Santosh Kalwar's Blog, page 12

The Broken Heart

The good news for Nepal and Nepalese is that we have recruited new PM—again, this time an intellectual PM with a doctoral degree. The bad news is that only three months of extension is given to our new PM to draft a constitution of federal democratic of Nepal.  Like many ordinary Nepalese, I am, too, hopeful that Dr. Baburam Bhattarai will live-up to the people's expectation. 

In the midst of political quagmire, I am writing this for all the broken heart people who fall in trap of being in love and later are heartbroken. According to one simple belief, everybody falls in love once in their life-time.  Some fall in love with politics, other fall in love with religion. Some may also fall in love with literature and some may just never fall in love, like me.

It seems that falling in love is quite easy. But, to remain falling entire life-time, is difficult. Pardon me for my not-so-open feelings on love. It is extremely hard to remain in love for longer period of time. Scientific experiments on large number of couples have demonstrated that a stronger relationship may not last more than two years of time.  Like just-living, just being in relationship is not enough. Why? Simply because if you are just being in relationship then there is higher chance that your relationship will break at some point in time.

The current data suggests that majority of the people get divorce in later part of their lives, especially in West. The same fact is trending in our developing world, as well. People are starting to live independently. One person loss is another person's gain and another person who is gaining popularity these days are self-help authors. Thousands of self-help books are sold on happiness, love, relationship, sadness, despair, anxiety, addiction, and dog-mantra and sex guru. However, not everything that is written is based on scientific merit and truthfulness, not everything that we trust can be trusted in our modern tech-savvy society. As our present day activity swings from Facebooking, Tweeing, and YouTubing , every passing seconds many relationships mode is changing from "In a Relationship" to "Single" and vice-versa. 

Many news-makers have written on heartbreak, they all report that "escapism" is the good way to deal with the problems of broken relationship but, I don't agree. Based on my personal experiences, I feel that the problem with the broken-heart lies not merely on psychological level but also on neurological level resulting in depression, anger, frustration, anxiety, stress, suicidal-thoughts, hatred, anguish, loathing etc. 

If your heart is broken once, you can try fixing by loving with another person. But if your heart breaks, repeatedly, what solutions do you suggest? Live, die, commit suicide, try more, forget it. Unlike romantic love and heartbreak, in our national politics also, many PM have broken our heart by not drafting the constitution on time, Dr. Baburam Bhattarai is yet another hope, hopefully not the last.

Hope you will come back soon...

Since you are gone, my world is black; I can see only grey

how can human be killed by her heart?

I don't feel like crying, I don't need to pray,

because I don't believe in Jesus or God, and I never will

Everyone got their problems, mine is so far away

how she can still be so close on me?

I miss you, but only for a while

I have felt lot of pain and sorrow,

maybe I'll become numb tomorrow,

'cause there shouldn't be so much feelings.

I've seen these spoiled souls, around me,

but you were never one of those

you don't need to bring me Mountains,

gifts or anything

Just bring yourself back to my arms,

that is more than enough, my only love, my soul

where are you gone all these days?

David Foster Wallace commencement speech

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"If you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete ...A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real - you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues". This is not a matter of virtue - it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centred, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home - you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job - and so now, after work, you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: you have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your cheque or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etc, etc.The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.Or if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just 20 stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks ...If I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do - except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: it's not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible car accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a much bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am - it is actually I who am in his way.Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line - maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible - it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important - if you want to operate on your default setting - then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already - it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."· Adapted from the commencement speech the author gave to a graduating class at Kenyon College, Ohiohttp://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/...

Living on the Edge

Lyrics:



There's something wrong with the world today

I don't know what it is

Something's wrong with our eyes



We're seeing things in a different way

And God knows it ain't His

It sure ain't no surprise

(YA!)



(Chorus)

We're livin' on the edge

We're livin' on the edge

We're livin' on the edgeWe're livin' on the edge



There's someting wrong with the world today

The lightbulb's gettin' dimmed

There's meltdown in the sky



If you can judge a wise man

By the color of his skin

Then mister, you're a better man than I



(Chorus)

We're Livin' on the edge

You can't help yourself from fallin'

Livin' on the edge

You can't help yourself at aaaaaaaall!

Livin' on the edge

You can't stop yourself from faaaaaaaallin'

Livin' on the edge





Tell me what you think about our sit-u-a-tion

Complication - aggravation

Is getting to you



If chicken little tells you that the sky is fallin'

Even if it wasn't would you still come crawling

Back again - I bet you would my friend

Again & Again & Again & Again & Again



Tell me what you think about our situation

Complication - aggravation

Is getting to you



If chicken little tells you that the sky is fallin'

Even if it was would you still come crawling

Back again - I bet you would my friend

Again & Again & Again & Again



Something right with the world today

And everybody knows it's wrong

But we can tell 'em no

Or we could let it go

But I would rather be a hanging on



(Chorus)

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah



(Repeat Chorus)

The destructive male by Elizabeth Cady Stanton

I urge a sixteenth amendment, because 'manhood suffrage,' or a man's government, is civil, religious, and social disorganization. The male element is a destructive force, stern, selfish, aggrandizing, loving war, violence, conquest, acquisition, breeding in the material and moral world alike discord, disorder, disease, and death. See what a record of blood and cruelty the pages of history reveal! Through what slavery, slaughter, and sacrifice, through what inquisitions and imprisonments, pains and persecutions, black codes and gloomy creeds, the soul of humanity has struggled for the centuries, while mercy has veiled her face and all hearts have been dead alike to love and hope!The male element has held high carnival thus far; it has fairly run riot from the beginning, overpowering the feminine element everywhere, crushing out all the diviner qualities in human nature, until we know but little of true manhood and womanhood, of the latter comparatively nothing, for it has scarce been recognized as a power until within the last century. Society is but the reflection of man himself, untempered by woman's thought; the hard iron rule we feel alike in the church, the state, and the home. No one need wonder at the disorganization, at the fragmentary condition of everything, when we remember that man, who represents but half a complete being, with but half an idea on every subject, has undertaken the absolute control of all sublunary matters.People object to the demands of those whom they choose to call the strong-minded, because they say 'the right of suffrage will make the women masculine.' That is just the difficulty in which we are involved today. Though disfranchised, we have few women in the best sense; we have simply so many reflections, varieties, and dilutions of the masculine gender. The strong, natural characteristics of womanhood are repressed and ignored in dependence, for so long as man feeds woman she will try to please the giver and adapt herself to his condition. To keep a foothold in society, woman must be as near like man as possible, reflect his ideas, opinions, virtues, motives, prejudices, and vices. She must respect his statutes, though they strip her of every inalienable right, and conflict with that higher law written by the finger of God on her own soul.She must look at everything from its dollar-and-cent point of view, or she is a mere romancer. She must accept things as they are and make the best of them. To mourn over the miseries of others, the poverty of the poor, their hardships in jails, prisons, asylums, the horrors of war, cruelty, and brutality in every form, all this would be mere sentimentalizing. To protest against the intrigue, bribery, and corruption of public life, to desire that her sons might follow some business that did not involve lying, cheating, and a hard, grinding selfishness, would be arrant nonsense.In this way man has been molding woman to his ideas by direct and positive influences, while she, if not a negation, has used indirect means to control him, and in most cases developed the very characteristics both in him and herself that needed repression. And now man himself stands appalled at the results of his own excesses, and mourns in bitterness that falsehood, selfishness, and violence are the law of life. The need of this hour is not territory, gold mines, railroads, or specie payments but a new evangel of womanhood, to exalt purity, virtue, morality, true religion, to lift man up into the higher realms of thought and action.We ask woman's enfranchisement, as the first step toward the recognition of that essential element in government that can only secure the health, strength, and prosperity of the nation. Whatever is done to lift woman to her true position will help to usher in a new day of peace and perfection for the race.In speaking of the masculine element, I do not wish to be understood to say that all men are hard, selfish, and brutal, for many of the most beautiful spirits the world has known have been clothed with manhood; but I refer to those characteristics, though often marked in woman, that distinguish what is called the stronger sex. For example, the love of acquisition and conquest, the very pioneers of civilization, when expended on the earth, the sea, the elements, the riches and forces of nature, are powers of destruction when used to subjugate one man to another or to sacrifice nations to ambition.Here that great conservator of woman's love, if permitted to assert itself, as it naturally would in freedom against oppression, violence, and war, would hold all these destructive forces in check, for woman knows the cost of life better than man does, and not with her consent would one drop of blood ever be shed, one life sacrificed in vain.With violence and disturbance in the natural world, we see a constant effort to maintain an equilibrium of forces. Nature, like a loving mother, is ever trying to keep land and sea, mountain and valley, each in its place, to hush the angry winds and waves, balance the extremes of heat and cold, of rain and drought, that peace, harmony, and beauty may reign supreme. There is a striking analogy between matter and mind, and the present disorganization of society warns us that in the dethronement of woman we have let loose the elements of violence and ruin that she only has the power to curb. If the civilization of the age calls for an extension of the suffrage, surely a government of the most virtuous educated men and women would better represent the whole and protect the interests of all than could the representation of either sex alone.Elizabeth Cady Stanton - 1868

Nowhere to be found

Finland is closed for foreigners.

Finland is closed for foreigners. Please don't apply for anything in Finland. Finland is not yet ready for students, employment, foreigners (aliens), and or anybody human. The Finnish Immigration service is closed. They cannot process application on timely fashion.

If you have decided to visit Finland then change your mind. It is not suitable place to live or study. This place sucks like no other. The people do not speak simply because they don't want to. They want you to learn Finnish instead. They are fucking rich Europeans after all.

The Finnish Immigration service website says it all,



" At the moment we are receiving a large number of enquiries and requests to process cases more quickly. This is using up some of the time that we have available for processing applications."

What is using what time? Processing application? It only takes nine months to have a baby but Finnish Immigration service cannot process fucking application in nine months, you see. IMO, they have given strict advice not to process application of foreigners maybe from political diplomats. If Finland was not ready for foreigner, why did they invite them? Based on above quoted sentence, it now seems that their time is killed by mere phone call. How stupid answer is that? We cannot process application because you call us and your call will take much of our time. WTF.  What are they doing in their office? Playing ice-hokey? Or, watching porno.

I think it will be better for Finns to throw-out all the foreigners from the country and remain completely shut-down for international relation.  Their way of looking "multi-culture" aspect is very different than rest of the world.

Adaptation is part of human nature but, many of those who cannot adapt to Finnish climate of Finnish culture should leave this country as well.

Every nation works in their own self-interest. Student visa are relatively easy because the universities earn some bucks out of that from EU, I guess. However, visa based on family ties are fucking difficult because their system provides "social benefit" to all those who are granted permission to come and live.

Many have taken advantage of such system and many will take it. The Finns should re-vise their strategy in case of immigration.  The official wait is not good for anyone. It does not help either to their client not to them in long run.

A phone query doesn't help either. You call them and ask about the status of your application and this is what they will say:



"Your … application is in QUEUE. And we don't know how long it will take to process it."







If they don't know, they who knows? They have your application and they are processing it but, you see, they don't know. Fucking IGNORANCE.

Wake up officers; it is summer-time in Finland, if you don't know it already.  One reason could also be that these government workers are not paid good salary by the government. All the government work is slow, in every country and in every fucking culture. I do not know why. Why is that the government works take so long time unlike private works?

They simply do not want to tell you because you belong to poor country and they can play rich vs. poor game on you.

One solution is to file a lawsuit to their office. But, this will make matter much worse, besides you need money, power and status for that kind of thing.

I am really pissed-off with their service. After staying in Finland for so many years, I think this country is not fit for me in long run. Today, I have decided that I will not stay here anymore. After one year or so, I will leave this country and never come back again.  

This country will be remembered in "silence". 

Reflections on the lost cell-phone

My wife recently lost her newly purchased Nokia mobile handset, while using the public transport. But, what is the fuss? Every day, people either lose something or gain



something, and for my wife it was no different — she just lost a mobile handset of about 50k, which I had gifted on her birthday.



No, I am not upset about it; neither had I scolded her as any semi-intelligent husband might have done in such a situation. All right, the big worry is that I am waiting for the lost mobile set to return. As if any wise husband would do, I am waiting for the person who might have found the mobile handset, to return it. It has been a long wait already, and I am still wondering, why the woman operator after dialling into her number says, "the number you have dialled is switched off". Maybe, the lost mobile phone has been by someone, I mean some human (not monkey), who has voluntarily switched off the mobile phone.



Mobile technology has progressed vastly in recent years. It has been upgraded with performance, battery life, operating system, child safety, camera and what not. Nevertheless, it still lacks traceable technology (suitable enough to find it) when a person loses it involuntarily. On the other hand, consumers do not always necessarily record their phone's IMEI number —which is a unique manufactured number given for each handset. If this number is known, one might possibly track their expensive handset. I put "possibly" because I am no mobile expert and this in surely not my domain of research.



Some mobile operators also give special services to their customer when they lose their SIM card. After this bitter mobile losing experience, I found that one could visit the mobile service operator's office and ask for the same SIM card. How can I not bring forth philosophical ideologies of Buddha and our Nepalese stereotype in this context? Why are you saying that you are a Nepalese, if you do not obey the teachings of Buddha? Some of his moral attributes: honesty, loyalty and bravery are three pillars of our Nepalese individualism.



Meanwhile, I do want to make a point on honesty and loyalty. People lose their belongings daily, and those who find them would never like to return them. Why? Never mind, I have to re-consider buying her a new handset.







Published: The Himalayan Times

Editorial section: Topics



Added At:  2011-07-05 10:25 PMLast Updated At: 2011-07-06 10:25 PM

Intellectual dishonesty

This refers to Mr. Biswas Baral's The plagiarist (June 30).



Plagiarism is a real issue of the world. I do not mean to be disrespectful toward the writer but the truth is that ideas and words are not the same. Ideas are bigger concepts derived from intellectual insight that does not need any words. It can be discussed, revised and recorded in any forms whatsoever. On the contrary, words are always naked.



Having taken bits-and-pieces from some source and naming them does not impair the originality of article, Yet, by simply giving credits to other authors, the writer seems to be valuing himself. Intellectualism comes from accepting and realizing the fact that there are bigger ideas and better individuals working on the tings you would ever have imagined.



Santosh Kalwar



via myrepublica.com



Published: Letter to Editor

04-07-2011

Republica

TB or not TB

This stage in my life is called "taking drugs". I am taking drugs, not illegal drugs, but medicinal drugs that are vital to eradicate tuberculosis. Wow, good for you, mate, that is what smoking can cause you.



On the one hand, we can always enjoy smoking cigarettes and a number of other drugs like marijuana and other illegal pills and drugs; but on the other hand, this causes severe lung damage.



So be it.



According to my highly acclaimed Finnish doctor, I am now at a stage where my lungs have been infected by bacteria known as Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The good old doctor suggests that the bacteria can be contracted in several ways, not only by smoking fancy cigarettes. You can get it by coming into contact with air droplets from sneezing and coughing by infected people. Despite many causes, I can only point my finger at smoking because that one has lasted for 18 good years. And I know many folks out here who do it for fun and to share the enjoyment or to pass the time. Although I want to recommend stopping or reducing smoking, I fear you will not because I did not too.



Some years ago, I wrote an article in the Post Platform entitled, "I used to smoke". In the article, I clearly mentioned the ups and downs of smoking; but I think many things have changed since then. Everyday, people smoke, and cigarette companies are bringing out new brands of cigarettes with skillful marketing.



A majority of the people got into the smoking habit at a very young age. When I started, I was just seven or eight years old. Later on, it became an everyday habit (addiction, I would say) with friends admiring the techniques and the beautiful ways in which the smoke would come out of the mouth. Adults too find it rather fascinating when they see Bollywood or Hollywood actors smoking in a movie.



As I can see for myself, mind you, smoking is, was and will be never cool. There is a good old saying in Nepali, "Ki parera janinchha, ki padhera janinchha" (one learns by doing or by reading). I hope that you will learn from my bitter experience that smoking gives more pain in the long term than it does in the short enjoyment of a puff. Our government has also introduced a new regulation banning smoking in several public places that is highly appreciated. Although many pundits would argue about that issue, I personally appreciate the government's move to ban smoking in public places.



Life teaches us many lessons we need to survive. Among many other lessons, one lesson I have learnt and can never forget wholly is "never smoke again, during my poor and painful lifespan".



Published: The Kathmandu PostSource: ekantipur.com

Posted on: 2011-06-24 08:23