Books like Taste of Nepal

This book is among the most informative and inspiring books ever. The subject treats–the Indian subcontinent’s experience (comparable to that of Ireland) of profit-seeking ‘entrepreneurs’ [especially the predatory East India Company] backed by British governments and opportunistic Western/Christian evangelical forces [giving ‘religious/moral’ ‘justification’ to foreign invasion, occupation and related apartheid type instituted rule–provides need to know detail for those in the West [UK] in an age where those wilfully or through ignorance of the facts are attached to supremacist nostalgic ‘Brexit’ views of yesteryear colonialism as benign, are still poorly challenged.

I am honored to be recognized as a member of the decolonization movement. This book is compelling and deserves mandatory inclusion in world history curricula. 

In late 2013, during one of my many visits to Kathmandu as the lead of the UK Nepal Friendship Society, I was privileged to be engaged and presented with a copy of this just-published book.

For any non-South Asian person with a passion for learning about the esoteric and spiritual heritages of South Asia, this book is a true, precious treasure of the rarest and highest kind for students of those precious and vibrant heritages in which the spiritual concepts of profound ethical, personal self-development, and respect for the unique role in both of the latter regarding Nature in all her profound manifestations (including sexual love) and of global value and significance! 

This book is rightly in my top five ‘must-read’ books list. It provides essential reading for anyone interested in the Gurkha golden thread from the earliest days of the creation of the state [formerly kingdom] of Nepal, the Gurkhas' crucial role in British history of the colonial period, and the unlooked-for race relations impacts in the UK of the 2020s. 

As an intercultural educationalist of Nepali culture and respected ally of the Gurkha community (providing three BBC TV News live interviews across the period of the heroic Gurkha Satyagraha – whose lead personally presented me with Mr. Gurung’s groundbreaking book – hunger strike for Gurkha rights and pensions in summer 2021), I commend ‘Ayo Gorkhali’ as essential reading for historians of the Nepal–UK bitter-sweet relationship. 

I was privileged to read Dr O’Brien’s book at his personal invitation before its formal launch. This arose from a shared interest in past/historical through to current threats to the achievements of inclusive, prejudice-free values, freedom of thought and expression, and respecting liberal values in parliamentary democracies.

Through ground-breaking research and masterly thought-provoking analysis of findings, this book evaluates the threats posed by totalitarian and authoritarian non-inclusive ideologies, political forces, and their justifiers and apologists.

It also examines the crucial role of supportive, disingenuous yet effective propaganda—from today's "fake news" (Trumpian, Brexit, anti-Trans, etc.) to state forces manipulating populist sentiments—enabling brutal and ethically unacceptable phenomena such as colonialism/neo-colonialism, 20th-century Nazism, Stalinism, and current menaces.

Betty Stark was the aunt of a friend of mine, and she was part of the first all women Himalayan expedition in 1955. It is an antidote to the very all-male outlook and structures of many climbs of that time. It had no leader, no ‘lead climbers’. Instead, they were a small team of friends, all experienced and capable, who wished only to explore, encounter, and climb as high and hard as they could. It is anti-heroic, recording the pains, sufferings, and losses and highs, quietly downplaying and yet the efforts and dangers come through. They were outliers and trailblazers. They made their point. They were the point.

Tiger for Breakfast is the illustrious story of a Russian adventurer and nightclub owner, traveler Boris Lissanevitch who opened the first hotel in Kathmandu in 1950. Boris also opened the first mixed-race nightclub in Calcutta and had the first car carried across the Himalayas from India to Kathmandu. His guest list proved remarkable too. Edmund Hillary set off from the Royal Hotel for Everest in 1953 and numerous royals stayed, including Queen Elizabeth. For better or for worse, Boris was a catalyst for the outside world to make inroads into the Himalayan kingdom and Michel Peissel’s book does a great job evoking those early days of travel and exploration on the Roof of the World.

This award-winning study combines accessible translations with local and global studies of the goddess Svasthani and her domestic devotees. A goddess little known outside of Nepal, Svasthani is embodied in the text itself and celebrated by families in the cold month of January.

Her only recent depiction as an icon in her own temple is a testament to the ever-changing forms of religion and culture in a corner of the world where living goddesses have long held significant power. 

Samrat Upadhyay’s English-language novels and short stories often read like anthropological work on Nepal’s middle class.
The Royal Ghosts fictionalizes the sluggish economy in and urban migration to contemporary Kathmandu, the decade-long civil war that ended along with the collapse of the Hindu monarchy in 2006, and the political tensions that defined Nepal in the first decade of the current millennium. His attention to the previous king’s grasp at power using political propaganda in the form of monumental billboards in 1990 (in “Supreme Pronouncements”) reflects my own interest in similar rhetoric fifteen years later.

I also like the use of the popular religious imagery when in “Chintamani’s Women”, the main character pauses briefly at the picture of the elephant-headed Ganesh on his kitchen wall as he offers a quick prayer for his deceased mother and sick father (RG 130). 

This is a fantastic book about a specific moment in Nepal’s history: the collapse of the 250-year-old Shah monarchy in 2008.

Mocko focuses on the three major Hindu festivals that regularly reinforced the monarchy: showing the vest of the Red God in May; receiving the blessing offered by the living goddess, Kumari, in September; and visiting the royal goddess, Taleju, in October. The removal of the king from prominent positions in all of these rituals has in no way impinged upon the celebrations of these festivals that have become even more popular in the intervening years.

Collected, translated, and introduced by the prolific author Manjushree Thapa, this volume contains poetry and short stories of various lengths and from a variety of Nepalese languages.

Categorized by perplexity, desire, liberation, and vision, these otherwise unrelated works use themes of food, death, work, migration, and marriage to convey the humanity at the core of a landlocked country’s transition to democracy and a new global economy after the first People’s Movement of 1990.