Knowing our mountains

Binod Krishna Shrestha remembers in the 1970s seeing foreign visitors to Nepal being mesmerised by the vista of mountains to the north of Kathmandu.

They used to ask him the names of the individual peaks. He was embarrassed to admit that he had no idea which was which.

So, in 1975 he started working on a panorama of the mountains, identifying the individual Himalayan peaks. He was helped by journalist Kunda Dixit, who sketched and identified the peaks as seen from Patan, and took it to Delhi to print a brochure.

The folder also had captions providing information on which expeditions had climbed the peaks, and it was later useful for celebrations by the Ministry of Tourism marking the 30th anniversary of the first ascent of Mt Everest in 1983.

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After this, Shrestha was involved in rural development projects and trekked across Nepal, and this brought him up close and personal with the mountains he had been seeing from Kathmandu.

He also visited other countries and took up philately, all along keeping up his interest in knowing Nepal’s mountains.

He found that Mt Everest is depicted in 84 postage stamps of 46 countries. And Nepal’s other mountains are on 41 other postage stamps of various countries. Shrestha collected these stamps, and brought out a book, Nepal Himalaya: The Roof of the World on Postage Stamps.

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“The fact that other countries put Nepal’s mountains on their stamps was a recognition of their importance,” Shrestha says. “And it was a pity that we Nepalis did not bother to know them.” Shreshta feels that this is a failure of the geography curriculum in Nepal’s schools. The peaks all have names, either of Hindu gods and goddesses given by the people of the lower valleys, or Tibetan names by dwellers of the high mountains.

The southern outskirts of Kathmandu Valley on clear days like this week provide a sweeping view of 250km of Himalayan mountains from Annapurna in the west to Numbur in the east. Few know that even Mt Everest is visible from Lagankhel and Kirtipur, peeking from behind Kang Nachugo in Rolwaling Himal.

In those days there was no pollution in Kathmandu, and the peaks were visible most days from the city itself. And from the ridges on the southern rim of the Valley, the view is of mountains further still — from Dhaulagiri to Makalu. Shrestha credits his passion for identifying mountains to his Jesuit teachers at St Xaviers School in Godavari, and especially Fr James Donnelly who passed down his interest in mountains to boarding school students like himself.

“Every December, we used to climb Pulchoki and Fr Donnelly used to point out each peak and tell us their names, and we never forgot them, they were etched in our memory,” says Shrestha, who clambers up to the terrace of his home in Sunakothi every day with clear skies to take pictures of the panorama. “With climate change threatening the Himalaya, it is important to know our mountains,” he says. “Only if we know them will we respect them, and value them.”

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