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.

I understand why some of my fellow citizens want to celebrate this document. But when I weigh that against why some other fellow citizens of mine find no reason for cheer, I find betrayal in the celebrations.

Road dividers in Kalimati are subtly deranged: a rough linearity is visible, until you approach them with attentiveness. You see that they have been jostled, thrown off-kilter, made unruly because they have been shaken out of alignment. From afar, the rush and jolt of Kalanki’s bottleneck traffic appears routine, until you cockroach your way closer […]

Rekha – Malāi thāha chha timi malāi sānchchai māyā garchhau. Tyesaile ma aru ko hāt bāta hoina, timrai hāt bāta marna chāhanchhu! Writer-director Rekha Thapa’s Himmatwali is a tribute to Rekha Thapa, the actress. Sudarshan Gautam, starring opposite Rekha Thapa, is an interesting accessory to the hallucinogenic landscape she has created. Like an origami figure, the persona of […]

Eelum Dixit’s directorial debut, Red Monsoon, explores abuse and refuses respite. It looks at the spatial character of relationships. It traces a line between rebellion and its genesis in abuse: literally between one pair of characters and with a bit more subtlety between others. It peels back the layers that obscure our chaotic metropolis by looking […]

“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 […]

A day before the elections The practice of democracy in Marpha is doubly dismaying. There is a robust and functional local democracy. But Nepali democracy comes here through the filter of tribal loyalty, therefore it manages to be extremely exclusionary. On the one hand the practice of a traditional form of democracy is celebrated as […]

Some said there was no way there’d be elections. Some said elections would happen, without too many incidents, although there’d be some. Things were uncertain. Some said the army would take over. The Maoists said the army was stockpiling weapons. Some Royalists said the army would take over. Everybody was waiting and watching. Everybody was […]