I was 11-year-old, studying in standard six. Since one of my uncles, Jagnath Acharya, was the Nepali Congress activist, I had heard about the meeting at Ganesh Man Singh’s residence and the announcement of People’s Movement. I didn’t know what it all meant – when I asked my father he told me with his childhood experience of 2007 that the political activists would take out rallies for democracy. “What will happen with democracy?” “You can vote, you can chose the prime minister and you can speak anything.”
I had accompanied my father in Village Panchayat voting, I didn’t know how I would get to chose the PM and I thought no one is stopping me from speaking.
I had just changed to school to admit to one that one of my brothers had just established. He was young and he taught us English two hours a day. He asked all of us to draw a picture of a tree on a full page without our names and give it to him. Most of us did that. Later, I came to know that his group had vandalized the Village Panchayat office and thrown away the trees we had drawn there. Tree symbolized Nepali Congress – I later knew.
A day after that two of my friends and I planned to do something. What? We didn’t know. Then we thought it would be most suitable for us to break glass window of trolley bus because that was of government. At evening, we waited for about half-an-hour with stones on our hand for trolley-bus and threw stones at it when it finally arrived. We ran without waiting to see the results. Next day, we were all very satisfied that we had done something for democracy.
Then came the big day. King Birendra met with leaders. Everybody was covered in vermillion powder and going to Kathmandu with flags. It was red all over. We wanted to go but nobody took us saying there would be big crowd. We decided to do the same in our village. We went to tailor, paid his some money for a flag of Nepali Congress (that day every tailor was busy making flags), cut down some tree branches and collected a few more friends and organized a victory rally. We shouted democracy slogans and walked around for about an hour (well the biggest fight between us was to get hold of the only flag we had).
I saw TV in the evening and the biggest ever crowd and some famous artists in the rally and slept with a feeling that if I had been grown up, I could have participated in THAT BIG RALLY.
