Oped»
Bridging the gap
- (un)common sense
KATHMANDU, FEB 08 -
You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. —Joni Mitchell
Will the young Nepali diaspora lose their connections with the old ones both in Toronto and back in my home country? Grown ups in Toronto I came in touch with during the last one and half years I have been here are a worried lot. “But we have to deal with Canadian realities,” my friend Diplov tells me. Is this a betwixt life, then? Many of the Nepali families migrated recently with some grown up kids. These kids are going to schools in Toronto. Some of them have moved to colleges and universities.
Toronto is perhaps the most diverse city on earth. Ride the underground subway trains and the world appears before you — the mosaic of faces that my anthropology professor showed us in our first class in the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Schools are not much different except, perhaps, in some areas where you see the predominance of one ethnic/cultural group. These exclusive places are becoming rarer in Toronto as new immigrants arrive and as the young kids grow up in the immigrant families. When the children of Nepali migrants go to these schools, they meet the world that is much beyond their Nepali home. They have to extend themselves into the world.
It was not hard to adjust to this world, Diplov told me. Teachers were nice and helpful. But for a while it was a bit confusing. It was not language as such, but the world was totally different, until we became a part of it.
Some of the angst is the product of this need to constantly jostle between the encounter with the broader world and their home front built around certain parental expectations. Parental expectations mainly come in two ways, says Diplov, a third year student majoring in international business at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. The biggest worry is about the way the young ones conduct their love and sexual lives. Many parents, not all, used as they are with the idea of control and regulating the sexual lives of their children, find it hard to accept the fact that young ones explore these things early on. This creates an interesting dynamics. The male children often are a lot freer than the females. But you could see why young Nepalis want to get out of the clutches.
The career paths are no less contentious. The emphasis is always on fields that will result in high pays — e.g computer science, medicine, business or finance, although the later two seems to have gotten some beating after the collapse of the financial system in the last year. To go to a university is the most desirable. Many who end up going to colleges are considered to be doing less than adequate. Quarrels over choices and love lives are not uncommon, many have told me during my one and half years’ stay in Toronto.
These two main issues aside, the question about losing connection with their tradition is a constant theme. Nepali community is not demographically significant in Toronto, with a best estimate of around 8,000 living in Greater Toronto Area. Within the city, they are scattered into different neigbourhoods. Many in the Nepali communities have been discussing the ways the grown up potentially help their kids connect with Nepal. The proposals I have heard range from establishing Hindu temples to building a Nepali resource centre. In December 2009, in a meeting organised to discuss the idea about Nepali Community Centre, one of the participants had argued that we had to go for building a Hindu temple because over 98 percent of Nepali communities are Hindus.
A friend of mine told me about how other communities very actively cultivate their culture and religion in their kids. For instance, according to him, Tamils take their kids to their temples regularly. Wouldn’t it be nice to have our own temples with our own priests? he asked. The young ones, based on my limited interaction with them, do not seem to be keen.
“We have to make it to this world,” many say. What does that mean? That we cannot be in a ghetto. Instead, what about extending ourselves into the world? Given the conditions in which Nepali immigrant communities are in, it is perhaps time to think of more creative ways of helping the young build connections with Nepal and the older generation. One way would be to encourage them to travel to Nepal regularly. Many are doing that, although it is not feasible for many to do that regularly given the cost and time involved in this long distance travel.
What does it mean to build connections with the old generation? Obviously, one is to give respect to them. Most do, but the modes of paying respect have changed. But more creative ways would be doing things that can help them learn about lives in Nepal through the stories that old can tell them.
For instance, it might be a good idea to explore if a small group of high school Nepali students in Toronto can video interview old people. Many of them are either residing in Toronto with their sons and daughters or visiting them from Nepal. The students can make a project of understanding various aspects of Nepali lives that these old people might have lived. For instance, they can ask old people about their villages. They can ask them about how men and women shared or did not share work. They can ask how caste system used to work and how it is working now. They can ask them about things changing in their villages and towns.
Or, what kind of food they used to eat? What vegetables did they grow? What kinds of songs did they sing or hear? How did they celebrate festivals? How did they farm? How did all of these things change in their lifetimes?
Making old people the subject of their inquiry would be one great way to recognise the old generation and make them feel that they are valued: that they are not simple repositories of superstitious beliefs, but active makers of their own lives and active chroniclers of the days gone by.
This project then could be complemented with more footage of Nepali lives that the students can make when they visit Nepal. Digital videos have become cheap enough these days to explore this. This can lead to making of a powerful documentary on changing lives in Nepal as lived and told by the old people. Both in Nepal and outside this connection between generations are coming under tremendous strains as people are constantly on the move. There is no substitute to long and enduring connections.
This documentary then can be screened in high schools where Nepali students go to or in the local libraries. Young diaspora could be an important medium for that. Instead of asking them to confirm to regulated lives, this kind of projects could go a long way in building genuine bonds based on mutual respect and recognition.
Headlines
Advertisements
