At every step there’s a pothole to avoid, muddy lanes to jump over and wire lines to navigate your way through.

Prema Shah, 67, frequently recalls and narrates accounts of Kathmandu during her school and college days when the air was clean, the mountains surrounding the valley clearly visible and a stroll around the neighborhood left you refreshed. But when she starts describing the city as it once was, her grandchildren often wonder if she’s misplacing the facts or blatantly exaggerating.

Kathmandu today is nothing like it looked back then, says Shah who wonders how the city plummeted to such lowly standards. “There used to be a lot of trees and everything looked a lot cleaner when I was young,” says Shah adding that the disarray the city is in now, alarms her. Kathmandu, till the late 1970’s, was a paradise, with a small population and a few cars on its narrow roads, she says. Since then, Kathmandu has undergone enormous change to become a polluted, traffic clogged, urban sprawl that is fast becoming unfit for living with each passing day.