English · Chapter 34
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Globalisation and Diaspora is a Language Development unit of the Grade 11 Compulsory English textbook. Its theme is the movement of goods, money, work, ideas and people across national borders, and the communities that form when people settle far from their country of birth. The unit trains comprehension on an expository text about global connection and migration, builds a vocabulary of trade, movement and culture, teaches the grammar of comparison, and puts both to work in discussion and in writing tasks such as essays, paragraphs and letters. NEB questions reward the student who can define globalisation and diaspora accurately, weigh their gains against their costs, and support each side with a reason and a concrete example.
Confirm the specific title and author of this unit's reading against your own copy of the textbook, because what follows develops the substance the unit's reading treats rather than a named text.
Globalisation is the process by which countries become so closely bound together that a decision taken in one of them is quickly felt in the rest. Goods are made wherever they are cheapest and sold wherever there are buyers, money crosses borders in seconds, and fashions and opinions travel faster still. Three forces drove the change. Transport became cheap and reliable, so cargo could cross an ocean for a fraction of its old cost; trade rules were loosened, so goods and capital met fewer barriers at national frontiers; and the internet and the mobile phone made contact between two continents cost little more than contact between two streets.
Diaspora is the other half of the unit. The word comes from Greek and means a scattering, and it names a community living far from the homeland of its ancestors while keeping a shared identity with it, the children of migrants included. What holds such a community together is deliberate: the mother tongue is kept at home, festivals stay on the calendar, food is cooked as it was cooked before, associations are formed, and money and advice flow back, so the second generation grows up holding two places at once.
Nepal belongs to this story in an obvious way. Large numbers of Nepalis work abroad, particularly in the Gulf countries and Malaysia, while others have settled in India, Europe, North America and Australia. The remittances they send home make up a substantial share of the national economy, and in individual households they pay school fees, medicine or a piece of land. Nepali associations abroad keep Dashain and Tihar far from home, and the students who leave to study belong to the same movement.
Both faces of the process carry gains and costs together. Open trade puts cheap imported goods and familiar global brands within reach of a local market, and undercuts the craftsman who cannot match those prices. Migration raises a family's income and teaches a worker new skills, and it separates parents from children for years and drains the country of trained people it has paid to educate. Culture gains from contact and loses from imitation, since what is borrowed can crowd out what is local. The unit therefore asks you not to praise globalisation or condemn it, but to see it as a force to be managed on terms that leave the country better off.