THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

Undocumented Sushma Joshi Hetauda is a one-day trip for Harimaya Praja. The only path to get down to the town is by walking next to the river edge, and the narrow mountain trail is often washed away in places by the rain. Holding her year and a half old son Sanubabu Praja, Harimaya fords raging monsoon waters and emerges soaking wet in her only set of clothes before reaching Manohari, where she pays twenty-five rupees as busfare to get to the district headquarters in Hetauda. Although she has come down three times, March, May and again in October, she has been unable to fulfill her mission – to get her citizenship papers. Nepali citizenship papers are remarkable difficult to get for bona fide citizens, especially for indigenous groups far away from state bureaucracy. Eighty-five percent of Prajas (the Chepang ethnic group) do not have citizenship. Chepangs have been publicized as a “backward” group. A highly organized national Chepang conference was held in early October in Hetauda, ...

WATCHING TROY The movie is Hollywood’s new take on Homer’s great epic, one of the greatest love stories of all time. Hollywood, however, seems more focussed on war than on love. BY SUSHMA JOSHI Greek mythology is not some thing that usually draws a crowd of teenagers at nine a.m. on a Saturday morning. But with a bit of Hollywood thrown in, it may just be possible. Show up at Jai Nepal Hall and watch the crowd that gathers for “Troy,” Hollywood’s new take on the greatest love story of all time. Homer might be disappointed, as I was, about certain aspects of the movie—for instance, the casual disposal of Helen and Paris’s love affair in the first half of the movie—for what the director considers the real juicy story, the story of Achilles. In keeping with current American preoccupations, war seems to be on Hollywood’s mind more than love. Immortality is the reason why men would prefer to die in war rather than live in peace, says David Benioff’s version of the screenplay. M...

Reading the Gita Sushma Joshi The Bhagwad Gita is a book I had avoided diligently. The Sanskrit was intimidating, the topic abstruse (a lecture on a battlefield to move a reluctant warrior), the book in general surrounded by an aura of religiosity which I did not feel I could live up to. The enthusiastic undergraduate students with whom I studied in an American college and who gushed about the Gita further put me off – the Gita, it seemed, was a book of hippies and New Age seekers, and nothing to do with me. This is how I, a child of Hindu parents and a part-time Buddhist, came to know more about the Koran and the Bible, the Sattipathana sutta and the life of Milarepa, than about one of the most well-known books of my own tradition. In college, I spent six months reading the texts of Islam, including the Koran, with a Jewish scholar. His commitment to the texts, scholarship and history was extraordinary. Also memorable were impromptu midnight readings of the Song of Solomon from ...

Bagsellers take a rest and play a game of cards on Tourism Day, Thamel. 

RNA tank in Putalisadak during bandh day.

Barbie, subcontinental style.