As I sip my Sri Lankan tea and take a quick bite of crisp lakhamari, my daughter walks in with her white bareeze shalwar kameez in one hand and my meticulously ironed tangail cotton sari in the other. "Mamu," she says, "we've got tickets for Khuda Key Liye at Satyam Theatre in Nehru Place!" Great! We drive down the busy streets of New Delhi listening to Geeta Dutt, Ghulam Ali and Narayan Gopal from yesteryears on my iPod, and get increasingly excited at the thought of watching a Pakistani movie in a Delhi theatre – the same movie that received a standing ovation at the recent Goa Film Festival.
Come to think of it, my life has been so interwoven with the colourful threads of Southasia that, at times, I forget whether I belong just to Nepal, my native country, or to Southasia itself! Having lived in Pakistan for four years, in India for 14 years and having travelled to all of the SAARC member states on work innumerable times has given me the pleasure of understanding the joy of celebrating Diwali and Holi in Delhi, Chaand Raat in Islamabad, Eid in Dhaka, Poya in Colombo and of course, Maghe Sankranti and Dasain in Kathmandu. The rich traditions, the vast canvas of cultural heritage that has been passed on through the generations, the ancient Indus Valley civilisation, the vibrant classical music and dance, the colorful tapestry of festivals and the interconnectivity of people living in the region – these are all fascinating facets of Southasia. In fact, new reality shows such as "Junoon Kucch Kar Dikhana Hai" and regional episodes of "Sa Re Ga Ma Pa" are actively crossing national boundaries, enabling increased harmony across the region.
In the larger context, my work in the grassroots of Nepal for three decades as a gender advocate, and working for 18 years for the empowerment of women of the Subcontinent, has given me several opportunities to thank my stars for being born a Southasian – with all its diversities and complexities, its paradoxes and contradictions. The region is truly a kaleidoscope of opportunity and challenge. This is a region with a strong women's movement seeking rights-based solutions. Yet, simultaneously, one sees the embedded discrimination that women continue to face from womb to tomb. Against this background, it has been my privilege to work on cutting-edge gender issues in the region, and to have been able to witness real transformation over the years. In fact, it was the contradictions that have presented many of the opportunities.
Collective resilience
Several memories float in my mind's eye: the confidence and strength of the rural women with whom I walked from all over Southasia to the presidential palaces in New Delhi, Islamabad and Kabul; the 300 traditionally dressed women whom I accompanied to Beijing for the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, debating how to negotiate their own spaces; the thousands of women and men who descended on the streets of seven Southasian countries simultaneously at 10 in the morning on 10 December 1998, to demand lives free from violence; the misery of trafficked women, while listening to their stories of coercion and deception as I walked the streets of Sonagachi and Kamathipura in the early 1990s; the joy of celebrating International Women's Day in Kabul, after 23 years of war in Afghanistan, with 2000 Afghan women from all the provinces; the 160 Sri Lankan women who came to Colombo to voice their concerns and needs, overcoming their trauma after losing family members and livelihoods following the tsunami of 2005; and the solidarity of women from all over Southasia, relating to each other and collecting more than one million signatures to demand strong gender architecture in the UN. All of these are moments that affirm the strength and resilience of the women of Southasia.