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...