“Power corrupts people, and absolute power corrupts people absolutely.”
It doesn’t matter where you’re from, you are surrounded by a substantial number of powerful and corrupt people. It’s because the world is built this way, and we are here as its result.
Growing up with parents who dedicated most of their productive times fighting for social justice, I was frequently taught about right or wrong from the time I started asking endless questions. I was taught how everyone is equal and why we should treat everyone the same. But things changed when I started going to school. I met other children from different backgrounds who weren’t brought up like I was. People would tag their origin for identifying every child, and the so-called progressive teachers would divide us according to our background.
My story didn’t take place in the first world; I was just a middle-class kid from one of the poorest country in the world. But the political climate there was similar. Separating people for their background was only a social issue then, but some (so-called) smart people believed in countering to it by oppositely doing the same thing. And the politicians were about to find a new agenda to divide people and keep their corrupt motives kicking.
The youth of my time, from the new millennia, wouldn’t even care to talk about politics like the youths of ’80s and ’90s. We only hated the politicians without caring who was responsible for putting them there. I grew up experiencing the social issues of hating people of other backgrounds. But when the time to shape my career arrived, I realized what level of an impact the evil acts of influential people had made to regular people like me, and to the whole country. Because of the very reason, the most excellent people were fleeing abroad. And the regular ones were following the same corrupt practice to succeed because it had become impossible to move ahead with ethics.
There have been different revolutionary movements in times — some of them were violent, but things changed for worse even after the systems changed. Welcome to a place where bad people succeed, so being the worst among all is the ultimate goal of everyone. Don’t confuse it with only politicians. From bureaucrats to businessmen to doctors to journalists to police to media companies to pretty much everyone, everybody here is racing to become the worst in their field to succeed. But they hate if others do the same. The politicians, I believe, are the perfect picture of what society is as a whole. There are sufferings and success stories too, but it is so chaotic that you can’t just explain them in a few words.
Is there anything I can do to fix it? The answer is a solid ‘No’. But as a writer, I can at least put my first-hand experience and research in words so that the world is well aware of how things run in places like mine and why it’s failing. So I decided to write a political fiction which is pretty much the picture of what is happening here.
It took a mix of extensive research and my own first-hand experience to outline the story. But putting the characters and connecting them to build a book was the ultimate challenge. This political fiction is surely not a pleasant ending that’ll make you smile at the end, but it’ll surely acquaint you with the few of the darkest realities of a failing nation from the third world.
Michael Ghimire 