random jottings…

When I “reviewed” (talking lightly here) a few weeks ago some news pieces on Nepal – I had only Nepali Times as the media source from Nepal (the other – non-Nepali source – being the BBC). It is going to be more of the same today for my category “in Nepali Press”. The reasons I read Nepali Times online are twofold – first because its a weekly paper and sort of summarises a Nepali week for me without having to check the news from “home” daily. Second because I really don’t like other two news portals – eKantipur and Nepalnews because of their craze with flashy banners, advertisements and all that, and they look dirty even when I block most of those flashy stuffs with Adblock in Firefox and Pithhelmet in Safari. Both those portals are so poorly designed in terms of their aesthetics that I rarely feel like staying on their homepage for more than a few seconds to glance at the headlines when I do stumble upon them occasionally (via links on Google News or other newswires). Anyway, its been a while since I took time to read all the articles in even the Nepali times, which I did today, and have something to comment on some of them if not all. Sort of my “mono-media review” – even there aren’t much news items on BBC about Nepal these days (Burma is making all the headlines and very rightly so). Read more…

Finding surprisingly faster internet connection yesterday morning at the cafe I frequent, I decided to check Nepali news sites after a long time. I don’t have much know how of the politics in Nepal since coming to Africa. Nepalnews and Kantipuronline both take ages to load due to all the unnecessary graphics and banner ads. So the only news I get on Nepal is if Beeb has something on its South Asia section – the latest being the Bhaktapur’s Kumari Saga, and a report on the disappeared people during the 10-year-war. It had also been at least a couple of weeks since I last checked Nepali Times – one newspaper (e-version of course) that I try to go through every week, mostly for the columns (CK Lal, Daniel Lak etc.). In fact, I have started to find even these columns repetitive and not much interesting lately. Anyway, yesterday morning I managed to open all these online Nepali news sites surprisingly quickly, so obviously browsed through (and loaded for offline reading) most of the columns/longer articles, avoiding day-to-day political pieces (don’t know myself as to why!?!).
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