Aditya Man Shrestha

It was the night of December 14 preceding or, say, proceeding to 15, 1965 (coinciding the Paush first) when this paper was born. The editorial board was agog with excitement and, also with anxiety. It was not just yet another paper that was coming out next morning. It was something putting Nepali skill on test to see if they can venture in producing an English paper worth reading.
It was to meet a challenge of national and international scale that some well-known English-language stalwarts were engaged in the first-page layout that night. Since it was the time of the king's direct rule in place, the government was not ready to take a chance in making its production a perfect product. Hence, the Secretary of Information and Broadcasting, as it was called then, Mr. Surendra Raj Sharma was present at the midnight to finalise the headlines. Tirth Raj Tuladhar, a man who was held impeccably high in his knowledge of English, was too busy in selecting the words to fit in the space available. He was by the way holding the post of Director of the publishing house, Gorkhapatra Corporation. Some of us were too at the production sight as we were responsible for the production of the first copy of the paper next morning.
There was no hitch as far as the main news of the day was concerned. That day the government had taken a decision to make drastic changes in the administration. As the king played the key role in decision-making, the ministers as such had little say in the selection of civil servants taking charge of the different ministries and departments of the government. It was because of this importance that the meeting heads in our editorial board decided to run a banner headline in that first issue. However, the question remained how to fix the words in the available space. So we had to run up and down the building in selecting the number of alphabets and size of the font. There was no big choice in big fonts. You had to select from among the 32 or 42 fonts, if my memory runs correct. Finally, the headline emerged as "Sweeping Changes In Administration" after a lot of brain scratching.
The Rising Nepal was the direct outcome of King Mahendra's wish. When he was on a visit to New Delhi he saw a bunch of Indian broadsheet papers displayed on a table, which carried the news about him. In course of scanning through the papers he asked his attending officials if publishing such a broadsheet paper in Nepal is possible. At that time, there were two English newspapers, The Motherland and The Commoner, produced in small size. The officials said "yes, it can be done." Immediately after home return, the message of the king's wish was conveyed to Singha Durbar that followed it up with the Gorkhapatra Corporation officials.
It was a time of dearth of people who were trained in journalism and, meantime, had a command in English. Hence, a search went out to look for some young people who had a command in English notwithstanding their interest in journalism. Thus a handful of young people were picked up to work at the editorial section of the paper. Mr. Barun Shumsher Rana was the first chief editor who had some experience in journalism. He, in fact, was rather political-oriented with a link with a small political party. He joined the paper as many other educated people did in joining various kinds of jobs the king decided to offer. It was a time of not big choice. But it was a time of new opportunities opening up in the new political set up in Nepal.
For 25 years, The Rising Nepal dominated the press world of Nepal. Firstly, throughout the Panchayat system till 1990, the government and the palace in particular, used it as its mouthpiece. The palace expressly granted more freedom than other sister publications to let the world know that the regime was, in fact, liberal. The palace faced a barrage of criticisms abroad that it had suppressed freedom of expression. To counter them, it tried to appear tolerant of its opposition and promoting national interests. This paper was instrumental in this effort.
Secondly, the foreign embassies, since they had no direct access to the palace, had to read this paper and, at times, find out meaningful messages hidden in between the lines of its editorials and news displays. The nature of the government was critically analysed and interpreted on the basis of what appeared in this paper.
Thirdly, this paper was meant for the foreign visitors. They liked it because there was no alternative to it and they found a lot of news about their countries. It was the time of increasing international exposure of Nepal and the Nepalis. Hence, The Rising Nepal got a stream of visitors every day for a few years of its publication. The editorial members too got a plenty of opportunities to visit abroad on one or other pretexts.
Despite all these advantages, the paper suffered from a number of physical constraints. The paper had to be hand composed. So there were chances of mistakes in print, sometimes, due to human and sometimes due to technical reasons. At times of reading the final proof of the paper in the wee hours, the eyes missed to notice even the gross mistakes that gave rise to storms following day. Hence, the editorial workers were always on their toes to get prosecuted for their inadvertent faults. In one publication, for example, "the population explosion" was printed as "the copulation explosion". It was just a replacement of p by c. It was taken in good humor as the population explosion was nothing but copulation explosion. However, there were times when things went wrong and were dealt with seriously.

(Shrestha is one of the founding editors of The Rising Nepal.)