At a height of 3,600 m, Jomsom, nestled in the upper reaches of the Himalayas, is a sweet, windy, one-horse town that looks like a film set from a Clint Eastwood western. It has some good hotels and eateries and several German bakeries. It was at a private finance company's ATM that I chose to withdraw 10,000 Nepali rupees just before I boarded my bus for Beni, another small town but much lower and closer to Pokhara, Nepal's favourite holiday destination.
As luck would have it, after I punched in my debit card's secret number, the teller machine baulked, denying me both the money and a receipt of the aborted transaction. Going into the adjoining office of Prabhu Finance, I asked the man there what I should do. He said the network had been bad and that the amount would be credited to my account automatically.
I got into my bus that rattled and grunted with trekkers from various countries, a veritable United Nations on the move, over rocks and stones that were the path. No roads here.
When the bus had exhaled its last set of passengers at Ghasa, my guide got a call from the owner of the Hotel Majesty, Jomsom, where I had stayed. Apparently, the ATM's network rewired itself splendidly after I had left and spewed out the money it had resolutely denied me. They connected to the owner of my hotel and told him to contact me.
So what was I to do? The money I wanted had come out three hours too late and I was that many hours of bus journey away in the bus park, the Nepalese term for bus depots, down in nondescript Ghasa. We were in a concrete structure that was a wayside eatery for tired tourists.
"Give the phone to the owner or the manager there," I was told by Nishant Tulachan, the owner of Jomsom's Majesty. I ran out of nerve and quickly handed the phone to my Nepali guide from Kathmandu. He took the phone and headed towards the lady concerned who shuffled away with a panic-stricken urgency as if my guide was walking towards her with a live serpent in his hands.
I can only imagine that she was trying to avoid being conned into another favour for somebody who was somebody's uncle married into the former royal family and needed her help in the form of heavy discounts, or worse, other forms of greater loss.
In another 20 minutes, however, the lady counted out 10 one-thousand-rupee notes and asked my Mumbai address and phone number and a receipt for the amount. When I did, this lady who'd been fleeing a fleecer 20 minutes earlier, offered me the money with her right hand, while her left palm reverentially touched her right elbow; an amorously pious gesture ingrained in much of the Nepali society.
Power Cut
Against this discomfiting though eventually pleasant experience, is my friend Sekhar Chetri's audacious proposal to the Kathmandu municipal council. Sekhar, who studied in Shillong and Pune besides working briefly in Belgaum, runs an advertising agency that has won the top creative awards for a few years running in Nepal.
In August 2011, Sekhar, who also has an LED business besides his advertising agency, wagered he would light up all of Kathmandu's streets for free if he were given 12 years of use of the city's prominent advertising vistas.
Needless to say, he is yet to hear from the Kathmandu municipal authorities that run a city hobbled by power shortages to the point of desperation; load shedding in Nepal's capital ranges from 10 to 16 hours per day.
(Economic Times)
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