Word: himalayan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Nepal's King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Deva (see THE WORLD). Shepherd first encountered the elaborate ceremonies of the Hindu kingdom in 1956 at the coronation of Birendra's father, Mahendra. The correspondent arrived for that occasion aboard a rickety DC-3 that "slithered low over the Himalayan foothills, searching for the gap in the mountains through which we slipped into the Katmandu Valley." He has since reported on coronations of two other Himalayan monarchs, the Kings of Bhutan and Sikkim. Over the years, the Shangri-la quality of the mountain kingdoms has been diminished by the encroachment...
...best method of transportation. While the cost of having a car is prohibitive, used bikes can be purchased cheaply or rented for a couple rupees (20 cents) a day. In the foothills or mountains, however, the only way to get there is to walk. Most of the Himalayan area is cut off in summer as well as winter. This part of the country, still one of the remotest areas of the world, is about as hard to traverse today as it was for the early Tibetans on their way to the Valley of Nepal. Now as then there...
During the past two decades, for example, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh cleared Himalayan foothills to make more room for crops. Without the forests, which act as great sponges that sop up and hold rainfall, the water rapidly ran off the slopes. The accelerated runoff caused disastrous floods over the past year. In cleared jungles in Mexico, Guatemala and Brazil, heavy rains quickly leached the nutrients from the thin layer of topsoil, rendering the land infertile within a year or two. (The trees had both anchored and nourished the soil.) In other cleared jungles, the sun burned out the soil...
...high-level government posts. At the U.N. in the 1950s, Menon regularly scourged U.S. "imperialism," although he condoned Moscow's suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. As Defense Minister Menon's failure to prepare for the 1962 Chinese assault on India's fragile defenses along the Himalayan border led to Nehru's greatest governmental crisis-and to Menon's own political demise...
With its sparkling air, snow-capped mountains and countless whitewashed Buddhist temples, the tiny Himalayan country of Bhutan is probably the world's closest real-life equivalent to James Hilton's Shangri-La. The 1,100,000 Bhutanese, most of whom are illiterate peasants, sense that they live in a uniquely calm and contented country, which they call "the end of the rainbow land of desires." Last week Bhutan gave itself another distinction by publicly crowning the world's youngest monarch, 18-year-old King Jigme Singye Wangchuk. He will henceforth be known as "the dragon king...