For bioregionalism to succeed in making any headway in South Asia, education must be de-Macaulay-ized to give space to traditional and local knowledge more in tune with bioregional concerns. Democracy that has been hijacked by rapacious business interests must give way to Gandhian Gram Swaraj and traditional decentralized governance structures.
By Dipak Gyawali Sep 27, 2024
The statement “Water if Life” invites a complacent shrug from business-as-usual folks for its banality but it invokes a sense of awe from those who are worried about its increasing degradation from myopic mismanagement of at least the last half century.
By Dipak Gyawali Sep 16, 2024
Globally, things are not much better either. When it comes to violent conflicts such as Ukraine or Gaza, international organizations such as the UN seem powerless to do anything (except when it was big powers misusing UN’s legitimacy in Korea or Afghanistan).
By Dipak Gyawali Aug 21, 2024
Hinduism is really not a religion but a supermarket of many religions and paths that differ more from each other thanMuslims differ from Christians. Modi and his BJP championed one brand that goes against the Hindu practices of others, including Tantrik/Shaivite/Buddhist-mixed Nepal, Bihar, Bengal, Assam and South India. His personalizing Ram Mandir at Ayodhya irritated even the Shankaracharyas.
By Dipak Gyawali Jun 12, 2024
My early job as an engineer was in bringing electricity to Dandeldhura some four decades ago. It was tough because one could find nothing, not even a shovel or nuts and bolts in Mahendranagar: one had to go to Palliya crossing the jungle where dacoit Phulan Devi was lurking, or even go to Lucknow for such pieces of equipment.
By Dipak Gyawali May 23, 2024
Both these conflicts did not suddenly start now: they have old antecedents going back to the post-World War-II defined Bretton Woods world order, its slow unravelling since1971 with Nixon abandoning the Gold Standard, and its accelerating decline at the start of this century with America breaking its promise to Gorbachev not to expand NATO eastwards.
By Dipak Gyawali May 08, 2024
Drawing on insights from scholars of yore – Herodotus, Ibn Khaldun, Voltaire, Malthus, John Stuart Mill and Darwin – and referenced with 206 detailed endnotes for a book of only a hundred pages, his first chapter begins by debunking the widely held belief that the impending crisis was unforeseen.
By Dipak Gyawali Apr 03, 2024
The Swiss in Nepal were about to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Swiss-Nepal cooperation; and with Nepal reverting back to multiparty democracy, there was a growing debate in Switzerland about what development cooperation was and should be.
By Dipak Gyawali Jan 09, 2024
The only difference this time is the rise of the non-West – China, Russia, India and rest of the BRICS –who are also entering into the fray for resources and markets. And what they, having more or less broken the manufacturing and military monopoly of the West, bring to the table are civilizational values very different from the Judeo-Christian ones of the Collective West. How that will shape the new world order is yet to be seen.
By Dipak Gyawali Dec 13, 2023
Alas, it has taken hardly a half dozen years – and two parliamentary elections under this dispensation – to see all hopes of any decent governance dashed. These years have resembled a bad tele serial of unending scams and corruption at the highest level of parties and governments they lead.
By Dipak Gyawali Nov 06, 2023
Currently Nepal’s fossil fuel addiction is severe: scholars at the Center for Renewable Energy at Pulchowk Institute of Engineering calculate that the country spends over 170% of its total goods export earnings to import petroleum products.
By Dipak Gyawali Sep 20, 2023
The kind of “flood” Kathmandu and other cities experience, with streets running full of water as if it were a river, is not because of too much rainfall: indeed, during the most recent flooding one saw in Kapan rainfall was not the extreme of cloudbursts but a normal monsoon event.
By Dipak Gyawali Aug 16, 2023
Both the Chinese and the Indian assertions, as well as currently African and South-East Asian as the boundary fault line of Indic and Sinic civilizations, are bound to play a greater role in governance debates in the years ahead.
By Dipak Gyawali Jun 21, 2023
The principle behind PSH is very simple and it has been used in Europe since a hundred years back: you pump water from a lower water body (a lake or a river) to a pond at a higher altitude when electricity is throwaway cheap during off-peak night time and send the water back to drive a turbine and produce electricity during peak hours when most needed.
By Dipak Gyawali May 23, 2023
The changing nature of that migration in modern times was first demonstrated to me at the 2006 March World Water Forum in Mexico City. Given the ongoing “regime change” political upheaval in Nepal at the time, official Nepal was totally absent without a formal government delegation.
By Dipak Gyawali Apr 19, 2023
Prachanda’s understanding of Nepal’s political economy was questionable from the very start. In the Onesto interview, he states that Nepal is a “semi-feudal, semi-colonial” country where salvation lay in the overthrow of the regime by a violent “peoples’ war”.
By Dipak Gyawali Feb 23, 2023
One way of conceptualizing the climate problem is to think of the atmosphere as a glass kettle on a stove: if it is simmering, the warm water rises up and cold water sinks in a gentle circulation. That is what the atmosphere was like before climate change.
By Dipak Gyawali Jan 23, 2023
Nitin later sent me his iconoclastic book What’s Left of the Jungle: a conservation story, which I have just finished reading. And I must admit, it is among the few books that I haverecently encountered which not only provides a sharp picture of the convoluted challenges environmentalists face in the Global South but also helps many like me reflect on our own, often unsatisfactory, past efforts to right the wrongs we have encountered.
By Dipak Gyawali Dec 21, 2022