‘Fragments of Memory: A Nepali National’s Reminiscences’.

“It is a fascinating account of ...two centuries of transformation telescoped in one lifetime.”

Prabasi is an enchanting raconteur and his memoir reads like a thriller. As a fellow global citizen of Nepali origin, with many similar experiences, I found his Fragments of Memory intriguing and inspiring. He circles around the world in a journey of many twists and turns, rise and fall, hobnobbing with the world’s great and mighty but also seeking solace in the wilderness of nature, the comfort-zone of his tight-knit family, searching for the meaning of life and reflecting on the evolution of human civilization. It is a fascinating account of what the author considers two centuries of transformation telescoped in one lifetime.

— Kul Chandra Gautam, former Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF and Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, and author of the acclaimed books Lost in Transition: Rebuilding Nepal from the Maoist mayhem and mega earthquake, and Global Citizen from Gulmi: My Journey from the Hills of Nepal to the Halls of United Nations.

Read this fascinating book review by Kul Chandra Gautam published on My Republica on August 10, 2020.

“Travelogue, love story, or rags to (modest) riches tale, above all this memoir is a spiritual treasure hunt.”

‘You have made me known to friends whom I knew not. You have given me seats in homes not my own. You have brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger.’  These words of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore have taken flesh in the questing soul of Satish Prabasi. Now a doting Manhattan grandfather, retired diplomat, and citizen of the world, Prabasi takes us all the way back to his childhood in Nepal—where he reached the age of nine before experiencing any mode of transport not based on animals.  Then he brings us forward with him, tracing the extraordinary and improbable circumstances through which he attained an education, a career, and a family.  At each turn, we see how Prabasi opened his heart to new people and places, as he opened his mind to new ideas and experiences. Fragments of Memory can be enjoyed as a travelogue, a love story, or a “rags to (modest) riches” tale, but above all this memoir is a spiritual treasure hunt. Prabasi’s insatiable thirst for wisdom is the golden thread running through all his reminiscences, drawing the fragments of memory together into one beautiful tale.

— Christine Eberle, a Roman Catholic writer, retreat leader, and public speaker, is the author of Finding God in Ordinary Time: Daily Meditations

“…….Prabasi fuses the insights and inanities of East and West into a riveting saga of one man’s life and times.”

In ‘Fragments of Memory: A Nepali National’s Reminiscences’, Satish Prabasi welds his personal antecedents and assorted experiences into a story crossing continents and covering the epochal changes of our times. The gripping narrative is a compendium of tales. A boy from a sequestered Nepali village wedged between China and India goes on to serve as a senior United Nations official in both Asian giants during pivotal moments in each. An academic and entrepreneur with a steadfast passion for development struggles to surmount entrenched political and bureaucratic obstacles. A seeker cognizant of the endlessness of his quest absorbs and explains things as he learns them. With the natural flair of a raconteur, Prabasi brings alive an almost forgotten world to train the spotlight on the progress and predicaments of today. With wholesome doses of lightheartedness and profundity, Prabasi fuses the insights and inanities of East and West into a riveting saga of one man’s life and times. A citizen of world surveys its constituent parts with a conviction that can only hypnotize and humble.

— Sanjay Upadhya, a journalist of Nepali origin based in Florida, is the author of Nepal and the Geo-Strategic Rivalry between China and India (Routledge: 2012) and The Raj Lives: India in Nepal (Vitasta: 2008)

“In many ways the book’s attractiveness is that it is the story of so many of us in the Twentieth Century who journeyed out of our villages, travelling away from our families, exploring new lands and working for great causes!”

Leaving his Nepali village as a boy to study in Varanasi, Satish Prabasi matured to join the Royal Government of Nepal. As a young civil servant, he was introduced to the conundrums of development and the complexities of government. A scholarship to the United Kingdom, and later advanced studies in Holland brought Prabasi into the mainstream of international development thinking. He began dealing with issues and development strategies, leading him to important assignments within the United Nations Organization.

Prabasi’s departure from South Asia and eventual settlement in the United States mirrors, in reverse, my own life’s trajectory. We are both adventurers and travelers, which assured that our paths would cross in the late 1970’s at a critical age of our intellectual growth and maturing abilities to act. Prabasi’s administrative and policy formulation genius with mixed well with my pension for program design and on-the-ground action. I, and Aneeta Gokhale, had recently founded the Centre for Development Studies and Activities [CDSA] in Pune, India, which was a unique venture envisioning development as an integrated set of physical, social, economic and participatory actions. We believed in “learning by dong,” while implementing our development strategies on the ground. In a chance meeting Prabasi was quick to envision the cocktail of UNICEF’s financial resources, leverage with governments, mixed with a team of on-the-ground micro-level planners, working with the people for whom they planned.

(To read the complete blog by Christopher Benninger, click here.)

— Founder of the School of Planning at Ahmedabad (CEPT University) and the Center for Development Studies and Activities (CDSA) at Pune, Architect Christopher Benninger is the author of Letters to a Young Architect (2011) and a co-author of Modern Regionalism: The Architecture of Sarbjit Bahga (2016).