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In the morning, in Chandanpur village of Lalitpur district, we decided to take a walk for a while. We wanted to see how people were living in their homes and what they were doing in their fields. We walked uphill for about 10 minutes and reached at a house. Inside, a lady was apparently preparing food along with her son. She turned out to be a MaSiKa (Matri Sishu Karyakarta: health worker on safe motherhood) who talked about her wrok in the village. “The Tamang women are less enthuasistic about getting expert advise and involvement during pregnancy than those of Brahnim-Chhetri caste,” she said. She is a Newar who attended highschool and is from the area of Lalitpur that is nearer to the capital city. “Initially it was so boring to come here in this type of village,” said the woman. “Now I am used to with the life here.” The woman also talked about the disease that was causing serious harm to the corn production in the village. She said many farmers in the village, including herself, have started planting cabbage instead of corn this year. [More about this has been mentioned in my Nepali article titled Motorcycle Diary that appeared in 26 July's Koseli.] Continue reading →

See the related article [Motorcycle Diary] in Nepali in Blogmandu

Recently I went to some “remote” areas of Lalitpur district pillion riding on my reporter colleague Suraj Kunwar’s Honda Shine. During the overnight trip we rode over the bumpy roads, stopped for tea and snack in small tea-shops and stayed in a dirty lodge. But the food was good. The village was beautiful and we went around the village, sneaked into the residential compounds, and talked to the locals.

The first day of the two-day journey occurred under heavy rain. We continued riding even as the pouring continued as if that would sweep away the hills from where the road went through. The raincoat wasn’t able to save us from the water. That was fun. The leeches were at times scary especially when you found them sucking blood just above the middle of your thigh! There was couple of moments of cultural shock. One included the tea-house lady offering me a glass of local liquor instead of tea because the locals understand that you are asking for the raksi (liquor) when you ask for tea! Continue reading →

It wasn’t predicted. It wasn’t on my schedule. In a way it was like any other unpredictable day in my professional life. As I was heading towards office thinking about what I might do in the newsroom, the cell rang- GSM I must mention, not the CDMA, as I have started carrying two if I am to exclude the third, data only CDMA phone that I put inside my backpack, over the past several days.

Presidential Complex was decorated with Moon and Sun on the presidential oath taking day

There is a convincing background for this, I must clarify. One of the numbers was published in the newspaper, at the end of one of my articles, and the text messages and miscalls (that’s right, not Missed Calls in Nepali usage!) kept flooding in. In addition to that, there are some benefits of carrying two different phones that are enabled by two different technologies albeit their service is provided by the same company Nepal Telecom. The reception of CDMA phone is very good in Kathmandu where the service of GSM is, to put it mildly, unbearable. Plus, if you go to remote places like Chandanpur village of Lalitpur district where I went last week, you won’t see signals for GSM while CDMA works perfectly fine. But, on the other hand, the GSM postpaid that I have is cheap to make calls compared to CDMA/GSM prepaid. So make calls from GSM whenever possible and receive on CDMA! Continue reading →

Media Watch: Nepali reporters and news outlets sometime make jokes out of themselves. While reporting news, they hardly care about facts, those facts that are usually the backbone of the story itself. Rookie reporters and careless editors are often to be blamed for such inaccuracies.

I am talking about the coverage of latest development from Washington DC on the compensation awarded to the families of nine of the 12 Nepalis killed in Iraq in 2004.

Someone called Rajendra Thakuri, “an entrepreneur” based in Washington DC, sent an email to a few media outlets, including to Kantipur where I work, detailing how his neighbor, Matthew Handley and Matthew’s law firm successfully fought on behalf of the Nepalis killed in Iraq. Rajendra doesn’t categorically mention that the court ruling was for only 9 of the 12 Nepalis though he says in his email to the media that “there is better news for some of these families.” But the title of his article in Nepalnews, presumably put by Nepalnews, is misleading and wrong.

Instead of trying to verify the information, which is so easy thanks to the Internet and cheap phone calls to the US, reporters blindly report in many newspapers and web sites today that families of ALL 12 will get the compensation.

Only Kantipur and the Kathmandu Post (not even our own ekantipur) got it right because they reported that the families of only 9 out of 12 will get the compensation [See the screen print version of some outlets via the links at the end of this post.] I shared all the documents that I downloaded from the web site of Cohen Milstein, the firm that represented 11 Nepalis, with Prabhakar Ghimire, who wrote the news for the Kathmandu Post. Both the Post’s and Kantipur’s reporting also includes interview of Matt that I conducted in which he talks about the case and his involvement in it.

The moral lesson: Of course, mistakes do happen because we are all human being [My own mistake, as one reader pointed out, is that it should have been Chicago Tribune, not Chicago Times as I wrote in the report]. But the grand question is: are we trying to avoid them? Reporters, please check facts before writing the story. There is something called Google. Just google it!!

Googling would have taken you to the web site of Cohen Milstein where they have separate section for this case that has PDF files of the many related documents.

Click on the following names to see the screen print of their respective coverage of each of the news outlets:

THT, Nepalnews, eKantipur.

[Nepal Samacharpatra and Rajdhani dailies have also published wrong reporting.]

Here are the PDF versions of the front and third pages of Kantipur: Page 1 and Page 3

All photos by Yogesh Khatiwada

I have posted the photos of me looking for, finding and buying the much acclaimed book Fatalism and Development by anthropologist Dor Bahadur Bista who has gone missing since 1997. Continue reading →