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एजेन्सी । काठमाण्डौ,कुरा सुन्दा अनौठो लाग्न सक्छ तर त्यही गएर देखेका र भोगेकालाई भने यो कुरा अनौठो नलाग्न पनि सक्छ । व्यापार गनै व्यापारी, ... -
अहिले मानिसहरू धेरै भन्दा धेरै यौन सन्तुष्टि कसरी पाउन सकिन्छ भन्ने कुराको चासो राख्ने गर्छन्। कतिले त यौन सन्तुष्टि पाउने नाममा लिंग... -
Around thirty minutes later, our German chum does indeed return to the room with a girl in tow. She is coyer than him (although not coy enou...
One night away may improve your sex life
Looking to get closer to your significant other?
Ironically, some time apart might do you some good. According to a new study, people who work away from home actually have more sex with their partner.
Couples who spend one to two nights away from home per month have sex 110 times a year. To compare, that’s almost twice as much as the rest of us.
Outrage grows over Indonesian proposal to give female high school students virginity test
Indonesian officials on Tuesday dismissed as excessive and unethical a proposal by an education official on Sumatra island that would require female senior high school students to undergo virginity tests to discourage premarital sex and protect .
Muhammad Rasyid, head of the education office in South Sumatra's district of Prabumulih, said he wants to start the tests next year and has proposed a budget for it. But other officials and activists have criticized the plan, arguing it is discriminatory and violates human rights.
Provincial education chief Widodo, who uses only one name, said Tuesday he will suggest that Rasyid drop the plan.
Muhammad Rasyid, head of the education office in South Sumatra's district of Prabumulih, said he wants to start the tests next year and has proposed a budget for it. But other officials and activists have criticized the plan, arguing it is discriminatory and violates human rights.
Provincial education chief Widodo, who uses only one name, said Tuesday he will suggest that Rasyid drop the plan.
Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook lit up with outrage, with some people calling the tests a form of child abuse that could emotionally scar the students.
"There are many more important and useful things that need to be cared for rather than such a test," he said. "As students, they need to be nurtured more than be judged."
In the capital Jakarta, Aris Merdeka Sirait of the National Commission for Child Protection, said the plan was "just aimed for popularity."
"Loss of virginity is not merely because of sexual activities. It could be caused by sports or health problems and many other factors," Sirait said. "We strongly oppose this very excessive move."
When disclosing his plan Monday, Rasyid said the idea would attract criticism but defended it as "an accurate way to protect children from prostitution and free sex." In order to pass, it would need approval from the district council of lawmakers.
Nurul Arifin, a female legislator from the Golkar Party, said the plan was unethical and "discrimination and harassment against women."
But Education Minister Mohammad Nuh described it as a violation of common principles.
A similar plan was scrapped in another Sumatran province in 2010 amid widespread criticism.
Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country of 240 million, is a secular nation where most practice a moderate, tolerant form of the faith. However, some conservatives are worried rapid modernization is eroding morals.
"There are many more important and useful things that need to be cared for rather than such a test," he said. "As students, they need to be nurtured more than be judged."
In the capital Jakarta, Aris Merdeka Sirait of the National Commission for Child Protection, said the plan was "just aimed for popularity."
"Loss of virginity is not merely because of sexual activities. It could be caused by sports or health problems and many other factors," Sirait said. "We strongly oppose this very excessive move."
When disclosing his plan Monday, Rasyid said the idea would attract criticism but defended it as "an accurate way to protect children from prostitution and free sex." In order to pass, it would need approval from the district council of lawmakers.
Nurul Arifin, a female legislator from the Golkar Party, said the plan was unethical and "discrimination and harassment against women."
But Education Minister Mohammad Nuh described it as a violation of common principles.
A similar plan was scrapped in another Sumatran province in 2010 amid widespread criticism.
Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country of 240 million, is a secular nation where most practice a moderate, tolerant form of the faith. However, some conservatives are worried rapid modernization is eroding morals.
Sex and the Psychotic Professor
Hugo Schwyzer is insane and is also a college professor, and one imagines his employer using this in a promotional campaign: “Pasadena City College: You Don’t Have to Be Crazy to Teach Here, But It Helps!”
Professor Schwyzer’s madness suddenly burst forth as headline news this month after he first announced that he was quitting the Internet and told L.A. Weekly he had suffered a “mental breakdown.” But then the professor went on Twitter and began spewing out a series of bizarre confessions, admitting that he was off his medication. His weird online meltdown inspired concerns for Professor Schwyzer’s safety and he was hospitalized again. He told the Daily Beast that he had been to the psychiatric ward three times in the past month and had suicidal thoughts. He told a Daily Caller reporter that he had made a “serious” suicide attempt.
As spectacular as his manic disintegration was, there had been clear warning signs for years that Professor Schwyzer was a sex-crazed lunatic. However, the red flags of mental illness were evidently ignored by the administration of Pasadena City College and Professor Schwyzer’s peers, perhaps because sex-crazed lunatics have become so commonplace in 21st-century academia.
More than two centuries have passed since the statesman Edmund Burke beheld the French Revolution and defended British conservatism: “We are not converts of Rousseau; we are not disciples of Voltaire. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers.” What Burke said of England in 1790 cannot be said of America in 2013, where atheists and madmen and the disciples of radical philosophers hold high office and other positions of prestige. Nowhere do these radicals enjoy more influence than in our nation’s institutions of higher education. We need look no farther than Chicago, where erstwhile fugitive bomber Bill Ayers now collects a pension from the University of Illinois system as a retired professor of education. Ayers was denied the title of “professor emeritus” because he once co-authored a terrorist manifesto that was dedicated to several comrades in the “anti-imperialist” struggle, including Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin Sirhan Sirhan. However, another of Ayers’ radical comrades is now President of the United States, so we can’t say the disciples of atheist madmen are without influence.
Among other radical causes, Ayers and his fellow Marxists in the Weather Underground were sexual revolutionaries, invoking the slogan “Smash Monogamy” to justify their occasional orgies and multiple short-term liaisons with partners of both sexes. Haphazardly screwing around failed to overthrow capitalism, but their rhetoric of politically inspired perversion had an impact, especially within the campus milieu where their anti-American ideology had been nurtured in the 1961s. College faculties had for decades harbored ideologues of deviance, including the famous fraud Professor Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University, whose methodologically flawed studies became the “scientific” basis of the sexual revolution, and Marxist theoretician Herbert Marcuse, who taught at Columbia, Harvard, and Brandeis. Marcuse has been called the “father” of the 1960s New Left movement; his books Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man (1964) can most easily be understood as a synthesis of Marx and Freud, and popularized the Left’s now-common conflation of sexual and political “repression.”
Whereas Freud had understood the need to repress chaotic sexual impulses, however, Marcuse encouraged the view that industrial capitalist culture led to an “inauthentic” sexuality, so that sexual “liberation” was a necessary component of the radical agenda. This was by no means a new idea; Karl Marx’s colleague Freidrich Engels in 1885 published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, identifying the traditional family as the fundamental basis of the capitalist order. Marcuse’s colleague Theodor Adorno was lead author of a notorious 1950 study, The Authoritarian Personality, which depicted traditional families as the breeding grounds of a crypto-fascist menace. It is perhaps not an insignificant coincidence that The Authoritarian Personality was a project of the University of California at Berkeley, where Adorno’s co-authors Daniel Levinson and Nevitt Sanford were members of the psychology faculty, and where the New Left later emerged in the Free Speech Movement of 1964.
The spirit of those 1960s radicals, who often waved the Viet Cong flag in their anti-war protests, nowadays marches under the rainbow banner of sexual liberation. No one on the 21st-century campus can disapprove of homosexuality without being branded a hater, and the rhetoric of the gay rights agenda is nowhere more fanatically espoused or officially endorsed than at America’s colleges and universities. Militant homosexuality coexists with militant feminism on campus; for example, the Women’s Studies department at DePauw University offers a course called “Queer Theory, Queer Lives.” New York University’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality is directed by Professor Ann Pellegrini, a Harvard alumna who lists “queer theory” first among her areas of research; the center has in the past year hosted events on “Queer Africa,” “Queer Asia” and “A New Queer Agenda.” The overlap of feminism and “queer theory” is not accidental. “Feminism is the theory; lesbianism is the practice,” pioneering feminist Ti-Grace Atkinon proclaimed in 1971, and Professor Bettina Aptheker, who teaches Feminist Studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz, has proclaimed that lesbianism is the “highest state of feminism.”
Given the prevailing norms of sexual scholarship in academia, what’s a heterosexual male professor to do? Evidently, Hugo Schwyzer’s solution was to declare himself a progressive feminist and teach classes on pornography. He carved out a career in the field of gender studies despite the fact that his degree was in medieval history. “My mother was a second-wave feminist,” Schwyzer said in a 2011 interview. “I was raised in the 1970s with ‘Ms. Magazine’ on the coffee table and strong feminist values--- I took my first women’s studies course early in my college career--- I fell in love with women’s studies. But I was leery about majoring in it in the mid-1980s. I didn’t know any guys who did that. So I took a lot of gender-themed classes and majored in history instead.”
Professor Schwyzer’s madness suddenly burst forth as headline news this month after he first announced that he was quitting the Internet and told L.A. Weekly he had suffered a “mental breakdown.” But then the professor went on Twitter and began spewing out a series of bizarre confessions, admitting that he was off his medication. His weird online meltdown inspired concerns for Professor Schwyzer’s safety and he was hospitalized again. He told the Daily Beast that he had been to the psychiatric ward three times in the past month and had suicidal thoughts. He told a Daily Caller reporter that he had made a “serious” suicide attempt.
As spectacular as his manic disintegration was, there had been clear warning signs for years that Professor Schwyzer was a sex-crazed lunatic. However, the red flags of mental illness were evidently ignored by the administration of Pasadena City College and Professor Schwyzer’s peers, perhaps because sex-crazed lunatics have become so commonplace in 21st-century academia.
More than two centuries have passed since the statesman Edmund Burke beheld the French Revolution and defended British conservatism: “We are not converts of Rousseau; we are not disciples of Voltaire. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers.” What Burke said of England in 1790 cannot be said of America in 2013, where atheists and madmen and the disciples of radical philosophers hold high office and other positions of prestige. Nowhere do these radicals enjoy more influence than in our nation’s institutions of higher education. We need look no farther than Chicago, where erstwhile fugitive bomber Bill Ayers now collects a pension from the University of Illinois system as a retired professor of education. Ayers was denied the title of “professor emeritus” because he once co-authored a terrorist manifesto that was dedicated to several comrades in the “anti-imperialist” struggle, including Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin Sirhan Sirhan. However, another of Ayers’ radical comrades is now President of the United States, so we can’t say the disciples of atheist madmen are without influence.
Among other radical causes, Ayers and his fellow Marxists in the Weather Underground were sexual revolutionaries, invoking the slogan “Smash Monogamy” to justify their occasional orgies and multiple short-term liaisons with partners of both sexes. Haphazardly screwing around failed to overthrow capitalism, but their rhetoric of politically inspired perversion had an impact, especially within the campus milieu where their anti-American ideology had been nurtured in the 1961s. College faculties had for decades harbored ideologues of deviance, including the famous fraud Professor Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University, whose methodologically flawed studies became the “scientific” basis of the sexual revolution, and Marxist theoretician Herbert Marcuse, who taught at Columbia, Harvard, and Brandeis. Marcuse has been called the “father” of the 1960s New Left movement; his books Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man (1964) can most easily be understood as a synthesis of Marx and Freud, and popularized the Left’s now-common conflation of sexual and political “repression.”
Whereas Freud had understood the need to repress chaotic sexual impulses, however, Marcuse encouraged the view that industrial capitalist culture led to an “inauthentic” sexuality, so that sexual “liberation” was a necessary component of the radical agenda. This was by no means a new idea; Karl Marx’s colleague Freidrich Engels in 1885 published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, identifying the traditional family as the fundamental basis of the capitalist order. Marcuse’s colleague Theodor Adorno was lead author of a notorious 1950 study, The Authoritarian Personality, which depicted traditional families as the breeding grounds of a crypto-fascist menace. It is perhaps not an insignificant coincidence that The Authoritarian Personality was a project of the University of California at Berkeley, where Adorno’s co-authors Daniel Levinson and Nevitt Sanford were members of the psychology faculty, and where the New Left later emerged in the Free Speech Movement of 1964.
The spirit of those 1960s radicals, who often waved the Viet Cong flag in their anti-war protests, nowadays marches under the rainbow banner of sexual liberation. No one on the 21st-century campus can disapprove of homosexuality without being branded a hater, and the rhetoric of the gay rights agenda is nowhere more fanatically espoused or officially endorsed than at America’s colleges and universities. Militant homosexuality coexists with militant feminism on campus; for example, the Women’s Studies department at DePauw University offers a course called “Queer Theory, Queer Lives.” New York University’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality is directed by Professor Ann Pellegrini, a Harvard alumna who lists “queer theory” first among her areas of research; the center has in the past year hosted events on “Queer Africa,” “Queer Asia” and “A New Queer Agenda.” The overlap of feminism and “queer theory” is not accidental. “Feminism is the theory; lesbianism is the practice,” pioneering feminist Ti-Grace Atkinon proclaimed in 1971, and Professor Bettina Aptheker, who teaches Feminist Studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz, has proclaimed that lesbianism is the “highest state of feminism.”
Given the prevailing norms of sexual scholarship in academia, what’s a heterosexual male professor to do? Evidently, Hugo Schwyzer’s solution was to declare himself a progressive feminist and teach classes on pornography. He carved out a career in the field of gender studies despite the fact that his degree was in medieval history. “My mother was a second-wave feminist,” Schwyzer said in a 2011 interview. “I was raised in the 1970s with ‘Ms. Magazine’ on the coffee table and strong feminist values--- I took my first women’s studies course early in my college career--- I fell in love with women’s studies. But I was leery about majoring in it in the mid-1980s. I didn’t know any guys who did that. So I took a lot of gender-themed classes and majored in history instead.”
While still working toward his Ph.D. at UCLA, he was hired at Pasadena City College in 1993 and showed his “strong feminist values” by having sex with college girls. “Before 1998 I slept with two dozen female students, somewhere in there, it’s a ballpark thing,” he told the Daily Beast last week. “That ended when I had a similar but not as bad a breakdown to the one I had now. When I got sober, I made amends to the college and swore off sleeping with students.”
By the time Hugo Schwyzer “got sober” at age 31, he had already been divorced twice, and had recently been dumped by an 18-year-old student, which “sent me spiraling rapidly downward.” He attempted murder-suicide with an ex-girlfriend, a stripper and fellow addict he had met in rehab two years earlier. None of this, however, prevented Schwyzer from becoming a tenured professor with an annual salary of more than $90,000, a published author and columnist featured at The Atlantic and at the feminist site Jezebel.com. Evidently, no one bothered to check Schwyzer’s credentials as a self-proclaimed “expert on body image, sexuality and gender justice.” As he told the Daily Beast, “I pretended regularly to have more credentials than I actually did,” admitting that the ease of his acceptance as “a very well known speaker and writer on feminism” with no more qualification than having taken two undergraduate women’s studies classes was “a little odd.”
In the context of academia, Hugo Schwyzer wasn’t particularly weird. He taught a course listed in the PCC catalog as “Humanities in the Social Sciences,” but which Schwyzer himself called “Navigating Pornography.” In February, when he invited famous male porn performer James Deen to speak to his class, Schwyzer was rebuked for having scheduled what PCC called an “unauthorized… public event.” In announcing cancelation of the event, a PCC official felt obliged to reaffirm the administration’s support for Schwyzer’s “academic freedom within the classroom.” The professor apparently exercised his academic freedom with tremendous zeal. “He started texting sexual messages and pictures of himself… and beginning in January, engaged in extramarital affairs with several women and one man,” the Daily Caller reported. Some of that behavior was revealed in late July, when a porn-industry gossip site reported the text messages (and video of himself masturbating) Schwyzer exchanged with 27-year-old performer Christina Parreira.
Actually, there was a lot odd about Schwyzer’s career, but he may have seemed fairly normal among the lunatic perverts employed by sex-crazed academia nowadays. Three years ago, Columbia University political science Professor David Epstein was arrested for having an incestuous affair with his adult daughter, and subsequently copped a plea deal, but remains employed at the prestigious Ivy League school. One of Epstein’s Columbia faculty colleagues, Professor Theo Sandfort, was for many years affiliated with the Dutch pedophile journal Paidika and is co-author of the 1990 book, Male Intergenerational Intimacy, a “scientific” justification of pederasty. At a Yale University “sensitivity training” workshop in March, bestiality and incest were among the topics in a discussion that the student director of the event explained was intended “to increase compassion for people who may engage in activities that are not what you would personally consider normal.” A survey of the workshop participants found that 9 percent said they had sold sex for money, and 3 percent said they’ve had sex with animals.
By the time Hugo Schwyzer “got sober” at age 31, he had already been divorced twice, and had recently been dumped by an 18-year-old student, which “sent me spiraling rapidly downward.” He attempted murder-suicide with an ex-girlfriend, a stripper and fellow addict he had met in rehab two years earlier. None of this, however, prevented Schwyzer from becoming a tenured professor with an annual salary of more than $90,000, a published author and columnist featured at The Atlantic and at the feminist site Jezebel.com. Evidently, no one bothered to check Schwyzer’s credentials as a self-proclaimed “expert on body image, sexuality and gender justice.” As he told the Daily Beast, “I pretended regularly to have more credentials than I actually did,” admitting that the ease of his acceptance as “a very well known speaker and writer on feminism” with no more qualification than having taken two undergraduate women’s studies classes was “a little odd.”
In the context of academia, Hugo Schwyzer wasn’t particularly weird. He taught a course listed in the PCC catalog as “Humanities in the Social Sciences,” but which Schwyzer himself called “Navigating Pornography.” In February, when he invited famous male porn performer James Deen to speak to his class, Schwyzer was rebuked for having scheduled what PCC called an “unauthorized… public event.” In announcing cancelation of the event, a PCC official felt obliged to reaffirm the administration’s support for Schwyzer’s “academic freedom within the classroom.” The professor apparently exercised his academic freedom with tremendous zeal. “He started texting sexual messages and pictures of himself… and beginning in January, engaged in extramarital affairs with several women and one man,” the Daily Caller reported. Some of that behavior was revealed in late July, when a porn-industry gossip site reported the text messages (and video of himself masturbating) Schwyzer exchanged with 27-year-old performer Christina Parreira.
Actually, there was a lot odd about Schwyzer’s career, but he may have seemed fairly normal among the lunatic perverts employed by sex-crazed academia nowadays. Three years ago, Columbia University political science Professor David Epstein was arrested for having an incestuous affair with his adult daughter, and subsequently copped a plea deal, but remains employed at the prestigious Ivy League school. One of Epstein’s Columbia faculty colleagues, Professor Theo Sandfort, was for many years affiliated with the Dutch pedophile journal Paidika and is co-author of the 1990 book, Male Intergenerational Intimacy, a “scientific” justification of pederasty. At a Yale University “sensitivity training” workshop in March, bestiality and incest were among the topics in a discussion that the student director of the event explained was intended “to increase compassion for people who may engage in activities that are not what you would personally consider normal.” A survey of the workshop participants found that 9 percent said they had sold sex for money, and 3 percent said they’ve had sex with animals.
Of course, Schwyzer was not fired for his crazy perversion. Tenured professors can never be fired. Instead, PCC put him on medical leave, so he’s still collecting his $90,000 salary. His fourth wife left him and the professor is now reportedly recuperating at his mother’s house with the help of five different psychiatric medications. But he is certainly not alone in his madness, which is merely symptomatic of how American academia has lost its collective mind.
Defiant Jasmine: It’s right I had a sex change op in prison
Defiant Jasmine: It’s right I had a sex change op in prison
'Ideal body' ... Jasmine after swap
Int’l carriers asked to fly lighter
The Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal ( CAAN ) has requested all international airlines flying wide-body aircraft to Kathmandu airport to restrict their take-off and landing weight to 196 tonnes until September 30.
The aviation regulator body made such a request to the Airlines Operating Committee Nepal (AOCN) in a meeting held here on Friday. Airlines officials said further updates would be given to AOCN after the completion of the Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) runway evaluation study being conducted by a Spanish company.
An aircraft has two weight categories—dry operating weight and pay load. Dry operating weight cannot be reduced, but pay load, which has three components—passengers, fuel and cargo—can be brought down.
“Considering the gravity of the situation on the TIA runway, CAAN has responded positively to airlines’ request to not bar wide-body aircraft from landing at the TIA,” said Bharat Kumar Shrestha, the AOCN chairman.
Amid safety concerns after repeated occurrence of cracks on the 46-year-old runway, CAAN had last Monday issued a notice to airlines to find alternatives to their wide-body aircraft (seat capacity above 250) flying into the country’s sole international airport that has a single approach system. CAAN has cited heavy aircraft (up to 299 tonnes) as one of the reasons for the runway to crack very often.
However, the decision was criticised by the travel trade fraternity and freight forwarders association, saying that the move will have multiple effects on the country’s economy. October-November is the peak of Nepal’s festival season and this is the time when thousands of migrant workers and other Nepalis living abroad fly home for Dashain and Tihar.
“As reducing the pay load to 196 tonnes will not affect airlines (except Korean Air and Thai Airways), we will soon ask the airlines to implement the CAAN ’s request so that the runway is not damaged further,” Shrestha said.
As Korean Air and Thai Airways fly Boeing 777, they will be hit the most. Hence, Friday’s meeting decided to make a special request to Korean Air to reschedule its flight to morning or evening and, if possible, change the fleet by bringing in other types of wide-body aircraft. “Thai was also requested to change the fleet type if possible,” airlines officials said. Traffic is thin at the TIA in the mornings and evenings.
Some airlines officials said CAAN ’s decision was harsh as their major business season is almost at hand. However, they said that considering the runway problem and its consequences, they were ready to compromise and restrict their load to some extent.
However, airlines wonder what the report that the Spanish company will prepare by the end of September will have in it. According to CAAN officials, further decision will be taken on the basis of the report to fix the runway problem permanently.
This could also mean closing the airport for international flights for more than three months after September.
As cracks appeared again on the TIA runway on Friday, the airport was closed for 30 minutes to carry out repair works. The airport authority, however, said it did not affect flights too much. A Thai Airways aircraft landing was delayed for 35 minutes.
Meanwhile, representatives of the Hotel Association of Nepal met Civil Aviation Minister Ram Kumar Shrestha and CAAN ’s director general Ratish Chandra Lal Suman and requested them to undertake the repair works without affecting flights.
The aviation regulator body made such a request to the Airlines Operating Committee Nepal (AOCN) in a meeting held here on Friday. Airlines officials said further updates would be given to AOCN after the completion of the Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) runway evaluation study being conducted by a Spanish company.
An aircraft has two weight categories—dry operating weight and pay load. Dry operating weight cannot be reduced, but pay load, which has three components—passengers, fuel and cargo—can be brought down.
“Considering the gravity of the situation on the TIA runway, CAAN has responded positively to airlines’ request to not bar wide-body aircraft from landing at the TIA,” said Bharat Kumar Shrestha, the AOCN chairman.
Amid safety concerns after repeated occurrence of cracks on the 46-year-old runway, CAAN had last Monday issued a notice to airlines to find alternatives to their wide-body aircraft (seat capacity above 250) flying into the country’s sole international airport that has a single approach system. CAAN has cited heavy aircraft (up to 299 tonnes) as one of the reasons for the runway to crack very often.
However, the decision was criticised by the travel trade fraternity and freight forwarders association, saying that the move will have multiple effects on the country’s economy. October-November is the peak of Nepal’s festival season and this is the time when thousands of migrant workers and other Nepalis living abroad fly home for Dashain and Tihar.
“As reducing the pay load to 196 tonnes will not affect airlines (except Korean Air and Thai Airways), we will soon ask the airlines to implement the CAAN ’s request so that the runway is not damaged further,” Shrestha said.
As Korean Air and Thai Airways fly Boeing 777, they will be hit the most. Hence, Friday’s meeting decided to make a special request to Korean Air to reschedule its flight to morning or evening and, if possible, change the fleet by bringing in other types of wide-body aircraft. “Thai was also requested to change the fleet type if possible,” airlines officials said. Traffic is thin at the TIA in the mornings and evenings.
Some airlines officials said CAAN ’s decision was harsh as their major business season is almost at hand. However, they said that considering the runway problem and its consequences, they were ready to compromise and restrict their load to some extent.
However, airlines wonder what the report that the Spanish company will prepare by the end of September will have in it. According to CAAN officials, further decision will be taken on the basis of the report to fix the runway problem permanently.
This could also mean closing the airport for international flights for more than three months after September.
As cracks appeared again on the TIA runway on Friday, the airport was closed for 30 minutes to carry out repair works. The airport authority, however, said it did not affect flights too much. A Thai Airways aircraft landing was delayed for 35 minutes.
Meanwhile, representatives of the Hotel Association of Nepal met Civil Aviation Minister Ram Kumar Shrestha and CAAN ’s director general Ratish Chandra Lal Suman and requested them to undertake the repair works without affecting flights.
Denied a sacred space
Two years since controversy erupted over the ban on Christian burials next to the Pashupati premises, and a viable solution has yet to be implemented, forcing the community to resort to desperate means to lay their dead to rest
Along the banks of the Trishuli in Nuwakot, a jeep is speeding on, tunneling furiously into the night. As the vehicle sails forth like a silent animal, roadside settlements pass by in a blur of mute houses and shuttered shops, interspersed by long stretches of dark nothingness.
It is 11.36 pm when the jeep suddenly swerves into a bend and jerks to a halt, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Miles away from the nearest settlement, there are no visible landmarks or signs of human habitation here—only the Trishuli hissing softly on the left while a thicket of trees looms on the right. The car’s headlights are turned off, and the door on the driver’s side tentatively pushed open. A man steps out, looking around cautiously before indicating to his companions in the car to join him. Two others are soon on their feet beside him, and together, the three approach the car’s back door. It opens to reveal two dead bodies lying next to each other, both covered in some sort of cloth one can’t make out the colour of at this time of night.
The two men carry the dead on their shoulders as they follow the driver, who is walking ahead with a torch in one and two shovels in the other, leading them into the forest. None of them are saying much to the others, heavy breathing and the crunch of pebbles and leaves underfoot the only sounds around.
Once they get to a flimsy clearing amid the trees, shovels are stuck into the ground and earth sent flying as two separate graves are quickly dug. When sizeable openings have been created, the bodies are deposited gently within these and covered once more with chunks of forest floor. It is then a walk back to the car, a sprint past sleeping villages, and back in the direction of Kathmandu from whence they’d come. Despite what the clandestine nature of this little sojourn might invoke in most imaginations, this was not a chapter out of some gruesome real life murder mystery. In fact, one of the dead comprised of an 83-year-old man who had passed away of heart failure in the Capital; the other a 62-year-old woman whose cancer had metastasised to the point where doctors—even those in India—could not treat her, and had eventually met a protracted end as the disease ate away at her. How did these two end up in the jeep? The answer is fairly simple: They were Christians, and there was no place in the Capital to bury them. At a loss for a viable alternative, this is what most in the Christian community here have been compelled to do ever since the burial ground crisis surfaced in Kathmandu about two years ago—drive bodies outside the Valley and bury them in random spots away from densely-populated settlements, more often without the knowledge of the locals, who would no doubt kick up a fuss if they were to be informed.
Grave problems
“It’s obviously not ideal, but what can we do? We don’t have any other options,” says CB Gahatraj, the chairman of the Federation of National Christian Nepal (FNCN). “We’ve been pushed into a corner.” The dead, he adds, are presently being ferried to Dhading, Trishuli, Rautahat, Sindhupalchowk, and Kavre on most counts, occasionally even as far as Surkhet, to be laid to rest.
Gahatraj despairs of the ‘indignity’ the Christian community has suffered at the hands of concerned government authorities with regard to the burial issue, a denial of religious rights that he says is ironic in a supposedly secular country. “It’s been over two years since we’ve been campaigning for the problem to be addressed, but authorities are still in the process of ‘holding talks’ while we’re left to make our own arrangements,” he says. “What is there to debate?”
The dispute over burial space for Christians—who make up only about 1.4 percent of the country’s total population—first erupted when the Pashupati Area Development Trust (PADT) decided to bar all non-Hindus from burying their dead in the Bankali forest on the temple’s premises in January of 2011. Sushil Nahata, the then-member secretary of the PADT, explains that the directive had been taken to preserve the sanctity of Hindu ground. “Once the Bankali area had already been taken up by graves, the cemetery was beginning to expand outwards, threatening to encroach on the Hindu shrines in Pashupati,” Nahata says. “It is the government’s duty to ensure that the Christians are allocated a proper and separate burial space.” He adds that as an autonomous body, the PADT would never compromise on retaining the purity of the temple complex, which is included in UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites.
Along the banks of the Trishuli in Nuwakot, a jeep is speeding on, tunneling furiously into the night. As the vehicle sails forth like a silent animal, roadside settlements pass by in a blur of mute houses and shuttered shops, interspersed by long stretches of dark nothingness.
It is 11.36 pm when the jeep suddenly swerves into a bend and jerks to a halt, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Miles away from the nearest settlement, there are no visible landmarks or signs of human habitation here—only the Trishuli hissing softly on the left while a thicket of trees looms on the right. The car’s headlights are turned off, and the door on the driver’s side tentatively pushed open. A man steps out, looking around cautiously before indicating to his companions in the car to join him. Two others are soon on their feet beside him, and together, the three approach the car’s back door. It opens to reveal two dead bodies lying next to each other, both covered in some sort of cloth one can’t make out the colour of at this time of night.
The two men carry the dead on their shoulders as they follow the driver, who is walking ahead with a torch in one and two shovels in the other, leading them into the forest. None of them are saying much to the others, heavy breathing and the crunch of pebbles and leaves underfoot the only sounds around.
Once they get to a flimsy clearing amid the trees, shovels are stuck into the ground and earth sent flying as two separate graves are quickly dug. When sizeable openings have been created, the bodies are deposited gently within these and covered once more with chunks of forest floor. It is then a walk back to the car, a sprint past sleeping villages, and back in the direction of Kathmandu from whence they’d come. Despite what the clandestine nature of this little sojourn might invoke in most imaginations, this was not a chapter out of some gruesome real life murder mystery. In fact, one of the dead comprised of an 83-year-old man who had passed away of heart failure in the Capital; the other a 62-year-old woman whose cancer had metastasised to the point where doctors—even those in India—could not treat her, and had eventually met a protracted end as the disease ate away at her. How did these two end up in the jeep? The answer is fairly simple: They were Christians, and there was no place in the Capital to bury them. At a loss for a viable alternative, this is what most in the Christian community here have been compelled to do ever since the burial ground crisis surfaced in Kathmandu about two years ago—drive bodies outside the Valley and bury them in random spots away from densely-populated settlements, more often without the knowledge of the locals, who would no doubt kick up a fuss if they were to be informed.
Grave problems
“It’s obviously not ideal, but what can we do? We don’t have any other options,” says CB Gahatraj, the chairman of the Federation of National Christian Nepal (FNCN). “We’ve been pushed into a corner.” The dead, he adds, are presently being ferried to Dhading, Trishuli, Rautahat, Sindhupalchowk, and Kavre on most counts, occasionally even as far as Surkhet, to be laid to rest.
Gahatraj despairs of the ‘indignity’ the Christian community has suffered at the hands of concerned government authorities with regard to the burial issue, a denial of religious rights that he says is ironic in a supposedly secular country. “It’s been over two years since we’ve been campaigning for the problem to be addressed, but authorities are still in the process of ‘holding talks’ while we’re left to make our own arrangements,” he says. “What is there to debate?”
The dispute over burial space for Christians—who make up only about 1.4 percent of the country’s total population—first erupted when the Pashupati Area Development Trust (PADT) decided to bar all non-Hindus from burying their dead in the Bankali forest on the temple’s premises in January of 2011. Sushil Nahata, the then-member secretary of the PADT, explains that the directive had been taken to preserve the sanctity of Hindu ground. “Once the Bankali area had already been taken up by graves, the cemetery was beginning to expand outwards, threatening to encroach on the Hindu shrines in Pashupati,” Nahata says. “It is the government’s duty to ensure that the Christians are allocated a proper and separate burial space.” He adds that as an autonomous body, the PADT would never compromise on retaining the purity of the temple complex, which is included in UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites.
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