We are hit hard (again and again)

On, 25 April 2015, 11.56am local time (GMT+5.45) powerful earthquake of magnitude 7.9 Richter scale, lasted almost a minute, struck Nepal, with epicenter nearby ancient capital Gorkha and devastating Gorkha itself, Kathmandu, Bhaktapur, Lalitpur, Sindhupalchok, Kavrepalanchok, Nuwakot, Dhading are some of the severely affected areas.

Several tremors and aftershocks have continued to follow the next 24 hours and nearly 25 hours later, another aftershock of nearly 6.7 Richter scale struck which added further damage to the devastation.

My family and we are safe and alive and our building has remained intact during all these tremors. Many people’s houses have cracked and people fearful of aftershocks are sheltering in the tents outside the house. The food and water supply are limited and many national international volunteering/support organizations have helped the needy ones so far.

If anyone reading this requires help and is in Nepal, please call “1234” from any telephone line in Nepal and you will be provided with help.

If you are someone willing to help people of Nepal at this crisis, please do so through the reliable people you know or directly through international aid organization such as Red Cross, World Food Program (WFP), UNICEF or similar trusted organizations.

The villages are most affected by the earthquake and if possible call people you know in those villages or try to communicate with them and let other people know (like us), if the survivors have reported they need help.

I would also like to thank all our friends, well wishers and relatives abroad who have been with us through this crisis and ready to help us anytime in need. We are always thankful to you.

UPDATE: (12th May 2015) After several aftershocks and repeated tremors and people returning to normal ways, another powerful earthquake of 7.3 Richter, on 12th May afternoon, shook Kathmandu with epicenter near Dolakha district. While it caused signifacant damages in Charikot and Dolakha districts and only few casaulties elsewhere, people’s lives have been disrupt and many people are again taking shelter in the tents and mostly in open spaces. People don’t know how long this will last and what damages are underway. Panic mode is again activated and it takes a long before we are able to return to normal lives. For now, most of the people daily schedule is to get up, eat, be scared, listen and ignore rumours, eat and go to bed and stay alert and try to be safe.

Resham firiri-रेशम फिरिरी

Resham Firiri

Music from the Himalayan Kingdom

If you are from Nepal, you know this song. If you have been to Nepal, you would have definitely heard this song. If you know someone from Nepal, you might probably know this song.

Resham firiri (रेशम फिरिरी) is a very popular folk song from Nepal. Young ones or elderly, village people or city dwellers, traditional, old fashioned or modern, you will hear this song in almost every occasion when Nepalese have to share happiness, sing and dance.

Lets begin. The purpose of my writing this post is to inform about this song and explore how this song reflects Nepali life and culture. Being someone from Nepal, my purpose is to inform people in other countries, though our own Nepali brothers and siters might like it as well.

Continue reading “Resham firiri-रेशम फिरिरी”

Pashupatinath in Pictures

Well, this time, it’s like a photoblog on Pashupatinath. Pashupatinath is one of the most sacred Hindu Temples in the world and one of the UNESCO world heritage sites. It’s in Kathmandu, (in a walking distance from my home) and from a long-long time, I wanted to take go to Pashupatinath and take pictures, a lot of pictures. Today, finally I had the opportunity. Even though it was rainy and the camera battery died before I could be safisfied fully, I have taken so many pictures. Some of them are good and many of them are blurry, fuzzy, dark and out of focus images (I should work a lot on my photography skills).
Camera: Fujifilm Finepix JV1004 (Many thanks to Natalie Blockley for the camera. I brought this precious little thing from her)
All the images were shot at 12Mpixel with Auto/SR Auto and Natural modes. For uploading and web purpose, these images were batch resized to 1600X1200px using Phatch application on Ubuntu.

For now, please enjoy the drive around Pashupatinath temple and may Pashupatinath bless all of us!

UPDATE:
I’ve been tinkering around the image gallery to enhance the visibility and today I deleted all the photos and again uploaded. This time, the pictures are cropped 1024*768 px using Picasa and slight lighting adjustments are applied. I realized that my hosting is not as fast as clould solutions like google or yahoo. So, I decided to put the same photos on the google plus/picasa album as well. Please feel free to view and comment on whichever is convenient.

Pashupatinath: Pashupatinath means the ‘god of the animals’. Pashupatinath is the name for Lord Shiva. There are many legends on how lord Shiva came to be known as Pashupatinath and how the present day Pashupatinath temple is made.
The golden Pagoda temple of Lord Pashupatinath lies on the bank of Holy Bagmati river. On the same river bank, below the temple lies Aryaghat, which is regarded as holy cremation place for the Hindus. Gaurighat, Guheshwari, Kirateshwar, Gaushala, etc are some other holy places around Pashupatinath temple.

Further reading are available on:

Wikipedia Article on Pashupatinath Temple
Pashupatinath information on SAARC Tourism website
Pashupati Development Trust Website (in Nepali only)

Photos will be available here as gallery when we sort out things properly. We’ve just moved in here.

If you want to see them, here’s the link in Google photos.