Choosing a topic to write on for a newspaper column at one of the most turbulent times in Nepali or any other history is like 'taking the road not taken', to use the title of the Robert Frost poem. A long time columnist too has their own moment of writing special features to commemorate the association. Dismayed by the snail's pace of political process in the country, therefore, I have developed a desire to theorise the stalemate. This would be both hubris and strength of an academician and literary writer who is writing column in a newspaper like The Kathmandu Post.

Foreign code of conscience

I look at our times from the selfsame tension, this perpetual process of adjustment. Looking back at the panorama that my column pieces have created, I see time unfold like a narrative in a Chinese scroll. But each column that you write seems to rise not only from the situation and the times but also from your personal judgment. When you look back at what you covered as a columnist, you see a history that we all have lived together. I have spotted my own problems and have been cautioned by readers that I sometimes drift towards literary waters and seek citations in my writing, which is not warranted by a column piece in a broadsheet.

I have come across some very friendly responses from expatriates and erstwhile students, and from some irate readers who pass very strong comments. It is all a positive gain for a columnist because you know somebody is dialogically engaged with your arguments. Responses relieve me in one important sense because writing for the media means exposing yourself to an unknown audience and unchartered territories where you will be judged, to use poet W.H. Auden's expression, under a 'foreign code of conscience'. Readers' responses do not come to you lock, stock and barrel. It is like an after-the-show theatre experience. You stage the play but cannot catch up with the audience after they disperse. But there is one important difference. Readers do not converge in one common theatre for somebody's experience. But columnists and readers do share a theatre, which is the country, politics and the common destiny that governs us all.

Writing in defence

A few memories are in order. After king Gyanendra imposed emergency rule in 2005, people's movements and free media reporting were restricted. Professor Lok Raj Baral, returning home after attending a meeting in Delhi, was arrested at the airport. I decided to raise this subject in my column. In carefully worded text, I questioned the rationale behind arresting an academician. I was not hopeful about its publication. But The Kathmandu Post editors did publish the piece, after all. I was surprised and delighted. I wrote these lines in the column: “I challenge the Indian media to produce evidence of remarks they reported he said in Delhi to implicate him as a betrayer. Did this professor ever indulge in looting the country and amassing wealth? Did he ever inspire people to kill old and feeble and innocent armless people in cold blood in political battles?”

That essay was read by many, including the top cabinet ministers of the king's government—Kritinidhi Bista and Tulsi Giri. I got a message from Bista that he would look into that matter and a call from Giri who wanted to discuss the opinions expressed in my Kathmandu Post columns, including this one. I had a lengthy discussion with him on my first generation mobile phone until it died. I was happy to know that some people were reading my columns.

Another incident is somewhat funny. At a certain wedding reception at the Radisson Hotel, an angry man came running towards me and uttered this questions in English, “Where do you think you are going?” I said “toilet” because I was rushing under pressure. He actually meant what was I was trying to prove by opposing the king's government in my columns. I was delighted to know once again that this rich, privileged elite was following my writings. There are many other instances.

Writing without cynicism

I know how interpretations can take their own courses once they are judged 'under a foreign code of conscience'. I learned more about this after I wrote in my column about a visa episode under the rubric, “Visa and empire of indifference”. I wrote this piece after I was roughly denied a visa to go to New York at the invitation of American writers. I wrote, “Like the protagonist in BP Koirala's story Shatru…, I too began to wonder why American visa was denied to me. Was it because of my democratic disagreements with the American Ambassador's interpretation of Nepali politics or America's call to the Nepali parties to accept king Gyanendra's first misleading offer, in my Kathmandu Post essays? But I knew as if in a flash, it was none of these. Who would bother to read my essays and say, “Oh, so you are a professor, a writer, one of the important promoters of American studies? Good! Come this way, please!” (August 9, 2006).

This was followed by many readers' responses and the American Ambassador's open reply in the Kathmandu Post itself. My purpose was neither to critique the US consular's office nor to be anti-American. It was just a debate, a voice perhaps that was needed to theorise the Nepali obsessions over American visas. I did that as an academic, not as any politician or media person. But I was surprised by the overwhelming response.

I was never given any editorial input to write on since the student editors themselves instituted my column under the above title. I have written each piece impelled by a certain inner energy, and as the man who asked my direction, without being mathematically accurate about my 'destination'. But I always write with no cynicism, which is in line with the spirit of the Kathmandu Post that, as far as I know, never worked to 'manufacture consent', to use Chomsky's phrase, for any power groups in this country.