December 11 Sunday 11 AM Union Square

Every Sunday 11 AM Union Square

The first time it was Anil Shahi, Sanjaya Parajuli, Sarahana Shrestha and me and it was in Chinatown. The next time it was the same group and the location was Union Square. The one after that was at Binay Sah's place. It was cold, and free lunch is a tempting proposition. That is when I met Ritesh for the first time. Then the invitation was extended to three other people, but only a total of two showed, one was out of town, a second had prior engagements, two were working, and so on: so Divita Mehta and I talked. She bought me MoMo. For this one four showed, although one was out of town, and three others were lined up to show. Sarahana called saying noone responded to her email when she asked if others were coming. She just might have overslept! Anil is out in New Hampshire attending a wedding. Binay is on call. Divita, Ritesh and I have another get together Tuesday evening.

The last major Nepali event in town was Rajeev Goyal's fundraiser, but I had to miss that for another DFNYC event. I donated to the Goyal fund online. (Lampson, Mistry, Dance-a-thon, LinkUp) In hindsight, I should have missed the DFNYC event and saved myself $75!

We don't have pictures from the prior events. I am glad Ritesh brought along his camera.

Mr. Sanjaya Parajuli was in attendance, Master Sanjaya Parajuli stole the show, and Ritesh Chaudhary was the guest of honor. Ritesh is a techie from Janakpur. He knows people in far away places who read this blog!

Over the weekend I had managed to mess up my body clock, so I was mostly twisting and turning in bed most of the night. I was able to catch a few hours of nap in early morning after I got out of bed and helped myself to Ramen noodles.

It was a nice day, although how nice I found out only after I got to Union Square. No wind, a lot of sun. But then we went indoors into Starbucks - Sanjaya bought me coffee - and by the time we came out, the sun was a goner.

Sanjaya showed up with his son. We had a pleasant conversation. We touched many bases. I was raring to maybe visit local Nepalis into their homes, call people, do phone banking if lists be available. He cautioned it might be better to instead grow this Sunday 11 AM crowd, a little at a time.

I have been writing to people in Boston and DC to replicate. And then to smaller towns across the country where people would hold the meet inside living rooms, take pictures and send them all to one central location online.

It is a nice social activity in its own right. But it is also important solidarity expression.

I brought up the topic of moving beyond the usual crowd of the politically active or those with white collar jobs, although there are many Nepalis who work blue collar jobs locally below minimum wage who might have advanced degrees from back in Nepal or India or elsewhere. The problem is they also tend to work crazy hours. It would be hard for them to show up.

I hope fundraisers will be held in living rooms for them at times of their convenience. I know that crowd parties hard. I have been to a few. Perhaps we can keep expanding our network. There is something called the cellphone.

Anil tells me there are more than 15,000 Nepalis in New York City.

Sanjaya and I touched many other bases. We talked about the projects we and others are involved with. Sanjaya threw in some important insights as to how there is more than one way to go about the projects. Transparent, online book keeping makes little sense for the clandestine projects. True. There are some mini projects that noone will know anything about. Only the end products will get seen. There will be few donors, all anonymous, each potentially big, as in $1000 each, and if there be book keeping, it will stay within that really small group, and for safety purposes, the names of the people actually carrying out the work in Kathamandu will not be circulated even among that small group of donors. I totally bought into what Sanjaya explained to me. Whatever works. As long as the work gets done, there has to be more than one way of doing it.

Ritesh arrived about 20 minutes late. By then Sanjaya, his son and I had already moved on to the coffee shop. Usually I am not big on coffee. It is social drinking for me.

The three of us had long, expansive talks on many different topics, very few of them to do with the Nepal movement. In the mean time Master Parajuli explored the nooks and corners of the coffee shop.

We mostly talked of globalization and how it impacts countries like Nepal and India, especially in how it impacts us and people we know. We talked India and China. There were the stories we had.

Then we dispersed. The Parajulis took off, and Ritesh and I went for MoMo. Darbar East is nice that way. Dhrubaji likes to engage in political talk.

Then we walked over towards Times Square. It was getting cold, but it was worth it. Ritesh knew of this shop where he wanted to buy a sweater. I ended up buying a winter cap and a pair of gloves. The prices were low. I like my prices low. I am a Walmart kind of guy.

Then it was adios until Tuesday, "7:45ish," for Ritesh and me.

We got to grow from four to 10 to 40 to more. Spread the word. When Nepal hits the world headlines, local media will come to us. That attention will further help the movement.