Let’s spit out the cliché: you are what you eat. What, then, are we? A garden of flowers nodding in the wind? A nation of voracious mlechhas?

Many a Nepali has gleefully derided a foreign hill, smug in the possession of the highest mountains in the world. I confess I am one such geo-populist.

Mountains melt, forests are felled, rivers flow and ebb, and where are we? It is tempting to imagine that climate change is too big for small places like Kurule to adapt to. But people still live here.

Cruelly, it was Langtang’s very vitality that spelled doom for extended families up and down the valley.

There are at least two ways to go about telling a story. More straightforward, though not necessarily easier, is to document societies and situations that amuse, frustrate, illuminate.

Hearing of the violence in Kailali, my first reaction was to chide myself for posting about the Valley’s half-bandh. My jokey tweet now appeared wholly inappropriate, and irrelevant. I deleted it. I began scrolling through the fragments of news reaching me through the wires. The act of reacting to the carnage both tamped down my […]

Kathmandu is now a metropolis of several million, the three elegant Malla city-states merged into a single smoke-spewing conurbation of higgledy-piggledly concrete and steel constructions.

Public transport is a doddle these days. With the empty can of the tempo rattling behind us, being seated in front with the driver is quite the same as being in a cab.

The sattal at Purohitghat by the Bagmati river is located on a long stretch of stepped embankment that did not start to be architecturally articulated before the 1790s. The sattal at Purohitghat was one of the smaller endowments, but probably the most fascinating one. The baluster columns and the cusped arches of the arcade follow […]