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Showing posts from October, 2013

MY CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WITH OUR FOURTH ESTATE

I eagerly awaited the daily delivery of the The Motherland newspaper at home because I could see the advertisement of the films running in the local cinemas of Kathmandu: Ashok Cinema in Patan and the rest of them were in the city, Ranjana, Bishwojyoti and Jai Nepal Chitra Ghar. It was a challenge how to get to the first show of a new release but some of my friends who were more centrally located were clever enough to secure tickets to them, Dipak Bir Singh and Pitamber Rana my school chums come to mind. The Motherland was one of the first English daily to be published back in 1958 A.D. and circulated every morning, all 1800 copies of it! There was not much else to read in the papers then; the king and queen, sporting dark glasses and gloved hands, were always inaugurating something new for the benefit of their shirtless subjects, the prime minister and his ministers were singing paean to the party-less Panchayat polity deemed most suitable to the soil of Nepal. We studied the