How do you make a dying tradition relevant? By mimicking the past or by making the past relevant to the present? Kathmandu’s recently held Sa Paru or Gai Jatra festivities proved to be a trial ground for tradition. For the Newar communities that remain and still practice their traditions in the inner city of Kathmandu, the day is very personal. It […]
What do Narayan Wagle, Yug Pathak, Narayan Dhakal, Krishna Dharabasi and Buddhisagar Chapain have in common?
The award ceremony for Writing Nepal took place in the cosy premises of Educational Book House yesterday. Our judge, writer Samrat Upadhyay, was rendered speechless. (Well, almost, courtesy a bad case of laryngitis. But he managed to gruff his way through.) Both he and the editor of La.Lit, Rabi Thapa, expressed a kind of surprised […]
Standing in queue, with a cheque in hand, waiting for the tortoise-crawl to the counter, the back of the head of the man standing before me becomes an intimate: in the ten minutes since I took my spot before it, surely, I have become more familiar with it than the brief glimpses the man might […]
When Quixote’s Cove, the bookshop this magazine is affiliated with, was established, it always wanted to wear more than a retailer’s garb. It drew its inspiration from the romanticization of ideas that felt as though they were in demand and had retail space. Strangely similar but proportionately as big as the US is to Nepal, the Elliott […]
After a very long time, I looked at a full-length mirror. A surface that could reflect the length and the breadth, the quirk and cookie, the flaw and full. I stood before a familiar face – a wall of mirrors in a theatre workshop. I saw myself there. A newly acquired scar broke the right brow […]
If the nature of a city and its people are reflected in the public/civic institutions they support, then Kathmandu appears distinctly barbaric. Our libraries are in shambles – they are run like museums, carrying bounded tomes of dust. Our museums are equally neglected for our present is too pressing to allow for anything but a […]
What is it that writers offer to society? One belief is that they offer a means for understanding our world – the people and relations that mould much of it. For instance, reading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice can help one understand how relationships tend to work. The broad picture it gives is of the way our […]
There I was, traveling to the pinnacle of civilization from a nation confounded by its own existentialism. Five legs over 36 hours – ordeals were to be expected. My journey was marred from the beginning – unloading and offloading my baggage became an enforced part of the ordeal. Beyond the winding maze of workers, I […]
