About - Kathmandu

Keynote

The story of Kathmandu told through personal anecdote and historical narration

Description

Kathmandu is the greatest city of the Himalayas; a unique survival of cultural practices that died out in India a thousand years ago. It is a carnival of sexual licence and hypocrisy, a jewel of world art, a hotbed of communist revolution, a paradigm of failed democracy, a case study in bungled Western intervention, an environmental catastrophe.

Closed to the outside world until 1951 and in a medieval time warp, Kathmandu’s rapid modernization is an extreme version of what is happening in many traditional societies. The contiguity of its animating spirits, gods, goddesses, witches and ghosts; the comforts of caste; the ethos of aristocracy and kingship; and the lately destabilizing spirits of consumer aspiration, individuality, egalitarianism, communism, and democracy reflect the layers of the city’s development. Two major threads are interwoven through the narrative, one of which follows the author’s story through a decade in the city, and another which unravels the city’s history and its successive reinventions of itself. Erudite, entertaining and accessible,

Kathmandu is the fascinating chronicle of a unique city.

About the Author:

Thomas Bell was born in the north of England in 1978 and studied history at Oxford, then the history of architecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He moved to Nepal in 2002 to work as a freelance journalist. He stayed for five years, reporting on the civil war for The Daily Telegraph, The Economist, and several other international newspapers. From 2007 – 2009 he was the South East Asia Correspondent of The

Daily Telegraph, based in Bangkok. In 2009 he returned to Nepal, married and had two children, and continued to write for The Economist while working on this book. He currently works on Nepali politics for the United Nations’ Department of Political Affairs.