Uzz Update

It has been long since I wrote anything. The World Cup was taking my toll and I fell ill for a few days – thanks to unlimited food during one of the late-night match.

Sadly, my favorite team is out. Argentina lost to Germany despite dominating the whole game. I felt sad – more when everyone I met since the day after is accusing referee for the loss. There were a few ‘controversial decisions’. My favorite team played well and thank god, I don’t have to print ‘Still Argentina Fan’ as of 2002.

And, as a true fan, I believe, next year, Argentina will be come well with Lionel Messi, Pablo Aimar, Carlos Tevez and others matured with experience.

On the other side, after a long time, I got enough time to analyze my RSS reader of Nepali blogs. It was good to see a few like Zaded blogging regularly while sad not to get some bloggers, like my good friend Deepak, absent during the time.

I have always felt once the crisis is over – well I believe it is still there in the country – it would be quite difficult for some bloggers like me to get back to blog on issues long forgotten for blogs. We have been so long blogging on political matters that most of us have more a news site than a blog.

But I also believe that it won’t remain long and bloggers would start going traditional blogging on various issues. I have found a few new blogs by Nepali and will be adding them to the directory soon.

I have come to Kathmandu after 12-day tour.

Yesterday, after day-long walk we reached Lukla for a night stay before we finally leave for Kathmandu. The story yesterday was same as it was all tiring walk from Namche to Lukla after attending the prize-distribution ceremony.

For dinner, we bought two cocks and Bikash cooked it for us. It felt good waiting for the morning which would bring a plane that we would use to go to Kathmandu.

Epilogue
(added more than week later)

The next day, we found that the weather wasn’t good and it’s not likely that the plane would come. Only one place arrived this morning and took off. We waited till 11:00 AM when finally another plane came and we boarded on it. It would not before four days later that another plane would land at sloppy Lukla Airport.

If somebody asks me to name one singer whom I like most, it would be definitely Raamesh. The musician, who likes to call himself people’s singer, has sang no love-songs but a lot of songs that vibrate the hearts with its vivid referral to people and encourages people to do something for the country.

When I read a book called Samjhana Ka Pailaharu or steps of remembrances, a travelogue of their travel in various parts of the country, often far away villages, singing for people (they called it the Ralfa Movement), I always wondered how can people be so brave. It was the time the autocratic Panchayat system and they traveled singing for revolution.

Be it any time, Raamesh has been a voice for revolution (many still call his songs communist songs). His is a Nepali Bob Marley or Bob Dylan for me (off course without the hashish) and I always desperately wait his albums (even if it is children’s songs).

I had a chance to meet him for the first time. I could have met him earlier as a journalist, but I always wanted to meet him as a fan. He was at Patan for a album release program which I too attended. I talked to him for about five minutes. It was nice to chat with him and he said a few things about his songs.

He said he was at the program because he liked the singer – Shishir Yogi. I knew why because Yogi’s choices of songs also match his interest – the songs that speak for the people and the country rather than romance. A few of Yogi’s new album Suskera are love or romance songs but there are few which are of Raamesh’s type (and I liked them). Continue reading…

Last week was very trouble some for me despite some of the happiest moments of my life.

There was a lot of pressure because of the hacking of United We Blog! Dinesh and I were all but under desparate to get it back and frustrations were taking toll of us. But thankfully, with somehow we managed to migrate the server to ipower after buying the space. Now its functioning alright but still need some cosmetic works to get back full fledged. Continue reading…

On the day when the capital city saw curfew imposed from 8:00am to 6:00pm, what to expect from the Nepali bloggers other than their experience about the curfew. For me, it was a bad day without the mobile and even internet (its just because I didn’t noticed that yesterday was the last day of my subscription!).

United We Blog! featured a photo entry with seven photos of the day. And a running blog by Dinesh Wagle about the condition of the city. Deepak Adhikari too wrote his experience about the curfew yesterday. Pradeep Chand rounds up many issues including the curfew. Deelip talks about his day under curfew.

During last two days, I could not put up the Best of Blogs and a few blogs I really liked to put includes one by Tajim about Future of Nepal. He presents eight alternatives one of which could happen in Nepal. Three interesting pictures taken at Basantpur yesterday is here.

Ideally, this means nothing to the viewers of The Radiant Star, but for the record, I have successfully upgraded the internal script that is used to run this site to a new version. WordPress is the most popular blogging platform and I have installed it in United We Blog! and NepalBlogs and even have transalted 1.5 into Nepali. Recently, version 2.0 was released, and I was more than tempted to do an upgrade.

But while I did most of the deleting and starting uploading, I found someone requesting not to upgrade right now. Horrified, I spent some bewildered time then thinking about how to restore if something went wrong and blaming my hurry.

But everything went fine and my upgraded went smooth and I am happy with the inituitive features of the new version.

This is personal site of a happy couple (that is Ujjwal and Tara) where you will find personal pages of them and occassional blogs. Besides, Nepal is Blogging is a small directory of Nepali blogs; Journalism Resources is the collection of resources, tools, reports and links for students of mass communication and journalism and Let’s Blog is everything you need to begin blogging – tools, tips, resources and a short history of blogging (and Nepali blogs).

Hope you will enjoy all of it and write back to us!

(PS: Radiant Star is the literal translation of Ujjwal Tara).

A year ago, on Oct 19, 2004, I blogged at UWB! wishing all a peaceful Vijaya Dashami. I had used peaceful instead of happy because we believe peace will make all Nepalis happy. I wish/pray this Dashain will give all Nepalis their lost dreams back. Continue reading…

Not actually. But, everyday, the Kathmandu Valley is experiencing a new tempature record. It was highest in the year a few days ago, highest in five years two days ago and now highest in 11 years yesterday. And weather forecasters still believe that it’s rising until the Monsoon – around a fortnight later. Would the all time highest record of 36.6 degree celcius will be broken this year? I don’t know but certainly the rise in temperature is causing loads of problem. Continue reading…