W hat do all ancient monuments such as the Pyramids of Egypt have in common? Did the builders want to leave a legacy behind for their posterity to remember them by? Did the ancients find a way for the soul to return to the heavens through secret passage ways? Or were the pyramids along with similarly strange structures such as Stonehenge and the Moai of Easter Island built by aliens as surmised by some influential intellectuals including the Swiss author Eric von Daniken in his seminal book "Chariots of the Gods"? The Pyramids at Giza and the enigmatic Sphinx have remained there from the dawn of history whatever route their creation took to come into being. Besides being a world tourist attraction they shine as beacon of human endeavour. Prime Minister Jung Bahadur Rana must have been one of the first Nepalese to see these awesome monuments while on his trip to England in 1850 A.D.  Egypt was known to us as Misr in those days, its name in Arabic. Abbas Pasha was the ruler ...

I have always marveled at the ability some people have for drawing faces. At school we had our classmate Narendra Basnyat who could take a pencil or crayons or water colour and draw faces the likeness of which were striking. I have got a crayon portrait of my father posing with his tiger he killed with a Colt .45 painted by a female Swiss artist in 1960. It still looks as good as new! I used to watch her draw in wonderment and could not help but notice how, in her concentration, she would cross and un-cross her leg ad infinitum. What started out as a charcoal outline of faces on canvas - my father's and the tiger's - transformed into their mirror images by the time she was finished. I have forgotten her name. She was a visiting artist, perhaps free lancing and making money on the side to subsidize her travel. The faces that have impressed me the most though are the self portraits by Vincent Van Gogh and, of course, "Mona Lisa" by Leonardo da Vinci. But I am digressin...