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Despite being from a country that lags behind in every development index ever devised, some of us still seem to be astonishingly thin-skinned about what outsiders say about us. Instead of being outraged about the hundreds of thousands of young Nepali women rotting in brothels in India, we react over forgettable remarks made by foreign actors or authors.
Ten years ago, Nepal's cities were convulsed by paroxysms of violence over something Hrithik Roshan was thought to have said. The politically-instigated riots were supposed to be against India, but six Nepalis were killed, Nepali businesses and tourism suffered, and our international image was badly dented.
Things haven't changed much. Taslima Nasreen is silly enough to forget to take her passport to the airport and misses her flight to Kathmandu. And she tries to make light of it by tweeting innocently that she didn't know she needed a passport to go to Nepal as she didn't consider it foreign. So what? But trust our cyber pseudo-nationalists to get their knickers in a knot and flame her with hate tweets.
They tweeted profanities, but what made things worse was, as usual, a mainstream portal that misinterpreted Nasreen's original tweet to say she had thought 'Nepal was a part of India'. If Nasreen had any plans to take next morning's flight to Kathmandu, she was advised to cancel.
The eruption of self-fanned anger on twitter's timeline later spread to the blogs, Facebook and news portals. People made fun of Nasreen, said she was ignorant not to know Nepal was a sovereign country.Why is it so important for us what Nasreen says or thinks about our political status? Even if she actually thought Nepal was "like India" as did Indian actress Madhuri Dixit few years back, just for the sake of argument, why should we let that bother us? There is no dearth of fools in the world. Should we go around answering everyone?
As a well-known writer, it was careless of Nasreen not to measure the repercussion of her tweet, which although said in good faith, she should have realised could translate as a political statement to many. And it would have been wiser if she just issued a simple sorry and moved on. Instead, she retorted with more tweets, and added fuel to the fire, going on to say fatwas will be issued to her in Nepal now and her books would be burnt.
But much more than an exiled Bangladeshi author, it was Nepal's cyberwarrior community that exposed itself as insensitive and insecure. If Nasreen is guilty of plain stupidity, why grace it with any more importance than it deserves? The way Nepalis reacted was perhaps scarier than what Nasreen said or implied. But most disgraceful in all this was how 'nationalists' of another kind chose to respond. They bent over their backs to issue apologies to Nasreen in a bid to save 'Nepal's face', proving once again how desperately we desire validation by foreigners.
The edifice of our nationalism seems to rest on whipped up jingoism and the faded glory of our past. Our otherwise laid-back nationalism erupts only when some ignorant fool somewhere is quoted saying that Buddha was born in India. Is our nationalism so fickle that we have to get worked up about this even as we know, Nepal as a nation state did not exist when Buddha was born and neither did India? Is our patriotism so brittle that we get into a frenzy when someone says Mt Everest is in China, even though half of the mountain is in China anyway?
If we were truly nationalistic, we should work towards resolving our political stalemate, taking pride in incorruptible leaders, ensuring 24-hour power and double digit growth. True nationalists would be helping create jobs at home so our compatriots wouldn't have to work for a pittance in 50 degree heat in the desert. Yet, one of our greatest source of nationalistic pride seems to be that our young men fight and die for a foreign nation or that the second shortest man in the world is a Nepali.
Ultra-nationalism and politically-fanned jingoism has always been a danger in Nepal. Ten years ago it was hardcopy tabloids being used by politicians to fan the flames of street unrest over Hrithik Roshan. Today, with social networking sites on the Internet, demagogues have an even more powerful instrument to spread hate wider and faster.
Chauvinistic Facebook pages that spread racism get thousands of likes. It's time for peace-loving moderates on social networking sites to speak up to drown out the messages of hate. The core issue is, we take our nationalism too seriously and our socio-economic backwardness not seriously enough. Let's put our own house in order first, let's work to build a prosperous and peaceful Nepal that we can be truly proud of, and nationalism will take care of itself.
