Really, if you think about it, what even is the truth? Is it merely some empirically validated and statistically guaranteed observation about our physical world? Or is it a chain of logically proven statements to arrive at a tautology? What about things that you cannot properly define. Or things that are beyond the realm of what can be conveyed. What is truth?
And so, I spent my days slaving away at an office building trying to figure out what the truth was. I tried many a things.
Eventually, I realized there was far too much news and somehow never enough information.
Every newspaper had its own account of Nepal. Sometimes they disagreed. Sometimes one of them covered a story that the others seemed to pretend had never happened. I had no grand solution for deciding who was right, but I thought it would at least help if people could see more than one version of the country.
That was the idea behind EkNepal, a platform I helped build while working with Alpinist Studios.
EkNepal brought reporting from Nepal’s major newspapers into one place. I worked on the frontend: the part that turned all of that scattered information into something people could actually navigate, read, and compare. You can still look it up at eknepal.com.
It was my first programming gig. I was paid one hundred dollars.
Honestly, I was just amazed that somebody had paid me to make something. Until then, programming was mostly me messing around with a computer. Now there was a real website, real people could visit it, and some little piece of it had come from a question that would not leave me alone.
The questions I work on now are different. They involve algorithms, mathematical proofs, experiments, and occasionally several days spent discovering that an idea does not work. But the habit is the same. I find something confusing, pull it apart, build whatever I can, and see what survives.
EkNepal did not tell anyone what the truth was. I doubt any website could.
But really, if truth rarely arrives in one piece, why do we keep accepting it from a single source?
A more factual account of the platform and my contribution — role, product, evidence — is in the project note.