As a teenager, Uttam Shaha says he used to watch scornfully from his bedroom window as men in brown shorts performed martial exercises in a car park below. Like many Indians then, he viewed the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) as a fringe group.
Thousands of vehicles lined up at petrol pumps in Kathmandu on Wednesday to beat a looming ban on fuel sales announced by the government as protests against a new constitution strangled supplies from India into the landlocked nation.
India has decided to delay implementation of bigger health warnings on tobacco packaging by a year until April 2016, as pressure mounts on New Delhi to take urgent steps to reduce tobacco consumption which kills up to 900,000 people a year.