A BEACH  NAMED PHEWA

An artificial beach will be made along the lake Phewa where people play beach volleyball and basketball. Fine out more about this ambitious project with Pragya Koirala.

There are people basking in the sun on the shore, youngsters are playing beach volleyball and some food lovers are busy savouring delicacies from the stalls located at the shore. Some people are also busy cycling and walking along the declining plane of the beach with clean and green area around them.

This is the picture the members of the Fewa Beach and Environment Committee (FBEC) have on their minds about the artificial public beach in Nepal along the shores of Lake Fewa which they hope to complete by 2004. FBECC had already began their master plan in May 2001, with the joint effort of the local entrepreneurs and environment conscious individuals.

"We have already finished digging sand from below the lake and a platform along the shore has been made," says Mahesh Bhattarai, the chairperson of the FBECC. He also informed that almost Rs. 5.2 lakhs has been spent for this job alone. Their total budget is supposed to be 25 lakhs.

According to Bhattarai, this beach is going to be 50 percent of what the natural beach looks like. They will be bringing sands from the shore of the Seti River, which obviously is going to be little rough than the natural sands around the sea.

In the beginning of the lake there will be 10-inch long retaining wall, which will be built from below the lake. This retaining wall will keep away the sand during the monsoon.

Besides the wall there will be the sand bed, the most important thing a beach requires and then comes the declining platform with walking and cycling path and trees around.

Actually the main objective of FBECC is to build the first artificial beach in Nepal. They also hope that the beach will attract more domestic tourists in Pokhara and will also serve as a playground for sports like Basketball and beach Volleyball.

"In the past we have come across many incidents like drowning and other related casualties have occurred while people were swimming in the lake, so we think that these incidents can also be minimised because people can come to the beach for a safe swim where we will be having lifeguards all around the shore," said Bhattarai.

The committee members hope that this beach business will churn enough money which in turn is going to be used for the cleanliness and protection of the Fewa Lake.

"After the beach is complete, people have to pay for the entry but it’s not going to be that expensive," said Bhattarai.

He told The kathmandu post that financial problem is obstructing the pace of development of the beach. Still they hope to present the first artificial beach of Nepal in 2004 with the help from the local entrepreneurs.

Bimal Baral, a local resident of Lakeside says, "besides being something new in Pokhara, this beach might increase employment opportunities in this area."

But this project isn’t without its drawbacks and some environmentalists have raised various questions regarding this project.

Sand has a very high ability to absorb heat, which ultimately will transfer heat to the lake that will raise the temperature of water. As soon as water temperature increases by every two degree, the metabolic activities of fish gets reduced thus leading to its death.

PL Singh, former minister and an environmental activists says, " If people try and act against the nature then there is a chance that nature will go against people as well."

According to him before taking any further steps in the construction of the beach, every pros and cons of the project has to be given careful thoughts.

Treading the untrodden path

Versatility and confidence are Uma Rajbhandari’s trademark. The adjective ‘first’ applies to things that Uma did as a Nepali woman. She is the first lady drummer, the first lady lifeguard and the founder of the first all female band ‘Sparkle’, writes Tejasuee Rajbhandari

First, First, First, she is the ‘first lady’ oops! Not the president’s wife of course but Uma Rajbhandari, the first lady lifeguard, first lady drummer and the founder of first all female musical band ‘SPARKLE’ is now busy with her new venture Voxpop, the Production Company.

Confidence is Uma’s trademark. She is always with full of confidence in whatever she does, be it playing drum in live concerts or saving the drowning man in the pool or while singing a song in front of the audiences.

However she achieved her celebrity status only after giving the popularly liked songs like Freedom and Harke. And today she feels proud to be identified as a singer and drummer in the public. The thing she enjoys the most in her musical career is ‘the expression of utter surprise on audiences’ face’ when they see her playing the drum.

Uma who is just 25 at present started playing the drum at the age of 13 and at the age of 20 she was already working as life guard in the public swimming pool of Balaju. She sings and also writes the lyrics and composes songs.

Recollecting memorable incidents she remembers saving a fellow’s life who had drowned. After rescuing him she came out of water only to find her goggles and her cap stolen.

She always had this undying craze for music and looking at the guys singing and swinging in the concerts and lack of female presence in that area made her sad.. And she dreamt to form a musical band one day. The year 1998 was a dream come true for her and she initiated the first Ladies band in Nepal.

Her strong craze for the music left her with no time to for the swimming pool and thus leaving the job of a lifeguard, she devoted her whole time to music. Nevertheless, only devotion and craze could not make the band moving and the members got separated.

She loves to sing rock and roll, however she prefers the sentimental songs. She loves the songs of Narayan Gopal and Aruna Lama. She also likes the songs of Babin Pradhan. Talking about the foreign singers, she likes Bryan Adams and Pink Floyd.

But once again Uma restarted the band with the same name and also registered it as a Non-Governmental Organisation to work for women.

Not only this she had also worked as a photojournalist in the Himalaya Times. There she remembers herself clicking off beat photos like men urinating in the middle of the public places. She also gets lots of fan mails and praises from the public. However she now aims to give programmes with different tastes to the viewers of television like Face to Face, which will be aired in Nepal Television very soon.

She has experienced many things but hasn’t had enough time to analyse the inner Uma but she feels confident in everything she does.

"Don’t limit your talent to yourself, expose it, you will surely get the right opportunity" says Uma to her fans.

Mail myths

People have mixed feelings about the e-mails slowly replacing the handwritten mails. Some even worry that the present generation of youngsters will forget this art altogether

Pragya Rajouria

Perfumed letters, tear smudged letters, letters written in hardly legible script of children who’ve just learnt to put their thoughts into words. All such letters might one day become museum specimens if the electronic mail and voice mail are to replace them altogether. But in country like ours it will take decades before such thing happens.

Even the history of letter sending and postal services in our country is very new compared to that of the Chinese and the Europeans. Rampant illiteracy in the country, difficult geographical terrains and limited mobility of the people are the main reasons for slow development of postal system in our country.

Tracing the history of letter sending and postal system in Nepal one can see that it began with king Prithivi Narayan Shah’s Nepal unification movement. It is not that rulers in Nepal before him didn’t write and send letters to places. Letters from kings before him exist but the kingdom of these kings were so tiny that they didn’t require postal network to reach letters from one place to another. Unlike these kings, king Prithvi Narayan Shah who had a big kingdom to run had to keep himself abreast of the news of different places. For this purpose he had a network of messengers known as the ‘halkara’. These messengers mainly carried official letters. Such handwritten official letters as old as 250 years written during his reign exist even today. Only official letters of the period are available.

Nepali public isn’t much of a letter writing crowd. It needs to be repeated that illiteracy is the main reason behind this. People living in different communities and villages make the literate person of their area write letters for them. Receiving replies from the recipients also takes long time even as long as one, two months. The story is different for the educated ones. Written communication is no big deal to them. Coming back to postal system, we can still dub the Nepali mail service as ‘snail mail service’. It cannot be compared with the mailing service of the ‘halkara’ days but it is neither swift nor reliable.

Today telephone service has made communication easy even though many places in Nepal lack this facility. Though expensive, even the illiterate can communicate via telephone easily. Crowds of people lining outside the local P.C. Os on Saturday is a common sight in villages where there this facility is available. Telephone also in a way has replaced letter writing to some extent. For those wanting to convey personal messages, telephone is a far more attractive option than taking up pen and paper to jot down the message. Today in city areas people have found another quicker alternative to writing postal letters, i.e. writing letters electronically. Some have even completely stopped sending personal letters by postal service especially to foreign countries paying high postal charges.

"The last handwritten letter I received from my friends and family is dated 1997. After that I haven’t even received a single handwritten letter from them," says Jyoti Rawal showing letters penned in various sorts of handwritings. Some were written in beautiful elegant script, some in painfully small handwriting and some were written in half English, half Nepali. In the entire collection of letters one thing was clear. The writers took pains to make the letter as neat and eligible as possible and none of them were written in a hurry. " I prize these letters because the people who sent them to me will not take the pains to send such letter to me again. I get e-mails from them. Gone are those personal touches even in the most personal of electronic mails. I don’t blame them for doing this because I myself find sending e-mails lot more convenient than postal mails," says Rawal.

After people started to send letters through e-mails, there has even occurred a change in the style of language used in writing letters. " I have noticed that the language used in e-mails are curt and very informal. Even personal e-mails lack the personal touch," says Dr. Arun Gupto, lecturer in English Department at Tribhuvan University. "People pay less heeds to the rules of grammar while writing an e-mail," he adds.

With typed words in black and white, e-mails are impersonal for sure and they do not have the personal touch of the writer’s handwriting. People have mixed feelings about the e-mails slowly replacing the handwritten mails. Some even worry that the present generation of youngsters will forget this art altogether.

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