“How often have we thought about what we have given in return to the city that has given us so much for our living?”asked Avash Karmacharya, Program Officer Indian Cultural Center, at the beginning of the program.[break]
“If an earthquake comes, the city is going to come down for sure and if quake doesn’t hit it, it is in any case going to come down sooner or later,” he said.
Anil Chitrakar, a prominent city planner, through a power-point presentation of photographs, maps, newspaper articles, and graphs of Kathmandu valley, talked about the preservation of cultural heritages and monuments, earthquakes, the implications of construction, shortage of drinking water, transportation, garbage management, and a myriad of other urban problems and his solutions for them.
Chitrakar also compared present day Kathmandu with photographs of the city taken from various dates in the twentieth century.
“The tangible or the built structures of the city can be preserved,” Chitrakar said showing a photograph of Basantapur Durbar square.
Chitrakar talked about some of the efficient technologies of ancient Nepal that could withstand an earthquake while he showed a photograph taken in 1934.
He also compared snapshots of Bouddha taken in 1960 and 1979 and explained why it grew so fast.
“During the insurgency, the city grew 12 percent per annum,” he said, adding, “No city in the world, perhaps, has grown at such a high rate.”
“No city can keep up with that sort of inflow and the city kept on growing but the infrastructure didn’t,” he said.
Showing a photograph of Sundhara, he said, “The stone tap in Sundhara has dried out after the Kathamandu Mall was built.”
“As the buildings go higher, they also go deeper and while they go deeper they have cut off the ancient water canals,” he added.
With a slide of an NCELL advertisement where two passengers and the rickshaw driver are talking on cell phones, he asked, “When everybody is talking here, who is listening?”“When there is shortage of electricity and water in the winter, everybody complains but as soon as summer starts they forget,” he said adding, “People should realize what’s happening.”
He criticized the politicians labeling their acts as “tokenism.”
The presentation was followed by questions from the audience which he answered.
When an audience member asked, “Is the problem the lack of management or people’s consciousness?” Chitrakar answered, “The days of doing things individually are over; we have to shift from individual to collective effort.”
Commenting on the talk program, a young lady stated, “We are the problem.”
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