{"id":590,"date":"2019-08-21T09:36:39","date_gmt":"2019-08-21T03:51:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.meromauka.com\/news\/?p=590"},"modified":"2019-08-21T09:36:42","modified_gmt":"2019-08-21T03:51:42","slug":"nepals-prime-minister-has-had-it-with-the-world-using-the-word-rhino","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meromauka.com\/news\/nepals-prime-minister-has-had-it-with-the-world-using-the-word-rhino\/","title":{"rendered":"Nepal\u2019s prime minister has had it with the world using the word rhino"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli has once again professed his aversion to the rhino\u2014no, not the animal, but the word \u2018rhino\u2019.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Monday, addressing 400 delegates from over 43 countries at the 56th Director Generals of Civil Aviation conference in the Capital, Oli went off script, imploring the audience to use the Nepali word for the armour-plated one-horned beast found in the jungles of the plains, instead of its English name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn the past ten years, we\u2019ve doubled tigers. We have similarly doubled \u2018gaida<\/em>s\u2019,\u201d Oli said<\/a>. \u201cDo you know what\u2026gaida [is]? You people know gaida as rhino. But rhinos are not rhinos, they are gaida. I request you to remember this word\u2014gaida. I am surprised sometimes because even in places without any gaida, people use the name rhino because they are comfortable with the term.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut gaida are gaida,\u201d Oli concluded, \u201cwhich are protected very well in the southern part of our country.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oli\u2019s distaste for the English name of the pachyderm dates back to at least 2015, when, during a press meet with his CPN-UML comrades, Oli gave an impromptu monologue that has come to be known as the \u201cGaida Puran<\/a>\u201d, spawning several memes across social media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhere did this term rhino come from? How did rhino come in the English language? How can there be [the word] \u2018rhino\u2019 in a country that has none?\u201d he asked in a series of rhetorical questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oli then went on to make a wild assertion: \u201cGaida is born neither in America nor in Europe. Nor Australia. One has to come here to see a gaida. If one doesn\u2019t see a gaida once in a lifetime\u2014even if they might be from a developed country, or whoever they are, however rich they are\u2014are they even human? Half of their life is wasted.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The word rhinoceros is derived from the Greek word \u2018rhinokeros\u2019, meaning nose-horned. The word is often abbreviated to rhino, used broadly for all variants in the family of Rhinocerotidae<\/a>. The Oxford Learner\u2019s Dictionary defines rhinoceros as \u201ca large heavy animal with very thick skin and either one or two horns on its nose, that lives in Africa and Asia.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2015, Oli had gone on to say that anyone who wanted to see a rhino\u2014or rather, a gaida<\/em>\u2014had to come to Nepal, which, of course, is inaccurate. Rhinos are native to all of South Asia and parts of Africa, where the native population refers to the animals by their local names. They can also be found across the world, in zoos and enclosures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the prime minister is prone to hyperbole. On Tuesday, Oli also said that Nepal is home to all 14 peaks above 8,000 metres. That\u2019s also untrue\u2014only eight of them<\/a> are in Nepal; the rest are in Pakistan and China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oli also insisted that Mount Everest be called by its Nepali name\u2014Sagarmatha\u2014when the far older name for the world\u2019s highest peak is Chomolungma, as the Sherpas and Tibetans called it for decades<\/a> before it was named Mount Everest or Sagarmatha. The historian Baburam Acharya is credited with coining<\/a> the Nepali name as late as 1956. If Oli demands that the mountain be called by its indigenous name, Chomolungma would have been a better bet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But back to gaidas. The rhino is an endangered species, currently found in parts of Africa and South Asia, including Nepal. In Swahili, the rhinoceros is called a kifaru<\/em>; in Zulu, the word is imikhombe<\/em>. In Hindi, like in Nepali, it is called \u2018gaida\u2019. The Chitwan National Park might be popular for its one-horned rhinos (Rhinoceros unicornis<\/em>) but these same species are majorly found in India, with Kaziranga National Park hosting over 2,400 individuals<\/a>, compared to roughly 645 in all of Nepal<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the five major species of rhinos, \u201cWhite rhinos and black rhinos live in the grasslands and floodplains of eastern and southern Africa. Greater one-horned rhinos can be found in the swamps and rainforests of northern India and southern Nepal<\/a>,\u201d according to a 2018 article published by Live Science<\/a>. \u201cSumatran and Javan rhinos are found only in small areas of Malaysian and Indonesian swamps and rainforests.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conservation of rhinos<\/a> and their rarity often makes news, which is perhaps where Oli\u2019s obsession with the species stems from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following the prime minister\u2019s comment on Monday, one Twitter user wryly commented<\/a>on his affinity for Nepali nomenclature as opposed to English ones. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf the prime minister wants to coin local names, then he should name his initials as Kha Pra and not KP,\u201d the user wrote. \u201cHis assertions should not be limited to speech only but should also be put into practice.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli has once again professed his aversion to the rhino\u2014no, not…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":591,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,17,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environmental-news","category-nepal","category-stories"],"yoast_head":"\nNepal\u2019s prime minister has had it with the world using the word rhino | Buy sell anything in Nepal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.meromauka.com\/news\/nepals-prime-minister-has-had-it-with-the-world-using-the-word-rhino\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta 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