Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

In this piece, written on Nov 5, 2025 originally, I pretend to be the CEO of a global-scale talent-management company that competes with the Koreans.

Nepal is an ethnically diverse country. We have many dozens of languages, hundreds of different ethnicities and sub-ethnicities. We have many, many dozens of distinct food traditions, dance traditions, and music traditions. We have traditionally not been able to take advantage of that, and often, particularly those of us living in the cities, have seen that as a cultural baggage rather than an asset that can be shared and used to make ourselves wealthier and be proud of it in the world. When we have used our culture and traditions, etc., as a point of pride, it has been a tokenism thing, as in, “Oh, I am a different person than you. I wear a colorful thing. Isn’t that wonderful? Give me all the cool stuff.” It hasn’t been for the inherent value of it. When you hear a song, particularly in a commercial context, you don’t consider it to be good automatically because it’s in a language that you don’t speak or understand. If you see a dance, you don’t automatically like a dance because somebody else is dancing it or the colors are very colorful. So that tokenist celebration of our different traditions isn’t helpful in a long-term commercial way. Rather, it’s hindering us because we are pretending our cultures and traditions, living as they are, already exist in a museum and that makes the concept that what our culture and tradition is is worthy only of living in a museum, in a dusty old room, and not as a part of our everyday life, not as a living culture.

My goal is to make money. Let’s be clear about that.

My goal is to make money.

My goal is to find my and our niche in this Global media Marketplace and leverage that to give us an edge and upper hand that nobody else saw the potential in. I saw the potential in the Nepali music industry after talking to my sister, who has friends in some bands, and she spent several years in India, studying and working a couple of years after. What she noticed there was that Indians of all ethnicities and regionality seem to have a soft spot, this excitement, about Nepali music and music videos. For some reason, despite there being basically 1.2 billion more of them than there are us, they are excited about Nepali culture and tradition as portrayed in our music videos and in our songs. There is a lot of potentiality that has always established a rich historical tradition of producing good music and visual representation. I thought that was a great point to start.

Where our diversity comes useful is in the understanding that the increasingly globalized world, is also increasingly diverse. To cater to the diverse needs, we need a diverse representation of them. In Nepali culture, in Nepali demographics, that diversity is reflected, and my only goal was to reflect Nepal’s diversity in our media representation so that can be spread out across the world. This is not necessarily, you know, a celebration of Nepal’s diversity, but leveraging of Nepal’s diversity to make money. That’s it. Which is not to, as I’ve said before, it’s not just about diversity. There needs to be talent. The listener of your songs isn’t listening to you or looking to you because there are so many different kinds of you, so many different colored clothes or different colored skin. They’re watching you because the quality of your product, the quality of your creative output, is really good. We have a historical tradition of producing really great output, and it’s been very encouraging.

So, the other step there was: How do we go about actually doing it? Okay, after I have the philosophy that I just mentioned, what’s the next step?

For that, the most obvious step fell: copying these South Korean band creative agencies’ pattern, but add a lot of Nepali flavor and culture and taste to it. So, instead of making it very regimented and strict, which I consider to be an inaccurate representation of the Korean culture, we decided to make it, dare I say, intense in a whole different way, which was: we will give you the freedom to do what you want, but you need to get really good at what we want you to do by doing what you want. I said, “I will give you the final exams, but you need to figure out what book you want to study.” Yes. “Here’s your mark sheet. Here’s the questions in this exact exam. Now you figure out the right books you’re going to study to answer this question,” and chatGPT is not going to do the work for you.

That’s worked out really well for us. The band members and collaborators that people have come up with have been fantastic—better than we could find through our search algorithms and so on. Other issue we’ve benefited from is that because this culture of respecting the creative arts has flourished in more recent years, every year that goes by, the quality of our contestants and the quality of applicants to our program goes up significantly. I hope folks from the first couple of years from our program don’t mind me saying this, but if we were to pair the entrant class for this upcoming year, who we’re working and deciding against, with the first year, 90 to 95 percent of the people we would have taken would have come from this year and not the first year we did. And that’s because the cultural attitudes around music and presentation, global awareness has changed.

Again, as a reminder, we don’t necessarily want to be a third-rate Nirvana or a fourth-rate Beatles. We want to be the first-rate Kutumba or the first-rate 1974 AD. So, it’s not just about socialized globalization and being aware of global trends, but it’s about understanding what our value is, who we are, and executing it with great confidence and passion and hard work.