A vision for Nepal-India relations

BABURAM BHATTARAI

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PTIPrime Minister Manmohan Singh with his Nepalese counterpart Baburam Bhattarai at UN in New York. File photo

The major thing is to build trust between our two countries, two governments, and two peoples.

My visit to India, which begins today, has great historical significance.

Nepal is passing through a major political transition. We fought against feudal autocracy and monarchy, and for overall socio-economic transformation, for almost 60 years. At times, our movement was peaceful, and at times, violent. But the consistent goal was to abolish feudal autocracy and monarchy, and democratise the state and society. Ultimately, the major political parties — which included the Maoists and traditional parliamentary parties — reached an agreement in 2006 to overthrow the monarchy and institutionalise democracy through the Constituent Assembly (CA).

Peace, constitution and India

We succeeded in abolishing the monarchy, and ushering in a new democratic era in Nepal. We are now in the process of institutionalising achievements through the CA, accompanied by socio-economic transformation, and federal restructuring of the state. According to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), signed in November 2006, we are now trying to complete the specific task of army integration and other aspects of the peace process. We are also trying to complete the process of writing the Constitution through the CA. Only after wrapping up this entire process will these gains be institutionalised, and we will enter into a new era of democracy, change and development in Nepal.

The role of India in this process is crucial. Nepal and India share a very unique relationship. Nepal is sandwiched between two huge states of India and China. But we are virtually India-locked, as we have an open border on three sides. Most of our socio-economic interactions take place with India. Two-thirds of our annual trade is with India, while only 10 per cent is with China. Given this historic tilt towards India, our bilateral relationship is unique. When you have more interaction, you have more problems and more friction. At times, there are misgivings and misunderstandings on various issues — some are genuine, while others are born out of scepticism.

India played a positive role in the peace process in Nepal, and during our transition towards democracy. My visit, at this juncture when we are at the last stage of completing the peace process, assumes special significance. While the peace process is basically conceptualised and led by Nepali political forces, the goodwill of international forces, particularly our neighbours, is very important for its success.

Security and development

An important bilateral issue between Nepal and India is related to politics and security. Nepal virtually lies in the southern lap of the Himalayas, and shares borders with two huge states of Asia. This geopolitical reality has to be taken into account. Naturally, there would be political and security concerns of our neighbours which Nepal is committed to observe keeping in mind mutual interests. Nepal will not allow its soil to be used against the security interests of any of its neighbours. Another key issue is economic development and development of resources. In the present day world, the economy of every country is interlinked with that of others, especially neighbours. If we have to prosper, we can only prosper if we cooperate with each other. Poverty and underdevelopment in the neighbourhood will have a fallout, and hamper your own development.

India and China are developing at a fast pace. Nepal, lying between two fast-growing economies, cannot remain backward and under-developed. We will seek the cooperation of both our neighbours, especially India.

We have to find areas of economic co-operation for mutual benefit of India and Nepal. One major field is the exploitation of water resources for mutual benefit. The next is drawing in Indian investment to Nepal — we are committed to creating a conducive environment for investors and providing them security. The trade balance between our two countries has been quite skewed. Our trade deficit with India is quite huge. The import-export ratio is about 7:1, which is not sustainable. That is another area where we have to deepen our economic cooperation.

Personally, I have had the opportunity to get my education in India, and my area of interest has been economic development. I will try to utilise my relations developed over the years to enhance bilateral relations, especially designed towards maximising economic benefits for both sides.

If Nepal can develop faster, it can become a development partner for India. For India also, a more developed Nepal will be a better guarantee of its security as only with development, peace, and stability, there can be security. Security concerns cannot be treated in isolation, but must be viewed in totality. Security and economic development must be seen together.

Trust and goodwill

The visit to India is basically directed towards building a better understanding between the two countries and two peoples. In that sense, it is a goodwill visit.

My personal thrust would be to have a very free and frank discussion with my counterparts so that we can upgrade the relationship according to contemporary needs. The relations and agreements institutionalised in the 20th century may not be enough to meet the needs of the 21st century. Hence, the emphasis would be to develop our relations further, clear misgivings and misunderstandings that we have against each other, and sort out the problems left by history. When the subcontinent was colonised by the British, they left behind a legacy which has created friction among the nations of South Asia. We have to overcome that, and develop mutual relations in the changed time and context. Instead of harping on old disputes, Nepal would like to look forward, and create an atmosphere of cooperation.

There are certain political issues, which would need more discussions. We can engage on it freely and frankly, but they can be postponed for the future. The major thing is to build trust between our two countries, two governments, and two peoples. Once there is trust, and we are sensitive and empathise with each other, even the most difficult issues can be resolved amicably.

A new era

To reiterate, instead of pushing any specific agenda, I want to talk about all the issues in a friendly spirit, with the aim of conveying and understanding bilateral concerns. This will also be an opportunity to interact with those outside government, especially civil society, media, and intelligentsia. Given my long association with Delhi, I have several personal acquaintances there and look forward to renewing those relationships.

It is my strong conviction that my current visit to New Delhi will usher in a new era in our bilateral relations. Nepal is in the last phase of completing its peace process, and is about to enter a new phase of peace and development. Our new bilateral relationship, which will be based on a strong development dimension, can bring about peace and prosperity.

My dream is to have an inclusive democracy, sustainable peace and prosperity in this part of the world. Nepal will try to contribute its best to foster that relation among all the countries of South Asia. Nepal-India relations can be developed as a model of cooperation between neighbours. I am quite confident that after this visit, traditional misgivings between the different actors in Nepal and India will substantially be cleared, and a foundation for better partnership for development in the 21st century would be laid.

(H.E Dr. Baburam Bhattarai is the Prime Minister of Nepal. He arrives in New Delhi today, on his first bilateral visit after taking office.)

The Hindu : Opinion / Lead : A vision for Nepal-India relations

The Hindu : Opinion / Lead : A vision for Nepal-India relations

Jagjit Singh, Reviver of Persian Ghazal Singing, Dies at 70

Jagjit Singh, a singer of wide popularity in South Asia who helped revive and popularize ghazals — a venerable form of Persian poetry set to music expressing the writer’s feelings, especially about love — died on Monday in Mumbai. He was 70.

The cause was a brain hemorrhage, a spokesman for Lilavati Hospital said.

Until Mr. Singh embraced the form, ghazal singing was followed largely by the elite. He helped bring it to a wider audience, including young people steeped in rock and hip-hop. With a hauntingly velvet voice expressing the brooding sadness and the lyricism of his songs, he performed to packed audiences in India, Pakistan and elsewhere in South Asia and released dozens of albums during his 40-year career. He also sang ghazals for Hindi films.

Jagmohan Singh, the son of a government official, was born into a Sikh family on Feb. 8, 1941, in the state of Rajasthan in northwest India. He was rechristened Jagjit on the advice of a family guru. He obtained a master’s degree in history from Kurukshetra University, in the northern state of Haryana.

Mr. Singh showed a talent for music, including singing, from early childhood, and in 1965 he moved to Mumbai to try make a career of it. After performing at weddings and singing advertising jingles, he established himself with his first album, “The Unforgettables,” in 1976.

The freshness of Mr. Singh’s voice — a departure from the prevalent style of ghazal rendition, heavily based on classical and semiclassical Indian music — earned him an enthusiastic following.

“The Unforgettables” was a joint venture by Mr. Singh and his wife, Chitra, a Bengali singer whom he had met in 1967 and who survives him. They sang together on many other albums. Their only child, a son, Vivek, died in a car accident in 1990.

Mr. Singh was awarded India’s third highest civilian honor, the Padma Bhushan, in 2003.

Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

THE FIRST STORY IS ABOUT CONNECTING THE DOTS.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

MY SECOND STORY IS ABOUT LOVE AND LOSS.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

MY THIRD STORY IS ABOUT DEATH.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.