Tag Archives: wagle

Nepal Banda and Power Cut

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By Dinesh Wagle
This is part of an article that appeared on today’s Op-Ed of the Kahtmandu Post. The other part is here. The complete article in PDF is here.

In my five-month-long stay in Delhi, I almost missed two things in particular about Kathmandu. 1. Why no bandas here? 2. Why no power cuts?

I was back in Nepal for a week recently and experienced both in ways that were in no way enjoyable.
A colleague at Kantipur told me about the banda the next day as I reached the office in the evening after booking a nonrefundable ticket with Buddha Air. I was destined to get stranded in Biratnagar (from where I planned to reach Delhi via Darjeeling). I thought, okay, a day of banda has become a non-issue for many of us these days, so I’ll take it. It’s like only a couple of hours of power outage a day. But eastern Nepal has become a hotbed of protests of all kinds. So my sixth sense and my colleagues at the Biratnagar office were saying that there might be another sudden banda or disturbance on the East-West Highway the next day as well. Continue reading →

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Winter Flagbearers: Delhi Cold and JNU Food Festival

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JNU holds its multi-national food festival in the midst of a Delhi winter that is not very cold

Dinesh Wagle
Wagle Street Journal
[This article originally appeared on the Op-Ed page of the Kathmandu Post today. See it here as it appeared on the paper.]

The hottest news in Delhi is the absence of cold. “Who stole Delhi’s winter?” asked the Times of India the other day and went on to conclude that “winter has cheated Delhiites this season.”

It was widely reported in December that the month entered record books as the second warmest in 108 years. January — traditionally the coldest month in Delhi — too has been freakishly warm with as many as 20 days out of 28 having recorded above average minimum temperatures, wrote the paper. The average minimum temperature of the Indian capital for the first 28 days of January was 8.9 degrees celsius.

Before I came to Delhi almost three months ago people had warned me in Kathmandu about the extreme weather conditions in the Indian capital. “Flying crows fall on the ground in summer heat,” one well-wisher had cautioned me. “And people die because of cold. Delhi has a very different kind of cold: treacherous and dangerous.” Continue reading →

Hips do Lie! I am not Dancing in These Photos!

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Dinesh Wagle Dances in a Nepali Village 2

I know I am a horrible dancer. Actually it would be wrong to associate the word “dancer” referring positively in the same sentence that talks about me. I can’t dance, plain and simple. But I really wanna learn the art. What you see in these photos is not me dancing but just posing for the camera. When I saw these photos for the first time on my camera’s LCD panel I was pleasantly surprised. It seemed as if I was dancing. Continue reading →

Ear of Corn (aka Makai Ko Ghoga!)

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The food price is rising worldwide making ghogas like these ever expensive. A VOA report titled ‘Corn-derived ethanol shares blame for food price hikes’ quotes John Ashworth of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, as saying that the ethanol industry’s reliance on corn has had some noticeable impact on food prices, especially meat.

“Because grain is valuable, when you take a good chunk of that supply out for making fuels, you are going to have upward pressure on the price of the raw material. Particularly for the cattle industry, which uses a lot of corn, when the price of corn goes up, then the price of beef is going to go up,” he said.  Pics by Dinesh Wagle