After reading Naresh Newar's 'Gorgeous Chobar' (#207) and Navin Singh Khadka's 'Saving what's left' (#208) it is clear that time is ripe for all well-wishers and the saviours of the Bagmati to have a minimum common approach to save this civilisation. If things go on like this, there will be no World Heritage Site left to protect with Unesco funds. We should also correct the misinterpretation of the myth of the draining of Kathmandu Valley which your Chobar article has repeated. Let's not mix up the legend of Manjushri's cutting the Kotwal mountain to drain the lake which happened in the Treta Yuga with Krishna's intervention in Chobar in the Dwapar Yuga. The great thing about the Kathmandu Valley Civilisation is that it is where the geological evidence of a big lake being drained 10,000 years ago through Chobar and Kotwal are interwoven with the mythology. We must honour and respect our river heritage and the important part that the Bagmati has played in the valley's civilisation. In the past 14 years, the Patan Rotary Club's Sankhamool Park project, the Mitra Milan Park at Pachali by the Kathmandu Municipality, Raj Tirtha encroachment across the Pachali Bridge and the UN Park are destroying this heritage. River beds don't belong to anyone, they belong to the river. Flood plains give rivers a place to go when there is too much water. When we constrict the river, there is disaster as has happened many times inside the valley in the past 14 years. Give the Bagmati back to the Bagmati. It is no man's land and everybody's land.

Huta Ram Baidya,
Thapathali