Asian Window

From Reuters:

Kathmandu: Four people, clad in white mourning clothes, carried a dummy corpse in a bamboo coffin.

“Gyane is dead. We are carrying his body to the cremation grounds,” they said, using an abusive shortened form of King Gyanendra’s name.

Watching the crowds gathered to celebrate the birth of the republic of Nepal last Wednesday, it was clear to me they were not yet done protesting against the king.

I flashed back to 2001, when I was awoken by a midnight telephone call. An old friend was on the line, saying he had heard the Maoist insurgency had exploded a bomb in the royal palace.

The Maoists at that time were still classified as “low intensity”, mainly confined to remote villages and valleys in this Himalayan nation and I thought they did not yet have the strength to do this. I was right.

As a helicopter hovered in the sky and after frantic telephone calls, it became clear: Crown Prince Dipendra had massacred his parents and seven other royals at a family dinner, then shot himself.

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Nepal’s ‘living goddess’ in limbo

Reuters report from Kathmandu:

The appointment of a new “living goddess” in Nepal is being held up by the recent abolition of the monarchy, a Nepalese official says.

According to tradition, the king’s priest appoints the girl, who is chosen in her infancy and is treated as a goddess, or Kumari, until puberty.

But the priest no longer has any say in the republic, the head of the trust overseeing the tradition says.

[Photo: The previous goddess, Sajani Shakya, retired in March]

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