KATHMANDU: If there’s any truth to the old notion that Nepal is a country with one foot in the 16th century and the other in the 21st, then Rubin Ghandarba is its living embodiment.

Just as his minstrel forefathers did in the centuries before radio and television, the 14-year-old spreads news through song, much like the bards of medieval Europe.

But instead of singing about great battles and petty gossip, as his ancestors did, the young Nepali sings of revolution in his Himalayan homeland, where a king is facing off against Maoist rebels and opposition protesters ahead of a key election.

In his cracking, adolescent voice, the teenager performs on college campuses, in crowded markets and at the pro-democracy protests that have become near daily occurrences here since King Gyanendra seized absolute power a year ago.

Ghandarba is the child of poverty — his Hindu caste of bards, also known as the Ghandarba, are among the lowest — and his songs are militantly humourless. “The people must rule, the king must go,” goes one set of lyrics sung over the tune of an old folk song.

Strong sentiment from a 14-year-old, but one that captures the mood these days in Nepal.

One fan, Kishan Bhushan, who sees the teenage minstrel at protests, called Ghandarba’s songs ‘the story of our time’.

There’s no way to gauge if Rubin is popular, or even well known, outside the circle of students in Kathmandu who spend much of their time protesting.

But some fellow bards — nearly all the few hundred left now earn their keep singing saccharine tunes for tourists — worry the authorities will eventually take notice of the young rebel, who has already been briefly detained twice at protests.

“One day, he is going to get in a lot of trouble — or he will get killed,” said Kishan Ghandarba, who, like most members of the caste, shares the same last name.

Rubin Ghandarba will hear none of it. He’s so inspired, in fact, he says he doesn’t write lyrics — they simply come to him ‘like tears from a poet’.

Ghandarba quit school and started singing for small change and food when he left his village in central Nepal at age eight because ‘my family was too poor for me’.

His first foray into political songs came a year later when he sang on a college campus about the 2001 palace massacre that brought Gyanendra to the throne.

The students loved it, he said, so he kept going back. And when Gyanendra took power last year, his tunes took on an anti-king edge. The act made him a regular at opposition meetings and protests — he even went with the leader of Nepal’s mainstream communist party to meet Maoists during last year’s cease-fire.

“I don’t want this king who travels to other countries, and spends millions and millions on cars, on airplanes,” he says, though he’s not sure which political party he supports.

It’s hard to tell how much of his anti-king sentiment is heartfelt and how much is simply the desire of young boy who left home as a child to be accepted.

But nearly every day he’s out looking for a protest in Kathmandu, his dirty grey, double-breasted blazer hanging off his slight frame.—AP