I’ve been following the work of Chandan Kumar Mandal carefully during the pandemic. He’s the labour reporter with the Kathmandu Post and has been writing daily about the millions of migrant labourers who leave their families in Nepal — often for years at a time — to work in neighbouring India or overseas. Many of them have undergone horrendous experiences since Covid-19 flipped the world upside down earlier this year, and many remain stuck in some sort of nightmarish limbo between home and family and their working country.
But it was a Tweet that Chandan posted in June that really caught my eye. Since then, he’s been on my list of people who I wanted to speak with, and last week I caught up with him on his day off from reporting. We started our chat talking about labour migration but the conversation ranges much further, to include being a reporter in the time of Covid-19, his start in journalism, growing up in Nepal’s Madhesh region and, of course, that Tweet.
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