Anshu Gupta

A child playing on a the wreckage of the devastated structure of a building from the Nepal earthquake 2015

A United Nations report mentioned that the earthquake affected more than eight million people. It caused several landslides, damaged many buildings in the densely populated city of Kathmandu and nearby villages*.

In my years of travel across India and abroad, I’ve never seen anyone love and treasure their heritage the way the people of Nepal do. When I went there post the Nepal earthquake of 2015, it was a common sight to come across civilians volunteering in hundreds at these heritage sites which had been left completely disfigured after the disaster. The JCB machines would pick up rubble at these sites and spread them out in an open space. The volunteers would then go around collecting bits and pieces of their heritage and put them in sacks and take it with them. I have never seen this kind of dedication towards historical monuments and it surprised me how deeply these people loved their heritage.

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