Ko Everest rāua ko Aoraki ngā maunga.
Ko Hija Khushi rāua ko Muriwai ngā awa.
Ko Kathmandu te kāinga tupu.
E noho ana au ki Rānui ināianei.
Ko Pancha Narayan rāua ko Sanu Bhai ngā tupuna tāne.
Ko Uttam Narayan te matua.
Ko Hira Devi te whāea.
Ko Sun, ko Moon, ko Poon, ko Joon ngā tuahine.
Ko Ranu te hoa rangatira.
Ko Riya te tamāhine.
Ko Ruben te tamaiti tāne.
He Kaiwhakamahere Tāone au.
Ko Raj tōku ingoa.
No reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.
Sweet as 21st
24th September 2005. Exactly 21 years ago today, the Auckland sky was painted with a beautiful hue of azure. I had only ever once before witnessed this colour before in my life. That was from Kagbeni located on the other side of the Annapurna ranges. From this out of the world clear blue sky, the AKL bound Thai Airways TG 491 descended through the long white clouds. The craft touched the tarmac, taxied, and came to a halt at the Auckland International Airport. My wife and I disembarked. Through the jet bridge, we walked toward the baggage claim area. After customs checking, we headed out of the terminal. We had arrived in Auckland.
Kia Ora, Tāmaki Makaurau.
Spring was springing in its full bloom
The spring was in the air. Red, white and pink cherry blossoms galore. Young green shoots had just bloomed from buds. The tender new leaves were defying gravity to reach out to the sky as if to touch the sun. The air was crisp. As I walked along the suburbs, the air was filled with sound of lawnmowers and it smelled of freshly cut lawn. Birds chirped from the first light of the dawn. Days were getting sunnier and longer. Joggers had started to get off their trade mills and hit the pavements.
The first apartment I lived was on Mount Street, which is off Symonds Street and very close to Queen Street. I used to walk down to Queen Street and surf the internet cafés to access my email. Often I would have to wait to get my turn to hop on a desktop. Back then Queen Street used to be buzzing with all the touristy action you can imagine. Double decker sightseeing buses. Rushing backpackers shuffling around. Multiple lingo simultaneously peppered the sonic waves as you walk along the footpath. Caffeine connoisseurs patiently waited in queues outside cafés eager to get their hand on their lattes.
In the first few months, I roamed around the streets of Auckland with the Lonely Plant guidebook in my backpack. With only primitive internet back then, this guidebook was literally my guide. Along with the guidebook I also had the wire bound AA street map of Auckland. Everything and anything had the air of novelty factor during those initial days. Especially, the Kiwi accent. Someone over the phone had to repeat ‘viaduct basin’ five times before I thought I understood the location they were giving me, thanks to the Kiwi accent.
The highs and the lows
I had arrived in New Zealand to get away from the then on-going political conflict in Nepal. I was sad to leave my family and home. However, I was enthusiastic and was looking forward to building my new life in the land of the long white cloud.
Within the first month of arriving in Auckland, I was called for an interview for a project officer role in the ANZDEC, the consulting company who wrote the Agriculture Perspective Plan (APP) of Nepal. I studied the APP as part of the course ‘Nepalese Agriculture Development Problem Perspectives and Strategies’ taught at the IAAS, Rampur by Prem Bhandari sir. While I made it to the final two but I did not get the job. Then started the hard yarn of burger flipping, telemarketing, phone surveying and door knocking. Thank goodness those $9.50 per hour minimum pay jobs. How I hated them all. But they helped me to keep me humble and grounded.
One day, one of the stores where I was doing the minimum pay jobs promised me managerial role if I stuck with them for long enough. This was a warning bell. I did not come to NZ for this. I wanted to utilise my studies in professional practice. My recently earned flash Danish Masters in International Economics was not helping me to land on any decent place here in Down Under. As soon as it became clear to me that without a NZ qualification, there was no chance of me landing where I wanted to be, I enrolled at the University of Auckland in 2006.
August of 2007, I landed on my first professional role when I worked with Chris Horne at Incite. Incite was a planning consulting firm which processed resource consents for Telecom NZ to install the 3-g network. Chris was a good boss. I remember buying coffee for him and his long marathon conference calls with other team members based in Christchurch. Incite was located in the building adjacent to where I lived on Dundonald Street. Although I did not stay for too long with Incite, Chris looked after me very well while I was there. I once freaked out when he allowed me to drive his silver VW Passat for a site visit. ‘You chickened out, Raj’, he jokingly said once when I told him how afraid I was to drive his VW. After Incite, I joined the North Shore City Council. North Shore was home. I felt welcomed. The place made me feel valued. To this day, I have fond memory of the Takapuna office and my colleagues then. From there on I was fortunate to practice a profession I trained for and love. The rest, as they say, is history.
21 life lessons from 21 years in New Zealand
I need to write a book to narrate all the highs and lows of the past 21 years. Or this blog is going to be boringly lengthy. So, let me try to sum up one year in one sentence in no order of hierarchy or chronology.
- Widen your horizon. (दायरा अली फराकिलो पारौं)
- Ignore toxic people.
- Shit happens, move on.
- Think big picture, pay attention to details.
- It's not about us, it's about the issues that matters.
- Being busy is good, pretending to be busy is bad.
- Take responsibility for yourself, make no excuses.
- Respect people's mana, and you shall be respected.
- We are, first and foremost, emotional human beings.
- Learn how to hear, listen and filter noise around you.
- Good health and peace of mind are worth fighting for.
- When we become slave to parochialism, triviality reigns.
- Having a horrible boss is the most terrifying thing in life.
- Ideas that are worth will last despite the toughest trial of times.
- People starting to criticise you means you are doing something good.
- In the universe of our of life, people revolve around you on concentric orbits.
- Smart phone and social media is dumbing us all down, killing our social life one scroll at a time.
- If you are unwilling to swallow a bitter pill, your addiction to sweet poison will soon ruin you physically, mentally and socially.
- In the pendulum of life people keep swinging between moving near and far, meaning important and non-important, and being closer and farther.
- Trying to change others is easy, that's why everyone does it all the time; changing yourself is the hardest, hence this is the most procrastinated task ever.
- Before we complain about our life in New Zealand, we have to acknowledge where we came from, what we ran away from to be here, and how life was back then and today where we came from.
Fast forward 2026 and beyond
It has been few years since my hair started to turn grey. I have by now long forgotten the energy that fuelled my ambition to conquer the world. Instead of harassing my eardrums with too loud music, I get high and dry with genre that is mellow. If not news of people who have passed away, that of those mortally unwell soon sneaks into my conversation with friends and families. My principal job these days is driver of free Uber service to cater my kids’ endless pick up drop off demands. That's OK. I'm just doing what billions of other parents do. I am often busy doing voluntary jobs that of course don’t pay me. I don't know why I do them but if I did not, I feel miserable. I choose to spend far too long rendezvousing and getting carried away out of this world with characters of classical books.
In my journey of life, I am in a happy place today. A roof over my head, two square meal a day (दुई छाक दाल भात), a profession that stretches my intelligence, actions that satisfies my soul, and a few good people who I can turn to when I need. What more can I ask for?
I am grateful to New Zealand for adopting and accepting me. This land enabled me to rebuild my life from scratch. I raised my family here. I am who I am because I live here. I have no complaints. Only profound gratefulness that I can’t express in words. At times, triggered by trivial incidents, the emotions of gratitude come in a sudden surge. Out of the blue they hit without warning and overwhelm me more than I can handle. I would not want to be anywhere else. Kia Ora Aotearoa.
As the whakataukī goes, ‘he aha te mea nui o te ao? Māku e kī atu, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata’ (What is the most important thing in this world? It is people, it is people, it is people.) New Zealand has a bicultural legacy. As a recent migrant, I acknowledge that. I respect it. From the early days of coming here, I have felt an unexplained connection with the people of the land. There are many similarities between the Māori and Nepali peoples (this is even more so with the Newars of Kathmandu, which is my ancestry). We have similar skin tone, our looks somewhat match, our spoken language is consonant heavy, there are words that sound similar albeit they mean different, we have strong family and ancestral traditions, we revere nature and seniors, we have many and complex socio-cultural etiquettes. The list goes on and on. At a more personal level, I can't stop but getting goosebumps on the skin and tears in my eyes every time I hear the call of a karanga at a pōwhiri. First note and I instantly get connected to its haunting melody at such a deep level. I do not know why. I hold the mana of the Māori people with deepest respect. This continues to grow as I learn more about the peoples and this land. This does not mean that I do not acknowledge the role of the Pākehā New Zealand. The history is history. We can't change it. We have to honour the past and move ahead. Just the fact that New Zealand is the only colony where the Crown signed a treaty with the indigenous people speaks volumes about the two peoples who clashed in the history. I am no way any sort of expert in this topic but I bow my head to pay my full and due respect to the peoples who came before me in this land to make it their home - firstly from Hawaiki and after them from Europe. The Matariki dawn ceremony held at the Ōrākei Marae is a ritual I don't want to miss every year. Similar to the Matariki, I do not miss the ANZAC day dawn service held at the Auckland War Memorial. I did not attend those ceremonies from the year I came to New Zealand but once I understood the significance of them, I would not miss to be there. I strongly believe that new migrants would feel more sense of belonging towards their new home if they go to the two dawn services. It only takes an effort to wake up early in in the morning on those two days.
The bond and connection back to the homeland of the first generation migrants is a strong one. I am no different from other first generation migrants. I live with the psychological complexities of having to deal with the transplanting shock of leaving home and having to regrow roots in a new country. The emotional osmosis is yet to achieve a state of equilibrium. I doubt it ever will. At times it feels like I am in a transition - I have left Nepal but I have never yet fully arrived in New Zealand. However, this agonising feeling - that voice inside the head - has somehow somewhat become quieter in recent years. That doesn’t mean it has fully disappeared though.
After 21 years of living here, I feel comfortable to handle whatever life throws at me. The only thing that is hard to handle - from day one to this day - is the emotional toll and anxiety that comes with living away from my parents. I miss them terribly. I regret I am not there for them. How sad.
Over the past 21 years, am I disappointed? Do I have could haves and should haves? Oh yeah, tell me about it. If I could time travel, would I do any thing differently? I won’t change a single thing. What about regrets? Hell no.
Hindsight is beautiful but it doesn't exist. Crystal ball that gazes into the future exists only in fiction. From here on for maybe the next five to ten years I would love to do two good deeds. Firstly, I really want to be able to give back whatever and however I could to this place which has given me so much more. Way more than I actually deserve. Secondly, I want to be able to do decent deeds to raise the profile and mana of my people in this adopted home of ours.
Vi får se, på dansk.
Coda
Everything is in the right place.
