I am a Nepali who has lived abroad for the past ten years, and have visited Kathmandu about once a year during the period. The annual visits have provided me with the opportunity to gauge the accelerating urbanisation of the Valley and to compare it to other cities of the developing world. In each of my visits, I have had reason for yet more alarm: where is this Valley heading?
Returning home after a day in the city in early January this year, I noticed, for the first time, black soot in my sneeze. It is unnerving to think that Kathmandu is exhibiting the same symptoms as Bombay, which is 40 times larger in terms of population, and Mexico City, 80 times larger and the biggest city in the world. It took these two metropolis more than a hundred years to attain the level of pollution which Kathmandu has picked up within all of three decades.
Like the tourist, I notice the number of new buildings, cars, level of noise, and dust pollution. But I am a Newer, and therefore also have the opportunity to observe close at hand the degeneration of the central city core. The decline is both physical and cultural. There is hardly any debate as beautiful old buildings are demolished to be replaced by monstrous concrete structures. By bulldozing over the old, we are trying to eradicate the traces of our past.
I am reminded of a remark by one of my teachers, who came as a tourist: "If one of your traditional buildings is placed in New York or in any major city of a developed country, it will be a museum on its own. Here you have a whole city…"