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The day old Satchmo (Louis Amstrong) died I was a young student in Kathmandu and lived at the Ascol hostel. And I thought, what an event, what a happening, a great musician and one of the greatest trumpeters has left this world and no one in Kathmandu writes even something about him. I felt a burning desire to do it and handed a typed article in at The Rising Nepal. And they published it. That was how I became a journalist & writer.
I'd always been contributing articles to The Rising Nepal, the Junior Statesman, and sometimes in The Christian Science Monitor ( I had a friend there named Paul Wohl whom I'd met in Kathmandu). I had good friends like Kanak Dixit (Himal Asia) and Kunda Dixit (The Nepali Times) and we were a writing trio. My mentor was their Dad, Kamal Mani Dixit, Patan's Man-of-Letters, who guided us three with his bespectacled intellectual, discerning gaze. Both Kanak & Kunda went to Columbia University, studied Journalism & Law, and returned to Nepal and are famous writers in Asia. I chose to go to Germany and found a place which I could call my home in the Allemanic Black Forest town of Freiburg.
At the university in Freiburg I met an English professor named Bruce Dobler, who was running Creative Writing classes, and I went to his lectures. That was the first time that someone encouraged me to write poems. I thought poems were for real academic geniuses. Since then, I have been bitten by the lyrical bug. As a kid I enjoyed reading the works of Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Shakespeare, Robert Burns, Yeats, Keats, T.S. Elliot and later, when I left my inside world and ventured to the outside world, which was Kathmandu, I got in touch with the British & American libraries. At the French Cultural Centre I became a film-fan of Claude Chabrol and Francoise Truffeaut. In the foreign libraries there were thousands of books, books that I could touch, smell, borrow, read. I was delighted. I'd reached my shangri-la, I thought.
I always loved a good story and it was literature written by authors like Franz Kafka, Maxim Gorki, Vladimir Nobokov, Updike, Hemmingway, Mark Twain and later Heinrich Heine, Hermann Hesse, Joseph Brodski, Günter Grass, Elfriede Jelinek, Reich Ranicki etc) that fired my imagination and influenced me in my lyrics and writings.
I think that there are only a few internationally known authors from the Himalayas, and more and more will be writing, I hope, when education becomes something normal in these regions. It's a long way till then. I find that education is the most wonderful gift that parents can make to their children. It is, what my Mom always used to say, something that no one can rob from you. As we say in Germany, Wissen ist Macht, knowledge is power.
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