At The Buspark (2), Kentucky Blues
At The Buspark
The legend has it I got beat up at the buspark and that is where it all started.
The truth is nobody laid hands on me. My classmates who plotted the whole thing were so scared of me they did not bother showing up themselves. They knew they had to come back to school once the vacation was over. Where were they gonna go?
Another meme has it that my grades nosedived because I started chasing girls. It was an all boys boarding school.
A third story line says I was not a math and science guy. I was an English Literature person. And so I did not do well for the A Levels Physics, Chemistry and Biology. The truth is that for the nationwide exam I sat for at the end of the year my score for science was the highest in class. I failed O Levels English Literature.
But let's start with the bare facts. I never hit anyone. No one at any point ever hit me. I never got into any fight. I never feared anyone while at school, before, during and after. I was always this natural leader type person with plenty of friends. Until people with a combined age of a few centuries ganged up on me.
Something big did happen at the buspark. My sports captain, someone who shared my ethnicity, was chased to be beat up. A student from my hostel a few years junior to me was humiliated at the buspark. The guy's reaction to the incident was that he lost his mind over the years.
Something very wrong happened at the buspark. Something much worse happened at the school before and after. And it was not from the students. It was from the motherfucking Pahadi Bahun teachers who ran the place.
It is important for me to bring this up. Students/classmates I had beat year after year for seven years to that point a few years later went to Harvard, Stanford and everything in between. My solace is that many of them ended up with brand names like Apple, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, but not one ever thought in terms of creating one. It is called the road less taken. I have not created one either, but I have said I will. I got time. I am only now getting started. You could go work for Apple, or you could create an Apple.
Like I say, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, I never went to Harvard. That makes me one better than Bill Gates in the out of the box thinking department. A Nepali - not a grad of that high school - who is a Harvard MBA now living in Seattle recently reported to me that some of my friends describe me as "the smartest person ever to have attended Budhanilkantha School."
The housemaster of the red house - this motherfucking Bahun by the name of Jiwan Raj Wagle - was the original mastermind of the buspark incident. During the weeks prior he apparently told his students, "Do what you have to do outside of the school compound!"
And so some of his students volunteered to orchestrate the buspark incident. My vice captain, who was from Kathmandu valley, tricked the perpetrators into writing an apology letter to the school authorities not long after it happened. They promptly owned up to the whole thing.
So now the school authorities had everything they needed to take action.
Instead they suspended my sports captain. A few weeks later they suspended me. Then they suspended my vice captain.
I have immense hatred for the Bahuns like Jiwan Raj Wagle and Sudarshan Risal. What those motherfuckers started was a family feud. And they found a ready ally in the white male headmaster.
First they wanted to kick me out of school. Then they said let him finish the school year and then let's kick him out. Finally they suspended me from my office of House Captain.
It was the strangest experience. I had not participated in any fight. I had not hit anyone. No one had hit me. I had not organized any protest later. I had felt bad about the injustice later, but I had kept my feelings to myself. I was gearing up for the end of year exams instead. And they still did what they did.
What happened was the entire establishment, the Pahadi/Bahun establishment started seeing me as a future Prime Minister, and they decided it was best to nip the bud early. And so they came after me full force. Nepal has never had a Madhesi Prime Minister.
It was a nexus of the Pahadi Bahun and the White Male. One Britisher once called me "Napoleon" a year or two later. Apparently my year as House Captain had threatened the White Male order in the world. He also compared me to Maradona. Maradona was relentlessly fouled on the soccer field. He suggested it was like that.
"Don't you miss it when we used to rule India?" he asked another Britisher in my presence months after I was done with school. This was in Thamel, Kathmandu.
I only came to America after he left Nepal. He was the college counselor. Before the final exams for A Levels, there were the trial exams. It was grades from these that went to the US and UK colleges. When you scored a BCC, the school gave you ABB since it was thought you would improve two months later and people did. I scored CDD. Everyone else's grades got jacked up by one, this guy left my grades at CDD. The day before the finals began he yelled at me so hard he woke up people asleep one floor up. He spoiled my week. I graduated with EEE. After school I did political work and wrote a 100 page book and applied. I got myself admitted to the top Economics department in the world, "not for your numbers, but your actions and words." The school awarded five seats and three scholarships. One of the five declined because he wanted to go to India. One guy readily took the scholarship and went to Chicago. One Bahun took the offer, went to Chicago, and came right back to go to medical school in India. He invested in round trip airfare to spoil it for me. If the Pahadi Bahun White Male nexus had not spoilt it for me yet one more time I might have met Barack Obama at Chicago. And he might never have become president. (
The First Time I Heard The Obama Name)
There was this guy Anil, classmate. If I were as good at soccer as he was, I thought, I would not spend as much time as he did at the Computer Center, I'd be out on the soccer field. I mean, this guy was our Bill Gates. He was the out of the box guy, passionate about computers and electronics. This white guy once yelled into his ears so bad Anil went to Japan for college, the rest of the crowd headed west.
That yelling was child abuse. Anil was not legally an adult yet.
It was like they stabbed a dagger into my thigh with the buspark incident and I reeled for the rest of my time there. I might have been depressed at some level. It is this experience from where I derive my intense political affinity for women. The illogic of the injustice made me feel very out of place in the logics of Physics, Chemistry and Biology. I went through the motions of my science classes like Galileo going through the motions of church services. He instead focused on the swinging pendulum. I saw water but did not have the vocabulary for it, so I did not know what it was that I was seeing. I took the emotional hits but it was long years before I had the words to articulate what might have happened.
I have thought in terms of political warfare. If I had the mind to do so well in academics and in group dynamics, the positive kind, maybe I can apply that same mind to political warfare and drive home the message to those Pahadis, those Bahuns. It is still not too late. This fight could go generations. I could fucking colonize their backyards.
This was also my introduction to the White Male. I was reintroduced to the White Male later in Kentucky.
One line of attack was that I was an out of the valley guy, I did not have connections in Kathmandu, and so the mishap fell in my lap. That was not the case. My vice captain was from the valley. There were as many connected Kathmandu valley people in my blue house as there were in the red house.
And a prince classmate threw his weight behind me. His father was brother to the king. The country was no democracy. In many ways his father was the most powerful man in the country. This prince got a body builder type to show up at school and go scare the people in the red house.
The white male headmaster suspended the prince. This prince, son to the most powerful man in the country, was not too connected to not be suspended, but the minions in the red house were too connected? That argument flies in the face of logic.
They came after me, they came individually after me. They formed an alliance of the Pahadi Bahun and the White Male because both felt their places in the world threatened by an under age guy who had just given them the best year any House Captain ever in school history.
And so I say nuke that high school. My idea of nuking would be to see a day when every page in every textbook is online, accessible to anyone and everyone. I think I already have seen that day. It is called the Wikipedia.
Image via WikipediaI was super engaged in 2005, 2006 and half way through 2007. I have been rather disengaged from the middle of 2008. But I just came across this article by Kanak Mani Dixit that gave me a glimpse into some of the work that is being done into the new constitution. 
