Conclusion: "To Serve the Nation”
This chapter has considered educational distinction within the context of Nepal’s postwar transition. Young people expressed their desire to serve their community in various ways that demonstrates how education has empowered them to undertake bikas as a personal project.
Even those who were looking to leave the area because of lack of employment opportunities couched their motivation in the logic of giving back. A few young men who were considering working as accountants in Macau explained that they were frustrated because they did not find opportunities to make an impact in Nepal, and they viewed their plan as a way that they can make a difference. One said, “We want to create an environment here so that youths don’t have to go abroad to search for work. We want to provide alternatives” (31-July-2013). It is not surprising that service was a common theme in my discussions with young people about their education. Both government and private school curriculums emphasize service in secondary schooling, the message students receive in the upper levels is to “serve the nation,” “be great,” and to do so with “humility” (Carney and Madsen 2009, p. 180). This sentiment has been promoted since the Panchayat government’s nationalizing agenda from 1960 to 1990 and then has taken a more fractured form since the 1990s wherein the students learn it both in government and private school curriculums as well as from political parties encouraging students to support them their ideological causes (Dixit 2002; Eck 2010; Onta 1996)
All of my interlocutors articulated this message. They conceptualize themselves as model citizens because they embody progress while seeing it as their duty as educated people to progress their community and the country. My interlocutors understood themselves to be in a particular position, mediators so to speak who could enable their families and communities to get from here - a traditional provincial way of being - to there - the horizon of bikas: aware, progressive, and cosmopolitan (Pigg ibid., p. 516).
Nonetheless, they are negotiating this process both within traditional sociocultural and geopolitical registers that often don’t align. My interlocutors’ experience of modern day schooling reflects a general experience of ambivalence; education is both “a source of hope and enrichment and a cause of bewilderment and despair” (Madsen and Carney 2011, p. 130).While the government and international agencies are concerned about youth disillusionment in postwar Nepal, my findings demonstrate a different type of resilience. The young people I researched were dealing with the despair of unemployment by maintaining humility and focusing on “serving the nation.” Nonetheless, their pride in being an educated citizen serves as a double-edged sword. Their educational distinction replicates traditional biases that implicitly fuel caste prejudice as is in the case of an uneducated person being like a beast. Their understanding of education creating the awareness to curb illicit activity also keeps people from being critical of the government’s role in perpetuating the endemic socioeconomic issues that perpetuate their marginalization. These young people’s extrapolation of their own progress onto the country’s progression imbues them with a sense of pride that encourages them to contribute. Nevertheless, it also keeps them from holding the government accountable for failing to absorb them into the labor market. This indeed benefits the Nepali state because instead of having frustrated young people politically mobilizing, these young people are investing in their communities by either providing free labor through service (sewa) or migrating out and sending remittances home. And thus my interlocutors are negotiating what it means to be educated and unemployed in politically unstable Nepal by embracing the belief that “Destiny is something we can forge on our own; it is not already written” (Female micro-loan recipient in Bagwana, 4-October-2013).