By Professor Pramod Shrestha
I never planned for any of it. My story is a lesson in how life and the history of a nation can sweep you up and place you where you least expect.
In January 1975, I walked away from a dream. It's not a vague aspiration but a tangible, prosperous reality. I was a "lahure" working in Turin, Italy with the FIAT car company (1973, around 4 months) and in Gothenburg, Sweden, working with VOLVO car company (about 13 months). Working as an engineer with VOLVO was challenging and interesting. I was learning a lot technically, and I could also speak some Swedish. My boss was like a father to me. The work was meaningful, and the future was secure. I was a modern-day lahure, but instead of a soldier’s uniform, I wore a technician’s coat. Yet, something pulled me home to Nepal. I don't know what that pulling "force" was?? I didn’t inform a soul back home in Kathmandu. I simply boarded a plane, landed in Kathmandu, and went straight to my parents’ house.
My mother’s face lit up with pure joy. My father, Juddha Bahadur Shrestha, was furious. In an era when few travelled abroad, he saw my return from a renowned company like VOLVO and FIAT as an incomprehensible waste of experience and potential. He didn’t speak to me for about two days. That silence was a heavy weight, the price of my unannounced choice. I traded the orderly precision of a Swedish/Italian factory for a teaching position at Tribhuvan University, stepping into a classroom instead of a control room.
For four years, I taught. Then, in April 1979, Nepal itself seemed to catch fire. The hanging of Pakistan's Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto ignited a spark that became the "2036 Saal ko Andolan." Student protests demanding an end to the Partyless Panchayat system erupted across the country. The storm was gathering.
At the Thapathali Engineering Campus, where I taught, the acting campus chief disappeared, choosing not to return to the epicentre of the unrest. In a hurried meeting, the Dean of the Institute of Engineering, Mr. Shiv Raj Pant gathered all staff. Without a word of prior consultation, he looked at me and announced I would be the new acting campus chief. The room was silent. I could have said no, right then. But the gravity of the moment, the chaos waiting outside, and the sheer unexpectedness of it all froze me. A simple, unspoken acceptance was assumed. And just like that, I went from engineering lecturer to the head of a campus in the middle of a revolution.
My world became a daily exercise in high-stakes negotiation. My students weren’t just aspiring engineers; they were leaders of the movement that would eventually force King Birendra to announce a national referendum. My office was no longer just for academic planning; it was also a negotiation room, a crisis centre. I learned to listen, to mediate, to hold a fragile line between the demands of a restless student body and the apprehensive gaze of the authorities. I was learning to engineer peace, not machines.
For a year, I managed this precarious balance. Then, one morning in April 1980, the political suspicion of the Panchayat system landed in our living room. My father answered the phone. It was Dr. Mahendra Prasad, the Vice-Chancellor of Tribhuvan University. Dr. Prasad was a very good friend of my dad. In my earlier post, i had mentioned that my Dad wanted to be a medical doctor. There was only one government scholarship seat to study medicine at that time, and that seat was secured by Dr. Mahendra Prasad. I could hear the tension in my father’s voice.
The VC said he had a police report on his desk, labelling me a “communist sympathizer.” His question, passed to my father, was one of bewildered accusations: “How can the son of an industrialist be a communist?” My father, to his credit, refused to be drawn in. “I don’t know about his politics,” he said firmly. “Talk to him yourself.”
He handed me the receiver. My heart was somewhat pounding, but my voice was steady. I told the Vice-Chancellor that my political beliefs were my personal affairs. “If you believe I am unsuitable for this post,” I said, “you have every right to replace me. That is your power.”
There was a pause on the line, a silence filled with the static of that old telephone and the weight of my challenge. I had called his bluff by not pleading by not denying it but by standing on the principle of my professional capacity.
The next day, an official letter arrived at my office. It was not a dismissal. It was my formal confirmation as Campus Chief.
That was how I truly became the head of the campus—not through ambition, but through a turbulent confluence of circumstance, a silent acceptance in a meeting, and a defiant phone call that cemented my position. Looking back, I didn’t just manage an engineering campus; I navigated the very fault lines of a nation in transition. The skills I gained weren’t in textbooks—they were written in the urgency of protests, the tension of negotiations, and the quiet resolve required to hold a centre that was constantly threatening to break apart.
I had returned from building cars to help, in my own small way, steering a piece of my country through one of its most stormy passages.
