Random hits on the keyboard

There is a thought that keeps returning to me whenever I walk through the Kathmandu Valley. This city is not built only with bricks and roads, but with thoughts. It is a manifestation of the collective consciousness of the people who live in it. Kathmandu did not become Kathmandu by accident. It carries centuries of shared memory and many layers of collective consciousness. Every narrow alley, every temple tucked into a street corner, and every festival we take pride in are the results of what our ancestors believed in and the values they shared. Tradition and culture did not merely decorate this city; they gave it life. Then came the years of building a “modern” Nepal. The priorities shifted toward physical infrastructure. I vividly remember our first mayor promising to turn Kathmandu into Singapore. What a tragedy. In that moment, the collective consciousness of the city pushed aesthetics and identity to the back burner and focused instead on roads and high-rise buildings, often at t...

I scaled Kathmandu to Janakpur - Hetauda - Chitwan - Bhairahawa - Nepalgunj - Dhangadi - Surkhet on road.. and  the conversation with a local shopkeeper goes as follows What? 'Nepal has a huge potential for water power. Nepal can be rich'  'All uranium from Nepal are being flown out in American on plane' "Nepal has mountains - it is very beautiful - so we can be rich through ...." "Nepal is poor because of India - we can not change our neighbour and it is a landlock country. If Nepal had access to an ocean..." "Nepal would have progressed if King has ......" "The US has a big interest because of its geo location between India and Nepal" "Chor Neta heru le garda, ..." With this huge potential of Nepal to be another global power,  I struggle to drive 100 km in 4 hours. @Kantipuronline I now know that I know nothing about development.

  Every morning I take a walk around the area. There are parks, high rise buildings - many of them are under construction. The wider road, with trees on both sides, chain of vehicles, functioning traffic lights and big public buses are exactly what we were told what development looks like. The city mayors of Kathmandu in 1990s vaunted it. And I had been believing this until I visited Scandinavian, where I see one or two-story buildings, narrow two-lane roads with wider cycle lanes, and almost no overhead crossings. Scandinavian countries, no way, meet Nepali definition of 'development'. As per the Kathmandu major's definition, Addis is a developed city. The roads are wide with overheads, and no dust on the street. There are pizza hut and McDonald's. And this morning, there was no water in my hotel. I called reception. A few minutes later, a water tanker delivered water to the hotel. I came to know that there is no sufficient city water in the hotel. As a Kathmandu dwell...