Guys,

Check this out. Please comment. Thanks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/magazine/10global-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

BKB

aba k garne yaar. I think Nepal needs a bit more foreign attention. I don't know why they focus only on Poor Afrikan countries. Nepal is one of the poorest countries, we are yet the best people on earth.

Nepal deserves to get some attention from our own leaders, those leaders who misuse the funds given to the poor, they sure will die a "kukur's" death or in next life they will be the poorest.

prabhu bhoka lai bhat deu, hamro neta lai buddhi deu.

Thanks alot for sharing this article.

Very good insight! It may be hard for people to listen to Pinchett's idea and not even migrants may agree at family's separations. But both sides have valid points, feeding the poor and helping is the most important and at the same time, it is not going to be so simple and complications are sure to arise. After reading the article, I felt the great burden on myself as well and couldn't stop having a very sad feeling. But at least, I learned and I realized the smallest role I can play.

Some sentences from the article:

Outside Africa, no country is poorer than Nepal. Its per capita income looks like a misprint: $270 a year. Sudan’s is more than twice as high. Nearly two-thirds of Nepalis lack electricity. Half the preschoolers are malnourished.

He is more concerned about helping Nepalis than he is about helping Nepal.

Indeed, Pritchett attacks the primacy of nationality itself, treating it as an atavistic prejudice.

Everything about the gathering seemed familiar, except the group’s chairman — Gure Sarki — whose shirt had such gaping holes they bared his shoulders to the sun. He wore a black knit cap yet shivered in the heat, and a boil-like growth the size of an egg rose from his forehead.

Sarki, 52, is an Untouchable whose family had lived in Chaurmuni for at least 100 years. Chronically hungry in his early 20s, he walked nine days to an Indian border town with road-building work. He stayed three years and bought a little land, but returned home after his father’s death at his grieving mother’s request. Sarki’s half-acre inheritance was too small to feed his children, so he worked for others when he could and borrowed when he had to at the village interest rate of 36 percent. He pointed to a reedy teenage son and boasted that he fed him three daily meals. “I would like to eat three times a day, but I am feeding the children,” he said. (Pritchett, wincing, whispered, “I’m almost certain this boy is malnourished.”) On one level, the story confirmed Pritchett’s view: migration, even to India, had helped Sarki more than anything else. But he did not leave again. “I like this place,” he said. “I have brothers and sisters here.” Staying or going — each involved pain.

A low-caste, underfed goat farmer, in a place with per capita income of $90 a year, Sarki is global inequality corporealized. He has never seen a bathtub. He has never been to a dentist. He has never owned a pair of glasses and squints to see his feet. He said the boil on his head has been there 30 years. and he did not know what caused it. When I told him the average American lived on about two million rupees a year, $25,000, he laughed as if hearing a fable. “That is like a story to us,” he said. He thanked us for coming and asked how to do better. Pritchett stammered. “What can you say, Be born in America?” he said to me. Then speaking through a translator, Pritchett assured Sarki that few Americans could manage with so little. Sarki smiled.

The jeep was quiet as we drove away, as if the sheer abjectness of Sarki’s poverty negated the meaning of anything that could be said about it. When we paused at a teahouse an hour later, I asked why Americans should care — so what if there are destitute goat farmers on the other side of the world? “I dislike arguments that try to give self-interested explanations: ‘We should care because they’ll become terrorists,’ ” Pritchett said. “I think we should care just because they’re human beings. The arc of human history has been the broadening of the scope of moral concern.”