Dr. Ramil Adhikary writes Nepali songs from a Wellington desk. Nepal keeps giving him awards for it. There is a lesson here about where culture lives.

• By Soren Neupane : reports from New Zealand. He also teaches Nepali language and AI literacy.

Some tunes slide into your head  – the way a good mood does on a brisk walk with joggers running past, cars far way and walkers talking talks — suddenly, without permission, and usually when you’re trying to look normal in public. And suddenly you are humming. You had not planned on that.  

There is a particular kind of creative life that only some fully understand: the one where you are physically elsewhere, but emotionally you never quite left. Dr. Ramil Adhikary lives this life with unusual grace. A professional who juggles family life – 3 children – moves calmly through New Zealand’s public service by day, he writes — usually by night, by feeling, by whatever private clock creativity runs on — folk songs and romantic ballads in Nepali. Songs that travel twelve thousand kilometres and win prizes in Kathmandu.

He has just done it again. At the recent 7th Sagarmatha Music Awards, one of his compositions took home an honour. It is his third major award of this kind. Wellington and Upper Hutt, it turns out, is not too far from the Himalayas — not if the feeling is right.

The Song

The winning entry, Aau Bachaa Garau, is a love song in the classic Nepali tradition — direct, warm, and entirely without irony. Its central gesture is a promise made in public, made to the universe as much as to a lover. In translation, which can only approximate the feeling:

Come closer, love —

let’s make a promise the universe can overhear.

No leaving, no fading,

just heart for heart.

It is the kind of sentiment that earns eyerolls in certain literary circles and standing ovations everywhere else. Adhikary is not writing for literary circles. He is writing for the aunties, uncles, grand uncles like me and for the young couples at weddings, for the Nepali grandmother in Christchurch who hears one familiar chord and suddenly- the heart welling inside, crying silently –  needs to sit down with tearing eyes, and hand over her mouth trying to stifle her outburst. Now, what was that about! You tell me.
 That is not a small ambition. That is, in fact, a very large one.

The Company of Continuation

Nepali music has always had this quality — an unashamed, brazen appetite for the emotional direct hit. Rajendra Thapa, a former Brigadier General, wrote “Pohor Saal Khusi Phatyo,” a heart wrenching love song of such devastating plainness that it reached the Nepali royal palace and earned a royal commendation. A military man writing a song about heartbreak, and a king giving him a prize for it. That is a deeply Nepali story.

Narayan Gopal and Tara Devi, Aruna Lama — voices so particular they seem to belong to the landscape itself — built entire emotional geographies out of folk melody and human longing. Their songs still find Nepalis in Oslo, Auckland, and New York, Stockholm, and pull them briefly, painfully, joyfully back. One line, one strain. And you are standing in a rural Nepali courtyard with cackling chickens and mooing cattle you thought you left twenty years ago.

Even Late Asha Bhosle, the legendary voice of Bollywood in India, wandered into Nepali music more than once. She sang many songs : of love, of family, of the old maitighar that tugs at every Nepali woman’s heart. “Yo Ho Mero Pranbhanda Pyaro Maitighar” (from the film Maitighar). After her recent demise, those songs echo a little differently gentler, deeper, and full of the grace she carried everywhere. May her soul rest in peace.

“Feelings arrive on their own schedule. When they surface, they demand a line, and then a page and it continues. It’s never planned. It happens when it happens.”

Adhikary’s work carries these same emotional sinewy ridges. It does not imitate the classics — it continues them. His song stands in the lineage not as pastiche but as genuine succession: another voice in a long conversation about love, loss, and the stubborn human hope that keeps people writing songs in the first place.

Question of Time and Distance

He started early. At twelve or thirteen, he was already writing poems — a child’s vision of a nation. The gravitational pull toward pain, sadness, the small storms that shape a young mind, was unmistakable even then. He cites Shelley: the sweetest songs rise from the saddest thoughts. For Adhikary, this is not a romantic cliché. It is a working method.

Living in New Zealand has not, he insists, diluted the source. Distance refracts; it does not diminish. The language flows. The emotions spread the hues in all directions to create the backdrop, side effects and the silent noise that takes on a natural form of song and melody.  The cultural memory holds. A good day gives him a bright, romantic melody; a heavy day pulls him toward something darker. Mood is the compass, not geography. “Feelings arrive on their own schedule,” he says. “When they surface, they demand a page. It’s never planned. It happens when it happens.”

The awards, when they come, are welcome — but he calibrates the baubles carefully. They are acknowledgements, not destinations. 

“Award or not, I will keep writing.” That is the statement of someone who has long since made peace with the fact that the song will come whether anyone is listening, and who writes anyway because the alternative — not writing — is simply not available.

The Bigger Piece of Puzzle

Nepali music is  NOT JUST one thing. It is a watershed — dozens of tributaries, each shaped by its own geography, its own history, its own way of naming loss. Kathmandu’s urban heartbreak is quiet, inward.

 The Tharu songs of the Terai carry mud and river-weight. Tamang melancholy echoes across hillsides. Magar grief holds itself like a blade. Sherpa sorrow climbs to where the wind takes the words away. And dohori — that lively, witty, mildly-spicy verbal sparring between men and women — reminds you that Nepali music is also capable of making a whole room laugh until it blushes.

Adhikary’s winning song enters this tradition not as a museum piece but as a living contribution — proof that the tradition is still porous, still welcoming, still growing. The fact that it was written in New Zealand is the point, not a footnote. Culture does not stay where it was born. It travels with the people who carry it, and it keeps being made — in living rooms in New Zealand, at desks between meetings, in the quiet hours after the official work is done.

“Move closer, my love,” goes the line. “Let’s make a promise the universe can overhear.”

Someone in Kathmandu heard it. They gave it a prize. That is how a culture stays alive.

A “thank you” to Soren Neupane for sending this article to The Upper Hutt Connection.

13/04/26