Talk:Laxmi Sharma

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion: Participate in the deletion discussion at the. —Community Tech bot (talk) 03:34, 19 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Laxmi Sharma 2 (cropped).png

Notability and an orphan
This is an orphan and I can't see where it could be linked to. The sources don't seem to be that great - she reports she was the first female driver of a type of rickshaw in Nepal but how would anyone verify that? 90.252.190.223 (talk) 22:16, 1 August 2020 (UTC)

First female driver of an autoricksha (Bajaj Tempo six passenger model) in Nepal

I don't know how acceptable memory, not documented in a written source, is in Wikipedia, but I worked in Kathmandu from about 1979 to 1987 and remember Laxmi Sharma, "the button person," quite well. Around 1982-84 I visited her at her home in Bansbari Ring road in connection with an English translation of the manuscript of her then unpublished novel, "Asaf Asafalta" -- it translates as "The Dream Which Failed"-- and she gave me a ride back downtown in one of her autorickshas which she drove. We were stopped by a policeman around what was then Prince Gyanendra's house in Maharajganj, apparently because he had never seen a woman driving an autoricksha and was shocked. He thought I was just a passenger who didn't know the driver. I found this funny, and as she was explaining the situation to him, I jokingly said in broken Nepali that she had just run over and killed two toddlers up the road. The policeman realized it was a joke, laughed, and let her go on.

I lived in India and Nepal, and later in Southeast Asia for fifteen years and never saw or heard of another female tempo, autorickshaw or tuk-tuk driver. While there are almost two billion people in this area so nothing is absolutely certain, it does seem highly probable that not only was she the first autorickshaw driver in Nepal, but in the entire South and Southeast Asian region.

Nepal being what it was at the time, I doubt that she had a driver's license or even understood that she was supposed to have one before driving. Births, marriages and deaths weren't registered, quite sizable factories appeared and ran without registration (the better to avoid the tax man in part, I suppose), and about 80% or more of the country's foreign trade was completely undocumented.

Mrs Sharma also genuinely repaired the vehicles. I remember once running into her in Maharajganj outside the British Embassy with a bag of mechanic's tools, and when I asked her what she was doing with them, I recall her telling me that one of her autorickshas (she called them "Tempos") had thrown a drive chain and that she was rushing to where it was to fix it herself since the driver couldn't.

All the above marked Ms Sharma as something of an eccentric for her time, and doubtless there are still a lot of elderly people in Bansbari Ring Road and Maharajganj who will remember her driving the three wheelers around, though how Wikipedia would arrange to interview them if you as an editor wanted confirmation, I don't know. You pretty much have to rely on the local media reports. There might also be some diplomatic archives containing information, but they would be harder to access.

This raises a larger point: while Wikipedia's insistence on written documentation may be appropriate for Western, highly developed societies, it risks, in my view unwisely, losing significant, legitimate recent historical information in traditionally less literate societies like Nepal and elsewhere in the former so-called "Developing World." Writing "The sources don't seem to be that great - she reports she was the first female driver of a type of rickshaw in Nepal but how would anyone verify that?" seems to me condescending towards Nepali systems of information management. There are plenty of ways to verify facts like this, but they require active investigation -- typically done by local media, etc. I don't think Wikipedia should be so ready to privilege the reliability of one society's media (to wit, Western and some East Asian) above another's which is merely marked by lower "production values" (i.e. expensive polish in the finished product); often this is a mistake born of simple unfamiliarity, or even unjustified arrogance. ALL societies have grave problems with accuracy of their media -- I don't think contemporary Americans and Europeans need reminding of this point these days -- but equally just writing off a society's media wholesale as "less trustworthy," apparently using as a crude heuristic that its GDP per capita is low, media operations are small and unstable, and Internet sites are unsophisticated is the sort of error of common sense that has gotten the West into a lot of unnecessary trouble (think Vietnam, Angola, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya for starters), and definitely needs to be put up for reexamination as a Wikipedia policy issue as the encyclopedia becomes more globalized in its coverage. FurnaldHall (talk) 02:31, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

Hi mam !! big respect .🙏🙏🙏
actually Im used fan of yours very impressed what you did. My request to you for just you catalog the items what you product by handicraft.It looks very nice. I just wants to promote here in UAE for online shopping people who has interests to buy. 31.218.2.1 (talk) 08:21, 10 May 2024 (UTC)