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Any complaints against candidates, who have filed their nominations for the National Assembly member election to be held on January 25 can be filed today, according to the election program made public by the Election Commission.

The registration of candidates' nomination papers was completed peacefully at the offices of the election officers in all seven provincial capitals on Wednesday, shared the Commission's Joint Secretary and Spokesperson Narayan Prasad Bhattarai.

According to the election program, the nomination papers and complaints, if any, shall be examined and the list of candidates will be published on January 9 and 10, the candidates will withdraw their names and publish the final list of candidates on January 11, and the election symbols will be given to the candidates on January 12.

Minister for Energy, Water Resources and Irrigation, Physical Infrastructure and Transport and Urban Development Kulman Ghising tendered his resignation on Wednesday.

He submitted the resignation letter to Prime Minister Sushila Karki this evening.

Accepting the letter, Prime Minister Karki congratulated and thanked Ghising for efficient leadership of three important ministries for three and a half months.

She also wished him greater success in his future political endeavors.

Minister Ghising also expressed his gratitude to the Prime Minister for providing him with the opportunity to work during this interim period.

A few months ago, this space was loud with chants, rage, and police sirens. Now it is quieter, filled with canvases, broken objects, photographs, and people speaking in low voices. Unsilenced Voices stands right outside the Parliament building, in a space shaped to represent authority and separation from the street. Its placement is deliberate. The works do not decorate the space, they interrupt it. Using fragments of the protest,  materials left behind, fleeting images, half-remembered words, it asserts memory.

The installation emerged in the aftermath of youth-led protests that swept through Kathmandu, fueled by frustration with governance, accountability, and political indifference. What began as demonstrations demanding change escalated into confrontations, met with heavy police response, leaving injuries, arrests, and even deaths among protesters. Though the streets eventually quieted, the questions the protests raised remain.

What stands out is not just the works themselves, but the way people move through the space. There is no hurry, no performative outrage. Visitors pause, read, return. Some speak in hushed tones, others remain silent. The space demands a different kind of attention than the streets once did, one that is slower, heavier, and impossible to ignore.

For the artists, this is not about turning resistance into decoration. It is a refusal to let memory fade. In a city that quickly moves on, that rebrands unrest as disruption and treats loss as collateral, Unsilenced Voices insists that September did not end quietly. It recalls the streets alive with chants, the smoke of burning tires, the sirens cutting through the air, and the grief of families who lost children, friends, and neighbors.

The installation does not offer easy answers, comforting slogans, or tidy conclusions. Instead, it asks viewers to engage with grief, to feel the weight of anger that still simmers, and to confront what was left unresolved when the protests subsided. Every visitor moving through the space is reminded of what was lost, what was fought for, and what was silenced in September. This is not art for walls,it is the echo of streets that demanded to be heard, now transformed into objects that will not let the city forget.

The protests may have ended, but the forces that sparked them remain. In this light, the installation is not a memorial meant to close a chapter; it marks the consequences the city has yet to reckon with. Even as the streets grow quiet, the calls for justice and accountability persist, carried in images, objects, and words that demand to be seen and felt. The city may appear calm, but the questions raised in September have not been answered.

Megha Majumdar’s debut novel ‘A Burning’ was a New York Times bestseller. It was named one of the best books of 2020 by the Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, Vogue, and Time among others. It won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Purasakar in 2021 besides being nominated for many other awards like the National Book Critic’s Circle John Leonard Prize and the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal. Many readers reviewed it on YouTube and Instagram. 

I haven’t read it yet but quite a few of my friends have recommended it to me. That’s probably one reason why I picked up ‘A Guardian and a Thief’ by the same author. The second reason being a blurb by American essayist Stacy Schiff, whose biography of Vera Nabokov won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in biography. She writes: “Wondering if there’s a novel out there that gives Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ a run for its money? Here you go. An indelible piece of writing, in equal parts dazzling and devastating.”

A Guardian and a Thief tells the story of Ma and Boomba and the lengths they will go to for their families. It’s set in near-future Kolkata in India that is plagued by flooding and famine. Ma, her two-year-old daughter, Mishti, and her father are leaving Kolkata to join Ma’s husband in America. But Ma’s purse gets stolen the day after they receive their visas. It had all three passports. Ma tells nothing about the robbery to her husband who believes his family will soon be joining him. 

In Kolkata, she searches high and low for the thief who brought this misfortune upon her family. When Ma finally finds the thief, Boomba, he offers her a deal: He will give her back the passports if she agrees to give him her house when she leaves for America. The story is set amidst a worsening food crisis that drives both Ma and Boomba to do things they wouldn’t have had circumstances been different. Set over the course of one week, the plot revolves around Ma and Boomba’s struggle for survival when the odds are stacked against them. 

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is one of my favorite books. A Guardian and a Thief is indeed reminiscent of that, and I loved it. What struck me the most about the book is that there are no heroes or villains here. Ma does many things that go against her morals, even stealing from the shelter she once worked at. Even though Boomba is a thief who commits a lot of crimes, he isn’t really in the wrong here. They are both two people trying to do what’s best for their families, and they both operate from a place of extreme love. The title thus applies to both characters. Each is a guardian and a thief. 

The book made me think about how people behave in the face of a crisis, and whether that is a truer reflection of who we actually are. Can you be principled when you are in grave trouble? Or do your instincts of self preservation override everything else? It’s interesting to try and get inside the character’s minds, with their conflicting thoughts and motives. They remind you of people you might know. They are relatable as well–you would easily behave the way they did had you been in their shoes. 

The ending seemed a bit rushed and over the top but other than that, I liked everything about the book–the plot, the setting, the characters, and the dystopian vibe. I found out that A Guardian and a Thief is actually a follow up to Majumdar’s debut novel, A Burning, after I had finished reading it. But the good thing is that it works wonderfully well as a standalone novel too. If you have enjoyed McCarthy’s The Road and have been searching for a story with a similar feel to it, this is one you won’t regret picking up. 

A Guardian and a Thief

Megha Majumdar

Published: 2025

Publisher: Penguin Random House India

Pages: 205, Hardcover