Tag Archives: Nepal

From Kathmandu to Timbuktu (sort of)

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This is my first post in a while.

Apologies for being slack but I’ve taken a plunger to my writer’s block and intend to be more prolific in future.

I moved away from Kathmandu about a month ago to begin a new job as AFP’s west Africa correspondent in Dakar, Senegal. So this will be my last post for the blog in its current guise. (Suggestions for a name change accepted with gratitude). I shall be responsible for our output in English from Senegal, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, Mauritania, Mali, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso and Cape Verde. Apologies to anyone I left out.

A large part of my new job will be covering the ongoing conflict in Mali, hence the slightly disingenuous headline and, while I’ll be in Senegal for the lion’s share of my time here, I hope to get out into some of those other countries in what has to be one of the world’s most interesting, newsworthy regions.

I had a life-changing experience in Nepal, albeit for just a short time. My 18 months on the roof of the world seemed to pass in the blink of an eye.

Here are some thoughts on Nepal and its people – published on AFP’s Correspondent blog – that I’d like to share. Please feel free to comment here or on the AFP blog post.

 

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Nepal Tibetans ‘suffocated’ by Chinese influence

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This post is based on an article I wrote for AFP, published on March 12, which can be found here.

Nepal has for decades been a safe haven for Tibetans fleeing China but activists fear that is changing (AFP, Prakash Mathema)

Ahead of this year’s commemorations of the 1959 Tibet uprising I talked to Tsewang Dolma, president of the local chapter of the Tibetan Youth Congress here in Kathmandu, to discuss her community’s fears for their future in Nepal.
We met at a cafe near a Tibetan refugee camp in Nepal and Tsewang stirred her iced tea nervously as she spoke.
Despite being arrested twice and followed by “spies” she says are working for the Chinese secret service, Dolma is one of the few Tibetans in Nepal prepared to speak openly what they see as an increasingly hard line approach by the government to their community.
“It’s not easy because we have no freedom. We are refugees here. Things have changed and people feel very suffocated,” she told me.
For decades, Nepal has been a safe haven for Tibetans fleeing China but activists say their people’s peaceful existence is at threat because of Beijing’s growing influence over its Himalayan neighbour.
Campaigners believe the wave of protests against Chinese rule that began in Tibet in March 2008 and the resulting crackdown has transformed the attitude of Nepal’s government.
Arrests of activists in Kathmandu have become frequent in recent years and the periods of detention are getting longer, activists say.
In February, Nepal police arrested 13 students protesting in front of the United Nations headquarters in Kathmandu, releasing them only after they had spent two weeks in jail.
“They were just taking part in a human rights protest and they were arrested. Before, when people got arrested they would be released on the same night,” said Dolma, who has been detained twice in recent months.
“We get information that they got orders from China to be kept in detention for so long.”
Nepal-born Dolma said pre-emptive arrests and large-scale police deployment in her community were contributing to fear and insecurity.
“They don’t allow any Tibetan to do anything freely,” she told me.
“I don’t know what really changed but it’s all Chinese influence. It was bad but now it’s worse.”
At Saturday’s 1959 commemorations, Kathmandu police arrested 22 Tibetans for “suspicious activities” at demonstrations that were more muted than in previous years as hundreds of officers looked on.
For three decades Nepal welcomed Tibetans into the country after the uprising, issuing them with refugee identity certificates, known as the “RC”.
But the government has refused since 1998 to issue RCs to Tibetans, including children born in Nepal to refugee parents.
“I have a lot of friends who don’t have RCs and they face so many problems. They were born here but they don’t have citizenship,” said Dolma.
“If they want to go abroad for study, they can’t. And if you want to work in a bank they require Nepali citizenship documents.”
Analysts say while India has traditionally been the influential player in Nepal, China is making in-roads in a nation that is recovering after a decade-long civil war came to an end in 2006.
Impoverished Nepal, home to 20,000 exiles from Tibet, appears keen to seek further Chinese aid.

Arrests of Tibetan activists in Nepal are becoming more frequent, campaigners say (AFP, Prakash Mathema)

In January Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and his Nepalese counterpart Baburam Bhattarai discussed investment from Beijing for infrastructure projects that could amount to billions of dollars.
In return, Nepal expressed support for Beijing’s “one-China” policy which states that Tibet is an integral part of the Chinese territory.
In the last few months rights groups including the International Commission of Jurists, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, have voiced concerns over Nepal’s hard line on its Tibetan community.
And Tibetan groups such as the US-based International Campaign for Tibet say the change in attitude is increasingly apparent.
“The characterisation of peaceful Tibetan community activities and demonstrations as anti-Chinese clearly reflects China’s agenda in Nepal,” an ICT spokeswoman told me.
Chinese authorities declined to comment but Nepal’s Home Ministry said its policy was to arrest Tibetans for “agitation against the Chinese government in sensitive locations inside Nepal”.
“We have a policy for not allowing any activities against our friendly neighbour China,” said spokesman Shankar Prasad Koirala.

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Westerners bewitched by Nepal’s shamans

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Kirati shaman Parvati Rai coaxing snake spirits out of a young Nepali man who has "lost his soul". AFP PHOTO/Prakash MATHEMA

Covering Nepal for an international news agency takes you into all kinds of weird situations.
I recently took part in a shamanic exorcism in Kathmandu. Here is the account I wrote for AFP.

The shaman’s body begins shaking as she mumbles an ancient mantra to the syncopated beat of a dhyangro drum, coaxing snake spirits from a young Nepali man who has “lost his soul”.
Iron bells hanging around her white shirt ring as she jumps around her patient in a shamanic trance, her head dress of peacock feathers waving wildly as she springs up and flings her arms around him.
In the background, awestruck white Westerners in headbands and beads watch the ancient, animistic ceremony, not in a remote mountain pass or a jungle clearing but in a comfortable, 21st century house in suburban Kathmandu.
“The boy has lost his soul and we are helping him find it,” says Mohan Rai, the 80-year-old founder of the Shamanistic Studies and Research Centre Nepal and a man on a mission to restore what he sees as an dying art in the Himalayan nation.
After decades of modernisation when witch doctors were almost wiped out, “urban shamans” are enjoying a renaissance among Nepal’s metropolitan middle class and Westerners looking to be healed, cleansed or awakened, says Rai.
He has been on the front line of this renaissance since setting up his centre in 1988 to revive a practice he says “has been left behind” by science, technology and the big world religions.
“Shamanism is 75,000 years old. But it is dying out in the villages and I want to keep these traditions alive,” said Rai, who is highly critical of the religions and governments he believes have actively plotted to kill off the practice.
“I have thousands of students a year and, more and more, they are Westerners looking for something else where Western medicine has failed. Many of my students are medical doctors looking to integrate shamanism into their own practices.”
Shamans, known in Nepal as dhami-jhankris, claim to find the lost souls of the sick by travelling between three worlds — lower, middle and upper — connected by an upside down tree called Kalpa Vriksha, the tree of immortality.
They say they commune with the deities and spirits — both benign and malignant — inhabiting each world.
Tobias Weber, 33, a farmer from Germany travelling in Nepal, said he was drawn to shamanism after becoming interested in healing but disillusioned with the limitations of Western medicine.
“Shamanism can complement what doctors and nurses in the West are able to do. Clearly, if you have broken your arm you are probably going to go to a hospital but there is also so much you can get from the spiritual side of healing which people never get to experience.”

Rai with German traveller Tobias Weber. AFP PHOTO/Prakash MATHEMA

Rai, who is in polygamous marriages to two sisters and speaks English, German, Spanish, French, Sherpa, Tibetan and Hindi, has enjoyed a colourful life.
Born into a Bhutanese farming community, he grew up helping his father, “a powerful and well-known shaman” with healing rituals for the sick in his village.
He joined Nepal’s legendary Gurkha brigade aged just 17 and has been a trekking guide in Kathmandu and a mountain rescuer in Alps.
He first came across Nepal’s shamans when he was an assistant to foreign anthropologists trying to locate witch doctors among the country’s indigenous tribes.
He realised that shamanism was of great interest to the developed world and set up his research centre to spread the message, employing shamans from the Tamang, Rai, Sherpa and Gurung Himalayan mountain tribes.
In his centre sits a photograph of a six-year-old German boy Rai claims to have healed after the youngster, riddled with cancer, was given just two years to live.
He also relates the story of a paralysed man he helped to walk within just a few healing sessions.
Australian Laura Martino is taking a course at Rai’s centre and wants to help people in her home town of Melbourne reconnect with their spiritual side.
“I came here with a totally open mind, which I had to because of some of the amazing experiences I’ve had here, like trips to the mountains and sleeping in  graveyards.
“I think the Western world has lost something in its approach to healing and we really need to get in touch again with nature.”
Shamanism has had its critics, however, in a country where ancient superstitions can have a devastating effect.
In February a group of villagers accused a neighbour of witchcraft and burned her alive because their shaman had told them she was a witch.
The crime caused widespread revulsion, with Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai appealing to Nepalis not to listen to the injunctions of shamans.
“In villages especially, faith healers are from the local community while western medicine practitioners are from cities and towns and are often regarded as outsiders,” said Ravi Shankar, assistant professor at Manipal College of Medical Sciences in Pokhara, Nepal’s second city.
Many academics in the West believe that shamans rely on a powerful “placebo effect” — the tendency of any treatment, even an ineffective one, to show improvements in health simply because the recipient believes it will work.
Even doctors who distrust Nepal’s shamans have in the past relied on their services, training them to use rehydration salts to treat diarrhoea and cotrimoxazole antibiotics in pneumonia cases.
“There is the negative aspect where diseases like epilepsy and mental illness are regarded as entirely due to supernatural causes and modern medical treatment is neglected,” said Shankar.
“But then this was the case in the West also about 150 years ago.”

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Nepali Girls Confined by Stigma and Superstition

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Nepal’s Republica newspaper carried a piece in January about a 40-year-old woman called Jhuma Devi Shahi who died while spending the night confined to a shed in the freezing hills of western Nepal.
She had been cast out in the cold by her family because she was menstruating and was considered unclean.
The people of Jhuma’s village believe she was killed by evil spirits and will never be allowed to see proof contradicting their superstition because she was cremated without a postmortem examination.

I investigated this mediaeval practice – known as chhaupadi – on a trip to Jhuma’s district, Achham, in December. Below is the story I wrote for AFP.

UPDATE ON FEBRUARY 5, 2012: The Himalayan Times is reporting today that a 16-year-old girl has died in chhaupadi, again in Achham. She is thought to have suffocated while trying to warm herself by a fire in her shed.

Saraswati Biswokarma, 13, sits in her dark shed, known as a 'chhaupadi goth'. PHOTO: AFP/Prakash MATHEMA

 

 

Saraswati Biswokarma sits in the dark, rearranging the threadbare cotton sheet and straw bed she is forced to sleep on before bringing her knees up to her chest with a shiver.
It is already mid-morning but she has not been allowed out of the airless brick shed where she has spent every night for the past week.
The 13-year-old was effectively banished to the shed — barely big enough to stand or lie down in — where she must experience her first period alone in a traumatic ordeal.
“I’ve been here eight nights so I have one left,” she says with a nervous smile. “It’s not nice here, it’s scary and I felt very alone on the first night. I was so scared.”Saraswati’s isolation is part of a centuries-old Hindu ritual known as chhaupadi that has been blamed for prolonged depression and even deaths in remote, impoverished western Nepal.
Under the practice, women are prohibited from participating in normal family activities during menstruation and after childbirth, and can have no contact with men of the household.
“I’m not allowed to touch any cattle or go inside our house. I have to stay in the shed and when my mother calls I have to wait nearby the house with a plate so she can give me food,” Saraswati says.
She is also barred from consuming dairy products or meat or taking a bath. Even looking in the mirror is frowned upon.
The practice stems from the belief that when women have periods they are impure and will bring bad luck on a whole family if they stay in the house and will contaminate anything they touch.
In 2005, the government, in line with a Supreme Court order, enacted a law abolishing chhaupadi but enforcement has been minimal or non-existent.
Saraswati’s shelter, known as a chhaupadi goth, looks like a miniature cow shed, with a dirt floor and no windows or running water.
In January last year, two women were found dead in chhaupadi goths in the remote district of Achham after temperatures dropped to 30F (-1C). In another case, a 15-year-old died of diarrhoea contracted while sleeping in a shed.
Chandrakala Nepali, 17, is preparing for her fifth night in her goth.
Her parents went to Mumbai to find work two years ago, leaving her and four younger siblings to live with relatives in a house high up in the hills an hour’s walk from Mangalsen, the main town in Achham.
“During the day I’m allowed out but only to work in the jungle, collecting firewood,” she says, sweeping the dark, cold hut, which is barely big enough to lie down in.
“I’m not allowed to walk on the same road as the cattle and I’m not allowed to be with my family for seven days. To eat, I sit outside the house and they bring me food on a plate.
“When I’m alone in the shed I feel scared. There are insects and I’m afraid of snakes coming in.”
Chandrakala says that if she has daughters she would never force chhaupadi on them.
But few women are prepared to challenge the status quo, and many continue the ritual for fear of community disapproval or out of religious belief.
Pashupati Kuwar, 30, lives with her five children in Budhakot, a small hamlet high in the hills.
Her husband is away, working in the Indian city of Pune, while her in-laws died several years ago, but Kuwar still observes chhaupadi.
“I don’t touch any cattle for five days. I sleep on straw. Most of the day I go out but I go back to the shed to sleep,” she said.
Pashupati says she will make her six- and 13-year-old daughters take part in the ritual.
“Some people think it’s wrong but if I didn’t do this my god would be angry.”
Pashupati’s own mother, Kunta Rawal, 45, has turned her back on chhaupadi.
“Before I thought it was important because of what I was told by elders and society but I have been made to realise that it is wrong,” she says.
Nepal’s education ministry is hoping to establish a literacy drive in the region, including health education classes dedicated exclusively to reproductive health and menstrual hygiene.
Thanks to campaigns by humanitarian organisations like UNICEF, the sites of confinement are beginning to improve, with women often allowed in separate rooms in the main house rather than banished outside.
Janaki Bohara, 40, president of the Bahagyaswor Paralegal Committee, a women’s advocacy group supported by UNICEF, says she will refuse to allow her 14-year-old daughter to take part in the ritual.
“If I see families doing this to their daughters I will say to them ‘look at me — I have nothing to do with chhaupadi but nothing has happened to me’. I’m ready to go to villages and fight people about this issue.”

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Nepal pupils get bog-standard education in toilet

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Think the schools are bog-standard where you live?
You should try getting an education in southwestern Nepal, one of the poorest places in the world, where a group of children have to sit through lessons in a toilet block.
Not a former toilet block, not a block which happens to house a toilet – a fully operational, non-converted, run-of-the-mill toilet block.
The children in Dang Deokhuri district, on the Indian border, have been learning reading, writing and arithmetic by a row of urinals next to two still functioning toilet cubicles after their school fell down.
Our correspondent Deepak Adhikari spoke to the headmaster, who said: “During the summer last year, the school building collapsed due to the monsoon rains.
“I ran from pillar to post requesting funds for a building. But neither the district education office nor the village development committee officials did anything.”
The school, founded in 1960, had asked for a new classroom but was told by the local education authority there only enough cash for the 150,000-rupee ($1,800) toilet block.
The lavatory is used mainly by a group of 18 five and six-year-olds sharing two desks and benches, while the other pupils — too embarrassed to use the cubicles — are forced to go out in the open.
“With a total of 150 students and no building, we decided to take classes inside the toilet. We use the urinal part of the toilet while the other two rooms remain unused,” said the headmaster.
Nepal depends on foreign governments and aid agencies for around a quarter of its 48-billion-rupee (650-million-dollar) education budget.
Only 80 percent of students complete primary education, with girls and children from low-caste communities most likely to drop out.
Worth bearing in mind next time you feel like complaining that you haven’t got a pot to pee in.

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Tusker tussle at Nepal elephant polo world champs

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Photo: AFP, Prakash Mathema

by Frankie Taggart

The original version of this article was published by AFP on December 9, 2011. You can read it here.

A portly consultant takes an inch-perfect pass from a balding banker, slots the ball home with clinical precision and punches the air with both arms, David Beckham style.
This is “champagne polo”, the commentator yells, but champagne polo with a difference, for the steed behind the winning goal weighs several tonnes and has just let go of a dung pile which looks the size of a small family car.
We are approaching the climax of the World Elephant Polo Championships, with players from across the globe gathering in a remote airfield in southern Nepal for a week of one of the most elite and glamorous sports around.
“Some players are looking very tired out there,” says Peter Prentice, a Hong Kong-based veteran of the tournament who chairs the World Elephant Polo Association and doubles up as a rather urbane commentator.
“I recommend a few repetitions of light weights to warm down and certainly a half a Carlsberg is about the right weight to relax those weary muscles.
“Seven to ten reps should do it, followed by a few lighter reps. A sauvignon blanc and then a chablis over ice or two should do the trick.”
Meanwhile a former Miss Nepal is told she is holding her stick the wrong way around.
Thus the tone is set for the exclusive business of elephant polo, a week of of fine wine, good food and socialising in Nepal’s Chitwan National Park, home to Bengal tigers, rhinos and, for one week a year, playboys and aristocrats.
The annual event, hosted by the Tiger Tops jungle resort, has attracted models, celebrities and other glitterati over the years, including former Beatle Ringo Starr and comedians Billy Connolly and Max Boyce.
But at the business end of the tournament the participants take their sport very seriously indeed.

The elephants are driven by trainers who control them with oral commands and foot pressure (AFP, Prakash Mathema)

“Players do look to the umpire to make the right decisions and don’t take it lightly if a decision doesn’t go their way,” says Dubai-based former Gurkha and logistics consultant Nigel Lea, 33, who got his eye in by swinging his mallet from the roof of a Land Rover Discovery in the desert.
“But the joy of elephant polo is that because you are all together as a community that only sees each other once a year, 30 seconds after walking off the pitch we calm down, shake hands and have a beer together.”
It is easy to understand why the players do not like to go home empty-handed — the package per person is around the $3,500 mark for a week and the entry fee for each team works out at an eye-watering $10,000.
“I don’t think it’s a sport for posh people,” Lea says, however. “Some people here have a lot of money, some people can hardly rub two coppers together.”
Elephant polo was dreamt up 30 years ago over drinks at a Swiss ski resort and is based on the rules of horse polo, with a smaller pitch to cater for the less energetic steeds.
But thinking you’ll be any good on an elephant just because you can ride a horse is rather like assuming you’ll be able to master the controls of a Sherman tank after taking a cycling proficiency course.
Two teams of four players in pith helmets sit astride elephants controlled by mahouts, or trainers, who drive them on using oral commands and pressure from their feet.
Communication is the main problem as the mahouts speak only Nepali, as do their mounts, who are thought to be able to understand about 30 words.
Players carry sticks up to eight feet (2.5 metres) long to hit the ball towards the opposing goal, with each game comprising two 10-minute chukkas.
The list of enthusiasts is illustrious. Cheering from the sidelines this year is Colonel Raj Kalaan, who played with the Indian Polo team for 20 years, owns the Haryana Polo Club near Delhi and commanded India’s 61st Cavalry.
Local people also turn up in their thousands every year to cheer on a team put together by the park warden and his staff, who work with elephants every day and are often among the top performers.
This year’s title was successfully defended by a team led by 72-year-old Scotsman James Manclark, a horse polo player and former Olympic tobogganist who invented the elephant version over a drink with Jim Edwards, a pioneer of eco-tourism in Nepal.
Elephant polo is not without its detractors, chief among them animal welfare groups who have campaigned against the sport in India.
It is immediately obvious, however, that elephant welfare is the top priority at Tiger Tops and the animals’ treatment is reminiscent of the pampering that thoroughbred racehorses enjoy.
The ever-attentive mahouts lovingly clean and care for their mounts, treating them at the end of each match to molasses sandwiches to keep their strength up.

The elephants are fed molasses sandwiches keep their strength up (AFP, Prakash Mathema)

Conservation is also a key issue for Tiger Tops and the WEPA, which has contributed thousands of pounds towards animal welfare and other schemes benefiting Nepal over the years.
“If you see how they are here, you can see they are happy and in their natural habitat,” said Stine Edwards, captain of the all-women Tiger Tops Tigresses team, which ended the tournament with an impressive third place.
Stine’s husband Kristjan Edwards was born and raised in Nepal, speaks Nepali as a first language and has the advantage of having spent most of his life on the back on an elephant.
“An elephant will never do anything it doesn’t want to do,” says Stine. “They (the senior players) all have their own elephants and they would never do anything which would not be good for their elephants.”
The intellect of the elephants is often underestimated, according to the players, who say it obvious their mounts know what they are doing on the field.
“They are so bright. One year we had an elephant who would complain when you missed the ball,” says Stine, mimmicking the animal’s trumpeting raised trunk with an arm.
“He’d be saying: ‘You — can’t you just hit the ball? I’m on a run here!’”

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Nepal’s ‘Brokeback Everest’ courts lesbian cinemagoers

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by Frankie Taggart

A version of this article was first published by AFP on November 16, 2011. The original can be found here.

Nisha Adhikari (left) and Dia Maskey as the star-crossed lesbian lovers in Snow Flowers

Kiran wanders aimlessly, oblivious to the traffic and wiping tears from her bloodshot eyes as struggles to take in the devastating news that the love of her life is about to marry someone else.
The poignant vignette is not real life but one of the final scenes to be filmed in a new love story due to hit cinema screens in Nepal next year. But this is no ordinary melodrama, for the object of Kiran’s desire is a woman.
The affair plays out in Snow Flowers, a breakthrough lesbian love story already being dubbed “Brokeback Everest” and set to be the first feature film to deal with the taboo subject of gay relationships in the 60-year history of Nepalese cinema.
With filming having wrapped on schedule in Kathmandu ahead of the international festivals circuit and a general release in spring, the only question is whether the public in the deeply-religious nation will be ready.
The movie, directed by Paris-based film-maker Subarna Thapa, stars two of Nepal’s leading actresses, Dia Maskey and Nisha Adhikari, in a story of two women tormented by their feelings for one another.
“It’s two individuals falling in love and facing all the controversy and restrictions, and mental, emotional and physical traumas of being a lesbian in Nepal,” Adhikari said.
“It’s a simple love story with a lot of complications.”

Nepalese cinema actress Nisha Adhikari films a scene in Patan for the forthcoming film "Snow Flowers". Photo: AFP

Local media have dubbed the film “Brokeback Everest” in a reference to Ang Lee‘s gay cowboy love story “Brokeback Mountain“, which grossed more than $178 million worldwide after its release in 2005.
Industry observers do not expect Snow Flowers to do that kind of business but are keenly awaiting the reaction of audiences in Nepal, a conservative, mainly Hindu country that nonetheless has some of the most progressive policies on homosexuality in Asia.
Adhikari, 25, says the film is a first as it deals with the turmoil experienced by same-sex couples in Nepal, whereas previously gay people have always been depicted in Nepalese cinema as figures of fun.
“The entire movie is based on the trauma — what it is like not being able to come out and live your life because there are so many restrictions,” she told AFP.
“There is no liberty in not living your life the way you want, irrespective of who you are attracted to sexually. This movie will be an eye-opener for a lot of people who have just viewed these issues very superficially and who think these are issues that can be easily ignored.”
Quite how the film will go down remains to be seen, although many argue that the signs are positive.
Three years ago, the country’s Supreme Court ordered the government to enact laws to guarantee the rights of gays and lesbians after a gay rights pressure group filed a petition.
Meanwhile the country’s new constitution, currently being drafted by lawmakers, is expected to define marriage as a union between two adult individuals, regardless of gender, and to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation.
For Sunil Pant, a Nepalese lawmaker and the only openly gay parliamentarian in south Asia, it is not a question of whether Nepal is ready for Snow Flowers but rather whether society has any hope of progress without a liberal film industry.
“Nepal always been tolerant and we are now really ready to treat each other equally,” he said.
“It’s also about freedom of expression and our right to be able to watch films about our lives and issues — at least occasionally. I am excited and can’t wait to see the film released in Nepal.”
Nepali films, said to have begun with D.B. Pariyar’s Satya Harishchandra in 1951, are seen mainly by cinemagoers from the poor working class, while the middle class and elites tend to watch Hindu and English-language movies.
Chaitanya Mishra, a sociology professor at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, is not optimistic about the mainstream reaction to Snow Flowers,    which began shooting in August in Kathmandu and Pokhara.
“I think that news, films and other media on same-sex relationships will not be accepted or find many supporters as such if we are looking for acceptance and support from a majority of the adult population,” he told AFP.
But he added that the film could be a huge comfort to people already struggling with gay relationships, demonstrating that “they may not be alone and that there may be others like them out there”.
“That is bound to give them immense relief and unburden them of a huge ‘dirty secret’, he added. “It will start them on a journey to humanise such a relationship.”
The makers of Snow Flowers hope it will open Nepal up to a new genre of gay cinema and progress is already underway, with recent short films dealing with homosexuality and Nepali documentary Struggle Within being screened at the Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival last year.
“No, the Bagmati was not set fire in reaction to the film screenings,” said Basanta Thapa, the festival’s curator.

Nepalese film director Subarna Thapa talking about "Snow Flowers" in Kathmandu. Photo: AFP

“Nepali society by and large is tolerant to such issues, unlike in India where the screening of Fire in 1998 caused a public stir fanned primarily by the right wing.
“The central theme of the film was lesbianism and was directed by Deepa Mehta, a film director of international repute… The same film, after many years of its release, was screened in Kathmandu and nothing happened here.
“So my own guess is that the film in the making will not attract any trouble from the audience.”
Snow Flowers director Suwarna Thapa says he is not interested in simply showing Nepal “what lesbians do”, but rather to tell a simple love story from an angle never approached before.
“It’s not a shocking film, like war movies or propaganda films, but there will be some impact in Nepali society,” he told AFP.
“Nepal is changing but it cannot be changed by the day after tomorrow. It takes time — it’s a long journey.
“Our Maoist revolution took 10 years to bring about change. Society and culture takes its time.”
Indeed, Snow Flowers is unlikely either to scandalise or titilate audiences expecting to see bared flesh as the relationship plays out through longing glances rather than explicit depictions of sex.
“This is an issue people would like to cover up in society. Maybe more than half the population can relate to the movie because people here totally ignore being bisexual,” said Adhikari, who shortened her long, carefully coiffeured hair for the role.
“Maybe people will go and see it just to see two women romancing — who knows?”

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Nepal children to track secretive snow leopard

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Snow leopard Nita with one of her cubs in the Himalayan Padmaja Naidu Zoological Park in Darjeeling (AFP, Diptendu Dutta)

UPDATE on November 18, 2001: Three snow leopards have been spotted in the lower areas of Mustang district in western Nepal, according to the Kathmandu Post – not by one of the children, but by an expert.
“I saw a small number of Himalayan Blue sheep grazing around the grassland near Taprang (link is to a time-lapse video) in Jarkot area… I waited for a while and moved my eyes around, and suddenly I saw a snow leopard coming towards the pasture from the stream nearby,” said Bikram Shrestha, field biologist and a member of the census team. “I was elated and took numerous pictures of the animal.”
Here is one of his pics:

A rare glimpse of the elusive snow leopard in Mustang district (photo: Bikram Shrestha)

 

by Frankie Taggart

This article is based on a shorter version I wrote for AFP. See the original, published on October 8, 2011, here.

Conservationists in Nepal have enlisted an army of school children to record the movements of the mysterious snow leopard, one of the most elusive predators in the world, a scientist said Tuesday.
Experts believe just 500 adults survive in the Himalayan nation, and few can claim ever to have seen the secretive, solitary “mountain ghost”, which lives 5,000 to 6,000 metres (16,500 to 20,000 ft) above sea level.
“Snow leopards are inherently rare, and also elusive in the sense that they are active during dusk and dawn, so few people, including biologists, have seen a snow leopard to date,” said Som Ale of the US-based Snow Leopard Conservancy.
The group has enlisted children from schools in the leopard’s habitat in Mustang, in Nepal’s mountainous northern frontier, who will work in pairs to instal and monitor digital cameras to count the endangered species.
The census, due to be carried out over two months in winter, will give scientists a more accurate idea of numbers in Nepal than more primitive techniques, including recording tracks and collecting droppings.
Although the Snow Leopard Conservancy used camera traps on a study in India six years ago, the group says this is the first survey of a large predator anywhere in the world by local communities who are not paid conservation experts.
“In parts of Africa, lions may be monitored by local people but they are well paid professional guides,” Ale told AFP.
Remote camera trapping, which Som describes as “an interesting but taxing venture”, is increasingly seen as the best way to get an accurate picture of the big cat’s population — but it is by no means a guaranteed technique.
“To be successful, one must place cameras on rugged terrain and trails snow leopards frequent. Our cameras in Mustang may or may not catch images of snow leopards which may depend on so many other factors besides the location — for instance, movement of prey, snowfall and all that,” Som said.
The pupils will be trained to set up digital cameras that take infra-red images and operate in sub-zero temperatures to areas where snow leopards would be expected to visit, automatically taking images of any warm-bodied animal that happens to pass by.
Each snow leopard has its own unique pattern and researchers match the photographed animal’s fur against pictures taken earlier in the survey or from previous surveys.
“Capture-mark-recapture” algorithms and computers are used to estimate the number of snow leopards present within the area surveyed.
The snow leopard is protected in Nepal by an act of parliament dating back to the 1970s which provides for penalties of up to 100,000 rupees ($1,300) and up to 15 years in jail for poachers and traders of its pelt and bones.
There are an estimated 4,500 to 7,000 of the big cats left in the wild. But that population is spread across 12 countries and nearly 775,000 square miles.
This habitat includes some of the most remote regions of the world, from Afghanistan, across the Himalayas, to Lake Baikal in south central Russia.
The figure is only a “best guess” based largely upon tracks, droppings and crude computer-generated habitat models.
“Clearly, if we are to ensure a future for this charismatic species, we need to know far more about its distribution and population trend in the 12 countries where snow leopards range,” Snow Leopard Conservancy says on its website.
“That requires monitoring their populations in representative areas and habitats to determine their current and future status. Are we dealing with the worst-case scenario of widespread, declining numbers, or are populations stable and even possibly increasing in some places?”
Ale himself is one of the few people in the world lucky enough to have come face to face with the animal.
The biologist photographed a snow leopard in 2004 on the southern slopes of Mount Everest, the first time it had been spotted there for more than 40 years, by observing the behaviour of its prey, a wild goat called the Himalayan tahr.
“If one knows where to look, one can sight snow leopard. In Everest, I saw snow leopard six times during my PhD study — all because my PhD work was to find out suitable techniques to study the elusive predator,” he said.

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The healthy diners saving Nepal’s vultures

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Vultures chow down

Vultures feeding on carcasses treated with diclofenac die of kidney failure (AFP/BIRD CONSERVATION NEPAL/File, Anand Chaudhary)

Nepal’s vultures — decimated by medicine fed to the livestock they call dinner — are making a comeback thanks to their own chain of healthy-eating restaurants.
The drug-free diners have been set up across the country over the last four years to counter the use of diclofenac, a painkiller commonly administered to the cattle that are a mainstay of the scavengers’ diet.
The latest, launched last year near the Annapurna mountain range in central Nepal, has led to a five-fold increase in the local population of the critically endangered bird, according to figures unearthed by my AFP colleague Deepak Adhikari this week.

See his story published by AFP on October 26 here.

Before the turn of the century, an estimated 300,000 vultures cruised the Nepali skies, but scientific studies say their numbers declined by more than 90 percent in just a few years.
Vultures feeding on carcasses treated with diclofenac die of kidney failure, often within 24 hours, says Bird Conservation Nepal.
Let’s face it – vultures aren’t the best loved species in the bird kingdom. Intrinsically linked as they are with death, the sight of this falconiformes circling above is about as welcome as a visit by the Grim Reaper at a nursing home.
And there is something distinctly unvirtuous about the idea of picking on the bones of the carcass of some poor soul which has met its end. Better the ferocious majesty of the eagle which swoops, kills and deserves its prey than the slavering shadenfreude of the vulture.
Even its name has become a staple insult in the English language to describe someone who benefits from another’s misfortune.
So should we not celebrate its demise? Well, no.
The loss of a major scavenger – apart from being a zoological tragedy – is bad news for all of us.
In Nepal the demise of the vulture has led to a rise in rotting carcasses and a consequent increase in feral dogs and the spread of disease.
Yes, vultures are… well… vultures - but they also do a good job in protecting us from rabies, anthrax and tuberculosis.
BCN came up with the idea of “restaurants” where the birds could eat uncontaminated carrion, the latest of them set up in Kaski district.

The drug-free diners have led to a five-fold increase in the local population of the critically endangered bird (AFP/BIRD CONSERVATION NEPAL/File, Bird Conservation Nepal)

In Hindu-majority Nepal, cows are considered sacred and killing them is strictly prohibited.
BCN buys old and terminally ill cattle and takes the animals to the restaurants’ farms in community-owned forests where they are treated, if needed, with another, vulture-friendly painkiller.
They are allowed to die naturally and, once declared free of diclofenac, are skinned and taken to nearby jungle where they are left out to become the vultures’ main course.
With around 860 bird species in a landscape that varies from fertile, semi-tropical plains to snowy Himalayan peaks, Nepal is a paradise for bird watchers.
It now has six vulture restaurants, and BCN says one project set up two years ago at Gaidahawa Lake, in the southern Terai plains, has seen numbers increase from fewer than 40 to as high as 282 at meal times.

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Leopard drags away and eats toddler in Nepal

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We reported yesterday on a man-eating leopard that dragged away and devoured a four-year-old boy in Nepal, the third victim from the same remote village in just four months.
You can read our report in the Daily Telegraph here.
It is possible that one killer cat may be stalking Bela village from its jungle lair in the mountains of central Nepal and could be responsible for all three deaths, the police told our reporter Phanindra Dahal.
“A leopard took away a four-year-old boy from his house at 6:20pm (1235 GMT) on Sunday,” said Surendra Prasad Mainali, the deputy superintendent of police  for the district of Kavre, about 40 kilometres (25 miles) east of Kathmandu.
“He was playing inside his house. The police and locals conducted a search until midnight and found his dead body inside a forest 15 kilometres away.
“The man-eater leopard has not been seen in the village since the incident.”
Mainali said leopards — an endangered animal in Nepal — had attacked numerous villagers in recent months and were increasingly targeting children.
Police have adopted a shoot-to-kill policy for any leopards seen encroaching on the territory of the Bela residents.
The incident put me in mind of another story we broke last month about 15 Nepalese villagers, including a 14-year-old, who were arrested for eating a leopard in the belief that the meat could guard against gout.
There has been no survey in Nepal of the population size but estimates by conservationists put the number of leopards in the Chitwan and Bardia national parks in the Terai at up to 125.
Conservationists say poaching for skins and body parts increased during the last five years of the Maoist rebellion when parks were poorly protected.
But improved conservation of forests since then has seen the population burgeoning.
Clearly Nepal has a problem where humans and leopards meet – and the cats usually seem to get the upper hand in direct conflict situations, with studies showing some 270 people were killed by the animal in the ten years to 2004.
There have been 106 leopard deaths at the hand of humans during the same period. (These figures, of course, are about face-to-face encounters. They do not take into account the many hundreds of leopards killed by deforestation, loss of habitat and poaching.)
Despite the fragile conservation status of the Panthera pardus in Nepal, it isn’t held in the same esteem as, say, Bengal tigers. The reason for this is that leopards are often seen, with some justification, as dangerous pests. They visit human settlements across Nepal frequently, killing domesticated animals and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

A leopard is seen in captivity in 2010 (AFP/File, Gianluigi Guercia)

They have also been known to attack as far in as the suburbs of Kathmandu.
Naturalists say that the reason is paradoxically Nepal’s success in protecting its forests. At the top of the food chain, the leopard is being driven out of its natural hunting ground by competition or depleting prey.
They generally avoid people if they can, but when they get hungry they have been known to attack children, especially older or injured leopards that can’t hunt traditional prey.
Another reason that encounters often end in tears or worse is that most locals panic when they see a leopard, and think it is a man-eating tiger, Shanta Raj Jnawali at the National Trust of Nature Conservation told the Nepali Times.
The leopard then gets spooked and tries to defend itself.
So what should you do if you are pottering around in your kitchen and you come face-to-face with a hungry leopard who thinks he might just be in with a chance of a free lunch?
“If you see a leopard, you should not disturb the animal,” advises Jnawali. “Walk out of the house, lock it and wait for the rescue team.”
Hmmm… sounds like the kind of advice that easier said than done. But suppress that urge to flap your arms around and holler – one day it might just save your life.

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