On my brother's death anniversary

I grew up with my four siblings, my elder sister was married off by then. The one above me was the youngest among the three brothers. I called him Sanudai. He loved piquant chutney made from garden fresh tomatoes and herbs. So, golveda ko achar was his specialty when I was growing up.

Sanudai would often start making this achar with only a few ingredients, taste his creation by dipping one of his fingers in the sauce and savouring it on the tip of his tongue. Then, he would run to the garden and come with a few other items. By the time he finished his achar, he would make a few trips to the garden, add these new items in his achar and invent a totally new dish than when he started!

Someday sanudai roasted the cherry tomatoes in a mackkle (a coal-burning pot), half of which would be wasted—they would burst open in the fire and lose the precious juice. 

Other days, he would roast a few cloves of garlic and our kitchen would fill with garlicky smoke. Once he roasted the green chillies to go with his tomatoes. Unfortunately, everybody started coughing and my poor brother was scolded badly.😔 

But the point is whatever he did, at the end his golveda ko achar always turned out heavenly that we all loved!

Sanudai is gone, but his golveda ko achar is still in my tongue! This is one of the stories in my recipe book that I wanted to share publicly to honour him. As I edit this book, I'm thinking of him and missing terribly! Rest in peace my dear sanudai. I'm sure to meet you somedays! 💖

Immigrants' English

Immigrating to a new place means starting your life allover again. If you've migrated from a non-English-speaking country to a "English" country, it would mean learning to read, write and communicate in English, before you can look for a paid, or even unpaid job. This can take you years!

I was in such situation. I had a very limited vocabulary in my brain with regards to English language. I could read a little and write even less in English language. My communicability in English language would have been about three years old child's level.

It took nearly 30 years for me to be where I'm today. But my children think my English is not good enough. "You write immigrant-English, mom". People can tell you're not a native-speaker when you speak and definitely know you're not "born-in-Canadian" when they read your Facebook posts.

So, should I feel bad that I don't speak like my children do? Should I stop expressing myself because my English is not as good as an English woman can express?

I tell myself "No"! I try reasoning myself that language is just one medium of communication--just like the math, music and visual arts are. As long as my audience understands me, I should be fine.

I've many professional friends from abroad. Some of them have heavy accents and some don't. Even the ones without any noticeable accent are often asked "sorry, say it again?" The "whites" automatically assume people with colour can't speak English!

In my case, however, they have stopped asking me to repeat, and my husband says I speak better English than he does. 

You see, he came to USA as a graduate student. He came with a master's degree in Special English and he was teaching in the only university as a lecturer. His command in writing English had impressed the department-head a great deal in the US. But, yes, my husband does have a mild accent when he speaks English. 

On the other hand, I hadn't even completed my bachelor degree. I had to work very hard in learning to speak and write English. However, most of my speaking-English came from first-hand and on-the-job. This maybe the reason I've less accent when I speak!

My English maybe less perfect than my children's, but I've a lot more people's skills. I do a lot of things around my house and I'm interested in just about anything. This should compensate what I'm not. I should be able to live with this and keep in mind that there is a room for improvement--not just for my English but in all other aspects in my life.

Suffering of the progressive people

The amazing character of the, so called, progressive people is hard to understand at first, because they manage to give you a perfect persona. For example, these people are extremely hardworking, diligent and pleasant to talk to. They seem to have all the skills and intelligence they need to make things happen--not just for themselves but also for others by lending their hands to help others.



These people are often charming and trustworthy. They seem to take others advice easily and learn from others’ mistakes. They recognize goodness in people and try associating only with these sort of people. They keep these people by their side even in their most difficult, tight-scheduled time, because they know these qualities will come handy for them someday.

This kind of drive doesn’t always work for the progressive people, however; because "positivity' isn't always a hallmark, they don’t understand. They only know how to move forward, not backward. But everybody has their setbacks sometimes. 

Also, while certain numbers of activities are necessary to live a normal life, taking more than manageable can tip life's balance that they don’t seem to understand.

Act of balancing is necessary in order to live happy and fulfilling life. But balancing act is not as easy as it sounds even for the most experienced ones, because it takes a broad prospective to maintain a balance between health and happiness. The challenge for the progressive people is that they always walk on the edge; there is no room left to maneuver for balance!

Because of their overarching ambitions, progressive people sometimes create their own suffering by putting their hands on too many things. They trip on their own intelligence, and sometimes they dig their own grave.

A very successful woman

Maintaining positivity is hard when one starts his or her life from a very dire situation. Yet, quite few of my close encounters have managed to do just that. As a story writer, this always fascinated me.

However, writing about somebody is not easy because of the privacy issues. I’ve to be always mindful of the privacy of the person I’m writing about, and this privacy issue limits my ability to become a “effective” story writer—I can never write the truth in my stories!

Despite the obstacles, I keep writing, and it is for the good purposes. For example, a bad news catches people’s attention before the good news does. This doesn’t mean there are more bad stories than the good ones. It’s just means people pay more attention to the bad news than the good noes. It’s just the way there is!

I know that there are two sides of every story, and I want the ‘positive’ people to know that things are not always the way it looks from outside. What looks like ‘success’ from out side may actually have come from a very dark side that the characters in the story don’t want to reveal. On the other hand, a "failure" many not be failure at all--since success follows failure and failure follows success usually, it's the cycle the person is, not the situation.

For example, I met a young lady a few years back. She seemed very successful. She had everything: She was educated, married with high-earner husband, studious children, big house and some bank balances. She looked happy and talked very sweet.

As I became familiar to her through a close-relative of mine, I found out that she actually has very little to be happy about. She had grown up in a poor family. She had lost her mother when she was a toddler. Her father was alcoholic, and she was raised by her grandparents in the house which was shared by four of her uncles and their families. None of her relatives were kind to her when she was growing up. She had learned to survive in that situation by smilling when she was frustrated and talk sweet when she was angry!

She also share her belongings with others and showed how caring she was, but inside she was boiling with anger and frustrations. Looking at her disposition, nobody could imagine who she really was.

People growing up in such situation become either totally useless person by dwelling upon their misfortune or a very resilient person. She had takes the later path and was determined to change the course of fait and never look back. 

Her story fascinated me. The more I hear about her the more I became interested to know her more and found out that she is polite to get what she needs from others. She calculated her every move. Hardship hardly affected her. She was used to facing them daily.

The Happiness Advantage-A Book Review

This was one of the “overdue” book-reviews that was siting in one of my computer files until I decided to publish today. The author of this book is too popular to be introduced, and this is one of his internationally best sold books. Yet, I hadn’t read it until a few weeks ago.

As the name of the book suggests, this book is about happiness and how it fuels our brain to succeed. In this book, Shawn explains how ‘happiness’ has been normally interpreted, the thought that success brings happiness, instead of realizing happy people are ‘successful’. 

I’m not Shawn, who has inspired even the most educated and elite people as a teacher, author and a best guest-speaker But I was always in the opinion that happy people are successful. In fact, this was one of my contentions with my husband. I wanted to raise happy children. He wanted to raise successful children!

Shawn has outlined the ‘rules’ to turn peoples’ bad habits into the good ones in "Seven Principles" in this book.  He has explained why happiness is an advantage to successes in numerous examples. 

There are thousand of other books on positivity in the markets. We can read them or listen to hundreds of inspiring lectures. Nothing will happen, unless we’re convinced in our mind that CHANGE IS POSSIBILE. 

This book reinforced my belief that no phycologist, psychiatrist, books, or lecture can change our 'fortune' (make us successful) until we ourselves determine to change our mind and put all our efforts towards making our dream come true. For this change first, we need to define what we dream for, then we need to work hard relentlessly. 

Most people know the meaning of "habit" because it's literal meaning is the same for everywhere. But the words "good" and "bad" are subjective. Because of this, many people find difficulties in turning their bad habits into good ones.

Bhaitika 2018

Tihar used to be one of my fondest festivals when I was growing up. Unlike my siblings, I was too kind and too sensitive about killing, so I didn’t enjoy Dashain festival, especially the Austami day when goats used to be slaughtered at my parents’ home every year. But everyday of Tihar gave me a very pleasant feeling. From Kag Tihar to Bhai Tika—five days’ festival, I enjoyed thoroughly!

This year one of my brothers and his wife are in Virginia, USA. They don’t have visa to visit me, but I was thinking of visiting them at one point. Then, my husband reminded me how they had neglected him and our son in one of their visits to this brother’s family in Nepal. My husband’s memory reminded me of other bad memories about this brother and his wife. They had not only neglected our mother but also humiliated in front of their son-in-law—my mother’s granddaughter’s husband. All that means no visit to this brother.

But I still was looking forward to exchanging our memories and experiences of the time this brother and I were growing up. I’m a middle daughter—I’ve one older and one younger sisters—and he is a middle son. So, we used to get along quite well when growing up. I was hoping to talk about those days.

I was also hoping to exchange our worldly experiences and our understanding of the spirituality. Now that both of us are at the age, everyday is a blessing. Material stuff are not important to us as they were in earlier days.

I knew his faith is not the same as mine--he strictly follows a sect of religion within the Hinduism—and I think all religions are equal.

Still, I was hoping to exchange our views on matters that concern to all elder human beings. But, no! Every time I called him this sister-in-law brought up how lucky she is with regards to her children and it is all because of her good karma in her past life. Then, she would start bragging about how well her daughter is living in Virginia. After hearing more than three time, I had to tell them “everybody lives well in North America”. 

What I was trying to tell them was that our relatives may have 4 or 5 story houses in Nepal, but they’re using one flat for themselves. Rest of the house is rented for their second income. Also, “two bedrooms” means two rooms in Nepal—they count every corner of the house as room. But here two bedrooms usually means there is at least one full bathroom (some comes with two or three), one kitchen, living room (may also have a separate dining room, family room, storage etc.) We’re currently renting a townhouse with all these plus a garage. So, living well for them could mean very different thing then living well for us.

But I think they took the other way. I tried calling them twice the next day, actual Bhai tika day, they didn’t pick up the phone. I suddenly realized they had been taking me “wrong”. They wanted me to just listen to them and say they had done a lot of pundye in their past lives so they could visit different countries and are having good time.

He is my brother and they were his family. They may not care about my feelings, but I do care about theirs. They may not understand it’s not polite to talk about themselves and brag about their fortune, but I do know it is rude.

So, I let them go the way they are and wrote this to him:

Dear  Mailodai,

Happy Daitika!

सधैझै बिहानै भगबानसित दाइको दीर्घाऊ र शुस्वातको माग गरे  अनि हजुरको वाइबर र  मैसेन्जर मा फोन गरेकी थिए. दुबईमा उठेन।  म हजुरहरुलाई वेट्न आउनु पर्थियो सकींन। नरमाइलो लगियो  र लामो वाकमा गए। 

मलाई आमाको नाम्मा एउटा स्कोलारशीप इस्थापना गर्न मनछ ज्वाईको पैसा नपरिकन. तेस्को लागि अब आउने अप्रिलमा नेपाल जाने प्रडछ .  तियो नगरी अरु  केहि गर्न मन्नै छैन. यो क़ुरा हजुरसित भननखोजे धेरैचोटी तर क़ुरा सधै आरकै तीर पुगियो, सारि !  

भगबानले हजुरलाई सधा शुखी राखून। लव यू सोमच 

हैप्पी भाईटिका 

बैनी, ससि 

The Religions Book: For A Book Review

Are all Religions equal?

A lot of people will have problems with this question. It’s because their emotions run deep when they hear about the religion they belong to, and that they think theirs’ is superior than anyone else.

Not easy to be impartial when it comes to writing about one's faith. But the authors—nine renowned theological scholars on world’s major faiths—of The RELIGIONS BOOK have managed to do just that, either by being impartial or by accepting “there is no logic in religions”.

Just by looking at the cover of the book one can see that the book covers everything—from “beside me there is no other god” to “the body may die but the soul will live on” to “so many faiths, so many paths, and “what’s true for me is the truth”.

This is a great read for someone who knows nothing or a very little about the origins (histories) of religions. The book will also come handy for others who wants to check their ‘facts’ or verify what they already know in the field of religions. For both the groups, this book will work as the encyclopedia of religion. 

Religions are sacred beliefs. The authors have just stated the information they have collected in this book; they’ve not debated. This is one of the most useful books I've read on religion, and I highly recommend the use of this book for reference.