April 29, 2006
Covering Nepal
I have to remind myself five times a day that what I'm doing at Open Source, and here at Thayer and Charlesfield, is not reporting, but collecting commentary and testimony that reflect diverse stories. I am supposed to act as a medium between bloggers who are experiencing things and other Internet users, who no longer need to be left on the wrong side of the information divide.
Yet, like a journalist, I risk over-simplifying, confounding, and systematically misinterpreting the stories I choose to cover. I read blogs and news services in search of big stories, and as a result I focus on monumental events-- wars, deaths, elections, protests, and the whole scope of official government acts-- that seem to demand demographically-obvious reporting techniques. Death of a ruler? Email former subjects and opponents. Religious festival? Find pictures of people in silly hats. Election? "Hi, there, Citizen. Whoyavotinfor?" People in the streets? "What's the fuss? Whose head on platter, today?"
The demonstrations in Nepal sparkled in the focus of international news media and blog aggregators, and covering them couldn't have seemed more straightforward. Yet I realized as I set out that I was faced with twin impediments: I hardly know anything about Nepal, and I couldn't make sense of the actual story. Who wants what? Who are these people in the street? All of these blogs calling for democracy: what are their agendas, and what are the sources of their anger, anxiety, and fervor for political change?
Among the few Americans who could point in the general direction of Nepal on a world map, the nation is murky (at best) in their imagination, a whirl of mountains, mandalas, and Buddhist temples. And while it may be some of those things, it clearly is neither Bhutan, which seems legitimately cordoned off from modernization, nor Tibet, which is probably a fantasy of its current state. So it was a significant undertaking to get a simple picture of a more real Nepal. The terrain is varied, the regime is Hindu and monarchical, the rebels are Maoists (but is finding more sympathy in rural Indian than in Beijing), and, at least on paper, India acts as its benevolent foreign affairs coordinator, a relic of its early post-colonial past. It was gratifying to receive this elementary education, but I was doubly skeptical that I had a basis for understanding the events that were unfolding there.
In my search for bloggers who were writing about the general strikes, I found a handful of people and organizations, some based in Nepal and most spread across the diaspora. They all seemed steadfastedly pro-democracy. They clothed themselves in the familiar revolutionary language that I know well from Jacobins and flower revolutionaries in former Soviet states and regime changers in Washington and the Green Zone.
That pretty much reflects what I ended up publishing in Striking for Democracy in Nepal. Despite my reservations, the story was an adequate answer to the question, "what are bloggers in Nepal (and those who are invested in it around the world) saying about the events occurring there?" which is the question that Open Source expects me to answer. Yet to distill down to a few lines of contextual writing and quotes from bloggers, I had to masquerade as an informed moderator. I also margiinalized some of the issues and comments I came across in order to fit my report into the form that I routinely use. What remains is a handful of characters on a familiar stage, dolls with interchanging outfits. Despot. Military Police. Jailed Dissidents. Rural Rebels. People From Every Level of Society Demonstrating. Universal Calls for Rule by the People.
Have I done violence to you, people of Nepal? I think so. I know so little about you.
You made me wonder how much I know about any place I visit on my laptop.
Posted by Henry Shepherd at April 29, 2006 03:51 PM
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