Maharajah Juddha's Manor House I am writing about the time Bodhnath was the only structure standing and miles around it there was free space and farming land. Somewhere in the vicinity people say was the storied Kailash Kuti Bhawan, the palace of the Licchavi rulers of Nepal. It was from this palace that King Amsuvarma had given his daughter Bhrikuti in marriage to the Tibetan king. The Chinese chronicler Huen Tsang arriving in the Kathmandu Valley in the 7th century praised it as the most magnificent building he had seen, a remarkable observation coming from someone who arrived on his pilgrimage from Xian, the capital of the Middle Kingdom and the most opulent city in the whole world at the time. What became of the palace one can only conjecture but whatever might have happened to it did not happen to the magnificent Bodhnath Stupa gathering a million dew drops on its wide dome to quench the thirst of the ...

I could not have even dreamed that I would visit a wall-less Berlin in a reunited Germany in my lifetime. Conventional wisdom told us that short of a Nuclear Holocaust the Wall was there to stay - just like the Greyness, the Stasi and Honecker of GDR. How ironical that the International Tourism Bourse more famously known as ITB, the world's largest showcase on travel and tourism, was organized in West Berlin every year in the month of March while just a stone's throw away Berliners in the east could not even cross over the Wall to the west, far less travel to exotic destinations around the world! I remember crossing over to the east of the city in my earlier visits to West Berlin. A Nepalese gentleman married to a Polish lady and living on the other side of the wall played host. He was working for Siemens and enjoying the best of both worlds! For all its dullness East Berlin was inexpensive and earning...

 I remember the time I bathed in the Triveni as a kid. This is the holy confluence or sangam of Ganga, Jamuna and the mythical Saraswati flowing from under and meeting those two real-life rivers near the town of Prayag later aptly named Allahabad, City of God, by Islamic conquerors. A bath here would merit us Hindus entry into heaven and the ritual was timely as my mother would pass away soon after. It is here that in 2001 in the Maha Kumbh Mela 60 million devotees thronged to take a dip making this the largest gathering of humanity in the history of the world! Triveni I am reminded of the sangam whenever I come across another awesome river during the course of my travel. The Brahmaputra is one such. Flowing from its source at Mount Kailash in Tibet, the river traverses pristine across the breadth of the Tibetan plateau north of Nepal. I have crossed it to reach Samye Monastery, one of the venerated Buddhist pilgr...

T he National Geographic Magazine has always been my favorite print medium for gaining insight into vanishing cultures, insular societies and natural phenomena that blow your mind. A combination of precise writing and award-winning photography brought these wonderful worlds to our living room before cable TV took over. I was curious when we got a call from Lisa Choegyal informing us that a correspondent from Natgeo wanted to interview my father. The year was 1982 and I had returned to Nepal from Europe with my recently-married wife just a year earlier. What was the subject of the interview I enquired? True to Natgeo form they wanted to interview father on one of the rarely performed sacred Hindu religious rituals. The One-horned Indian Rhinoceros is one of the few mammals surviving today that has the look of a prehistoric creature a million years old. Chitwan or Chitta-bana , the heart of the jungle, located in the Nepal Terai ...

Maharajah Juddha Shumsher J. B. Rana with his Crown As a kid I used to gape in wonderment at the magnificent crown my father possessed not knowing that the jewels were only for show. The dark green, emerald drops were made of glass, the sparkling diamonds were probably zirconium, and the pearls were not of the best sort. Every Rana general had his personal crown in those days, and my father was no exception. I did not recognize the difference between this personal crown of father's and the other more valuable crown of the Nepalese Commander-in-Chief of the Army that my father was seen wearing in many a portrait displayed about the house. Little did I know that my father was the last person to put on his head the army chief's crown from the Rana era, real glittering diamonds, snow white pearls and thumb-sized emerald drops and all. The feather in the crown was the magnificent plumes of the Bird of Paradise that gave it such a majestic look. The Bird of ...