That Toni Hagen was awarded the highest decoration this land could offer (Birendra Pragyalankar, in 1984) with a gratis visa for unlimited stay in Nepal as also permission to move about freely in the whole country, including the restricted areas speaks of the measure of our trust, hope as well as the regard we had put on him
Among the few names from abroad who come to mind for putting Nepal on the world's map in the course of its leap from the medieval days towards modernity in the last century, Dr Toni Hagen's comes foremost. This was before Leo Rose took up Nepal's politics for his study; before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay ascended Everest; before engineer Miyahara arrived in Nepal to settle down here to promote it as a global destination for tourism; and before Dr Johan Galtung began broadcasting Buddhism on a global scale.
But how did Nepal become a Shangri-la for a budding geologist from the high mountain milieu of the Swiss Alps and what pushed him at the prime of his profession to vacate his house in Rapperswil and renounce the safe haven of his homeland to set off on the uncertain journey of a far-off land, for long hermetically sealed off, to make it his second home? Was it the instinct of orophilia built into his very DNA or even that of his daughter Katrina who has been holding health camps in Nepal, unremittingly, every year, memorialising her famous father with a dedication rarely seen?
With Professor Hagen, my sole encounter goes back to the year 1986 at the Kathmandu Rotary Club, in the course of an assembly we had organised to hear from him. That session left a wish in me to see him again, but that was not to be. The developmental wisdom that the Professor hid behind his scholarly exterior was to emerge eight years later in 1994 in the shape of a volume Building Bridges in the World, which sparkles with quite a few lessons in development where he does not mince his words.
The Seven Utopias, for just one instance. At a time when rivers have become hotbeds of intense controversy fueling communal divide, one of the nuggets that glitters like gold there is: "a river should not be a border, but a nexus (p.171).
Founding himself stumped by King Birendra's query on the appearance of his volume in 1983 whether it was not too late in coming for his country, Toni rejoined tellingly: "It is late, but never too late, provided the will for change is there".
On another volume, now underway on Toni Hagen, had the king survived the infamous palace carnage, would, probably pose his question again, and the professor probably would respond with the same words. After decades of that rejoinder, we are still groping for the political will for change he was looking for in us.
No wonder then that in our dystopia where conscience is missing altogether from politics, where the will power among the mass public to engage in self-help is almost absent, where the false prophets of development have brought decades of doom, where dependence is assuming dangerous proportions, where the cultural objectives from shrines are being funneled into foreign antique markets, apart from the humans exported garbed as Bhutanese refugees, where the cost of negative project failure is five times larger than the cost of positive projective failure, turning foreign aid into a veritable AIDS (Acquired Immunity from Development), little wonder that this throne of gods has failed to keep its promise.
Behind the fact that Toni was not invited to the 1974 UNDP seminar on local geology and minerals could have been his reservation that the Nappe thesis left scant scope for availability of minerals and petrol in the Himalayan region, but the Cold War politics of those days also left each side of the Kohli-Emerenko-Hagen debate with rednecks.
No less importantly, the way the Swiss project of 40 kms was deviously flung aside to build the much longer 110-km highway, the manner in which K.I. Singh did a complete about-face in his politics on his return from China from a Saul to a Paul, and that an erstwhile minister of planning was found trying not only to coax, but also seduce Toni to disclose if he had found gold in the ammonite (Shaligram) from Muktinath (he did not), each says a lot about the malpolitics of our Nepal and its neighbourhood.
Is there then anyone here to hear what Toni left behind?
That Toni Hagen was awarded the highest decoration this land could offer (Birendra Pragyalankar, in 1984) with a gratis visa for unlimited stay in Nepal as also permission to move about freely in the whole country, including the restricted areas, apart from an honorarium for each visit made to Nepal, speaks of the measure of our trust, hope as well as the regard we had put on him.
The role he played, the contributions he made and the dedication he showed will therefore be under-estimated if we consider him merely as a citizen of his country of birth. Such souls, in my opinion, are truly the 'Citizens of the whole Earth'.
