Reviews

What a way to go the wrong way

Prawin Adhikari | May 7, 2014

“Pālai pālo moj garnu parchha!” After spending nearly two hours trying to parse the mysteries of human suffering as portrayed in director Dipak Shrestha’s Wrong Way, the illumination came at the very climax: two men roll around on a bed, mounting and dismounting, grunting and pushing and punching, while a dolled-up woman watches. Wrong Way isn’t a rape-revenge-flick […]

Review: Grill Me, Jhamsikhel, Lalitpur

gobArganesh | May 1, 2014

Things seemed to be going well. Well in the way that the days passed with ease and adequate happiness. I felt that this was one of those times I would look back upon with a mixture of envy and wonder, whenever it was that I once again majorly fucked everything up. It was only a […]

Interrogating modern Nepal

Thomas Bell | April 11, 2014

The Vanishing Act, by Prawin Adhikari (226 pages, Rupa Publications 2014) The early stories in Prawin Adhikari’s debut collection examine the mixture of guilt and innocence with which a young boy growing up in the village of Abu Khaireni receives his first lessons in nature, dealing with other boys or spying on the afternoon lovemaking […]

Change within, change without

Nepalikukur | April 4, 2014

Over the years, Nepal has hosted any number of events related to climate change, hardly surprising considering we live in the shadow of the Himalaya, the ‘third pole’. Receding glaciers and Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs) are only, if you’ll excuse the pun, the tip of the iceberg in this regard. Many such events have […]

Review: Chez Caroline, Babar Mahal, Kathmandu

La.lit | February 20, 2014

It’s unclear if the proprietors of Chez Caroline in Babar Mahal Revisited chose their location at the far, far end of the suspiciously polished and over-restored palace as a means of enticing their clientele, or to run away from them. I entered the restaurant perhaps a bit too earnestly dressed, and the busy diners all […]

Review: The House with a Thousand Stories

stone.soup | February 3, 2014

Aruni Kashyap’s debut novel The House with a Thousand Stories (Penguin, 2013) is about many things: women, marriage, fear, guilt, purity and xenophobia, alienation from the state, language and its transformative properties, and a variety of oppressions. When Pablo, a young man raised in Guwahati, returns to the village of Hatimura in remote Assam, he becomes witness […]

Review: Cafe Soma, Jhamsikhel, Lalitpur

gobArganesh | January 31, 2014

I woke up this morning and I wasn’t hungover; I was something else. I was dusty, ragged from too much breathing, from too much Kathmandu. I woke up this morning with a dust hangover. The problem with a dust hangover is that having a few quick glasses of dust in the morning doesn’t help you […]

Review: doing it justice

Nepalikukur | December 19, 2013

I was submitting to the drone of Lou Reed against Metallica’s guitars when a friend called, wondering if I wanted to see Rajesh Hamal, onstage, presiding over a court of young actors including Karma, Diya Maskey and Dayahang Rai. The old and the not-so-new – how would these mash-ups match up? It takes a brave […]

Review: The Walls of Delhi

La.lit | December 10, 2013

The Walls of Delhi, Uday Prakash, Translated by Jason Grunebaum, Hachette India, 2012. Stories on cities, non-fictive accounts of their people, and grand narratives of their past and present have become a fad of late. Given its political and demographic position, New Delhi is naturally one to earn such interests. Like all big cities, Delhi has its […]