New national anthem ready

With the government and the Maoist discussing the modalities of the interim constitution from Wednesday to finalise it, a new national anthem has been made ready.

Coordinator of the new national anthem selection task force Satya Mohan Joshi told Nepalnews on Thursday that they have finally selected a new national from the 1,272 songs they received from around the country.

"The new national anthem incorporates national feeling, feeling of the people expressed in the recent people's movement, love to the land and speaks of the glory of the Nepali people," Joshi said.

The team is scheduled to submit the text of the national anthem to the government later today. The process to compose music for it would begin only after the direction from the government.

The new national anthem is divided into two stanzas and has 50 words.

In spite of reports that the committee would compose the anthem selecting suitable words from all the songs it received, the committee has selected the song sent by a single person. When asked, Joshi did not reveal the name of the person whose song was selected. "Code numbers were given to all the songs that were received and we proceeded to select one as per the guidelines we were given. We got to know the name of the composer only after the anthem was selected," Joshi added.

The history of the national anthem goes back to 1895 during the reign of Prime Minister Bir Shumshere JB Rana. Two separate tunes were composed to salute the king and the prime minister during their public appearances and the army band was asked to play the music for them.

Once the two tunes were composed, the rulers formed a committee to write the lyrics. The then Nepali Language Publications Committee asked popular poet Chakrapani Chalise to compose the songs, who wrote two separate songs.

After the establishment of democracy in 1951, which ended the Rana rule, the salutation song in honour of the Rana prime ministers was discarded while that of the king continued. In 1962, three years after Chalise's death, a new constitution was written, making the royal salutation song as the national anthem. nepalnews.com Indra Adhikari Nov 30 06