Enjoy the game, accept the results

A sport holds its thrill in two aspects. First, there is sportsmanship and second, despite knowing the skills and potential of teams and players, the results are almost always different.

Sportsmanship is when rules are followed. Players despite putting in their best efforts in every second of their performance, notwithstanding the results, accept the rules and results of the game fairly. If every team starts a brawl after a defeat, the game will hold no value. The fierce enmity on the field for the success is a beloved friendship outside. Continue reading…

Baburam Bhattarai: the hopeless hope?

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Dr Baburam Bhattarai

For non-Maoist supporters, Dr Baburam Bhattarai is the favorite among Maoist leaders. For urban population, the brilliant academic record of Bhattarai, a PhD, along with his no-nonsense statements made him the hope in Nepali politics at the time when many thought politics is made dirty by the group of leaders who did nothing more than quarrelling for the post.

If any politician garnered affection and praise from non-party supporters, it was Bhattarai. Continue reading…

Writing Responsibly on Internet

Internet has been the most revolutionary convergence of communication tools. The greatest beneficial aspect of the internet as a communication tool has been the possibility for each and every person with internet access to communicate globally. Communicating to the world has never been as easy as it is now. Loads of services, also collectively known as social media, such as blogs, microblogs, photo/video sharing and social networking allow users to publish information and/or comments on available information so easily that time and again users tend to forget the bigger impact that those information or comments may have. Continue reading…

Good journalism is good for journalism

Distribution channel will change in future and we have no control over what people will use. They may use something we don’t know today. At the publishing house, we have to specialize on producing good stories.

When I was in Hamburg, Germany to attend the first of three phases of the Journalism in Digital World at the International Academy of Journalism – Intajour, one of the big question amongst the fellows there was ‘how the upcoming technology going to change journalism.’

The advent of the Internet followed by the development of mobile devices- such as smartphones, e-readers and tablets – which people increasingly use to read the news has to change journalism someway, many of us believed. For a media house, and journalists the possible further development of new platforms poses a big opportunity (to become early adopter of profitable venture among upcoming developments) and a threat (how to remodel journalism to perfectly harness the capability of the platform). Continue reading…

Internet Intermediaries & Freedom of Expression

(This post is a result of my participation in the South Asia Meeting on the Freedom of Expression and the Internet in Kathmandu, 2-4 November. This is my personal opinion but I owe to participants of the meeting whose comments may have helped me to shape this.)

By Internet intermediaries, I mean those companies or people who has a role in providing internet services to the people including, but not limited to, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), webhosts, web service providers, website owners, and also cyber cafes and telecommunication companies. Continue reading…

Online Anonymity: Is it necessary?

(The idea for the following post came during the South Asia Meeting on the Freedom of Expression and the Internet in Kathmandu, 2-4 November. Anonymity was discussed during a session on first day along with surveillance, security and data protection. The following post, however, is only my thoughts, not the summary of what was discussed during the meeting.)

Before jumping into my views, let define anonymity clearly. Anonymity is derived from the Greek word meaning “without a name” or “namelessness”, according to Wikipedia. In colloquial use, anonymity typically refers to the state of an individual’s personal identity, or personally identifiable information, being publicly unknown.

It’s important to distinguish anonymity from privacy, which means individuals’ ability to seclude them by revealing only selective information. Normally, anonymity is hiding oneself completely while privacy is hiding selective information about oneself. Continue reading…

Nepali movie seeks crowd-fund

(Update on Nov 4, 2011: The movie crowd-funded the pledged amount in 25 days!)

Deepak Rauniyar, a young Nepali film director, is attempting to crowd-fund the post production of his movie – Highway, through Kickstarter, which claims to be the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects.

This is first time that any Nepali creative project has sought crowd-funding. Although the shooting and many works of the movie have been already completed, the 33-year-old producer/director/assistant editor is seeking to raise nearly Rs. 2.3m (USD 30,000) in 30 days.

As of writing this post, the project has already raised USD 15,494 in 11 days, and it looks like the project will raise the pledged fund. Continue reading…