I never saw Mutka sober during the entire two weeks of his group's Nepal visit. He was a member of the specially constituted Finnish media group for the promotion of Nepal in the early nineties. Nepal Finland Society had helped me organize an educational trip for about a dozen travel writers. I personally escorted the group to various parts of the country; included in the itinerary were inspection visits to a few Finnish development aid projects like aforestation, drinking water and sanitation. Pokhara and Butwal were included in the itinerary. Driving in the bus while covering a particularly treacherous part of the national "highway" Mutka opened his bleary eyes and asked me a very pertinent question, "Why do people pay all this money to get a sore ass?" Yes, why indeed! Travel in the developing world is fraught with difficulty in many fronts but in our own region it reaches a crescendo; the state of the infrastructure or the lack th...

From Bhadrakali Temple facing Singha Durbar, where the equestrian statue of King Prithivi Bir Bikram Shah Dev (frequently mistaken for a Rana prime minister) stands, I often revved up the engine of my new motorbike for a moment or two of glory and raced towards the statue of Prithivi's namesake ancestor. The year was 1971 and I had acquired a 90 c.c. Honda motorbike from Japan to take me to college. In that short stretch of road I always hit speeds of 110 kph and more before braking. I was no legend in motorbike antics like Uday Gurung, a Nepali Evel Knievel or another daredevil driver like Tri Bikram Singh, the local Schumacher of our time. Tri was peforming tricks in his Hillman Hunter like executing hairpin turns in crowded New Road. Those two had a cult following among some of my friends who had just passed from school and had started to live life on the fast track. Our normal conversations would not be complete wit...

Each time I visited Hyatt Regency Kathmandu, the visits getting more frequent following the cessation of armed hostilities in 2006 until the world economic meltdown of 2008 melted away the boom in incentive travel; the management more often than not invited me to the coffee shop for lunch. From nearby Bodhnath and surrounding lamaseries there would inevitably arrive a table-full of chubby looking monks in their maroon habit to nibble at the delectable Hyatt offerings that comes, even to us, at prohibitive prices. This incongruous situation became even more curious when, under closer observation, thick Rolex gold watches were seen on the wrists of a few important members of the congregation. I remember when we were attending St. Xavier's School in the early sixties, there used to be a huge Tibetan Refugee Camp in front of the Zoo adjacent to the school. The Chinese administration of Tibet had started a brutal campaign to introduce Marxist dialectical materialism to the ancient peo...

T he tall, silky maiden of that photographic album so lovingly preserved by her mother was ethereally beautiful. I used to flip through the pages in wonderment: she was with high society here, posing in a bikini suit there; raising a toast here, being toasted by a set of glitterati there. She was a burgeoning actress in Hollywood then in the Marilyn Monroe mold but she had given it all up suddenly and inexplicably. As so often happens in life a call of a higher order had persuaded her to give up the life she revelled in. Zina Rachevsky Princess Harriet Straus Rachevsky was a widow in her sixties when she came to Nepal in search of her daughter pictured in those many poses in that photo album and also a grand-daughter she knew only from hearsay. She arrived in Kathmandu in the late sixties and found a place to rent in the estate of my father in Kiran Bhawan. Those were the days of the hippies, the precursors to the ...

A s a kid it was always difficult for me to ascertain whether they were heroes or villains, some minor players in a Shakespearean tragedy or the main act itself. But one thing is for sure which is that I was always uncomfortable whenever this topic came up. Even before school I knew about those four as Nimbu Didi would tell me in hushed tones how they were executed. She lived near Shova Bhagabati so she was present thereabouts when Ganga Lal was shot. She would dramatically rip at her bosoms and say that Ganga Lal yelled while tearing his shirt apart baring his chest, "Shoot, shoot your own father, shoot" before the bullets made his body go limp. There is an apocryphal story circulating that one top Rana general himself snatched the rifle from the hands of a wavering soldier and shot Ganga Lal. Ganga Lal Shrestha Coming from a line of Rana rulers of Nepal I, like many fellow Ranas of my generation in similar position, carry...