On 20 February this year, the eighth-grade students of East Horizon English Higher Secondary School in Jhapa found their language teacher, Rekha Ma’am, seated amongst them. That day, our team of four weary Word Warriors was taking on her role. After 16 long hours on a night bus from Kathmandu, we decided to throw our […]

Picture yourself eating dāl bhāt in a Nepali restaurant in Amsterdam. The sun plays lightly along the cobblestones, the tourists go about their strange European lives, fiddling with cameras, furtively glancing at the racks of lewd postcards and daydreaming in the fog of legal dope. The walls are peppered with sun-worn Everest panoramas and the […]

Dear young artists (students of Fine Arts, recent graduates, emerging talents) of Nepal, I found out earlier today that on Saturday, The Kathmandu Post published an odd article about Aditya Aryal aka Sadhu-X, one of our most promising artists. It was very disappointing for many reasons, which I will address below. But first I want to urge you not […]

I took a quick, cold shower on Sunday morning, the last day of the Jaipur Literature Festival. The previous night, I had transferred from a comfortable hotel, walking distance from the festival venue Diggi Palace, to a cheaper location. The temperature inside the new hotel room was not artificially controlled. So I dried myself fast […]

“India had not worked its magic on me. It remained the land of my childhood, an area of darkness; like the Himalayan passes, it was closing up again, as fast as I withdrew from it, into a land of myth; it seemed to exist in just the timelessness which I had imagined as a child, […]

editor’s note – It has been brought to our notice that our blogger is struggling to keep up with the deluge of simultaneous sessions spitting out ideas ranging from the sublime to the mundane. There is, apparently, Just Too Much Going On. A few hastily written notes, marred with metaphysical coffee stains (or whisky?) have nonetheless […]

The steady morning rain didn’t dampen the extraordinary spirit of the 2015 Jaipur Literature Festival on Day 2, even though some sessions were cut short and there was a bit of initial confusion around rescheduling.

Despite headlines that tell us people read less these days due to social media and television, more and more people are reading, claimed William Dalrymple during his keynote speech to the Jaipur Literature Festival on Wednesday,

“One of the reasons I have come to concentrate on imagination as a means through which we can assemble a coherent world is that imagination is what, above all, makes empathy possible. It is what enables us to cross the empty spaces between ourselves and those we (teachers) have called “other” over the years….That is […]