Nepal unrest: How 2015 earthquake created one of Gen Z's top leaders

Gen Z in Nepal was not born in hashtags or memes. The movement now leading and organising the protests against graft, nepotism, unemployment and the social media ban traces its origins to a disaster - the 2015 earthquake. The temblor also built a man who would 10 years down the line go on to become one of Gen Z's most powerful figures.

As the Himalayan nation reeled from collapsed homes and broken lives, Sudan Gurung - once a fixture of Thamel's party circuit - stepped into a role no one expected. The earthquake changed Gurung. "A child died in my arms. I'll never forget that moment," Gurung, 38, had said at that time. Out of that helplessness came Hami Nepal, a volunteer collective that began with donated rice sacks. A decade later, it is from this group that Gen Z has drawn its identity.


Before the quake, Gurung had built a livelihood around clubs, DJ sets, and the endless circuitry of events. "His background in nightlife gave him a sense of how to read an audience," musician Abhaya Subba, a pioneering Nepali rock singer-songwriter and the frontwoman of the band 'Abhaya & the Steam Injuns' told TOI. "Now he channels it into rallying young volunteers."

Moments after the devastating quake, Gurung's first instinct was to post a plea online. Nearly 200 volunteers arrived. They carried rice into villages, pitched tents in schoolyards, ferried the injured on borrowed motorbikes. That impromptu network became Hami Nepal (We are Nepal). By 2020, it was registered as an NGO with more than 1,600 members. "Unusually disciplined for a grassroots leader," said Dr Sanduk Ruit, the celebrated eye surgeon and one of Hami Nepal's mentors. "Gurung's focus on logistics rather than rhetoric is what makes young people trust him."

The ongoing protests transformed this legacy into something political. When the govt banned 26 social media platforms and Nepal's students felt the ban was nothing less than erasure, Gurung gave a call to assemble - in school uniforms, textbooks in hand. Alongside the neat uniforms and exercise books came another kind of emblem. Protesters raised the 'Straw Hat Jolly Roger' flag from the Japanese anime One Piece - Monkey D Luffy's banner of rebellion against corrupt authority - and held it aloft beside their textbooks. It was a generational shorthand, a cultural code their peers understood instantly.

Today, Gurung stands in a liminal place: not a teenager in the crowd, but not yet burdened by the compromises of the political establishment. He remembers the monarchy, the insurgency, yet he also embodies the impatience of those born after both. His Instagram posts are direct: "We will raise our fists. We will show the power of unity, the power of people who refuse to bow down to corruption. Do not stay silent. Do not stay home." Hami Nepal, then, has become the architecture of Nepal's Gen Z.