In this powerful new episode of Rootsland: The Resistance, Henry K and Sia tell the story of Bipin Joshi — a young Nepali rapper and farmer who left home to learn modern agriculture in Israel, only to find himself caught in one of history’s darkest moments. Through Bipin’s journey and his family’s unwavering love, Rootsland explores courage, loss, and the quiet power of resistance — and how even in the blood-soaked soil, hope still finds a way to grow.

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Produced by Henry K in association with Voice Boxx Studios Kingston, Jamaica

Intro by Kim Yamaguchi

Opening/Closing Music Bipin Joshie Pashna

प्रश्न… song by my brother bipin Joshi. Waiting for his safe release. #rescuebipinjoshi. - YouTube

Produced by Henry K in association with Voice Boxx Studios Kingston, Jamaica

ROOTSLAND NATION Reggae Music, Podcast & Merchandise

As Israel’s Hostages Came Home, Bipin Joshi’s Mother From Nepal Learned Her Son Would Not - WSJ  By Krishna Pokharel

The Kai's righteousness govern the world.

Broadcasting live and direct from the rolling red hills on the outskirts of Kingston, Jamaica, the Roots Land Podcast.

Stories that are music to your ears.

Yes.

Greetings, Roots Land Gang, and what is up, Siya?

Henry, what are we listening to?

Are we still talking about Asia?

Are we still in the Far East?

For this episode, yes, we are traveling back to Asia.

This time to the spiritual land of Nepal.

You know where that is?

Isn't that where Mount Everest is?

Yes, actually, you are correct.

Nepal is the home of Mount Everest.

Your geographical prowess never ceases to amaze me.

But first, getting back to Japan and last week's show, we had a few of our listeners that were offended when I told you to look up what moashi meant.

They thought I left you and them hanging.

So, full disclosure.

A moashi is the loincloth that a sumo wrestler wears.

Oh, you mean those sexy underwears?

Yes, that's right, the sexy ones.

Didn't you once have a moashi, Sia?

Very funny.

Yes.

Yeah, I did.

Yeah, when you were pregnant, you had one, right?

No, Henry, you better not put that in there.

Oh, okay.

No, I won't put it in.

Don't worry.

But in all seriousness, the voice that you're hearing that started our show belongs to a young man named Bipin Joshi from Nepal.

A rapper, a dreamer, a farmer.

What is it about farmers and singing?

Weren't some of our best reggae singers farmers?

Yes, once again, you're right, Siya.

Reggae music is full of farmers who are singers.

Joseph Hill from Culture, Winston Rodney from Burning Spear.

Even the great Peter Tosh grew his own food and herbs.

I guess when you come from spiritual places like Jamaica or Nepal, it gives you a connection that ignites the creative process.

The song we heard is called Prashna, which means question.

In that song, Bipin raps about the struggles of Nepal's farmers.

Men and women working the soil, fighting drought, debt, neglect.

It's a song about the land, about survival, about asking why life is so hard for those who feed the world.

And you know firsthand, Sia, you're from the country, right?

Didn't you have family that were farmers?

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

I grew up on a farm.

My papa was a farmer.

He worked hard.

I see the sacrifices that people have to make in order to make ends meet.

You know, my papa and my grandma, like I said, they're farmers.

It's not easy.

Not an easy road.

Bipin Joshi was just 22.

He grew up in Mahendranagar, a small farming town in Nepal's western plains.

And Bipin was offered a big opportunity to leave.

But his mother, Padma, a schoolteacher, proud and cautious, didn't want him to go.

Didn't want him to go where?

To Israel.

He had just been accepted into a special agricultural program, a work study exchange designed to teach modern farming techniques to students from developing nations like Nepal.

He told her he wanted to learn a skill that could help his family, his community, his country.

He said, mom, it's only 11 months.

I'll see the world, learn something good and come back to start my very own farm.

Bananas, maybe walnuts.

Wow, that's wonderful.

You can hear hope in his voice.

His mom remind me of your mom.

Remember, she didn't want you to go to Kingston.

She thought it was dangerous.

She didn't want him to go.

So true.

His mother was just like mine.

And maybe that's why I connected to the story.

We both came from small towns.

We wanted to go out into the world and bring something home that would last longer than just a song.

Something that would last forever.

Bipin along with three other foreign workers were taken hostage.

We have breaking news out of Israel this morning where Hamas has launched a surprise attack within Israel's borders overnight.

First launching rockets from the Gaza Strip, then selling militants into the streets of the southern part of Israel.

Let's go right to NBC's Raf Sanchez.

Who is in the south of Israel.

Raf, good morning.

What is the latest where you are?

As we speak, Palestinian gunmen are inside Israeli cities and towns, something we have never before seen on this scale.

And they are fighting run and gun battles against Israeli ground forces.

Hamas, the major Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza, says they have taken Israelis hostage and they have taken them back inside of Gaza.

For nearly two years, his family waited for news.

Here's Pushpa, his concerned sister, appearing on Israeli TV.

676 days since the October 7th massacre and 50 hostages are still captive in the Gaza Strip.

One of them is not from Israel.

In fact, he was a student from Nepal studying agriculture at Kibbutz Aluminum when he was abducted.

I'm honored to welcome to studio now the sister of hostage Deacon Joshi.

Pushpa Joshi.

Pushpa, I want to begin by saying welcome to Israel.

Unfortunately, it is under these circumstances that I wish they were not as difficult as it is.

I see the pain and I feel the pain sitting in this room with you.

Pushpa, what would be your message right now to Beepin.

My message will be so my brother, you are very strong.

I believe you.

You are very strong and God is always with you and God is always.

God will always bless you.

Be cool and become try to fight with your situation and the next thing is your sister, your family is with you and we are here to for fight for you and for raising voice for you.

We are here for you and please don't worry and I know you are brave.

I know you can deal with this situation.

I hope that very soon we'll meet.

A very powerful message.

His loving sister Pushpa hoped one day they would meet again.

And then at the beginning of last week, the heartbreaking news came.

Here's an article from the Wall Street Journal.

Padma Joshi's heart had swelled this summer when she was handed a black zip up bag containing the belongings of her only son, Beepin, a college student from Nepal missing since Hamas gunman snatched him from a kibbutz during the October 7 attacks.

Inside the bag, Padma found a poem he had written for her days before his abduction.

Mother, your little child has grown so tall, yet I still run to your arms when I fall, wrote Bipin, the first member of his family to seek work outside Nepal tending orange and lemon groves near Israel's border with Gaza.

Today I chase horizons wide, but your lullabies still echo inside.

Bipin's words had fortified Padma, a primary school teacher from Mahendranagar who somehow found herself the face of a two year diplomatic campaign to retrieve the sole Nepali national held in Gaza.

Yet on Monday, she gathered with her family on a phone call with an Israeli military officer who conveyed news they had long feared.

20 captives were crossing over Israel's border to jubilant homecomings.

But Beipin wasn't among them.

His status, they were warned, was unconfirmed.

Ten hours later, the officer called back with even a grimmer update.

Hamas had released a statement saying that Bipin's remains would soon be delivered to Israel.

Padma listened in silence, then broke down.

She hadn't slept all night, she said in an interview.

We've been in so much pain.

Wow.

Wow, that's heartbreaking.

In this moment, it's like it's hard to wrap your head around positive thoughts, you know, you're asking yourself why?

Why couldn't he survive?

He had so much hope, you know, so much dream and aspiration.

But so, so did all the others, you know?

So did all the others.

Bipin Joshi was not Israeli, not Palestinian.

He was a student, a guest worker caught in the crossfire of someone else's war.

One Of a thousand invisible laborers who cross borders every year to pick fruit, to clean hotels, to help build cities they can never afford to live in.

People who leave home not for glory, but for survival, Hoping to send something back.

Does that sound familiar, Siya?

Yeah.

Absolutely.

I'm still living that life.

I'm still working hard, Hoping to send something back every month.

You and so many other people.

The unseen casualties of our modern world.

The quiet ones whose names fade between headlines and hashtags.

And yet you.

They are the ones who keep this world running.

The ones who plant, who build, who heal.

While the powerful and the politicians argue over who owns the land.

Beepin's story reminds us that resistance is just sometimes the act of showing up, Daring to dream in a place where dreams are not supposed to grow.

You know, when I think about Bipin, A young artist, a dreamer, a farmer.

There's a line from the Bob Marley song I shot the sheriff that keeps echoing in my head every time I plant a seed.

He said, kill it before it grow.

He said, kill them before they grow.

That line just hits different when I hear Bipin's story.

Because he was planting seeds.

Real ones.

Seeds of knowledge, of skill, of hope.

And the sheriff, Babylon, well, he didn't like that.

When Bob wrote that line, he wasn't talking about gunfire.

He was talking about control.

About how a system always finds ways to destroy what it can control.

Because nothing scares Babylon more than a young person with knowledge in his hands and wisdom and purpose in their hearts.

Bipin didn't carry a weapon.

He carried a song, a shovel, A dream.

And that was enough to make him dangerous.

I remember the first time I heard that song.

I shot the sheriff.

I was just a kid growing up in Long island, New York.

I understood the words of the story, But I knew there was a deeper meaning there.

And then, years later, standing on the hills of Kingston, I finally understood that line wasn't about bullets or Babylon.

It's about life itself.

About how every time you try to plan something honest in this world, there's always someone waiting to cut it down.

Henry, this is sad.

This is heavy.

I thought resistance is supposed to be more uplifting, But I get it.

This story needs to be told.

Sia, we're painting a picture here.

You know how the show goes.

Sometimes our foundation colors start out a little dark before we get to the rainbows and the sunshine.

You know that because right now, the Joshi family is still mourning, holding on to what's left of their son's life.

A poem, A memory.

His body as it comes back home to Nepal.

But I guarantee you, they won't be mourning for long.

Padma Joshi, that humble schoolteacher, and her determined daughter, Pushpa.

They spent the last two years doing the impossible.

Crossing borders, speaking to diplomats, learning the language of power.

They became negotiators, lobbyists, spokeswomen, not because they wanted to, but because they had to.

While other nations brought their loved ones home.

Thailand, the Philippines, the U.S. and U.K. nepal's government was inexperienced, unsure how to navigate a crisis of this scale.

So Padma and Pushpa, they did it themselves.

They carried their fight through foreign offices and newsrooms, stood before world leaders, and made the world say his name.

Bipin Joshi.

They did what their own government could not do, what the wealthier nations had the means to do, armed only with willpower and the unbreakable love of a mother and a sister who refused to surrender.

We gather here in deep sorrow to honor the memory of Bp Joshua, a kind and devoted young man who came to Israel from Nepal with hope in his heart and a spirit of hard work and friendship between Israel and.

And the car.

Bipin, as was mentioned here, was murdered in a brutal attack of October 7, an act of cruelty that took the lives of so many innocent men and women who sought only to live and work in peace.

For many months, for many long months, we prayed and we hold to his return.

But today, unfortunately, we finally accompany him on his last journey home.

With love, with respect, and with profound sadness.

In recent months, I also had the privilege of meeting Beeping's mother and sister.

When they came to Israel, they met the president, they met the prime minister, they met the foreign minister and many dignitaries.

Their quiet dignity and boundless love for him touched everyone's heart.

We could feel, all of us, the depth of their pain.

And our hearts broke with them.

Their courage reminds us that behind every name and every photograph that we see today stands a world of love, of family, and of dreams that are cut short.

You know, Siya, There's a story that comes from the Far east, from the lands of Nepal, India and beyond, about a mystical flower known as the lotus.

It's a flower that blooms where no flower should, in the still, murky waters of rice fields and riverbeds.

Rising from the muck and the darkness below, its roots twist through the mud.

Its stem climbs towards the light it's never seen.

And when it finally breaks the surface, it opens, pure and untouched, a symbol of beauty born from struggle.

For centuries in the teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism, the lotus has stood for awakening the triumph of spirit over suffering, proof from the deepest, darkest places, something radiant can emerge.

And that's what Bipin's story feels like to me.

A young man who began in the humble soil, who faced chaos and loss.

And yet from his life, something luminous has bloomed.

His mother's strength, his sister's courage.

Their faith that love can outlast war.

Because sometimes the most beautiful things come from places of pain.

And like we say in roots land, sometimes the story is the best song.

In that Wall street journal article, it states that Beepin was a hero in his final moments before he was kidnapped.

When a grenade slid across the floor of a basement in kibbutz Alomim, he lunged forward and hurled it away before it could explode, saving the lives of his friends and co workers he'd only known for weeks.

The painful truth of the situation is that Beepin was one of those determined individuals who actually sought out opportunity to pursue a better life.

Because so many young people from impoverished and forgotten places are preyed on by sociopaths from gangs and extremist groups.

Predators who recognize the most vulnerable children brainwash innocent youth and turn them into cold blooded killers.

Whether in the favelas of Brazil, the barrios of Mexico, the ghettos of Kingston, or in the Gaza strip, these are the very forces that cost Beepin his life.

But by refusing to accept or normalize this violence, and by offering real educational and economic opportunities to vulnerable communities, we can break that cycle if each of us does our part.

Turning hate into love, despair into possibility.

Every time we choose to plant a seed, even if they threaten to kill it before it grows, we create new cycles for humanity.

The more they kill, the more we plant.

Because somewhere in Nepal right now, a young student is hearing Bipin's story.

A kid with the same dreams, the same notebook, the same hunger, and that kid's going to plant something new.

That is how it works.

That's how resistance spreads quietly, like roots underneath the soil.

Until one day, the whole field begins to bloom.

Because, as Padma and her daughter Pushpa Joshi, women of quiet Hindu faith, would tell you, life never truly ends.

It simply changes form.

The body may return to earth, but the soul, the atman, it moves on, seeking new beginnings in the great cycle of creation and return.

That's the faith that carries them now, the belief that Bipin's spirit has not vanished, but continues, still growing, still giving like a seed, waiting for the right season to rise again.

As his family wrote when they heard the news of his loss.

It's hard to imagine a future without you, Bipin.

Every flower in the garden we planted for you will remind us of you.

Every orchard, every field.

You are now part of Nepal's landscape and now also part of Israel's.

And I'd like to end this show with a wish or maybe more of a prayer that all the suffering, all those innocent lives like Beepin Joshis lost in this horrific war are not in vain, but will serve some greater purpose.

That out of the blood, the destruction and the rubble, something new will grow, something.

Something lasting.

Because as much as the sheriff, as much as Babylon tries to keep the seed from growing and cracking through the blood soaked soil, I pray it will rise up.

I know it will rise up like a mighty oak.

And one day it will bathe in the sunlight right alongside the banana and walnut trees that young Bipin always dreamed of planting.

How would you describe him to our.

To our viewers?

He is very helpful person and hard working person and he is very kind and curious person.

He like to help people and if we talk about his hobbies, he like to play guitar and he like to wrote songs even he wrote one song related to the Nepalese agriculture and he liked to play football and he's very innocent person and he, he.

He born in a peaceful country, Nepal and unfortunately he had to be caused between two wars and he.

He has no idea how to deal with.

I can feel his.

Yeah, let's go.

Produced by Henry K.