crowded, crazy, catmandu: a day in the capital

Its my third day back in Kathmandu, nearly two years after my last visit. I stayed home all day yesterday. And today I am in a mood to go out and see what has changed in these two years. I plan to go to downtown Kathmandu to soak in the atmosphere (not advised for health reasons if you are a weak type!), to see what has changed over these two years since I was here last, and most of all to re-orientate myself to the sights, sounds, and smells of Kathmandu. First thing in the morning however, I wanted to go an have a haircut. A 25-rupees haircut is a very tempting prospect indeed, for I had paid 7.50 pounds only a few weeks ago for the same purpose! After the haircut and a hot shower (to my complete surprise I found a hot water system installed at home, which I wasn’t expecting at all!), and early lunch of masu-bhat, I ready myself for the challenge – use local buses, micro buses, three-wheelers et al., plus my own feet to explore Kathmandu downtown.

LHR-DEL-KTM: the homecoming

Before I left England for a conference in New Delhi, my plan was to post updates on the trip while I was still in Delhi. That didn’t happen for many reasons, one of which was the lack of reliable and affordable internet access…in Delhi? you might wonder. But while in the capital city of our mighty neighbour India, I heard quite a few conference delegates complaining about how bad internet service was in Delhi even compared to Kathmandu. I hardly ever saw an internet cafe on my five-day’s stay there. The conference organisers had provided just FIVE laptops with internet access for the use of 700+ delegates!! There was wireless internet available at the conference venue but that was extremely expensive, despite being as slow as a dial-up. They were charging 150 INR for 30 minutes of connection! So although I had enough to write about from my five days in Delhi, probably more so than I had written over the past 11 months this year, I didn’t. Other reason is my chronic procrastination and laziness. I like to be “connected” when I write my blog entries, even when I am just typing up on ecto. Having had to connect to the net using dial-up from home, now I am admiring the real value of ecto as a blogging software. However, owing to my laziness while in Delhi, I still have to write/type up my “Delhi experiences”, in fact “experiences” from the two-hour queuing at the Heathrow for the security check all the way to two-hour delay in flight from Delhi to KTM (which I must admit turned out to be a boon as KTM was bandh till 4pm yesterday)!!

starting afresh

I don’t know now whether I am/should be pleased or saddened while writing this…but I sure am a very relieved man…It feels like a very heavy load has been taken off my body…Reason? I just deleted every single entry that was listed under “draft-posts” in ecto, the software that I use for posting entries on random jottings… thought I should start afresh rather than try to add a line or two, tweak this and that or try to complete entries, which, almost certainly, would have been started in a completely different frame of mind than what I have now…this saves me the pain in tweaking and trying to make the writings/posts coherent over a period of time, as well as the need to make decision on which date to use while posting – i.e., the day a post was started or the day it was completed! I won’t delete those that are written on my journal(electronic and/or paper) however, although I must admit I have in the past burned my journals full of writings so many times…I now wonder what was I thinking burning those!?!…I now believe its a lot of fun to go back to such writings sometime in the future and wonder “what the heck was I thinking when I wrote that?”. But I just couldn’t bear keeping them in ecto as draft, some for nearly a year now! Seeing lots and lots of unpublished drafts was like adding more and more weight onto my already strained shoulders (probably heart & mind too!)…

Life ~ a box of chocolate???

Life is like a box of chocolate…you never know what you gonna get.
- Forrest Gump’s Mother

I just realised there are more “draft-posts” on my computer than those I have managed to complete and post on my blog. Like most other entries, this entry is also starting “titleless” and I have no idea what I’m going to call this post I just decided the title (good thing about writing on computer!). Nonetheless, I’m typing away, despite the tiredness but surprisingly without the sleepiness that it usually comes with. I also managed to burn my hand while cooking a couple of days nearly a week ago, possibly for the first time since I left Nepal all those years ago! Not a huge burn, but since it’s on the wrist that usually rests on the edge of the laptop while typing, I am having a slight difficulty with typing these days. A good excuse for not updating the blog? May be…

And I don’t know whether I should post this blog “today”, i.e., give today’s date, or give the date on which I started. I must have started this entry at least a week ago, so its strange coming back again just to add a few lines here and there. But I have so many things in mind, so many issues to respond to that I don’t think one entry will be enough. So, this will probably be one of those “mindless musings” and nothing else.