Bill Stone discovered my Blog and wrote to me reminiscing on his young days in Nepal and living in Kiran Bhawan. I encouraged Bill to give an account of the time he spent in Nepal as it would provide a fascinating glimpse into a past we have come to be nostalgic for. Bill has kindly obliged and, in his own words he writes, "I have thoroughly enjoyed the 'project' and would be glad to submit further installments". Keep 'em coming, Bill! This is Bill's story. INTRODUCTION I came to Nepal as a 10 year old in October 1959, having lived my childhood in the US Pacific Northweat (Oregon, Washington, Monatana). The four years we spent in Nepal were the longest I had ever lived in one place, and so special. Since returning "stateside" I have enjoyed several careers, in pharmaceutical manufacturing, as a Deputy Sheriff, a truck enforcement office, tax fraud investigation manager, and shipping manager. I have never been back to Nepal, but I remember...

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 ...

"It is a curse to live to be this old", the dowager maharani reflected to herself. Her woebegone days were here to stay with her; would she have had the honour of committing sati   after the death of her beloved husband Maharajah Jung Bahadur Rana this nightmare would be over! She had not accompanied the maharajah in that fateful last hunt as she was mourning the loss of her son. Alas, her only son Baber Jung, a favourite of Jung, had passed away in the prime of his life. It was bad enough to not be able to see properly, to be wracked by arthritic pain in all her joints, to even have to bear the loss of her foster son Maharajah Bir Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana after 16 years in power, but to see the old alliances of her adversaries again emerging in Nepali politics was something the dowager maharani could not stomach. She was still alive she reminded herself and what she had started out as her life's ambition of installing Bir Shumsher on the   gadhi   of Kaski and Lamjun...

T wo books bear irrefutable testimony to Nepal's lifting its snowy curtain in the early fifties and both have seen many reprints as they are still sought after by a younger generation of readers seeking a peek at Shangri-La. It is probably not any coincidence that one of them is Michel Piessel's biography of Boris Lissanevitch the father of the Nepalese hospitality industry titled "Tiger for Breakfast". The other is a fictional account titled "The Mountain is Young" written by the celebrated author Han Suyin who visited Nepal to cover the coronation of King Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev in 1956 A.D. Han Suyin in her youth This is not a book review. I am writing about the background story that I am familiar with that went into this book. Han Suyin is the pen name of an Eurasian writer born Elizabeth Chow in China from a Chinese father and Belgian mother. She was one of the first writers of her generation who helped bridge the cultural divide at a time...

Jindan Kaur, last queen of the Punjab The last queen of the Punjab had finally reunited with her son in England. Reclining on her divan in the balcony of her Lancaster Gate residence she squinted at the hazy expanse of Kensington Gardens sprawling before her and reflected on the dizzying cycle of kismet she had encountered in life. Daughter of a kennel keeper of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, Jindan Kaur was a classic beauty with brains and had in course of time climbed up the proverbial ladder of the court and ended up in the bed of the king. She had been proclaimed a maharani and a son born of her would be in the line to the throne! After Ranjit Singh's death and a few years of instability her son eventually had been crowned the king of the Punjab in 1843 A.D. at a tender age of five and she, Jindan, had been proclaimed the Queen Regent. After this crowning glory of her life however her ascendant fortune had started to unravel quickly. Duleep Singh by artist Winterhalter ...