Nepal Telecom (NT), the state-run communication supplier, is launching Third Generation (3G) mobile services from Thursday. The service is being launched on the occasion of International Telecom Day. NT officials claim that Nepal is going to be the first country in the South Asia region where 3G mobile services will be launched.

According to NT director Buddhi Acharya, the SIM card for 3G service will cost 4,195 Nepali rupees (abut 64.5 U.S. dollars) and its charges will be similar to that of prepaid mobiles.

For the time being, the 3G services will be made available to area within the Ring Road in the capital city of Kathmandu.

Now Nepalese will be able to surf internet from their compatible Mobile handsets at more than a broadband speed of 384kbps

For a Mobile Freak like me This is a great news and i never expected that Nepal , a poor and small country of mine, will be the first to launch 3G service in south Asia. the mobile industry in Nepal started booming just a year ago and now with 3G available its having bright future ahead.

With introduction of 3G by Nepal Telecom its now possible for nepalese to make video calls. As compared to India , India being booming economy and being at top for Mobile penetration has not been able to launch 3G yet .

From official NTC ( Nepal Telecom ) site below are the tariffs

Note: Rs 65= 1 USD

Applicable Tariff for 3G Mobile Service:-

• Total Cost - Rs 4195.00
• Talk Time - Rs.3500.00
  (above rates are inclusive of applicable taxes)
• Validity - 18 months
• Video Call - Rs 10.00/ minute *
• Data Service/ Video Streaming - Rs 0.02/ KB *
• Recharge Procedure & Validity as Namaste Prepaid Mobile
• Rates for Voice, SMS, VMS, CRBT, MMS and other voice related services will be applicable as Nepal Telecom prevailing Namaste Mobile tariff.* exclusive of applicable taxes

Seeing the above Tariff I can say that its amongst the Cheapest 3G provider worldwide.

Hats off to NTC ( Nepal Telecom )

Kathmandu: Nepal’s embattled king Gyanendra owes more than $460,000 in unpaid electricity bills, making him the Himalayan nation’s biggest power defaulter, a report said on Saturday.
The king, who faces an uncertain future with former Maoist rebels calling for the monarchy’s abolition, owes the money for electricity supplied to four royal palaces and bungalows since early 2005.
“We have been regularly sending cumulative electricity bills to the palace as well as to the royal relatives. None has responded, let alone paid,” the Kathmandu Post newspaper quoted an unnamed government source as saying. Gyanendra is in arrears to the tune of 30.5 million rupees ($462,000).
He owes 24.3 million rupees alone on the sprawling Narayanhiti Royal Palace which serves as his official residence and lies in the heart of the city.
The figures do not include the bills for his residences outside Kathmandu.
If the power costs of Gyanendra’s royal relatives were included, the total sum would come to “over 33 million rupees ($500,000) in unpaid electricity bills” up to January 2007, the official told the Kathmandu Post.
Gyanendra stopped paying his electricity bills when he seized absolute power in February 2005, saying he needed to crush a deadly Maoist insurgency. He was forced to abandon absolute rule in the face of an alliance between political parties and the Maoists who have now signed a landmark peace deal and formed a government.
The unnamed government official said the electricity board could not cut off power supply to the royals “considering their profile.”
Since being forced to end direct rule, Gyanendra has been stripped of most of his powers including his position as head of state of the impoverished nation.

Kathmandu: As the world celebrated the 2,551st birth anniversary of the Buddha on Wednesday, Nepal, his birthplace, had an additional reason to rejoice—the discovery of an ancient cave—an older Ajanta, with exquisite wall paintings, in its northernmost tip jutting into Tibet.
   A team of scholars and climbers stumbled upon the treasure trove last month during a search for historic caves said to be abounding in the virtually uninhabited tract of frozen land, preserved by the icy temperatures and untouched for millennia.
   Funded by adventure gear-maker North Face and a US-based production house, the expedition discovered a partly collapsed enclave containing a mural of 55 panels depicting the life of the Buddha. The paintings are highly evocative of Ajanta, says art conservator Luigi Fieni, referring to the first known Buddhist cave art dating to the 1st and 2nd centuries BC. Fieni has been camping in Mustang, the remote mountainous district that was once a rich and powerful Tibetan kingdom dominating the trans-Himalayan trade between India and Tibet.
   The art, he says, is executed in a style not seen in Mustang. Besides, they depict animals like the deer, leopard and tiger which are not found in Mustang, giving rise to the theory that either the painters were Indians or people familiar with Indian techniques and life in sub-tropical regions.
   The enclave could have been another Nalanda. American author and climber Broughton Coburn, who was part of the expedition, says probably one high cave in the enclave was reserved for Buddhist teachings.

OBJETS D’ART

Cave fresco discovered by miracle, says scholar
Kathmandu: The wall paintings in the ancient cave, being described as an older Ajanta, discovered by scholars and climbers at Mustang in Nepal show various figures, both male and female, making offerings to high lamas and teachers. Other nearby caves have mounds of manuscripts in ancient Tibetan script which, when deciphered, could yield a wealth of knowledge on Tibetan forms of Buddhism and probably on the history of Tibet, Mustang and even Nepal and India.
   “We discovered the cave by a miracle,’’ says Fieni. And it must have been nothing less than a miracle that the expedition happened to catch up with a shepherd who had been inside the cave as a boy of eight. To mark his discovery,
he had scratched his name on the wall and then forgotten all about it. For nearly two decades after that, probably no one else found the cave.
   “When we arrived in the area and told the villagers what we were looking for, the boy, now a young man, remembered his cave. It was a miracle that he could still find his way to it,’’ said Coburn.
   The royal family of Mustang, descendants of the powerful kings, is still around and the expedition and its findings have been blessed by its former king, Jigme Bista. “We are glad the caves are in an inaccessible place and unlikely to be discovered (by marauders),’’ said Coburn. The plan now is to conduct further research and documentation and ask Nepal to protect and preserve them.
   That could be a difficult task. Nepal lacks funds and has not been able to protect national treasures already unearthed. There has been a spate of thefts in Nepal’s temples, including the famed Pashupatinath, with priceless artworks finding way into the international black market.

via TOI

Its New year tomorrow in Nepal. Happy new year to all my Nepali Friends and those Reading this blog.

I never expected to find my mother-tongue here in google trends
I was just checking the trends in Google Trends

i found Nepali language among the top queries hitting language ( that meant people used www.google.com.np to hit these query terms i tried with terms

1. “Nokia software”

2. “Nokia 6600″

)
you can try with some other terms as well..

The graph for Trends of term “Nokia software” is here

and the chart of top 10 languages hitting above query ( “Nokia software”).

Similarly i tried for term “Nokia 6600″
the results are
The Graph is here

Chart

What google says about how they decide which language hit the most query ?
from their site

When the Cities tab is selected, Google Trends first looks at a sample of all Google searches to determine the cities from which we received the most searches for your first term. Then, for those top cities, Google Trends calculates the ratio of searches for your term coming from each city divided by total Google searches coming from the same city. The city ranking you see on the page and the bar charts alongside each city name both represent this ratio. When cities' ratios are fairly close together, the corresponding bar graphs will be roughly the same length, and the exact ranking between these cities is less meaningful.

The Regions and Languages tabs work just like the Cities tab. Google Trends uses IP address information from our server logs to make a best guess about where queries originated. Language information is determined by the language version of the Google site on which the search was originally entered.

Keep in mind that instead of measuring overall interest in a topic, Google Trends shows users' propensity to search for that topic on Google on a relative basis. For example, just because a particular region isn't on the Top Regions list for the term “haircut” doesn't necessarily mean that people there have decided to stage a mass rebellion against society's conventions. It could be that people in that region might not use Google to find a barber, use a different term when doing their searches, or simply search for so many other topics unrelated to haircuts that searches for “haircut” make up a very small portion of the search volume from that region when compared to other regions.

Kathmandu: As Shivaratri, the festival of Lord Shiva and one of Nepal’s major rituals, dawns closer, there is mounting tension in the kingdom with King Gyanendra’s diehard supporters having announced they will organise a march of naked sadhus through the capital’s main roads.
The architect of the proposed rally is Bharat Keshar Simha, a former army general and palace aide de camp who supported king Gyanendra’s coup two years ago and since the monarch’s ouster last year has been trying to woo India’s pro-Hindutva organisations into saving the monarchy from being abolished in Nepal.
Under the banner of his World Hindu Federation, a once religious outfit that became active politically after King Gyanendra’s ascension, the staunch royalist plans to bring at least 2,000 Indian Naga sadhus — famed for disdaining to wear anything more than a loin cloth — to raise the cry for a Hindu kingdom in Nepal.
The Naga babas, as they are reverently called in Nepal, are a regular visitors to the Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu during Shivaratri each year, along with droves of other Indian holy men and pilgrims. Smeared in sacred ash and often seen sharing an opium joint with foreign tourists or praying in difficult yogic postures, the Naga sadhus add colour to the Shivaratri celebrations.

However, this time there is mounting concern after reports that the king’s men will try to create anarchy under the guise of the rally. With the Nagas known for their short fuse and recklessness, it is feared they will retaliate with lightning speed, triggering an orgy of arson and looting.
While Shivaratri falls on Friday, the WHF has announced it will lead the rally on Sunday, marching from the Pashupatinath temple to Singhdurbar, the heart of Nepal’s government where the prime minister’s office, parliament and a host of important ministries is located.
Leading politicians are expressing concerns over the rally. Besides deputy prime minister Amik Sherchan, now Madhav Kumar Nepal, chief of the second largest party in the government, the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist, warned of foul play.
“Thousands of people are coming from outside Nepal,” the communist leader said. “The rally is likely to snowball into another Hrithik Roshan incident.”
The Indian business community in Nepal has been panicky since 2000, when anti-Nepal remarks falsely attributed to Hrithik Roshan created riots with looters targeting Indian businesses. Nepal’s home ministry said it will not ban the rally.

via Times of India