What are you hoping to get out of your appointment?

‘To provide service, help the community.’

How is that going so far?

‘We are doing our best.’ (Scrolling through his phone.)

This past year was an exercise in equanimity. Forced indoors under lockdown, quarantine or ‘shelter-in-place’ orders as governments scrambled to contain Covid-19, many of us eventually found ourselves on edge, listless and irascible. By the end of the year, we were spent. In such trying times, we turned to indulgences and sought comfort in that most maligned of disciplines – the arts.

A name doesn’t mean anything. Nevertheless, many people grab hold of their name and use it as a fertiliser to grow things like identity. What is interesting, though, is the soil the fertiliser is applied to, the soul – what makes you a human being.

Aahva had run away from home at 17, packing nothing but some clothes, some food from the kitchen, her dead mother’s diary and three thousand Indian rupees that she had found while rummaging through her father’s drawers.

‘Line of Thought: Dialogues on Pedagogy and Personal Practices’, running at the Nepal Art Council in Babarmahal until Saturday, 18th January, 2020, intends to start conversations, some beyond pedagogy and practice.

After a fall of reading and re-reading your submissions to the fourth edition of La.Lit’s Writing Nepal: A Short Story Contest, Judge Samrat Upadhayay has revealed his picks!

So what do we love, in the end? An amalgam of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and phosphorus? Or a projection, a shadow, a signal that blinks off when its physical progenitor ceases to draw breath?

On the first day of 2019 I happened to be rifling through a bookshelf in a hotel in Benaulim, Goa, a bookshelf of the sort common in places where people come to forget.

“Have you seen a nāgā?” I was talking to an eminent scholar, from a famous American university, about Kathmandu’s religion. He clearly felt that I’d misunderstood what these spirits might be. “They are not snakes,” he said. “They are a bit like a fish or an eel, with long fins along each side. They are […]