It's been (a) while, it's been wild...

It’s been a while.

It’s been a year, in fact exactly 365 days. A lot has happened in those 365 days- at home, abroad, in politics, in sports and in pop culture. Benazir Bhutto is no more, the Tony Blair era is over in Britain, gasoline hit $100 a barrel, Raikkonen became the new F1 champion and Beckham started creating shots for Landon Donovan.

But no other development has been quite as dramatic and astounding as the rise of Maoist to power in Nepal, at least not in my eyes. In a matter of two years, the rebel group that had been waging war on the government went from being a target of army helicopters to being the authority regulating the same helicopters. Such a rapid rise to power of a party bearing communist ideology is almost unheard of in the present era.

The fall of former political giants like the Khum Bahadurs who did very little to steer the country in a good path is undeniably a good sign. While I cannot forgive the Maoists for the atrocities they committed in the past, I certainly do hope that the new faces and fresh brains in the political arena will be catalysts in the progress that we are all hoping for. It is however, hard to imagine how the Maoist will effectively wed their capitalist economic plans with their socialist reforms. How strange is it to say that my government is controlled by capitalist communists? Their social reforms plans, such as land reform, have a lot of promise in lessening the gap between the rich and the poor. However, if the economy is steered by capitalist drivers, there will be individuals and corporations who will look for nothing but profit, often times at the expense of the underprivileged. This, I feel, is very likely to create conflict down the road because of the conflicting modes of operation.

Nonetheless, I am still hopeful. I do hope that I am wrong and that the new government will provide some solid platform for the progress of the nation. Although the past cannot be altered, the future can indeed be shaped.

By the way, if you are wondering what I was referring to in the beginning, it has been a year since I last wrote something for the blog. Yes, it has been a while and it has also been wild- a wild ride in Nepali politics...