Reviews

Review: 3 shorts from Film Southasia 2013

Pranab Man Singh | October 3, 2013

Film Southasia (FSA) is a bastion of cultural programming in Nepal. It has been a source of entertainment, education and the occasional glimpse of illumination since I was a teenager. I’ve grown older, but the festival keeps on going, and I wonder if my years of flight and turmoil have added the layers of disillusionment […]

Dark waters

Nepalikukur | October 1, 2013

To say I am concerned about the wellspring of inspiration nourishing Nepali (short) filmmakers is an understatement. Where is the lunk loping across mustard fields in a lather of testosterone, the object of his desire a vision of chiffon, heaving bosom and pouty lips? Where is the ruler line of morality that demarcates the good […]

Review: The Kalajatra exhibition at Patan Museum

The Dionysian | September 4, 2013

In a recent article reviewing the Kalajatra exhibition at the Patan Museum, the artist Birendra Pratap Singh is quoted as saying,”Creating nude body of a woman is my way of satirising the current society which has become commercialised through advertising and is heading towards degradation.” But tudal, the wooden beams that support the eaves of pagoda temples around Nepal, have […]

Review: travelling without moving

Nepalikukur | August 4, 2013

The Kingdom at the Centre of the World: Journeys in Bhutan, by Omair Ahmad, Aleph Book Company, 2013 We have come to expect production values from Aleph Book Company, and The Kingdom at the Centre of the World: Journeys in Bhutan does not disappoint with its delicately rendered cover of a dzong suspended, as it were, in time and […]

Review: Troubadours, poetry and photography

The Dionysian | July 10, 2013

These days, Kathmandu’s artistic calender is busy enough to offer choices. This hasn’t always been the case, but now that its started and we’ve packed ourselves thick, it will probably only get busier. There are some who would believe that quantity is an essential to the birth of quality. A facebook events skirmish will reveal […]

Review: In need of federation

The Dionysian | June 18, 2013

It is growing increasingly irreverent and tiresome to hear Gautam Buddha and Mount Everest being used as reasons for Nepali pride. Both are geographical happenstances regarding which the Nepali nation made no conscious choice. When statements extolling Buddha and Mount Everest are made by a person as eminent as the Vice Chancellor (VC) of Kathmandu […]

Uma: between meditation and melodrama

stone.soup | June 11, 2013

Then, along came Uma. It had a lot of expectations attached to it – the actors are among the best of their generations, and the director Tsering Ritar Sherpa is a pioneer among his peers, for the breadth of his vision and for his courage to make fiction-films like Mukundo and Karma.

Review: Not all fun and games

La.lit | March 9, 2013

Āja Ramitā Cha, by Indra Bahadur Rai, Sajha Prakashan, 2011 (1964) There’s a moment in Indra Bahadur Rai’s Darjeeling saga Āja Ramitā Cha (1964) when a teacher remarks, “We say Nepal-Nepal, as for Nepal…” There’s truth in the charge that the Nepali diaspora, and its cultural influence, has been neglected by those ensconced in the […]

Review: the wrestler and the courtesan

La.lit | February 27, 2013

His translation of the Urdu epic Hoshruba is expected to run to 8000 pages in 24 volumes, but Musharraf Ali Farooqi minces no words in his latest novel, Between Clay and Dust