Kathmandu:

Like it or hate it, the US cannot be ignored.

Its currency rules the world. Almost all countries hold a bulk of their foreign exchange reserves in US dollars. This provides liquidity for trade and investment to all nations. Remove the dollar and world trade would collapse overnight.

The US with only five per cent of the world’s population contributes $10.7 trillion or 30 per cent of the world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

America is by far the world’s largest importer, with its people buying $1.63 trillion worth of goods from the rest of the world. It is the largest trading partner for most countries.

American companies are at the cutting edge of development of new technologies: PC, e-mail and the Internet; Microsoft’s Windows, Yahoo and Google were all born in the US.

Italians may have discovered pizza but it was US companies like Dominos and Pizza Hut who cut it into slices, popularised it and took it worldwide. Fast food, with its origins in the US, is enjoyed by children everywhere.

American movies and music delights (and sometimes enrages) audiences all over the world. It is difficult to imagine a world without Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, Tom Hanks or Julia Roberts.

You may not agree with how and against whom America uses its military might, but you can hardly have any doubts about its awesome and unmatched power.

You could, I am sure, add to this list. However valid these reasons may be for admiring America, my grounds for liking the US are different: America offers a standard of living to its low and middle-income citizens, which, in most parts of the world, is not even available to the wealthiest.

However rich you may be in Nepal, you may own ten Mercedes’s you still will not have access to the kind of roads which everyone, rich and poor, can drive on in the US. With all your wealth you will not get the telephone services which everyone in America takes for granted. In the US your phone will be installed in hours. You are then connected to virtually every supplier in the US and Canada from flower delivery services to airlines by toll free numbers, thanks to innovations offered by the private phone companies.

All your bank balances in Nepal will not give you access to the entertainment offered by hundreds of channels provided by cable operators to all US residents.

No amount of money in Nepal or India will give you the health care, which thanks to private insurance companies, is available to a majority in the US. Politicians from third world countries routinely go to the US for medical reasons and do not trust the system they have created, over here, for us lesser mortals.

You may be the richest person in Nepal or India, but your wealth will not get for your children the quality higher education which the offspring of middle class parents in the US take for granted. American Universities boast of more Noble-laureate professors than the rest of the world put together.

Your rupees will not buy you speedy justice. Courts are hopelessly clogged with cases and at the present rate of clearance, the arrears will always be with us. In America, a mix of arbitration and efficient processes ensure that a routine case will be settled in months and not take several lifetimes.

Is it any wonder then, that people aspire to go to the States? I remember how happy my secretary, Sandra, was when her daughter went to the US for further studies. America, with all its faults, remains a dream destination for most.

The freedom which everyone including immigrants enjoy in the US is breathtaking, and is the reason for its success. You, on landing in America, can buy a house, rent a shop, take over a

business and buy shares. No permissions are required.

Most other countries, Nepal and India included, even after liberalisation, do not come close to America in offering the economic freedom which could make them achieve what America has done. Our mentality is to control everything.

Until the mind-set of our government’s change from control for controls sake to facilitating business by getting out of the way, I am afraid, the lines of our young wanting to go to the US, will not wane.

May God bless America.

(The writer can be contacted at: everest@mos.com.np)