Raj Narayan Pradhan received the First Lain Singh Bangdel Smriti Puraskar awarded

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Darjeeling: Raj Narayan Pradhan has been awarded the first Lain Singh Bangdel Smriti Puraskar on the occasion of the late Bangdel’s 90th anniversary.

First Lain Singh Bangdel Smriti Puraskat given to Raj Narayan Pradhan

The Bangdel Foundation awarded the 79-year-old writer from Darjeeling a cash prize of Rs 5,100 in a ceremony organized on December 28, 2014 in Kolkata, India.

The prize was given away by Nepal’s former Chairman of the Cabinet Khil Raj Regmi.
Indian writer Budhhadev Dewan and Nepali writer Radhe Shyam Lekali were also honored during the program.

Furthermore, Krishna Prasai’s ‘Ghamko Barkha’, the Nepali translation of the Hindi anthology ‘Dhupki Barish’, Gopi Krishna Dhungana’s gazal collection ‘Aafain Bhitra’ and Lekali’s music album ‘Aagat’ were also released on the occasion.

Expressing his joy at being able to visit Kolkata for the ceremony, Regmi said, ”The protection, promotion and expansion of the Nepali language, literature and culture by Nepalis living in different cities in India has promoted Nepal’s significance.”

He added that the released works will provide great contributions to Nepali literary writing for the Nepali-speaking population in Kolkata.

Writer Dhungana provided analytical comments on Prasai’s ‘Ghamko Barsha’ and Lekali’s ‘Aagat’, saying ‘Aagat’ would create an identity in the field of lyrics writing for Lekali.

The Foundation’s chief Ganesh Kumar Pradhan said, “There is much room for improv ement of the Nepali language, literature and culture, and in this undertaking, we’ll move forward united.”

Source:Republica

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Sikkimese writer Yishey Doma invited to stay at Rashtrapati Bhavan

7:37 PM

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Gangtok, Aug. 22: Sikkimese writer Yishey Doma has been invited to stay at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi for around three weeks in September under the “in-residence program” launched by the President.

Sikkimese writer Yishey Doma 

Doma, 34, received the invitation yesterday afternoon through an e-mail.

“I could not believe it. I am so happy to know that I have been selected to stay at Rashtrapati Bhavan. It means a lot to me. I can’t express this feeling,” Doma told The Telegraph today.

The programme was launched by President Pranab Mukherjee on December 11, 2013, with an aim to provide an opportunity to artists and writers to stay at the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Painter Jogen Chowdhary was the first invitee of the programme. The Rajya Sabha member who is the former keeper (art), Rashtrapati Bhavan, and Prof. Emeritus of Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, stayed at the President’s house earlier this year.

This time, four persons, including Doma, would be staying at the Rashtrapati Bhavan from September 8 to 26. The other three invitees are writer Dr Vempalli Gangadhar from Kadapa, Andhra Pradesh, and artists Rahool Saxena from Chennai and Pratap Sudhir Morey from Mumbai.

“I read about the programme in a newspaper. Applications were invited by the President’s office and I decided to send a letter. I e-mailed my complete resume in January. I had a little hope that I would get selected,” said Doma who works as a sub-editor for an English daily in Gangtok.

She is an English graduate from Sikkim Government College and did her Masters in Journalism from Sikkim Manipal University in 2003. Her schooling was at St Joseph’s. Doma is from Martam, a small village in East Sikkim.

Her book Legends of Lepchas: Folk Tales from Sikkim was published by Westland Tranqueber in 2010. She has also written a coffee table book, Sikkim-a Hidden Fruitful Journey and a travel guide on Sikkim, Sikkim Traveller’s Companion, in 2008. Doma is also the co-author of Stranger’s Notes and other Essays that was published in 2003. Her short story Mantras of Love was among the dozen entries chosen by Random House to be published in a collection by Indian women writers in 2012.

Doma said her favourite author is South African novelist J.M. Coetzee.

Asked how she planned to spend time at the President’s house, Doma said: “I am writing a book. I want to write a bit during my stay.”

She added that all expenses, from travelling to accommodation and food, would be borne by the President office. “I am eagerly waiting for the schedule, which, I am told, would be sent through the e-mail in a few days. I will leave for Delhi on September 7.” Last year, Doma was conferred “Sikkim Sahitya Samman” for her contribution to literature.

Source: Telegraph

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Adi Kawi Bhanubhakta's Great Great Grand Son in Dooars

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From the pages of history and textbooks, and the statues strewn around Darjeeling and Dooars region, to be able to see Adi Kawi Bhanubhakta Acharya's family in person.

Adi Kawi Bhanubhakta's Great Great Grand Son in Dooars

The people from Bagrakot in Dooars claimed their piece of history when the Great Great Grand son (6th Generation) of Adi Kawi Bhanubhakta Acharya Dr. Bratraj Acharya visited here.

Dr. Acharya is a part of the Tribhuwan University team which is currently touring India. 

[Pic: HD]Adi Kawi Bhanubhakta's Great Great Grand Son in Dooars

From the pages of history and textbooks, and the statues strewn around Darjeeling and Dooars region, to be able to see Adi Kawi Bhanubhakta Acharya's family in person.

The people from Bagrakot in Dooars claimed their piece of history when the Great Great Grand son (6th Generation) of Adi Kawi Bhanubhakta Acharya Dr. Bratraj Acharya visited here.

Dr. Acharya is a part of the Tribhuwan University team which is currently touring India. 

[Pic: HD]
Source: The Darjeeling Chronicle

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Wordsmith - Prajwal Parajuly little interview with The Hindu about writing habits

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PRAJWAL PARAJULY 

WHEN: I usually can’t wake up before noon. The exception would be if I have stayed up all night and all morning; then I might even go to bed in the afternoon. I don’t write every day. Or every week. Or every month. I always know when I am about to get into my productive ‘groove’, so I sleep until I can’t sleep any more and write for 12- 14- or 15-hour stretches. I have tried to be a morning person but have failed miserably.

Prajwal Parajuly

HOW: I type on my laptop. Nothing else works. If the writing flows, I write. Otherwise, I watch mindless American TV, read or play poker. I’ve often been asked if I don’t feel guilty when I haven’t written for weeks and months. I don’t. I am the most ill-disciplined person I know. It’s cute.

WHERE: I have a few favourite places. I like seeing the constant traffic of people from my window in New York as I write. Even if it’s at 4.00 a.m., it’s fun to see some activity outside. My parents’ rooftop in Gangtok used to have amazing views of the Kanchendzonga but a neighbour has constructed a massive building that now obstructs the mountain completely. Grr. Oxford and London have a few wonderful cafes where I do my editing. I can’t write at coffee shops but can happily edit.

WHAT: Some writers smoke when they write. Some claim that they need to be buzzed. I eat chocolate. In Gangtok, the perpetual howling of street dogs is my background music.

As told to SWATI DAFTUAR

Source: thehindu.com

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Prajwal Parajuly | The Gurkha’s son - interviews

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He promises to give me “something extra” as we begin the interview in the lobby of a hotel on Kolkata’s Park Street. In the city for the Kolkata Literary Festival (8-13 January), he’s been giving several interviews.

Two stacks of his just-released novel, Land Where I Flee, and the 2012 collection of short stories, The Gurkha’s Daughter, are brought to him as we begin to talk. He signs his full name, Prajwal Parajuly, with practised ease—the two Ps much bigger than the other letters.

Parajuly has drawn on the life and culture of the Nepali community in his fiction. 

“I am thrilled,” he says about the response to his novel. “The reviews have been extraordinary and it’s already on the best-seller lists.”

As an afterthought, he adds with a chuckle: “Some people called me to say that they found some sentences too long and incomprehensible. Well, all I can say is my book’s not for them.”
The 29-year-old, Nepali-speaking Indian author shot to fame three years ago with a two-book, multi-country deal with Quercus. The buzz was that it was for a “record amount”. He was reportedly the youngest Indian to have achieved that feat. “I hope it is untrue because I feel bad for a nation if a 26-year-old is the youngest Indian to land a multi-country book deal,” he says, almost gloating.

“My primary intention is to tell a story. That it is based in my community is convenient,” says Parajuly, his big, inquisitive eyes darting behind dark-rimmed Burberry glasses. With a grey-black Burberry jacket and a striped muffler thrown over a white T-shirt, teamed with black trousers, I say he’s quite dressed up. At other times, he’s more likely to be spotted in Bermudas—as I saw him at a creative writing workshop he conducted in Kolkata last year.
I first met Parajuly at a conference on the Nepali diaspora in Shillong in November 2011. His publishing deal was under way and he had just finished his short-story collection. “I quit a successful career as an advertising executive at The Village Voice in New York and travelled the length and breadth of India to write... mostly on Nepali-speaking Indians,” he said at the seminar. “(My) novel will be a platform to voice the struggles of a people trying to belong in a country that is as much theirs as any other Indian national’s,” he said.

The Indian Nepali community, sometimes referred to as Gorkhas or Gorkhalis, has been in a long-drawn struggle demanding a separate Gorkhaland state be carved out of West Bengal. The territory sought includes the famous Darjeeling hills. “I think it’s a valid cause,” Parajuly says. “I don’t see why a Nepali majority area should be under a Bengali-majority state; the two people do not share anything in common. However, I’m opposed to the methods adopted by the political leaders, such as strikes, arson and dress codes.” In Land Where I Flee, he has decried the excesses of the political party he calls the Gorkha Jan-Shakti Morcha, an obvious reference to the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha, the leading political party in the hills.

Parajuly has written with the zeal of an anthropologist and the wonder of a child on the life and culture of the Nepali-speaking community in India, Nepal, Bhutan and the West. He has painstakingly stuffed his books with every aspect of the multi-ethnic linguistic community—marginalization, the Gorkhaland movement, the Bhutanese refugee crisis, Maoism, women’s rights, the caste system, and Indian and Western stereotypes.

“I hate this stereotype of Nepalis being loyal,” he says. “Loyal! This description just smacks of servitude. Sample this,‘I have a Nepali working at my restaurant, he’s so loyal.’ Of the many things that we are, loyalty is what we get ‘praised for’!” But even while battling stereotypes, he resorts to some—his characters and situations are often oversimplified representations—as he creates an exotic world full of “fascinating revelations”. An explanation for that can be found in his novel: “Of course, you must stick to pigeonholes in your writing, there’s all that talk about inauthenticity.”

A Gangtok boy, Parajuly was born to a Nepali-speaking Indian father and a Nepalese mother. He went to the Truman State University in the US to study communications and worked as an account executive at The Village Voice for three years. In 2010, he went to the University of Oxford, UK, to study creative writing. The Gurkha’s Daughter, which he had finished even before this two-year master’s course was over, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas prize in 2013.

Sometimes autobiographical elements seep into his writing and it’s as if some lines have been taken straight from his everyday conversations. “Everyone in Darjeeling speaks Nepali. We speak Nepali at home. I am Nepali,” Amit says in the short story Immigrants. The characters of Amit, a 25-year-old successful Nepali who owns an apartment in Manhattan, and that of Ruthwa, a writer trying to work on a new story in Land Where I Flee, have often made his friends and followers on social media ask him if he is writing about himself. “I draw from my personal experiences; everyday incidents make my stories. But these characters are definitely not me,” he tells me.

Parajuly is already a hero to his community, on the lookout for an icon who will help dispel stereotypes of Nepalis being fit only for blue-collar jobs. Criticisms of his writing, if any, are mostly restricted to private conversations. “Some Twitter followers have written to me saying I’m helping change the mindset towards Nepalis,” Parajuly says.

“For a young Gorkha writer, a debutant at that, to have his two books published internationally is heady. And Prajwal is a fabulous storyteller,” Kalimpong resident Bharat Mani Pradhan tells me. Pradhan helped organize a “launch” of the novel in the Himalayan town in December.

Meanwhile, Parajuly is busy doing the rounds of festivals, and promoting his books on social media. He says he dislikes all this—travelling, networking and promoting. “I was forced to be on Facebook and Twitter.” However, he hardly betrays any such apathy on social media, where he engages intently with his followers, replying to every comment, retweeting every compliment and carefully avoiding those that could be potentially controversial. His links are accompanied with lines such as “Here is a fantastic review...”, “This is one of the most intelligent reviews I’ve read”, and “Fantastic, intelligent review...”.

With no immediate writing plans, the self-proclaimed poker addict—he claims to have survived one term in Oxford from money he made while playing at the Poker Society—is currently reading Amit Chaudhuri’s Calcutta: Two Years in the City and “vegetating”.

I ask him about the possibility of a sequel given that some of the characters in his novel had made their appearance in his collection of short stories. “So you noticed,” he says. “I thought it was fun to inject some characters from the stories into the novel for my loyal readers. You are the only one to ask me about that ‘masturbatory inter-textuality’,” he smiles with the satisfaction of an advertisement copywriter who’s just discovered his punchline.

That’s my “something extra”!

Souece: livemint

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Agam Singh Giri - अगम सिंह गिरी , 1928 - 1971

12:25 PM

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Agam Singh Giri - अगम सिंह गिरी, a poet of distinction, is regarded as one who best represented the Indian Nepalese (Gorkha) people in Nepali literature. His five poetical collections are याद (Yaad) - Remembrance, आत्मा व्यथा (Atama Vyathaa) - Anguish, mine, आशु (Aashu) - Tears, जीवन गीत (Jivan Geet) - Life's songs, युद्ध र् योउधा (Youdha r Yoodhaa) - War and Warrior, जलेको प्रतिविम्ब र् रोएको प्रतिध्वनी (Jaleko Pratiwimba r Roeko Pratidhawni) A burning image and a weeping echo. The first collection was published in 1955 and the last one was published posthumously in 1978 and it was awarded the first Bhanu Puraskar in 1979 by the Nepali Academy of West Bengal.

Giri writes of sadness felt incessantly by him and a rather over-burdensome sadness prevades his poems. No product of any personal trauma, yet this sadness was intrinsic to Giri's own nature. The poets painful realisation of the sad plight of the Indian Nepalese of Gorkhas made it later more acute and the poet discursive. Nevertheless a majority of the best poems of Giri fall in the later category of his poems. In his first phase the poet alternated between inwardly cognizing his sadness as though in purity when poetry was for him 'a painful expression of an accursed life' and focusing it outward and bearing it in fusion with other feelings as an in-grown aspect of the existing social reality. The second choice or tendency perceptibly gained on the first.

Of the Indian Nepalis or Gorkhas, who, Giri felt, are today only a faint shadow of their former glorious self, he says:

You have become unrecognisable here
Blood in your cheeks has dried up
The light in your eyes is gone
You look like a child who has fallen asleep, sobbing
Like a prisoner tortured long
The ill-fated whose morsels are snatched away
And the house dispossessed
I have come only to see whether you are 'You'
But, you have become unrecognisable

Ever of romantic temperaments in his writings, Giri wrote lilting metrical lines and smoothly rhythmical free verse with equal ease. He opted increasingly for the second in his later days in an effort to selectively take in some of the agreeable aspects of modernist writing. He wrote युद्ध र् योउधा (Youdha r Yoodhaa) - War and Warrior making relevant to the Gorkhas on a grand scale the ringing declaration of Netaji Subash Chandra Bose 'You can perhaps force a man to shoulder a rifle but you can never make him fight to give his life for a cause which is not his own.'

Source - gorkhapedia

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Dr. Kumar Pradhan - never filling void in Nepali Literary World

12:15 AM

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 An eminent literary figure, a writer, a scribe, philosopher, thinker, historian as well as editor of two reputed newsprints Dr. Kumar Pradhan (76) leaves behind his gracious work for heavenly abode on 20 December in Hospital at New Delhi.

Few days back Dr. Pradhan suspected a small bulge in his abdomen, he went to New Delhi for the treatment after which he expired making a never filling void in Nepali Literary World.
With loss of such an eminent figure stalwarts in Darjeeling, Kalimpong, Sikkim , Kurseong, North Bengal, Dheradun , Assam , literary organizations, social organization, North Bengal University, Sikkim University has expressed a dismay. Loss of Dr. Kumar Pradhan has made a tremor in Nepal also for his valuable contribution he made in the field of literature by his relentless work, said Nepalese Parliamentarian Shri Robin Koirala to media.

Born on 07 May, 1937 in beautiful hill of Darjeeling at Kurseong Dr. Pradhan started his schooling at Ramkrishna Vidyalaya, St Alphonsus Missionary School Darjeeling, Govt College Darjeeling and completed his Masters in History from Calcutta Univeristy in Kolkata.

After completion of higher education he started his first benchmark from a job of Teacher in St Roberts at Darjeeling, he also served Govt College Darjeeling as head of the department in History Department as well as served Kurseong College as Principal.

After the retirement in 1993 he started his work in media lineage as the founder cum editor of the most popular Nepali newsprint ‘Sunchari’, having closed production of ‘Sunchari’ in the year 2007 , Dr. Pradhan started with popular Nepali Daily published from Siliguri ‘Himalaya Darpan’ as the Editor. On 2013 September he thought to cut off himself from the busy schedules and take a rest, he then left ‘Himalaya Darpan’.

Immense power house of literature Dr. Pradhan’s most acclaimed write-ups are Gorkha Conquest, History of Indian Nepali Literature, Adit Kehi, Pahilo Prahar, Warta like promising assets he accorded to rich Nepali literature in his journey of life and struggle for literature.

Dr. Pradhan was accorded Bhanu Puraskar in the year 1973, He was also conferred Sahitya Sammelan Puraskar by Darjeeling Nepali Sahitya Parishand as well as Sikkim Nepali Sahitya Parishad,he was conferred with Agam Smriti Puraskar, Press Club of Sikkim PCS accorded Dr. Pradhan with Kanchenjunga Kalam Puraskar in 2006, Sikkim Government also felicitated Dr. Pradhan in 2004 for his tremendous work towards literature.

In his everlasting journey and struggle for the literature, Dr. Kumar Pradhan was among the top stalwart who fought for inclusion of Nepali Language in the constitution (recognition), then it was ‘Nepali Bhasha Manyata Andolan’ which was spear headed by then Sikkim’s Member of Parliament Lok Sabha Smt Dil Kumari Bhandari in 90′s.

Dr. Kumar Pradhan’s body will be flown to Bagdogra on Saturday 21 December said son Shri Gahendra Pradhan, funeral will take place on 22 Dec Sunday.

Source - Sashi Thapa - voiceofsikkim

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