Word: nepal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Other enlightened souls are shown beside the Buddha. Among the gallery's most glorious artifacts are depictions of bodhisattvas - those who deliberately postpone their passage to nirvana, Buddhists believe, in order to help others along the eightfold path. In the 14th century, metalworkers from Nepal's Kathmandu Valley crafted the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, a manifestation of the Buddhist lord of compassion, in gilded copper and precious-stone inlay. An androgynous-looking deity with wide hips and sensuous form (in Chinese tradition, Avalokiteshvara or Guan Yin is female, in others male), Avalokiteshvara's serene face projects the harmony to which all Buddhists...
...Road Less Traveled Pant's journey from rural Nepal to Kathmandu's parliament - with detours through a college campus in Belarus and the nightclubs of Tokyo - reveals how one gay man and his community came to terms. By leaving Nepal as a young college graduate, he experienced for the first time both homophobia and acceptance. In 1992, he went to Belarusian State Polytechnic Academy in Minsk to get his master's degree in computer science. The newly independent country, which had been part of the Soviet Union, welcomed students from the developing world, but he arrived at a time...
...people. That's where Pant read about the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City's Greenwich Village, an uprising against police harassment that many consider the beginning of the gay-rights movement. In Tokyo, Pant also discovered ancient Hindu texts celebrating same-sex love. When he returned to Nepal, he used this knowledge to explain to his parents that homosexuality was part of Hinduism's old traditions. This made coming out to them easier. "They had some questions," he says. "But when you talk about culture, about religion, it's not something foreign, somebody telling you something from outside...
...Nepal, as in the rest of the world, the fight for gay rights is closely linked to the fight against HIV and AIDS. The deadly virus was initially tagged as a "gay disease" in the West, and its early victims struggled against a blatant and sometimes violent backlash. In Asia, homophobia took a different form: denial. For years, authorities asserted that HIV couldn't be a problem because homosexuality simply didn't exist. But by the late 1990s, it was obvious that HIV/AIDS posed a serious public-health threat that would only get worse if ignorance remained official policy...
...room to draft sample legislation protecting their rights. Pant was there, hovering in the background, but the crowd was more interested in getting answers from the two straight politicians who were attending to hear their complaints about support for gay students and delays in getting passports marked "third gender." Nepal's example is powerful enough that donors from Norway and Sweden want to help them replicate it elsewhere. That effort will begin on Aug. 18 with a meeting in Kathmandu of gay activists from all over South Asia. It's hard to say what the gay world in Asia will...