Reinventing the Self in Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine

Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine is a story of a young Punjabi woman named Jasmine whose life takes her from India to the United States, where she goes through many different destinies with her effort to reinvent her coherent self. Searching for and defining a new identity is a central question for immigrants living in a foreign land. The confusion of identity and cultural conflict pushes the immigrants into an identity crisis. The novel exposes how Jasmine, the female protagonist, as an outsider, strives to shape her identity to fit in the mainstream American society. Fortunately, she encounters confirmations of her shifting identity in different stages of her life. Instead of rejecting these identities and names in various phases, she seeks to create a harmonious relationship with those identities. In this context, this paper tries to explore on how she struggles throughout her life to reinvent the coherent self by her constant effort to assimilate to the alien culture and setting.Crossing the Border: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Vol.4(1) 2016: 29-38

Spying - An Ethical Profession

In this essay, I will discuss the ethics and morality of spying. I will examine the dilemmas facing governments who choose to cross moral boundaries for the sake of national security. In discussing the morality of spying I will justify spying from a consequentialist and utilitarian perspective. The spy-game stretches the moral boundaries and the end often justifies the means. An example of this dilemma would be torturing a suspect to save a large number of people. Events involving the assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud al- Mabhouh made headlines worldwide and prompted this discussion. The question asked is how far can intelligence agencies stretch these boundaries?Crossing the Border: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Vol.4(1) 2016: 39-44

The Discourse of Power and the Politics of Squatting in Nepal

The aim of this paper is to provide a discursive analysis of the phenomenon of squatting in Nepal. The paper begins by charting the concept of discourse from its inception as an analytic framework in Bakhtin’s theory of discourse to more recent application in tracking regimes of power, including international developments. The paper then examines the discourse of representation and praxis characterizing government and urban planning approaches to squatting in Nepal, followed by two case studies conducted in Chapagaun that illustrate the manner in which power circulates in a Nepali squatter settlement as well as in the lives of individual squatters. The paper concludes by arguing that the resources which fuel the praxis of squatting (e.g. finances, political connections and knowledge) often exclude the very people most in need of land and housing through disarticulation, or the omission of local voices.Crossing the Border: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Vol.4(1) 2016: 3-18

Jealousy and Destruction in William Shakespear's Othello

Othello is honest. He wants to establish an order and peace in the society. He falls in love with a white lady, Desdemona. Despite the discontentment of Desdemona’s father Brobantio, they marry each other. Iago, an evil-minded man, is not happy with the promotion of Cassio, a junior officer to Iago, to lieutenant’s post in support of the chief Othello. Iago becomes jealous to Cassio and plans to destroy the relation between Othello and Cassio in any way it is possible. He uses Roderigo, a rejected suitor to Desdemona and Emilia, the innocent wife of Iago in his evil plot. Iago treacherously makes Desdemona’s handkerchief, a marriage gift from Othello, reach in Cassio through Emilia. Then he notices Othello about the Apresence of the handkerchief in Cassio as an accusation of Desdemona’s falling in love with Cassio. In reality, both Cassio and Desdemona are innocent. They are honest and loyal to their moral position. But because of jealousy grown in Othello by Iago, Othello plans to murder his kind and truly loving wife and his dutiful junior officer Cassio. Othello kills Desdemona and Iago kills his wife Emilia as she discloses the reality about Iago’s evilness. Othello kills himself after he knows about Iago’s treachery. As a result, all the happiness, peace and love in the families of Othello and Iago get spoilt completely because of just jealousy upon each other. Crossing the Border: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Vol.4(1) 2016: 53-58

Healing Trauma with metta: Nepali Texts in the Nepali Context

Nepali society for more than one and half decades has been under panicked condition losing many lives and property which remained irreparable for a long time. It is our memory that helps us reminisce those horrible past events from which one can hardly get rid of, thus, we are inflicted with the memories – traumatic memories that neither let us get rid of it nor let us live out of. We, as part of this painful past, have been with this reality. Many survivors have imbibed this fact in the form of printed media – writing memoirs, stories, novels, poems, etc, from which one can be aware of many such details which make us feel even more traumatic. One can’t live with this memory for a long time; thus, one needs a recovery of such painful past memory; for that a Buddhist tool can be a cure – metta.Crossing the Border: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Vol.4(1) 2016: 45-52

Transform Spatial: Making the Case for Spatial Thinking in Higher Education

This white paper argues in favor of an interdisciplinary approach to curriculum design that places greater emphasis on spatial thinking in order to prepare students in higher education for life and careers in the 21st century. While part one of the paper outlines and supports various claims regarding spatial thinking, the second part of the paper proposes an intervention, and introduces the transformed curriculum of a compulsory first-year composition course that emphasizes spatial thinking and experiential learning. Crossing the Border: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Vol.4(1) 2016: 59-78

Interdisciplinarity for Bridging Disciplines

Interdisciplinary Studies crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. No discipline stands alone entirely. In other words, disciplines are not distinct entities at all; they sometimes overlap, sometimes borrow, and sometimes invade upon one another. And some disciplines are famous for their particularly interdisciplinary or bridging disciplines by nature. they may, thus, within the one discipline fuse physical sciences, social sciences and humanities as they consider interrelations between two or more separate domains.Crossing the Border: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Vol.4(1) 2016: 1-2

Art and Autobiography: A Study of the Self in Literature

In this paper, I have attempted to apply critical approaches of William C. Spengemann to study Oscar Wilde’s Salomé as an autobiographical work that involves a set of assumptions such as biographical information about the author and information about the work’s genesis, which should be given the secondary importance. Instead of the idea of defining autobiography as self-written biography, it is necessary to understand the ways in which different autobiographers write in different forms and at different times. So the main purpose of this paper is to explore the self in literature, i.e. Wilde’s Salomé. Essentially, how can a piece of literary work be considered as an autobiography that has been practiced in response to shifting ideas about the nature of the self?Crossing the Border: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Vol.4(1) 2016: 19-28

Cybercrime and Security in Nepal: The Need for Two-Factor Authentication in Social Media

History of using computers is not long enough in Nepal. It was started in around 1995, but it got easier for us to access to using computers after 2000. We had no easy access to telephone and internet even before 2006 due to the Maoist Insurgency. In 2006, the users of Internet were 1.1% of the total population of Nepal, which reached around 17.2% at the end of 2016. With this rapid increment of internet users, risk of misuse such as cybercrime has increased through the use of internet. This paper thus will describe in detail about the cybercrime and security and authenticity related issues.Crossing the Border: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 5(2) 2017: 31-36

Formal Education for Personal and Professional Development: A Case of B.Ed. Female Graduates in Pokhara

The paper aims to prove that formal education acquired at university level has its direct relation with the personal and professional development of an individual. For instance, the female graduates of the study area have shown that they are benefitted in their professional teaching and personal life from the knowledge and skill they had acquired during their formal learning. In order to present it lucidly, the paper has been structured in six parts. The introductory part builds the context and states the research questions. It is followed by historical background, which deals with the development of formal education in Nepal; it also includes discrimination against women in education sector. The third part is theoretical discussion that deals with the impact of formal education in enhancing students’ skills and knowledge, problem solving and personality development. The fourth part is about methodology that briefly discusses the methods of data collection and analysis applied for conducting this research and drafting this article. The core part of this article is data analysis in which the collected data have been analyzed and the sixth is the conclusion followed by a list of references.Crossing the Border: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Vol.5(1) 2017: 61-82