THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

Sushma Joshi I live five minutes away from Bhatbhateni. My favorite place to shop in the area is—no, not the supermarket, wrong guess…its Organic Garden. Set in a small Rana-style house a little away from the road, Organic Garden is a two-in-one deal: a garden restaurant with an organic store. While the restaurant serves a delicious wild boar burger, gigantic salads, and Jumla red bean soup, the store is filled with hemp seeds, stinging nettle soup, and dried frogs. Yes, that wasn’t a typo (Frenchmen, rejoice!). I wrote “frogs”—riverine amphibians dried to a slender if rather smelly tidbid and displayed proudly by the glass windows. Samir Newa, a founder of Organic Garden, said his interest in providing people with local produce started with a simple desire. After traveling in 65 districts in Nepal and sampling their delicacies, he wanted to know: how can I get these products in Kathmandu? He never liked Coke, and he wondered what could be a local alternative. From his own experience, ...

A R T M A T T E R S By Sushma Joshi ECS Magazine, December 2007 If location was anything to go by, Cinderella, the annual production by Kathmandu’s Shakespeare Wallahs, was going to be a miserable experience. The hall inside the British Embassy compound seem to lack that great American invention—central heating. They had, it also appeared, spared no expense to replicate the joys of England—drafty halls, inhospitable corridors, straight backed chairs with meager padding. A glare of great klieg lights shone in our eyes as we waited for the pantomime to start. The British may have inherited a chilly, dimly-lit island (no fault of theirs), but they sure know how to make something out of nothing with it. Recent reportage claims Britain’s greatest exports are its culture: literature, art, cinema, personalities. As soon as the wicked stepmother and the two ugly sisters stepped on the stage, decked out in their atrocious outfits, the audience knew that recent reportage was right. A...

A R T M A T T E R S ECS Magazine, December 2007 By Sushma Joshi Giovanni Battista Ambrosini is 59 years old, but as he crouches on the ground and assiduously draws his signature image—a figure that could be a bird, a child, a spirit—with a white wax-stick on a canvas stretched out on the tiles of Babar Mahal Revisited’s courtyard, he appears centuries older. The white mane of hair looks familiar, so does the high forehead. Does Giovanni descend from a long line of artists in Italy? Did his ancestor exhibit alongside Leonardo da Vinci in some of Florence’s prestigious studios? This question goes unanswered. He seems as blithely unconcerned with the vagaries of history and parentage as he is with the sacredness of the canvas, which Nepali artists treat as a treasured space that would be sullied by the slightest disrespect. Meanwhile, on the canvas spread out on the courtyard, Giovanni directs four young women to dance with naked feet. Like the wind, the young women are his c...

This link leads to a story about a Norwegian funded program for hydropower engineering at Kathmandu University.

The Half-Moon Files By Sushma Joshi I happened, by accident, to hear about 'The Half-Moon Files.' The Berlinale, Berlin's international film festival, is the biggest in Europe after Cannes, and there were 250 films competing for attention. But the woman who told me about it was certain I would be interested. It was about the POW (Prisoner of War) camp in Berlin after WW 1 and had interesting anthropological elements, she said. 'It is about Indians in the POW camp,' she said. As soon as she said 'Indians', I knew I had to watch it. It was the last day of the festival, but I had no hesitation chucking my ticket to the Hongkong action movie and heading to the Arsenal, a theatre located in the basement of the Filmhause of Berlin. The documentary was in German, which I do not speak or understand. But it was probably the most interesting film I, as a Nepali, watched in the entire festival. The reason was this-- the film, an ostentious 'ghost story' in whi...

Sushma Joshi Kantipuronline.com, February 7, 2007 Vogue, one of the world’s premier fashion magazines, features actress Angelina Jolie on the cover of its January 2007 issue. Jolie wears a raspberry rayon matt jersey evening dress that drapes across her body in perfect, sensual symmetry—there’s a sari-like hint to the drape of fabric against her legs. The classic, elegant look comes from the design table of Bliss Blass, a New York couture house with clients as diverse as Oprah, Laura Bush, and Sigourney Weaver. What most Nepalese don’t know is that one of the designers of the label is Prabal Gurung, whose rise to meteoric New York success rivals those of the best stars. A St Xavier’s graduate, Prabal was the only one of his class to study this field in 1990. Like all boys, he struggled to belong, but was made to feel different. However, this very sense of being “different” helped to push him to define his sense of identity later on in life. Prabal went to Delhi, where he attended the N...

War-torn Shangri-La Danger at the roof of the world http://www.msmagazine.com/summer2006/shangrila.asp by Sushma Joshi As Ms. went to press, at least 13 people had been killed in demonstrations in Nepal and hundreds of thousands had flooded the streets of Kathmandu demanding the return of democracy. Consequently, parliament, dissolved by King Gyanendra in February 2005, was reinstated. The people also demanded a redrafting of the constitution to eliminate the monarchy’s far-reaching powers. The king’s curfews, arrests and seizure of absolute control were done ostensibly to secure the country from a 10-year insurgency by Maoist rebels—who have now agreed to peace talks with the reinstated parliament and new government. Ms. assigned Sushma Joshi to report on what has been happening to women. Eline Henry, a 33-year-old French schoolteacher, loved Nepal so much she planned to extend her vacation in Kathmandu and volunteer at a children’s organization. “The people are so friendly,” she wrot...