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Recently, the news regarding discussion over shortening the four-year undergraduate degree caught my attention. As per news reports, such a need was felt due to high drop-out rates and no employment guarantee after completing the course. It has also come to light that the four-year course often takes five years to complete, and students struggle to financially support their studies. In this context, rather than returning to the three-year bachelor's degree, the university should develop concrete plans to ensure that the four-year degree adheres to the academic calendar and is completed within four years. 

Furthermore, the university should introduce new curricula that are industry-friendly, bridging the gap between the classroom and the real business world. These curricula should link academic courses to business profiles with the potential to thrive anywhere in the world.

In this short piece, my primary focus lies on how the curriculum can be revised to mitigate the significant drop-out rates. While my ideas may be more pertinent to the Information Technology and Management fields, they can offer valuable insights to the ongoing discussions. The curriculum should be designed with the goal of empowering students to apply their classroom knowledge in real-world situations or the business world. For instance, in the context of Business Communication, a subject tailored for management students, we can integrate courses like e-commerce, report writing and interpersonal communication, among others. When studying e-commerce, students could have the opportunity to visit actual e-commerce businesses to gain practical insights into their operations. Additionally, inviting founders or co-founders to share their entrepreneurial journeys in the classroom could serve as a source of inspiration for students contemplating the initiation of their own e-commerce ventures.

Prospects of Freelancing/Outsourcing

We live in a globally interconnected world. Despite living in a land-locked country, we can contribute significantly in the knowledge industry. Nepali university graduates can work on projects where distance and weight are not taken into consideration. They can become the workforce of European or the US companies if they champion certain skill sets. Taxation on the income earned through foreign exchange is quite lower compared to income earned through salary or investment in Nepal. As per the report, information technology services brought Rs 67 billion rupees to Nepal, with joint efforts of 106 information technology companies and some 15,000 freelancers.

By championing certain skill sets I mean acquiring skills and extending knowledge areas that are being sold faster than others. Several online workforce platforms, such as Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancer, and PeoplePerHour, have gained global recognition. Their statistics show top jobs or skills that sell more than others. Based on their real-time data, interactions and jobs, they also rank certain skills and sub-skills. They also rank those skills based on their nature like technology, marketing, customer service and admin, accounting and consulting, design and creative etc. Among the skills Upwork ranked for 2023, full stack development, front-end development, back-end development and mobile-app development are skills that sell the most under tech skills. Similarly, search engine optimization, social media marketing, search engine marketing, email marketing are some most salable skill sets under marketing. Likewise, under customer support and admin, email, phone and chat support, virtual assistance, data entry, digital project management, research and transcription are the most in-demand skills. There are accounting and creative skills which are also in demand encompassing skills from recruiting and talent sourcing to graphic design and business analysis to video editing.

Developing Skills from Colleges to Beyond

My concern is that the university students can link their academics to a number of salable skills including the mentioned ones. They can create clubs in their respective college where they can discuss and share their knowledge related to the skill set. There can be a front-end development club, digital marketing club, virtual assistance and data entry club, translation and subtitle club and many other clubs that can work together for common good. For the successful operation of such clubs, the college management can also facilitate and provide expert counseling and coaching. The students that do not have clubs in their colleges can hone their skills independently taking classes in training centers.

The benefits of such platforms are tremendous. Technology has also made society homogenous. Nationality and national borders have blurred. A Kenyan teacher assists to write research papers to a British university graduate student and a Nepali software engineer works with a Dutch programmer to create a global web application owned by an American. You need to showcase your portfolio in a detailed and precise manner and start applying to those related to your skills. Most of the jobs in those platforms are looking for skills that our university students may possess. Rest of the details like race, nationality, age, sex do not matter. Hence, young graduates need to pick up a skill or two based on their interest and existing knowledge. They then need to hone their skills, and need to apply the skills to job providers in the global online marketplace.

According to the 2023 financial report from Payoneer, an American financial services company, there has been a significant increase in demand for skills such as programming, marketing, project management, and web design over the past year. The report also highlights that 46% of freelancers experienced an increase in demand for their work, indicating a growing reliance on freelancers by businesses. Nepali university graduates should join this global freelancing trend to financially support their studies. Some may even progress to the next level by forming companies and teams, potentially achieving millionaire status within a few years.

Smriti Ravindra’s debut novel ‘The Woman Who Climbed Trees’ caught my attention due to its publication from HarperCollins and also due to a brief review from Prajwal Parajuli that mentioned “The Great Nepali Novel is here!” The narration of the novel is straight and the language is eloquent, and makes it a good read for even readers with limited English competency. The reason for that may be the writer’s conscious decision to take the stories to a wider audience-base in the Indian subcontinent. The eight-chapter novel chronicles an Indian woman’s coming-of-age.

‘The Woman Who Climbed Trees’ is a familial, societal and cultural saga of three generations. The setting of the novel is Nepal’s eastern Tarai and a town in India’s Bihar state. Meena who hails from Darbhanga gets married to a Nepali boy, Manmohan, during her early teens. Through the vivid descriptions of marriage ceremony between Meena and Manmohan, the novel showcases the tradition of nuptial ties between Nepali and Indian citizens, mostly living in border sides, as well as presents the social and cultural intricacies poignantly and subtly.

The characters in the novel describe the common qualities and differences between Nepal and India. There is an expression which is moving - you never realize when you get married in your country and within a few minutes of travel towards your new groom’s house, cross a river or pool and reach the other country. The novel depicts the difficulties, hardships, struggles and blues of the native Madhesi people. The Nepali state bodies tag them as ‘Indian’ in a latent way and the so-called high class people discriminate against them merely on the basis of their skin and voice tones. There are many anecdotes that demonstrate biases and discrimination towards them.

The novel starts with the marriage between Indian girl Meena and Nepali boy Manmohan. The marriage process is captured in depth as it is a linkage between cultures of individuals and countries. Pre-wedding happenings like selecting the groom, showing and exchanging photographs, making marriage a serious talk within the family for weeks, women planning and preparing weeks before the marriage ceremony, girls teasing their newly marrying friend, bride and bride’s family getting prepared emotionally and physically for the successful marriage have been illustrated with great precision and detail.

Meena and Kumud are sisters-in-law. Despite their relationship, their love and affection between them is so intimate and strong that they question the established notion of sexuality. Meena likes to be intimate with Kumud, more than her husband. She likes to touch and sleep with her. Kumud does not bother with the actions of Meena and she too, becomes happy to remain near Meena. Both of them, turn by turn, write each other’s name in their arms using piercing needles. In an instance, Meena tries to get physically close to Kumud and reaches her hands on her breasts, kisses her and smells the perfume consciously. All these incidents reveal the manifold dimensions of sexual orientations. Unwillingness to stay with husband and physical proximity with sister-in-law are a few acts that question established notions of sexualities. Such kind of proximity also exists between Meena’s daughter and her girl friend Sachi. Both of them also tattoo each other’s name on their body. Thus, the idea of binaries of sexuality is hammered by the intense love, affection and proximity between the same sexes.

Language use in the novel is distinct as the words with roots of Hindi and Sanskrit are written with English transliteration. Transliterated words like ‘dera’, ‘mani’, ‘maika’, ‘sauji’, ‘daal’, ‘marsiya’ and nearly one hundred others are used without English translation. This might have been done deliberately by the author in order to present the seriousness of the subject matter and localize them. Similar to Arundhati Roy, many vernacular words in the novel have been used in English as a method of code-switching and code-mixing. The monologue of Meena while her husband is far away from her in Kathmandu is beautifully woven where she reflects upon her emotions. When one’s husband is distant for a long time, there comes the feelings of frustrations, boredom and loneliness. Meena is not an exception to this as there is a significant female population in Nepal whose husbands fly overseas after mere days of marriage. Most of such females leave their maternal home and town and shift to their husband’s home and help in his household chores. They do not get to stay with their husbands nor do they get love and affection from their own parents. On top of that, readers find the wrath, frustration, and disgust in the emotional monologue of Meena for she has left her family, society and country for the sake of her marriage and in a matter of few months, her husband lives separately in a distant land.

The narrator changes in the middle part of the novel. Meena’s 12-year-old daughter Preeti narrates the events of her family. Her recounting of experiences while staying in Nepal and the journey to and from her maternal uncle’s house in India are presented eloquently. Through her experiences, readers can learn about the world-view of the twelve-year-old girl about nation, outer world, family, society, kinship, friendship, culture etc. Preeti narrates everyday experiences of a typical Nepali family like Jay Nepal Cinema Hall, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, Bollywood films, Jay Santoshi Maa etc. The novel takes us through a number of subject matters revolving around fables of Ranipokhari, regimes of Shah Kings, their corrupt ADV, popular Bhai-Dhoj festival in the Terai region, Prithvi Narayan Shah, Lord Vishnu, King Birendra and his royal family, temples of the Kathmandu Valley, Royal Palace, New Road, Casino, Agricultural Development Bank etc. A common experience of traveling for the first time from east Terai to Kathmandu has been narrated in an amusing and hilarious manner.

The little girl expresses her experience of proximity with her bedridden grandfather in a compelling and powerful way. In his final days, Preeti sees her mother and aunt giving her stinking grandfather a bath. During that time, she says, “Ma rubbed the sparrow that looked like a bell, I felt like I had swallowed a blade and its thin metal sliced my throat.” The little girl elaborates the child marriage that happened in the generations before her and some festivals like Durga Puja that are observed in Terai. The instances of sexual advances are raised in multiple subplots, the first between Meena and Kumud, then between Preeti and Shankar, and Preeti and Sachi. Among those, only physical proximity between Preeti and Shankar are digestible to the society and the rest are nonconforming to heteronormativity.

The novel also mentions India imposing an embargo during the regime of King Birendra. There are different subplots of gossip in Nepali society which are briefly discussed. A Bollywood actor’s remarks to Nepali people creates a sensation throughout the country including riots and movements. The wife of Rajiv Gandhi was not allowed permission inside the Pashupatinath Temple because she was a Christian and in that revenge, Gandhi resorted to embargo. The limitations while living in a landlocked country like Nepal, logic that it should not be sanctioned in the humanitarian perspective as well as the need to teach a lesson to India are expressed through the monologues of the child girl. Likewise, the load shedding days of the past, sufferings of the common man, day to day blues of the students are presented in a number of subplots.

The novel is not free from exaggerations. For instance, a phone rings in the house of Meena and the caller is a random man with roots in Janakpur. He says that he is a neighbor of Meena and that his son has arrived recently from the US. He asks help from Meena to look after his son, providing the location of the house with excuses of delay of flights. Meena asks her son and daughter to check in the house. When the children reach the house, the house seems to have been looted recently and the random person’s son seems to have been assassinated. The children rush towards their home in fear. The entire incident seems to be far from reality.

In the last part of the novel, a fairy tale is presented where an old woman escorts the daughter of the barber at night to her daughter’s marriage for the sake of bridal make up. Initially, the daughter refuses to go with the strange old woman at midnight. But the woman cajoles them with a bag full of jewels. The barber insists his daughter go with the old woman out of greed. In the pitch darkness, the old woman asks the girl to climb a strange tree. The girl hesitates in the beginning but the old woman threatens that disobedience shall result in death. The barber’s daughter Laxmaniya climbs a tree out of fear and after she reaches the top, she sees lots of women enjoying their own worlds. Some are smoking and some are preparing for marriage. After makeup, she returns back home and as promised she receives a bag full of gold. When she shows the bag to her father after reaching her home, she finds that the gold has turned into an ordinary stone. Soon a quarrel ensues and she throws the bag over the lake. Full of myths and fairy tales, the novel has piqued the people to people relation between India and Nepal as well as taken the locations and nation items of Nepal to the international readers.

Fiction centered on climate change is an emerging genre in the literary world. Arguably, there are only a handful of novelists who have incorporated climate change issues as a major theme in their works. After discovering Amitav Ghosh’s 'The Hungry Tide', I became acquainted with his work 'Gun Island'. Gun Island is also the first English book to receive the prestigious Jnanpith Award. I was mesmerized by the way Ghosh blends folklore with serious issues of climate change and a hotter planet. His writing style made me realize that climate change, often considered a research-based, scientific, and rational subject, can also be interpreted and narrated through ancient myths and fables.

We are accustomed to hearing and reading catastrophic news caused by climate change, ranging from floods to landslides, tsunamis to hurricanes, sandy storms, and more. These events have become so common in our daily dose of social media and news browsing that we are hardly moved by the significant loss of lives, habitats, and property. We have taken them for granted. But, Ghosh’s storytelling is unique. He draws on the Bengali fable of ‘Banduki Sadagar’, or the gun merchant, and transports us to the Sundarbans, the mangrove region of Bangladesh, where he intertwines the folklore of Manasa Devi, the goddess of snakes.

Deen, the narrator and protagonist of the novel, accompanies marine biologist Piya in her research work. Deen, a rare books dealer, is captivated by Bengali legends of the gun merchant and befriends Piya, who is studying the rare Irrawaddy dolphins. They travel to distant and remote places where human settlements are sparse, such as the Sundarbans, where they find villages that have disappeared in recent years. They are startled by the rising sea levels and the villagers' struggles due to lack of fresh water. The salt levels have increased to the extent that aquatic animals exhibited abnormalities.

Through the journeys of Piya, Deen, and Tipu, Ghosh reminds us of the threats posed by climate change. Deen and Piya discuss oceanic dead zones - the vast stretches of water with very low oxygen content, too low for fish to survive. These dead zones are rapidly expanding due to the runoff from chemical fertilizers. This runoff triggers a chain reaction that depletes most of the oxygen in the water. The phenomenon of oceanic dead zones is vividly illustrated in the novel, enabling general readers to comprehend the harsh realities of the climate crisis resulting from human actions.

The novel also discusses environmental degradation caused by refineries. During a conversation with Deen, Piya discusses refineries, which may be responsible for creating 'dead zones'. She reveals that she has been fighting against refineries through an alliance of environmental groups, but she exposes the dark truth that these refineries are run by giant conglomerates that line the pockets of greedy politicians. In Nepal as well, the exploitation of the Chure region has been a topic of discussion for various reasons, but it has been forgotten as the exploiters enjoy the support of politicians.

The novel delves into serious issues of dolphin beaching. The underlying cause of beaching is explored, where man-made sounds from submarines, sonar equipment, and similar sources can be potential triggers. Piya explains that marine mammals use echolocation to navigate, and disruptions to this navigation can cause them to become disoriented and stranded. It seems that the character of Piya, portrayed as a marine biologist, is intentionally crafted as an expert who discusses and shares the crises and scenarios caused by climate change. Deen appears as a curious learner, while Piya stands out as a profound expert.

In addition to portraying geographies and habitats devastated by climate change, the novel also shares instances of migration and the pivotal role climate change plays in the migration of humans and other animals. Characters like Tipu risk their lives crossing seas and islands to reach Italy. They face obstacles from state authorities, the seas, and foreign individuals who are involved in human trafficking. The stories in 'Gun Island' exhibit elements of magical realism, presenting folklores in a way that mirrors the real world, including chance encounters.

The novel also presents irony about the indifference towards climate change in a satirical manner. An international conference is hosted by a museum to celebrate their acquisition of a special edition of a popular Shakespearean book. However, the city where the conference takes place is engulfed in a wildfire for several days. Airlines, local transportation services, and conference organizers display indifference towards the wildfire, treating it as a natural occurrence. Eventually, due to the relentless wildfire, the organizers are forced to relocate the conference venue at the last minute to the place where the narrator is staying.

The increasing number of bark beetles is also discussed in the novel. Findings suggest that these beetles are expanding their range as the mountains warm up. They invade forests by tunneling inside tree bark. The novel draws connections between bark beetles, forests, and wildfires. The stories of the suffering of Bangladeshi people due to climate crises, such as cyclones and floods, are also presented. Strong winds capable of tearing roofs off houses and rising water levels are evident in various parts of Bangladesh. These personal stories of suffering resonate with the natural calamities faced in our own world.

The novel consistently carries the theme of the climate crisis from beginning to end. Through Bengali folktales and fables, it warns us about the potential apocalyptic world. The novel is, in fact, an alarm, reminding us of our role in exploiting and devastating the planet for short-term gains and vested interests. Rather than being prescriptive about our actions, it vividly portrays and envisions the consequences of the climate crisis escalating at an unstoppable pace.