Our Times

I have not sat before the laptop because I missed writing. I have sneaked into my rather unorganized room to write some computer codes but thoughts had been hovering in my head from very morning. They have come and left, when they came I was either at office or just at road and by the time I reached home they would have left me. They would come to me like a déjà vu. This way I have many times written stale thought. May be thoughts are not stale unless they are written or told. I am remembering my school days, not the school, not many friends but just I wanted to know why I was like that or why that time was like that. I can remember those chit-chats in breaks and lunch hour, how they would pass in no time and how reluctant we used to be to return to class. In those ten minutes rarely we reached the class before fifteen minutes. Still, discipline was much strict in school then in college, we were regularly reprimanded for being late, not taking studies seriously, being careless about life etc. etc. The nature of the teacher was same at school and at college. Many times when the lecturers and teachers who had failed to get job elsewhere uttered those things, I would feel pity on them yet I knew the generation that was to follow ours would be much more pitiful if we had to stand in their foot. They regularly advised and chide us for not taking studies seriously. This continued throughout the semester but most of us always passed those semesters in spite of hopeless lecturers. The same lecturers would boast on department rooms how did they manage to drill their lectures into our dummy brains. They felt proud of their skill and credited themselves for the unexpected results. I feel most of us are shaped in schools. During school days we used to write essays on children, moral education, discipline etc. where we wrote ‘when young a kid’s brain is like soft clay which can be molded into any shape desired by the potter’. I can’t say how many of us knew what we wrote yet it seems right. Our education system aimed at producing people who knew what a sewing machine is but it doesn’t produce tailors. Those were the days when the country was seeing political changes; people were divided in terms of their political bending. In home parents, neighbors, uncles and aunts all talked about politics. Newspaper were filled with ‘who said what’ kinds of things. TV’s showed the speech made by politicians. Socialism, Communism, Fascism, dictatorship had become common as Constituent Assembly, Republic, Federal Republic has become common these days. I remember during the first general election in 1990, I got a flag of Communist Party of Nepal, United Marxist and Leninist. I brought it hope and tied it at the top of water tank. Those days flags waved at the roof of most of the home. Many people had got new nicknames like Short Communist, Lame Congress, fat ‘Panche’, little exploiter, bearded reactionary etc. etc. In many homes empty walls hung the pictures of political leaders or their quotation. To sit before the elders used to be the most boring thing for us. We also learned names of people who have been credited for changing the world like Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Churchill, Angels, Mussolini, Stalin etc. Soon their stories and biographies started becoming popular. Not because my father supported communist (it might have contributed something), I had started observing that communists were more dedicated in organizing assemblies, public meetings, pamphletting or other party related activities. I clearly remember the days when I had a tough time reading the translated ‘Dialectical Materialism’. I was only at class nine then. We used to talk about Lenin and Marx. Those literatures of equality, classless society, triumph of the working class inspired me. What Marx wanted, was also the world I wanted to be in. I wanted to be a labor the movers of the world. I liked farmers, the feeders of the world. I used to think if the communist win we will witness that world, the euphoric world. I might not have known free education, free land etc. but I wanted that. I hated extravagant marriages, festivals etc. I had slowly started thinking the richs are cruel, exploiter and the protectors of all miseries. I didn’t understand what a capitalist society is or who a capitalist is but I disliked anyone who was known as capitalist. Before class ten I had read ‘Dialectical Materialism’, ‘Communist Manifesto’ and few other literatures. Yet they contributed nothing to my understanding. I just learnt capitalist society is worse, capitalists are blood hound, materialism and industries are the only ways to prosper and communism aimed for classless society. Even today I don’t know much things. While working I got chances to meet people with political background, who have worked for prohibited parties during the kings rule, who have participated in revolutions but I realized they know much less than myself. Once we were just chatting the general issues then one of us asked the other who has been a popular communist in his time the difference between socialism and communism, he couldn’t say a word. To him the same things I had learnt in college was the definition of communism and communists. I cannot say, what leaned me toward capitalism in the later days of my college. I had however ditched my love for communism lot earlier.