The Mountain Media

08/09/2026

When the 2023 South Lhonak flood and 2024 cloudburst tore through North Sikkim, concrete bridges collapsed and villages in Dzongu were cut off for weeks. What restored access wasn't new engineering, it was old engineering.

Ru-Soam: hand-built cane and bamboo suspension bridges, made by Lepcha communities using knowledge passed down for centuries. No steel. No blueprints. Just cane ropes tied to trees, built to sway with floodwater instead of resisting it.

UNESCO and the Sikkim government are now documenting Ru-Soam as climate-resilient infrastructure.

Some of the best engineering in the Himalayas was never lost. It was just waiting to be remembered.

06/09/2026

The art of making Khudi, save it share it.

04/09/2026

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Deep in Dzongu, a restricted Lepcha reserve in North Sikkim, activi...

20/08/2026

In 2013, scientists at India's National Remote Sensing Centre ran the numbers on South Lhonak Lake and didn't like what they found: a 42% chance it would burst, a near coin-flip risk, on government record, a full decade before anything happened. Downstream sat Teesta III, Sikkim's largest hydropower project at 1,200 MW, built at Chungthang anyway. For ten years, the lake kept growing while the dam kept running, no relocation plan, no structural upgrade, nothing to account for a risk everyone already knew about.

Then, on the night of October 3 to 4, 2023, the lake broke almost exactly the way the study said it could. The flood destroyed the dam within hours, killed 55 people, and left 74 more missing. Over 7,000 people across 1,756 families lost their homes; more than 2,000 houses were gone across Mangan, Gangtok, Namchi, and Pakyong.

Fourteen months later, the story took its strangest turn: regulators cleared a rebuild on the exact same site, this time 118.64 metres tall, nearly double the original height. Key technical approvals are still pending. Construction hasn't started. The matter is now before the Supreme Court, which has issued notice and has not yet delivered a ruling.

Sources: Raj et al. (2013), Geomatics, Natural Hazards and Risk (42% risk study) · Sattar et al. (2025), Science (disaster reconstruction) · Supreme Court petition filings, 2025 (displacement figures) · MoEFCC Expert Appraisal Committee minutes, Jan 2025 (rebuild clearance) · Down To Earth & Mongabay India (reporting) · LawBeat (Supreme Court status, March 2026)

15/08/2026

In Sikkim, a quiet fear travels with every meal. Nepalis call it kapat, Bhutias call it dhuk, Lepchas call it gni'ing, the belief in a poison deity kept at home, requiring careful offerings to stay calm. Tradition says it should feed on white offerings only rice, milk, flour, and its keeper must abstain from meat and alcohol. But if the keeper breaks that discipline, the deity is believed to grow addicted, first to animal meat, then human flesh, and that's when it turns on unsuspecting guests, sometimes needing no more than a jealous thought to poison someone. In one documented account from Rumtek Monastery, a monk conveyed to a researcher that this local poison-keeper belief connects to Palden Lhamo's fierce iconography, since she's traditionally shown carrying a sack of disease, this is the researcher's recorded account of the conversation, not a verbatim quote, and across Tibetan Buddhism she is far better known as Tibet's chief protector deity and guardian of the Dalai Lama lineage. The same fear echoes across Bhutan and southeastern Tibet.

There's a twist most miss: Tibetan Buddhist ta**ra holds the opposite belief too, that poison, mastered, becomes medicine. Legend says Guru Rinpoche was once poisoned and turned it into nectar. Kapat may be its folk shadow, the same idea playing out without the mastery to control it.

Strip away the supernatural, and there may be a scientific root too. Aconitum ferox, locally bikh, grows wild across these same hills, and its real effects, numbness, vomiting, skin turning blue, the heart giving out, line up closely with how these deaths are described. Long before toxicology existed, a death like that had only one explanation available.

Source: Bhutia, Kikee D. (2021). "Death by Poisoning: Cautionary Narratives and Inter-Ethnic Accusations in Contemporary Sikkim." Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics 15(1): 65–84.
Guru Rinpoche's poison-to-nectar story per traditional Nyingma Buddhist accounts.

05/08/2026

Long before pipes reached Darjeeling, its springs were already sacred to the people who lived among them. The Lepchas, in their own tradition, honored water as a living force woven into the mountains, forests, and rivers around them. Separately, Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian households across the hills came to treat the same springs as chokho pani, water considered pure and holy, drawn into daily rituals and quiet acts of reverence. That inheritance is fading quickly today, since only 14 of the original 26 natural springs that once fed Darjeeling are still active, weakened over decades by deforestation and unchecked construction eating into the catchment areas that once protected them. What has filled the gap is a private economy, where water once treated as sacred is now trucked in and sold by the litre, a trade locals have come to call the water mafia. Government projects meant to fix the crisis have been promised for decades, yet the shortage remains largely unresolved. What Darjeeling is losing is not only its water supply, but a reverence for water that ran deeper than any single tradition, shared quietly across communities long before anyone measured it in litres or rupees.

22/07/2026

In the mid-1980s, as the Gorkhaland agitation swept the hills, C.K. Pradhan rose fast — from a name in the movement to commander of the Gorkha Volunteers' Cell, the militant arm of the GNLF, controlling parts of Kalimpong that even security forces avoided. But unlike most feared leaders, he was known as approachable, flamboyant, easy to reach, genuinely liked by the people he led.
That popularity, and his growing independence from GNLF founder Subhash Ghisingh, cost him. Accused by his own party of a hand in a 2001 attempt on Ghisingh's life, he was stripped of his post. On October 3, 2002, reportedly days from launching a breakaway party, he was shot in the back on a crowded Kalimpong street.

Over two decades later: no arrest. No conviction. No official answer.
The junction where he died now bears his name — C.K. Chowk. The file on his murder remains open.

*Please note - Militant here refers to his documented command of the GNLF's armed wing — not a judgment on the movement's cause.

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19/07/2026

At age 6, Kazi Lhendup Dorjee was sent to Rumtek Monastery. By his mid-20s, he had risen to Head Lama, running one of the Himalayas' most powerful religious institutions for eight years. Then he walked away from it all, joining his brother to build schools across West Sikkim.

In 1945, he founded the Sikkim Praja Mandal, Sikkim's first political reform organization, and by 1953, he was leading the Sikkim State Congress, fighting for rights for the Nepali majority population who had none under the Chogyal's feudal rule. By 1973, he was leading the protest movement that finally forced the monarchy to accept an elected government. He later admitted, on record, that an agent from India's Intelligence Bureau personally handed him money to fund it.

In 1975, a controversial referendum, held under Indian supervision, ended nearly 300 years of Namgyal rule. Sikkim became India's 22nd state. Kazi, who had just been the Chogyal's own Prime Minister, became its first Chief Minister.

India honored him with the Padma Vibhushan in 2002. Sikkim never quite forgave him. He carried the word "traitor" for over 30 years, dying in 2007 in Kalimpong, alone.

Hero or traitor? Swipe through and decide.