Hajmola - Love it or Hate it?

Humans need to eat, but as we're all different we all have different tastes and therefore we like to eat some foods and not others. We sometimes might not prefer to eat some foods but given a choice we'd rather not, for example you are presented with a cup of coffee when visiting somewhere but thinking you would rather have tea, you drink the coffee anyway out of politeness. Some foods though clearly don't have this middle ground tolerance, your body will accept it graciously or reject it like an allergic reaction.

Pooh would!

Yes, as the clue in the title suggests, I am talking about Hajmola. If you have no idea what Hajmola is, you should be able to find them in any local Indian groceries store. It is tablet usually eaten after a meal that offers to control digestion and flatulence (between you and me, that means 'farting'). Millions of these tablets get churned out from Dabur, India, and plenty of people around the world enjoy taking a Hajmola for that preventative step towards reducing indigestion and related diseases.

Hajmola - the cure to farting!

I suprisingly saw a bottle of Hajmola tucked away on my living room bookshelf, the Mrs confirmed to eating the stuff. I asked, "How did Hajmola end up in our house? They taste horrible!" (- a reference to when I was in Nepal in 1999, I was offered to try one by a cousin while in the vicinity of Pashupatinath Temple, I spat the the thing straight out, and everyone and all the locals turned around like I had committed a crime - an embarrassing scene. It tasted so vile at the time, I couldn't contain myself, it was like a bee sting in the mouth. I think I may have upset the gods.)


Thirteen years later, I'm told,  "They [Hajmolas] taste different now, they come in different flavours too, Imli, Pudina and Lime. Try this Imli one."

Not entirely convinced, I bravely open the lid of the bottle. I bring the open bottle towards my nostrils and give it a quick sniff - like a police dog, enough to not warrant the tablets as something suspicious.

Giving it a third thought, I thought to myself, "Nooo, they really taste different now? Well, it has sure been a while. If Snickers used to be called Marathon and still live on, Hajmola is within a chance."

Hajmola tablet - in the mouth you go and back out you come.

No kidding, if fart came in tablet form, it is Hajmola (ironically). I tried, I really did, but I spat the thing straight into the nearest sensible place. Maybe another thirteen years Hajmola when maybe I might start losing my taste buds.

Do check this guy out on Youtube. He has started a Hajmola Challenge. The challenge is to chew not one, but ten Hajmola's in one go, chew them, and swallow them comfortably in 90 seconds. Can this guy do it? Funnily, in the 2 years since that was posted, no one has challenged him! and I am not surprised! :-)

Hajmola. Love it? or Hate it?

This has reminded me, it's been a looooong time I've tried Marmite.

Peace.

P.S. Why anyone would want to is beyond my wildest imagination, but Hajmola's do carry an overdose warning. Irritation to the stomach they say [1].

[1] http://www.dabur.com/Export-Health%20Care-Hajmola

Gold: protect your heritage.

Judging by my past posts, when Dashain is around the corner, I get the itch to blog, so here I go again!

"Eye spy, with my little eye, something beginning with G."

In the Nepali world, it seems most men know very little about gold before he is married, except being an expensive metal. And particularly if their partner is Nepali or South Asian in origin, they find out just how much their partner 'loves' jewellery, but there is more to it than that. I haven't owned or wore a single piece of jewellery until I was twenty-four (maybe I have no class, some may say) when I passed my masters degree. I tried it on, but didn't feel the appeal and left it with my parents. Six years later, even right now as I type this, I'm wearing no jewellery, not even my wedding ring - mainly out of fear of losing it as I seem to have become skinner in the last few years! But that's my choice, no disrespect to you if you wish to bling yourself out.

"I pity the fool"

So what have I learnt about gold since getting hitched? Many things. Firstly no matter how much you detest a woman's admiration for jewellery, the 'worship' of gold has a deep cultural significance in peoples from South, Central, East Asian heritage. From the worship to the goddess of wealth, Lakshmi in Hindu culture, 'golden skin' of Buddha in Buddhism to the use of gold as a 'protection' in the absence of a husband, gold symbolises more than the face value of gold itself. That I can appreciate, and often the gold is inherited, and so carries sentimental value. However, recently,  I've started to question folks (not literally but in my thoughts) that are routinely buying gold and/or 'hoarding' on to it. Though I think there is nothing wrong with it, as some spend their money on diamonds, shares, artwork, whatever, I worry about how safe people keep these valuable items.

Before I go on, if people think I shouldn't be here raising attention to jewellery held by Nepali's and other communities, then sorry I just did. In fact, it's not exactly a secret either. Under our noses, I know people personally who have had their house's robbed and left devastated with their loss. Criminals are getting smarter with gold metal detectors and know what communities are hoarding expensive items. But at the same time, home owners are not being very savvy in looking after their precious items. Since the recession, particularly this year, there have been a spate of robberies which you can read here, here and here, and there are no signs of successful robberies going down. But what can you do about surviving a robbery if it happens to you?

To begin, ask yourself:

- If your gold disappeared the next day without your knowledge, how would you feel?

-  Could you afford to replace the monetary/sentimental value?

-  Can you prove you own the jewellery, if say the police or your insurance asked?

If some of those questions, make you feel uneasy, then maybe it's time to think how to protect your jewellery? (I just realised I'm talking like an insurance salesman, this is weird as I hate sales people, difference is I'm not taking your money and it's honestly for your own good :-). There are FREE (yes, free) things you can do to make those robbers life a misery.

1) Don't put all your jewellery in a single cupboard or at the bottom of a chest of drawers. I know it's convenient but you're just asking for it. The items you don't wear that often, maybe their better placed way out of reach. Spread them around a bit, waste these f*cking robbers their robbing time.

2) Related to the above, think about places where people wouldn't normally go, perhaps a loft? A hidden safe? Even if you have hidden it well out of reach, if a robber has a detector and found your jewellery, how hard would it be to access and walk out of the house? Test your idea with a close one or someone you trust.

3) Check the strength of your door and windows. Lots of houses get robbed this way because people forget to shut windows. If you have double glazing, some have in locks them. Lock them when you go out. If you rent, ask your landlord about obvious faults. It's your right to have them fixed. See here.

3) Keep all your receipts for your gold jewellery in one place. If you don't have receipts, as jewellery might be gifts or were bought aboard, take photos of ALL your jewellery. Keep all receipts and photos somewhere safe, a locked cabinet file would be ideal. For the extra paranoid, photocopy all your receipts and photos and keep a copy at another property you trust. After all, if your house gets robbed, anything could happen. Pressure cookers can be made into bombs these days, you know?

4) Get your jewellery valued. Ok this one is unfair, I'm making you spend money, but if you bought your jewellery items some time ago, have you ever wondered how much your gold jewellery is worth now? Have a look at the rise in gold price in the last twenty years, it is worth thinking about.  Let's say you bought 11g of gold in 2002, looking at the charge, that would have cost you £6 x 11 = £66. In 2012, with the gold price floating around £35 per gram, that same 11g of gold is now worth £35 x 11 = £361. That's about six times as much you paid for it in 2002.

Gold Price between 1992 - 2012 - not a bad investment in 2005.

Also, your home insurance will pay you if the inevitable happens, and you'll definitely get back what they're worth today, than what you paid, 5, 10 or 20 years ago. I would recommend doing this also if you don't have receipts and want some piece of mind on the gold purity. As a guide a decent jeweller would charge 0.5%-1% per item. So indirectly I'm saving you a lot of money and giving you peace of mind!

5) Check, double check and triple check you ACTUALLY have home insurance and if you do check that they can insure high value items. So many times I hear people's stuff getting stolen for them to later realise they didn't have insurance or their insurance didn't cover the items involved in the theft. For a lot of insurance providers, you have to declare items more than £1500, but there are some (such as Endsleigh) where you don't have to, just as long the value of the items doesn't exceed the amount of cover you're after. So say you wanted £40,000 worth of cover, and you have something worth £20,000, then in principle they should cover it if that £20,000 item goes missing. Again, check, check, check. For the extra paranoid, check the terms and conditions yourself, and get important things said over the phone in writing to you or get them to point to the relevant paragraph in their small print. If you find these things difficult, find someone with experience who can help. It can be time consuming checking every detail.

If you done those five things, then give yourself a pat on the back. You can be confident that if your possessions go missing, you won't go out of pocket. The next steps involve spending some money and thinking about physical security, especially if you care about the sentimental side of your jewellery. Here are some of my random ideas:

6) Get a house alarm installed. Test it.

7) Get a safe. Test it

8) Get CCTV - personally not a fan of this, unless you live in a mansion. 

9) Get a pet - they can 'feel' like a deterent.

10) Get a Bahadur. Kidding - they should be in school!

Lastly, with whatever mechanisms and ideas you put in place, please don't give any clues to people wouldn't normally trust where your valued possessions are. I kid you not, this is a true story. I know a landlady, who had some students lodging at her house, then one day she went to her private place to manage her gold jewellery. Next day, everything was stolen, twenty-thousands worth to be precise. It was like her life savings she had collected for the past thirty years. Turns out, one of the lodgers saw her go to this secret place, and did the damage when the landlady was out.

Don't let it happen to you!

So, there you go, a sharing some experience of gold, not very glamourous, but for the wider good. I also found out what a 'tola' actually is. People still swear by this measure for gold weight. Seen as I know what a gram is as I used to bake cakes at school, here is a basic conversion to put things in perspective:

1 Nepali tola = 11.66375g

Happy Dashain

Further Reading: www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jan/31/gold-theft-asian-families

No sports, study, but oh look at David Beckham.

Make a note in your diary: 10:00am to 10:23am (GMT), Friday 3rd August 2012, Why? Read on.


The diamond Jubilee is over, millions of £££ spent to allow(!) Cheryl Cole sing to the Queen, the UK now turns it's attention to sports to make up for it. Yawwwn :-O some of you might think - a lot of you have no interest in sports, but now the England Football Team are playing in Euro 2012, and the Olympics are on our door step, there will be no getting away! However, there is a lot of goodness that comes out watching sports, you see how the professionals execute their best, pushing the human body to the limit. From time to time I wonder about my own sporting experience, how my parents (and society) didn't particularly encourage me to go further in sports, and how more successful Nepali sportswomen and men (see what I did there) who have broken the social norm's have played out (unintentional pun) their sporting passions.

Hate Sports? There is a society for that, and they really hate sports!

Firstly, to the set the scene, I would have regarded myself as a good football player when I was in primary school and secondary school, my natural position was in either defence or right wing.  For some reason, I was never effective as a striker, I seemed to always run back too far to stop the ball going too near my team's half, hanging around at the top waiting for the ball was just not my thing. I needed to know what was going on up field and be ready to make the heroic 'Sol Campbell' tackle[1] to prevent the other team from scoring. My pace wasn't too bad either, as well as good at chasing strikers, I was effective at creating space on the wing and legging it down the outside towards the corner flag to finally whip one in for the boys waiting in the box. So yes, I was good ;), I hardly ever got picked last when it came to P.E. (Physical Education or Sports) lessons and I played football, representing secondary school every year (I secretly liked rounders too because I was a bad ass* at throwing and getting the opposing team out; for some reason it's more of a 'girly' sport now, sigh). To top that, I was attending martial art classes on Monday and Wednesday evenings throughout my secondary school years. I surprise myself now how active I was back then, a different story with todays school kids (so I hear): crisps and coke cans for breakfast, PlayStations instead of Park-Swings [2], face-booking instead face-to-face and Bey-Blades whatever the hell they are), maybe its just the media portraying kids like terrorists. 


Either way, no matter how much I enjoyed taking part in a variety of sports, it all seemed to go down hill towards the end of school. Some of my school friends use to play for a local club, and they use to always say, "You should come to our practice sessions, we need good players like you". But my parents would say, "No, it's dark outside, we don't want you going out after five-thirty." I didn't understand the logic, but despite the disappointment being an obedient child I just obeyed. As for my martial arts, I did well in the 4 years I trained, but I gradually kept on skipping lessons before leaving all together until I moved away to uni. Apart from the occasional kick about in the park, the rare gym appearances and morning jog, I had pretty much spent my twenties not participating in anything regular. It seems to happen to the best of us, and whilst we cheer on the Michael Phelps, Usain Bolts and Jennifer Enniss of this world, take a moment and bow down to the Nepali sportswomen and sportsmen who despite the lack of facilities and pressures of society to go to work or education (or even just abscond Nepal), make it to the Olympics and remain faithful to their nation and sporting discipline.


This Summer at the London 2012 Olympics, look out for a Miss Shreya Dhital, she will be participating in the 50m freestyle swimming heats (first stage). As far as I know, she is Nepal's National record holder for the 50m butterfly, currently standing at 34.75 secs [3]. The current world record for 50m freestyle is 23.75secs [4], so competition is likely to be tough but I wish Shreya the best in London and don't forget if I am correct, you'll see Shreya between 10:00am to 10:23am (GMT), Friday 3rd August 2012 probably on BBC 1 ( but check your Olympics TV schedule). There will be other Nepali participants taking part in Table Tennis, Weight Lifting and maybe some others sports too, but I can't track their names :-( They are training at Kent University so if anyone knows any more, do let me know.

Shreya Dhital - this is for real, it's a Nepali at the Olympics! Namaste :-)

So what's the moral of this post? If your good at something, whether it's a sport, a field of study, hobby, whatever it is big or small, stick with it. I have no regrets for my sporting choices. If I was a smarter kid, maybe I could have found a way to get those extra football sessions, and found a way to carry on with martial arts. Maybe with some motivation or inspiration from somewhere I could have gone further, but that's just life, I got distracted, found other priorities and moved on. A decade or so later, I've now returned to martial arts, and take part in any sporting activity that is going on with my various social groups. It feels great from a social perspective as well my personal well being. So if you're reading this, wondering whether you should go hit the football field, wrestling mat, basketball court, swimming pool, etc, what is stopping you? Hard work perhaps, but then everything requires hard work. No one will be complaining when you're like Miss Shreya Dhital when she is able to command 15,000 Nepali Rupees for breaking the National Records. So get out there, make your dreams happen! :-)


My best wishes to all Olympic hopefuls.




[1] Sol Campbell's never ending tackle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYN7Vgn924c
[2] Admittingly, I do have a Playstation, it was fun at first but now it has just become an expensive bluray player. I had a NES too when I was 8 years old - but I did my school homework first (that's one for another time).
[3] http://www.khelkud.com/2011/08/shreya-dhital-won-11-golds-and-national.html
[4] http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/2012/sports/swimming/events/womens-50m-freestyle
* bad ass means 'good' in slang.

The Value of Money

I think I deserve a few slaps (or lut-tee hits) on the wrist, first for not writing any posts and secondly for leaving it for too long. I'm hearing through the grapevines, people like my 'alternative, up-front' viewpoints. Someone even said, I could be classed as 'The Times' amongst the Brit-Nepali blogging community (as opposed to the Daily Mail usual trash). Maybe a long way to go until I get the 'The Times' knocking at my door, but each to their own, here goes another gentle blog.

The other day, I checked my bank account and I noticed I have £5.23 to survive for the rest of the month. Peanuts you might say, but in fact I feel OK. That's right, I feel content with £5.23 right now. I know I've covered my spending for this month and I don't intend on going on any spending binge in the next 7 days. There is always the evil credit card if something comes up, but lets 'try' not to go down that road -  I will just survive until the next pay packet appears.

Working for peanuts to feed the monkeys.

Unfortunately however, for some, having that amount just doesn't seem to see the light of day. Seeing £5.23 in their account signifies something entirely different altogether - a call to participate in some nefarious clandestine money making activity.* Sure I would like to have more money, but there just never seems to be enough of it - funny that. "But hey, not to worry, I'm going to sneakingly get it out of YOU instead!" I have no desire to dip into my minuscule savings nor have I the desire to ask my family, friends, sell my daily possessions, borrow, cheat or manipulate people to get additional funds. At the end of the day, it's my fault I have £5.23 in my account, what I spent my money on yesterday and what I will spend on today, tomorrow or in one years time, is down to me; not my family, friends or what 'society' has told me to spend my money on. If I can't afford something that I should have bought when I was able to, then that's my fault too. Just tough - smash the piggy bank open when it gets full.

Save or the pig gets it!

So what's my point? Well, it seems lately, I say lately, I mean in the last 5 years, since I've been working full-time, I've been taken for a mug for other people's mis-management of finances and their general lack of appreciation for the value of money. Yes sad face :-(. I've been duped into the game of lending people money for situations they've got themselves involved in, buying into their sob story and given promise of having the favor returned. It's easy to say when hearing about such a situation that I shouldn't buy into it, but when you're approached for money it's very easy to get sucked in; in that if you didn't help you would be left with a guilty conscience. This becomes worse when relatives get involved, it can become damaging and get awkward if not dealt with in the right way.

I know I'm not the only one experiencing this, I seem to hear countless stories like this all the time and I always think how dumb are these people to let these things happen to them. And there's me falling for the same tricks in these stories I hear. We'll always hear stuff like this as long there is another person willing to hand over his or her hard earned cash over. However, thankfully (which I say in the nicest weird possible way) I have been a victim of two such encounters, where in hindsight I should have just said no or offered an alternative solution. Fortunately I've only seen the smoke and not been burnt enough to see the fire (if that makes sense), but I've heard far far worse, so I count myself lucky. 

Today I'm going to share my extortion experiences to:

a) just get it off my chest
b) understand to readers what it's like from the person that lends the money.
c) understand to the cheating borrowers that don't keep to their word you have no respect and cannot be trusted when you cross paths with your lender.

A caveat is my experiences are with people who are not exactly poor, they have access to money if they asked for it or took an alternative path, but instead they choose to knock on people's door to start the exploitation process and have no intention of paying me back. Another thing is, what has this got to do with Nepal, Brit/Nepal, Brits? Not a lot really, this happens in every society, but Nepal being a poor nation with mostly poor citizens, it's inevitable some poor people will try their tricks, but it's not just the poor, it's ordinary and wealthy citizens who are at it too, maybe more than we want and care to admit and it's these folks I want to target.

My first experience as gullible lender was with someone who racked up a massive phone bill, I mean massive - started out as a few hundred pounds (which is already too much) later turned into a four-figure sum. They knew they were passed their contract allowance, but the person thought they would get away with it if they ignored paying the bill. Soon did they realised this wasn't the case, and they had the mobile operator ringing up on a daily basis asking to pay up. But the person kept on fobbing them off and routinely ignored their calls. It came to the point the mobile operator was going to bring in the bailiffs if it wasn't paid. I gave into this, and helped them out. I wasn't exactly loaded at the time, in fact everything I earned over the summer was wiped out, which I was hoping to pay off an overdraft which I had planned on paying off after my summer job.

Hello? Is this the billing department? Yeah? Well. Bleep! Bleep!

My second and last experience was with a person, who I should have been more assertive with. We were both on holiday to a certain destination to see relatives, we had planned to stay a certain length of time, and that was always the intention. However it turned out this person wanted to stay longer (for selfish reasons). I was reluctant at first because we had planned (and budgeted) to spend more time at this person's home city and we would need to fly back. After a while I said to this person, I would call the flight operator to see how much it would cost to change the ticket times, and then we would make a decision then - in case it was too expensive. After talking to the flight operator, the operator said it would cost $100 each to change the flight times to a later date. The person got all emotional about wanting to stay and they promised they would pay me back, so being the gullible lender, I gladly obliged to extend the stay.

Borrowers - feel the pain.

To this day, 5 years after both incidents I haven't been paid back a penny nor have I had neither person attempt to get in touch with me about paying back. Even it was £1 a week, it's a start. I don't get bitter about it because if I couldn't afford it, I would have never offered to pay for their cause in the first place. Like I said earlier, what I spend my money on, even if that's lending to someone else, that's still my fault.

Other weird experiences I've had, but stood my ground, is one guy rang my family for £2000 for no real reason - "I just need it". The phone was passed to me to deal with, and I had to politely say that no one here has that sort of money (which is the truth) and they disappeared for a while - I later found out he managed to get the money from someone I knew, and took them about 3 years to pay it all back. But you never really get the full truth with these things. Just Unbelievable.

Only last week, someone else wanted money for their visa fee. Again, remember, people that I've had to deal with are generally with people with access to money and just trying to be clever. This guy I know works, and gets a nice lump sent to him from mother and father every month. What's funny is, I'm told he's been asking a lot of people, and they have basically said, "No", and he's trying to get through to me, but it seems the word has got round that I'm not an easy fish to deal with, and he tends to convince other people that know me to ask me on his behalf. I'm a genius!

So the moral of the story, most times, lending money is just asking for trouble. So be careful. Really understand what the reason is, and the likely-hood of being paid back. I've learnt most times, money is not the problem.

And to you folks who have borrowed money and have never paid it back, if you have any remorse, think about your lenders. They had the heart to take what they earned and save your day. To your lender it's not always the money, it's the principle.

Ever get shafted? Or are you shafting someone right now? Feel free to share your story. You can comment anonymously too.

Peace.**

* I wrote everything before the asterisk about 7 days before the end of May 2012. Now it's June 2012 and I have more than £5.23 in my account, and yes I'll be typically British and not tell you how much I earn...it's ruuuude! :-)

**Sorry, bit serious and somber this post, I'm keeping in mood in line with England's 2012 performance expectations this summer.

Macha Pani Ma Update: The fish are on holiday except one - I need to give him or her a name.

Cousins don't exist.

Dasai has arrived and it's that time of the year to visit family and friends we know and also those relatives who we don't know or are just too far in the family tree, but just knock on the front door and appear at your house out of nowhere.

Nonetheless, I'm fortunate to have ALOT of relatives, mainly living in Nepal, but also in other parts of the world including the UK and USA. And it ceases to amaze me how many middle aged men and women I've had to refer to as Uncle and Auntie or some random stranger as 'dai' or 'didi'. Being a member of the Asian race, it's something you get accustomed to. Everyone is your brother or sister : - ) (except your wife or husband. Even my mum used to call her parents didi, dai (older sister and older brother). It's weird. There is just no saying who's your brother or where a certain family member fits in the family tree, maybe it's not worth us knowing - controversial subject ;)

I'll give you a recent example that made me think. I was at a wedding a few years ago, in London, UK. A nice small low key wedding for close family members. The brides and groom's families hadn't met before and so during the reception (after the ceremony), someone from the brides side (they were European) suggested everyone from the grooms side introduce themselves and their relation to the groom. So the queue went round and it came to me, and I said, "I'm so and so, and I'm his cousin, his mother and my mother are sisters". I made it clear my relation to the groom. But then about 10 other male relatives say the following in turn:

"I'm X, and I'm his brother."
"I'm Y, and I am his brother."
.
. ( yes you get the idea)
.
...and I'm Z, and funnily enough I'm also his brother."

When the groom has one real brother, how do you explain to a bunch of Europeans, who's the real brother? I know it's a cultural thing, but what's so hard about saying our exact relationship to somebody? Do we not want to come across as less important or too distant? Maybe it's just too complicated to explain what the relation is. Fear not, help is at hand, hopefully the following might be of assistance.

Unless you live in some authoritarian society, a little inquisitiveness can do no harm and a lot of great. I did some fact finding on cousin relationships on Wikipedia[1] and how you're meant to formally describe the more complicated family ties. It was all new to me, but did you know if your cousin (no not your brother or sister...lol) has a child, then that child is actually also referred to as your cousin. Well almost, as you shall see there is a correct way of describing that relationship. The way to describe that relationship you have with that relative you seem to always pass ships with is explained in the chart below.

European Kinship System - Timro bo ko ho? [1]

The system uses the idea of "degrees" and "removed" to exactly describe the relationship. So going back to the example I mentioned earlier, your cousin's child is your 'first cousin once removed'. So, using the chart, see if you can work out the correct relationship in the descriptions below (answers will be in my next blog post).

So when it's your turn to describe your relation to the relative that magically appears at this time of the year, you can be a smart ass and tell them how it is : - )

1. Your Mother and your relative's Father are siblings.


2. Your grandfathers sister.


3. Your Uncle's grand-daughter.


4. Your second cousin's son.


5. Your great Aunt's great great great great grandson (Tough).


On a final note, in reality I wouldn't use the exact terms in this kinship system but I think it's helpful just to be clearer to folks that don't know you. Now if I've got you intrigued in all this cousin relation stuff, I recommend you take a read of the article over on Wikipedia [2], lots of talk about double cousins and inbreeding!

Anyway, happy holidays didi, bhaini's and dai's, bhai's (if you pardon the pun).


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:European_kinship_system_en.svg

A perspective abroad...

http://iloveourfuture.blogspot.com/2011/03/divided-we-stand-united-we-fall.html

Made in UK, sorry no China, UK bhaneko

We all have them; whenever we're about to embark on a trip to Nepal, some relative (or relatives!) tries a fast one, and will kindly request, "Dada/Didi, can you send me a iPhone?"

When you can't or barely afford an iPhone yourself, what is your reaction? 

a) Think about it, ponder over your finances, procrastinate for a bit, and make a decision later.

or 

b) Just buy an iPhone at your nearest Apple store because you love your relative so much.

I don't know about you, but for me, it's "c) You can go to hell!"

Shock, horror, why would I think like this, I must be a cruel kinda guy >:) well actually I think I have, what you're about to read is a reasonable opinion : - )

If you gonna sell it like that, ma pani laptop chian-cha, (but must be shipped from UK)!

It all started off when I was at someone's house for the evening, and someone mentioned how their Dad in Nepal wanted a laptop from the UK, shipped to Nepal. Instantly, that sounded really daft. I've been to Nepal, and I've been to the electronic stores in Nepal, and there are plenty of laptops for sale, prices not that different from UK, why doesn't their Dad just buy one there (or arrange some Western Union job, and buy the laptop in Nepal?). You guessed it, everything made in the UK is great is 100% superior to the rest of the world (even if it's stolen or 2nd hand).

Wrong.

Uhh...does a Rolls Royce airplane engine interest you? Thought not, sorry nothing else is made here.

Unfortunately, that is the impression etched into the Dad's mind in Nepal (and every other person from a developing country), despite a product so universal and manufactured from a handful of countries uhhh.Chi.emm..na.emm.and.Tai-wan, it has to come from the UK. "Oh look, yo UK bara aiyo." except the truth is it's made in China and has made a complete round trip to a country neighboring where the laptop was probably first assembled, with it's electronic parts taking a few drops on the way. If someone could prove to me statistically, laptops (or any globally known or used device) are inferior in Nepal when compared to the same products bought abroad, then I'll be happy for someone to prove me wrong : - ) It's like saying, I want to buy a BMW car (pretty standard across Europe), but request to buy one from Germany, (assuming it's about the same price) and have it shipped over to the UK, which would probably cost me more, and in essence a waste of time. Maybe no one trusts the Germans or Chinese. : - )

Oh yeah just take one, they just magically appeared.

The other gripe I have is, when a request like this arrives is, you buy an iPhone for someone (same argument as above, you can get one there too), this gets around your family, and they either all start asking to buy one for them as well (like iPhones grow out of your back pocket), or suddenly you're enemy no.1 for not giving them a gift of equal or superior worth. It's usually both. You can't win with folks back home, so there is only one solution...

....arrive with nothing. 

God Save the Queen and Jai Nepal

P.S. In the end, the Dad bought the laptop in Nepal. A wise Dad, like so many : - )