Are you searching for an opportunity to unleash your literary imaginations? If so, get ready to let your creativity, expressions, and thoughts run wild.
What if aliens were planning to visit us soon? What if we have been living on a simulation the whole time and haven’t noticed? What if you had superpowers? Running alongside our train of thoughts, we sometimes stumble upon unchartered territory and dwell there till it fills us completely. From epic literature to famous scientific inventions, all have been the works of unique imagination that dare to question the possibilities.
We are also naturally curious and it is fun just to think about alternate pasts or alternate futures if things were different. What has happened in the past, may not have happened that way. What things we consider normal, may not have to be that way. Our world would have been different if things we are used to weren’t in existence. And maybe, our unique imagination has some glorious future to bring. Let us take our mind’s eye to work, let us explore the endless possibilities, and let us ponder for a moment, “What if…….?
Subtle Dystopia
The movies made all of us think the birth of AI would abruptly annihilate human civilization. But what if AI’s goal has been to subtly manipulate the human minds? Why kill them, when they make good slaves? The customized social media content is creating rapid polarization and thus much hate and debate between people. Exponential rise of conspiracy theories has sunk plain surficial truths into deep gorges.
Did you really want to buy those shoes or did those customized instagram ads infest such desires into you?
“If it is free, you are the product”. Are you unknowingly spending your data and change in thought perception for a free product?
Can you be present in social media and maintain freethought at the same time? Are we already in a dystopia and just unaware?
Trails of Life
You have been walking along the trails of life for quite some time now. Congratulations on making it thus far. Now take some time to look back at it. Tell us your story. Share with us a snippet of an event in your life that means something to you. Also, you’ve come across a lot of other lives, tell us if you found any of them interesting. Show us life through your lens.
PLEASE ENSURE YOU READ THE RULES CAREFULLY BEFORE ENTERING THE COMPETITION:
The article must be original work and must not infringe upon the copyrights, right to privacy and other rights of any person or entity.
Any form of literature (poem / story / essay / article) is appreciated.
Participants can submit their content in any of two languages; English and Nepali.
The competition is open to students of +2 level and undergraduates of any college within Nepal.
There will be no participation fee for the competition.
No articles with a political or commercial agenda will be accepted.
One article per author. Subsequent articles from a same person will be disqualified.
Category for their article can be chosen by the participant. Winners will be declared on each category.
Article should be in either of the formats: .docx, .pdf or .txt.
The decision made by the Judges will be final.
Prize:
Winners of each category will be awarded with certificate of acknowledgement and attractive cash prize as mentioned.
Winning articles will be featured in MeroSpace website and magazine.
On weekends, I and my best buddy Samir liked to go around visiting the cemetery by the Bagmati river. There’s a burial ceremony every other Saturday with the same ritual. First, the cemetery workers dig a decent-sized hole in a free spot. After an hour or so, hordes of vehicles enter through the intersection towards the cemetery following the white van with the corpse on it. The body is put on display and surrounded by flowers. Everyone tries to have a word with the cold body one last time before it is lowered into the ground beneath. People close to the deceased express their prayers over words trying to reason death, the sweet journey of the afterlife engulfing everyone’s speeches. And there is crying, lots and lots of crying. All in all the whole scenario is quite alluring, at least for Samir and I.
Although having this common odd fascination with death, we each had different views on the subject. His was the generally accepted one- that there was life even after death whereas I took the skeptical side- that death was the end of life and heaven and hell were concepts created by mankind to stray away from the haunting reality of nothingness. Taking different perspectives, our conversation always meaningfully explored new nooks and crannies on the subject of death.
Samir studied Business management during the day and tutored some of his neighbor’s kids in the evening while I had my hands full with 2-3 jobs at a time trying to make ends meet in the country’s capital of capitalism. Our personal lives were different too. He lived lavishly with his whole family in his house while I cramped up in a single rented room with myself. But no matter how different and busy our lives were, every weekend the world always aligned perfectly, freeing us from our obligations to provide a couple of hours of spare time for our weekly ritual.
One of these times, however, he bailed out on me to go on a date with his girlfriend. I wasn’t angry at him, just sad coming to realize that I had no one else except him to talk with. In a world of posers, he was the only one I shared my true colors with and now finding out that I was secondary to the only person I could talk to without a mask made me realize how lonely my life actually was. Knowing my imagination would spiral me down to the depths of my depression if I sat in my room, I headed to the cemetery without him.
As Poe would have said ‘the clouds hung oppressively low’ that chilly winter evening. The place was stranded which was unusual. Normally, there would be at least a couple of grave workers cleaning the grounds and a few people walking around or worse, on a date, but today no one was near the cemetery except a young couple walking through the road at a distance with quick steps. It finally dawned on me that it was October 31st, Halloween and even though people here didn’t celebrate the spooky festival, they wouldn’t come to a cemetery today for reasons both obvious and oblivious.
I took a stroll around and came across a freshly dug grave. With no sign of a burial ceremony anywhere near, the place seemed even more strange now. With no one around, the mischievous within me came alive. I jumped into the pit. It was shallower than the usual 6 ft graves. I looked around for a while reassuring myself I wasn’t being watched. Nothing seemed out of place. I laid my body on the damp soil and closed my eyes. “So this is how it feels to be buried”, I said to myself. It felt surprisingly comfortable lying a fathom deep into the earth, although the constant fear of someone closing up the pit mongered in the back of my head. As I tried to lift my body, my right hand didn’t sink into the damp soil the way the left did. There was something round buried under the ground. I sat up and started to remove the mud that surrounded whatever-that-was cautiously, so that I wouldn’t damage it.
It was a lamp, not too different from the one I saw on Aladdin- the movie. I climbed up from the pit and dusted off the little bits of mud that had stuck on the lamp. It seemed to be made of brass but was quite heavy for its size. Out of sheer curiosity, I rubbed it with my palm for a while. Nothing came out of it. I rubbed it with the sleeves of my shirt to see if it needed extra friction. It didn’t work either. I stifled a big laugh at my own naive stupidity. Judging from the heaviness of the lamp, I anticipated some long-lost treasure inside the lamp and decided to open it. At first, the tarnished brass didn’t budge so I had to pull it with all my might. After some jerks, the lid came off- whoosh.
Out of the opening came black smoke, at first dispersing everywhere, high-fiving the clouds and then accumulating into a bulky figure of a ghastly appearance. The whole place became eerily silent as the demonic angel opened his mouth,“Who is thy mortal that hath summoned me from my sleep?” he asked.
Doubtful, more than afraid, about the contrasting appearance of the genie that I had summoned I replied “Hello”
“Well well, you seem to be thrilled, ask any wish thy want fulfilled.” spoke the beast.
“Any… wish?”, I tried to bargain with the devil.
“From heaven’s trickling elixir fountain to the haunting bells of hell, if you can give the word, I can cast the spell ” stated the genie and laughed with all his might.
“I wish to be immortal” I smirked without any hesitation.
“Are you sure?”, he seemed astonished.
Finding out I had made even the demon worried, I chuckled “Yes, I’m sure”.
He then started chanting some mantras that I couldn’t decipher. The only words I could understand were “pleasure”, “away” and “death”. After he ended his chants, he gave me a sly grin and turned into a silhouette, vanishing into the clouds. I couldn’t understand why he would be smiling and rested on the conclusion that he wanted to seem tough even though he had made a terrible mistake, giving mere mortal godly power.
Over the next few days, I tried to kill myself in controlled conditions to see if what I had witnessed was real and not a hologram prank. At first, I constrained myself from drinking water. When I got thirsty just after an hour, I thought the genie’s wish was fake. But after dragging myself through one whole day without drinking, I wasn’t thirsty anymore. Rather, my body was replenished as if having been hydrated from within. I tried to drown myself but after suffocating for a few minutes, I could breathe underwater like a fish. Every part of my body was immortal. I even tried to cut my veins but no blade proved itself to be sharp enough. I would never wound myself, even the smallest of cuts, ever.
I was elated- everything a man feared just seemed pathetic to me now. Rising over every mere mortal, I was on cloud nine. Jumping out of cliffs and swimming with the sharks became my hobbies. However, the genie’s grin always lingered in my mind- the devious curve of his lips, the sparkle glaring out of his eyes, and his elevated cheeks as he finalized his chant.
Years passed and along with it centuries and millenniums. I tried to lay low for a time thinking that if people knew about my secret, they would try to trap me and they did too for a while after my secret went public. But they soon let go of me as it was no crime to not die. I had lost any empathetic emotions toward any people as the human attachment was only short-lived for me. I never aged as no part of me, even my skin never died. But after a while, in my time scale, nothing would stay the same.
Some thousand years into my existence, scientists had gone way too far performing experiments that people lived in constant fear of the many ways science could kill them. There was a big rumor that someone was playing with the Higgs field and everyone was scared to think about what would happen if it went out of hand. A few months passed and one day the false vacuum got triggered. When it crushed everything out, the feeble human civilization also got wiped out of existence. The sun, the stars, everything got obliterated into sub-atomic entities, everything except the immortal me.
Now, there is no light, no sound, no air, nothing. It doesn’t matter if I close my eyes or open them, for all I see is darkness. No senses are of any use. But I do feel cold, not because of the freezing temperature around me, but due to the loneliness inside my heart. As I drift into oblivion, I finally understand the devil’s chants. He was taking the pleasure of death away from me – because that’s what it was, death, a pleasure. It didn’t matter what there was after death, even if there was anything I would never know. All I now know is that death was an escape route from the burden of reality that had now been stripped away from me. The genie’s sly grin is the only thing that fills my head as I drift forever into nothingness- trapped for eternity.
Beneath a white canopy at a building compound on the bank of the Bagmati lay a man of 75, his body decorated with flowers, and garlands – with people flocking around, some in a line waiting to offer flowers and pay the last regards, some gathered around in their circles making a reunion with their friends, a horde incoming and a horde outgoing. The compound in Sanepa was busy with people struggling to park their vehicles afar, and the police cleared the roads so that the people in the red-blue plate land cruisers didn’t have to struggle with theirs. A lot of people there, like me, were drawn in by their admiration for a man; to mourn his death, and celebrate his life. The man was Pradeep Giri.
My admiration towards Pradeep Giri ignited during the lockdown when I came across his discourse on the epic Mahabharata, particularly because of my interest in the epic after binge-watching the Mahabharata TV Series on youtube. Not only was the analysis so profound, but Giri’s storytelling generated great interest in me. It had humor, it had simplicity and the tone had charm. That interest continued, and I started following the man, watching his interviews, talks, and parliamentary speeches.
Giri was a politician, political thinker, writer, and a lot of other things. But if there’s one word I would describe the man, it would be as a storyteller. He had a lot of things to tell. He had seen Nepali society and politics from up close. He was a voracious reader, particularly of literature, politics, and philosophy to name a few. He had gifted oratory skills. He was a profound thinker, an analyst, and a commentator. These aptitudes made him an excellent storyteller, who told stories of the people, to the people for the people – both rulers and the ruled.
Whenever you saw him speak – at the parliament, at an interview, at literature festivals, and on talk shows – you wouldn’t take much time to realize the richness of his knowledge and understanding. He would draw parallels and analogies from the Hindu scriptures, from instances in world history, classics, and contemporary literature, and from his own experience- to explain people and situations of the present. With natural sweetness in his tone, he brought up relevant Sanskrit Shlokas, Hindi Shayari, lines from Urdu poems, and English quotes to the Nepali discourse he gave. Needless to say, he also had a great command in Maithili which was the native language of his dear hometown, where he mostly lived in his Ashram. His intellect, complemented by his natural oratory skills made him one of the rare public intellectuals you would want to listen to, not just in the political sphere but in Nepal overall.
His simplicity in lifestyle and his love for rural life, close to the trees and nature made me admire him even more. He said on a talk show that he loved planting trees and how good he felt thinking about how the tree he planted grows and lives past generations with its ever-benevolent nature.
At parliament, he brought historical and literary contexts and drew connections to explain his arguments. He had poems, Shayaris, idioms, and quotes at his disposal. From bringing the story of Chamberlain and Churchill of World War in condemning the government’s inaction during Covid-19, to reminding the house of BP Koirala’s ideas on people-centered development – he held the mic. He brought the stories of Hamilton and Jefferson, Nehru, and Indira Gandhi, and explained how crucial the role of leaders is in shaping the nation during its initial years. Like the grandchildren gathered around to listen to interesting stories from their grandfather, the house would listen – folk stories, stories from his past – which were largely connected to the past of Nepali politics, stories from fiction, stories from the legends, and scriptures.
He wouldn’t get the best marks at attendance in parliamentary meetings, but he never came unprepared when important matters were in context, like the Covid-19 pandemic, MCC, the border dispute, and budgetary sessions to name a few. Words were his weapons. Yet, they were never harsh. There was a sense of responsibility in his words. Rather than blatant criticism, his words felt like advice. Contrary to the opposition speeches that were usually just derogatory rhetorics targeted at the government- Giri stood apart offering constructive criticism, with rhetoric so powerful, it left a pin drop silence in the hall – yet offended none.
He was a politician of course, but a large part of his identity was as a political thinker. Despite being a member of the Nepali Congress party, he had a strong inclination towards Marx and communism. He was also influenced by Gandhi and Indian socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia. While in Banaras, a place renowned for sheltering Nepali political refugees, Giri was influential not only among the Nepali diaspora but also among the Indian youth socialists. He was a strong supporter of BP Koirala’s ideas on socialism and an alternative model of development and was vocal against policies prioritizing urban over rural development. His stand on republicanism, inclusive socialism and Maoist Conflict resolution was significant in the transitional years.
Pradeep Giri was a rebel in his own right. He refused to sign the constitution of Nepal- 2072 as a sign of protest because he did not feel that it addressed the concerns surrounding the Madhesi people and he felt it was rushed. He expressed concerns to youth leaders of his party that there hasn’t been enough effort in challenging the party leadership, and that there should be more protests against the wrongdoings in the party. He gave discourses on Marxist ideology at the invitation of communist parties despite being a member of a party where anti-communist rhetorics are widely practiced when agendas don’t suffice at elections.
Giri, despite being a member of parliament from time to time, and having close ties to the likes of the then Prime Minister Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, never had an ambition for any powerful executive office. When offered by Bhattarai to be the spokesperson of his cabinet, Giri politely refused stating “ I don’t have a proper sleep schedule. Sometimes when I read a book at night, I don’t even stop until it’s dawn already. So, I am not capable of the job.”
Giri, an anarchist by nature, thought holding an executive post would deter his freedom. Despite being born into a wealthy political family, Giri was untouched by the lust for luxury and power. He preferred being in an advisory role – the ideological part of politics. He wanted the youths to lead but strongly believed that the youths needed to adhere to a guiding principle and an ideology. He preferred being Chanakya to a Chandragupta Maurya, in his own words.
At a time when the politics of ethics seems to be at its deathbed; when principles don’t drive a party and a leader anymore; when the politics of divide is on the rise; when power and wealth are the only motivation, the absence of a man like Pradeep Giri will create a void that cannot be filled so easily. Adieu to the man who had at hand the sword of power but never fancied wielding it, still chose to stay among the wielders teaching lessons; to the man who held words and stories as his power; to the man- Pradeep Giri.
