first time i heard about Match Fixing was in 2000 when South Africa was touring India and few Indian players were found to be bribed to lose the match.
Those players to be exact where Mohammad Azharuddin, Ajay Jadeja and even Herschelle Gibbs of South Africa was alleged in the crime. That tour was a disaster; i still remember how whole Cricketing Culture was shocked to hear that Match Fixing was in happening in International Cricket where Players play for the sake of their country rather than a club or corporate company.
If Match Fixing occurs in IPL or Champions League T-20, then no one cares because those games are meant only for Entertainment, does not matters you lose or win. But in International Cricket, Match Fixing is like bacteria which will not only decays the country where it happens but entire cricketing world.
The allegations from Pointing and Hayden, that corruption is rooted in Sub-continent is enough to break the whole cricketing world in two Parts. Given the size of BCCI and money and power it has and coupled with PCB and Cricket Srilanka, it can be a disastrous for these teams even if they think of parting there ways from ICC just because of these allegations.
I have a feeling that Aussies are pissed off with Murali who won Warne in race to top bowler so they time and again come up with allegations against the sub-continent players. But these Australian Mates must watch their mouth before speaking.
They alleged Pakistani players being the most corrupt, i agree, some may be corrupt, specially folks like Mohammad Asif and Shoaib akhtar, but don’t forget Pakistan is the Country where Wasim Akram, Waqar Yunous, Inzamam-ul-haq come from and who were more talented than any Australian or English player.
They allege India is corrupt, but MATE, you forget Sachin, Ganguly, Dravid, Kumble, who single handedly brought back the entire Indian Team to the top of the world after the shady history of Match Fixing. Just because few happened to be mole in the group does not mean everyone is same.
No team wants to Tour Pakistan, because of security, that is rightful for them, but dissolving PCB or striping Pakistani Team from International Cricket will be the disastrous action that ICC can take today. If you want to change anything, change the way Cricket is run.
Change officials of PCB, take extreme actions against people like Mohammad Asif, Salman Butt, etc. so no one dares to fix a match again but banning whole team will be hard blow against all those upcoming Pakistani Players who have high aspirations to play for their country.
And this one for Aussies: what ya talking mate, stop whining, just because you are world champions does not means your players can’t be corrupt. You know, you telling sub-continent is corrupt sounds quiet racist to me.
Additional Reading: Give Pakistan cricket team a chance of redemption