Apropos of your editorial “Park for tourism” (THT, December 28, Page 6), we should experiment with high end tourism in this pristine destination, means the far-western district of Kanchanpur.

Perhaps the government could come up with stringent criteria for hotel and tourism activities including minimum investment to stop it from degenerating into West Nepal Sauraha, Fewa or Thamel.

These are the major tourist centres which have not been able to generate much revenue to the national coffer and employment opportunities for the locals.

Interested locals should be encouraged to pool their land, mind, money and expertise to run respectable and niche tourism business in the spirit of co-operative business rather than turning their individual cow sheds into guest houses.

No human settlement should be allowed to spring up at the periphery of the reserve turned into a park. All out efforts should be made to turn it into a place for the ‘royals and rock stars’, a serious wildlife destination, rather than a love Park either for the domestic or foreign tourists who cannot tell the difference between a lion and a tiger.

Tourism history tells us that this place used to be very popular with Japanese anthropological groups in 1990s. Let us exploit its immense potential to promote upper crust tourism.

A national park should not become a place that destroys the wildlife as well as local culture and tradition in the name of promoting tourism.

The authorities concerned should keep in mind that promotion of tourism should also help promote the local culture.

Manohar Shrestha, Kathmandu

Extravaganza

In major cities of Nepal like Kathmandu, we can clearly see that English New Year is given high importance due to which youngsters are found singing, dancing, wandering and even having lots of fun.

What we can observe in our country is this New Year’s Eve has just become an extravaganza which has given whole lot of emphasis these days. Even parents of such youngsters are found enjoying it without any objection being felt.

However when it comes to Nepalese New Year, we simply don’t find such kind of charm in our country. Such youngsters are found not to be giving the same priority and importance as they are found giving to English New Year.

Due to this reason whenever English New Year arrives in our country, every hotel in our country is filled with rich people who come to celebrate it with great joy and pleasure.

Now this has to take place even with the arrival of Nepalese New Year which is not very far from us. Only then we will be doing some kind of justice to our culture.

Media have also given much more importance to Gregorian calendar than that of the Bikram Sambat which is used in official as well as religious purposes.

Pratik Shrestha, Baneshwor