......See you again:)

I can't believe I am writing my last blog, don't know how these 12 weeks went by so quick. Time really flies by when you are having fun and I really had a great time writing all these blogs. Though I didn't write as many blogs as I had planned to, I think I managed to share some of my experiences that I had in CQUniversity and Australia which I hope you guys enjoyed reading.

Saying goodbye is always hard and I am running short of words. I guess this is not the end of my blogging journey as I plan to continue writing in future through my own blog site.
At this point of time, I would like to wish all you guys the very best for future and may you find the right University for further studies like I found mine.

At last, I would like to share with you guys a short movie I made out of the pictures we took on a night out with Uni mates. We all had such a great time together.

Good Luck and Have Fun!!!
See you again!
RS

Writing Competition for Library and Information Week

Few months backs, CQUniversity held a writing competition for National Library and Information Week. The theme for the competition was libraries or access to information and they were to choose 3 best entries to be published in the Sydney Library Website. I thought I should give it a go and hence wrote a short essay which was selected to be published in the Library Website. Today, I want to share that piece of writing with you guys and here it goes:

Access to information: Right or a Privilege? by Romu Shrestha

What is life without curiosity? Take a minute and think of a person who has had no questions in his mind all his life. I am sure a person with no questions doesn’t exist. Curiosity is a human nature and such human nature of questioning everything led us to the world of information technology today. We really don’t think about it in that deep manner when we are reading an article on the Internet or when we are watching news on our big HD plasma screen TV and are thinking about something happening in some other part of the world which probably has got nothing to do with us. We kind of don’t realize these days that we can be really hungry about information. This is probably because any information that we need is easily accessible. We can click on blahblah.com and bingo we get everything that we need right there. With such convenient access to information, life has definitely got better and easier.

If we look back in our past and see, we didn’t have resources to access information easily, we had no Internet, no mobile phone to check tomorrow’s weather, no magazines with Britney spears new found love story (many more such interesting gossips), no satellite TV channels with live reporting, no YouTube with videos on just about anything & everything and so on. We had all the questions and no answers. But today, things have changed and we have pretty much found answers to all our questions with easy access to information.

We, who live in well developed countries like Australia, believe that it’s a human right to have access to information and education. However; it’s time we need to ask ourselves a question and that is what about those people who live in underdeveloped countries where there is not enough food, water resources, electricity , education etc which are basic human needs or rights, forget about the Internet, TV channels, well equipped libraries and other resources to access information. Don’t these people have right to access the information like us or do they have to be privileged in order to do so? In that case, is access to information is really a right or it is just another privilege for certain number of people like us? Somebody wise has said, “If you have a question, you will definitely find an answer”. Hence we need to think about those fellow human beings who are under privileged and do something to make global advancement more successful and more meaningful.

I still wonder if access to information is a right or a privilege. Do you have an answer???

Cheers!
RS

Nepal Festival 2010

Nepal Festival 2010 was held in Darling Harbour Sydney on 4th September 2010 as promised. Despite of the bad weather (it was raining almost all day), the organizers did not cancel or postpone the event and did their best to make the event interesting and engaging for the attendees. Though the venue was not as crowded in the afternoon as expected, people started to show up after it stopped raining in the evening. There were lots of food stalls serving variety of Nepalese food, information stalls of migration agents, educational institute & universities and some other business. As CQUniversity was one of the sponsors, we had our stall where we provided information about studying in our University and little goodies to the visitors. It was quite an interesting experience, lot of people thought I was an employee of the University :) The festival also showcased performances of young Nepalese, mainly traditional dances and songs. The highlight of the show was the performance of a famous Nepalese Rock band named 1974 AD; however, their performance started bit late at around 8:30pm. The crowd got bit furious because of the long wait as most of the people were there for their performance. Nevertheless, the band rocked the stage and got people grooving with their hit numbers.

It was a good event but could have been lot better as organizers didn't seem to be well prepared to pull off the entire event smoothly. What I really liked about this event was it brought together most of the Nepalese living in Sydney, to celebrate their culture even being miles away from their country.

More pictures can be viewed here:
http://www.nepalmelbourne.com/?p=334

Cheers!
RS

Celebrating Culture!!!

Cultural festival – sounds like a very good idea of having fun while you get to know more about some other part of the world. These festivals are always bit fancy and fantasy like as you get to experience something you might not have seen or experienced before. A preset idea of these cultural festivals in my mind is a crowded event with people from everywhere,plentiful of food stalls, different types of cultural programmes for entertainment, a lot of information stalls and some marketing companies trying to lure people into business. I reckon if you breakdown the facts of every cultural or international festival it’s the stalls and their presentation that make it a successful or unsuccessful event.
We all know that Australia is one of the most prominent multicultural countries in the world. You can just walk down any street and will find at least ten different people representing ten different backgrounds. This stat is bit exaggerated but it’s kind of true. Every now and then there are various festivals and events happening with a different representation like Chinese New Year Italian food festival, Australia- India friendship day, etc. It’s like you name something and we have a festival for that. Now this is the real beauty of living in a multicultural society, you get to celebrate everything in the world.
To maintain this trend of celebrating culture, NRN Australia, Nepalese Community Associations and Nepalese Embassy is jointly organising a cultural event which is named Nepal Festival 2010. This event will be proudly hosted in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane on different dates. Well, I am more interested in the one that is going to be held in Sydney as I live here. This festival in set to take place in our very cool Darling Harbour, on 4th September 2010, which is this Saturday. I am really excited to attend this festival mainly for two reasons. First is obvious, as me being a Nepalese away from Nepal, I love to celebrate my culture in every possible way and secondly I’ll be representing my University in the event. As CQUniversity is one of the sponsors of this event, we will be putting up an information stall for the festival attendees. I feel good about the fact that my university is supporting a cultural programme about my country. I am really looking forward to it and hope it’s going to be a very successful and fun event.

More details on facts and features about the event can be found here:
http://www.nrn.org.au/festivals/index.php

Cheers!
RS