THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

Apologies for the ten year old photo with the shaved head on my profile picture: I can't seem to change it! Its stuck! But here's another one (and this one is already a few years old as well) so you can recognize me on the street when you see me...

Sushma Joshi The budget speech of Fiscal Year 2008-9 was given a month ago, but people, I amongst them, are still mulling it. Dr. Baburam Bhattarai quotes poet Laxmi Prasad Devkota on his fourth point: “we should aim to fly high and touch the moon.” The shadow of poetry is apt -- indeed, the document is a piece of literature in itself, gripping in the way it tries to address the concerns of an entire nation. And like a poet's dream, the vision is large and slightly hallucinatory, addressing everything from social security for elderly people and widows to ambitious highways, from cleaning up the Bagmati to mainstreaming madrasas into the educational system. After a while, reading line after line of Dr. Bhattarai saying “I have allocated” followed by a seemingly astronomical number, the budget starts to look like a good piece of fiction. From money to prolapsed uterus to herbal collection facilities for Jumla, from electric fencing to keep out wild elephants in Jhapa to the cultivati...

The Kathmandu Post Sushma Joshi Why did it take us so long to get here? I think, as I watch an actor cross the entire theatre of Gurukul on a rope suspended diagonally above our heads. Simultaneously, a screen in front of us displays a video projection of the raging Karnali river. The actor in question is in the play The Karnali Moves Southward (Karnali Dakshin Bagdo Chha), and as the audience looks up and watches him cross the rope bridge over a virtual river, he plunges to the ground to his death. The shock that follows in the theatre is visceral. We are watching a moment of performance, and yet the lament that follows from the death is so real it shocks the audience to a funerary silence. The video footage of the woman with a basketful of grass crossing the same river in the same manner, when it appears on the video screen, appears banal. The audience is sure to check its momentary knowledge of the “real” with the “virtual”, and wonder how many times it has watched a television scre...

The Kathmandu Post By SUSHMA JOSHI The Patan Museum courtyard, was at first empty, then quickly full, by 5:10pm on Saturday evening. The event was a fundraising concert, and the musicians in questions were Kutumba and a sibling duo, Barta and Binod Gandharva. Binod is still in high school, and Barta is yet to go to college. The event was aimed to raise funds for their education. Kutumba is a name I've heard a lot, but keeping with my rule of avoiding events in which musicians who play traditional instruments congregate, I briefly considered not attending. Traditional music played just on instruments has too many strings and too much melancholy. I prefer my traditional music on the radio, where it rightly belongs, paired with a nice vocalist. Of course I was wrong. Kutumba turned out to be a group of nice young men, dressed in rather funky red and black Nepali style blouses and trousers, with a phenomenal repetoire of music. Yes, indeed, the instruments they used were mostly traditi...

Breaking Trail ECS NEPAL | The Nepali Way, March 2008   Text by : Sushma Joshi The room in the Summit Hotel where Arlene Blum waited to talk was full of expatriates, not unusual for a Cultural Studies Group talk—but on the side, sitting on the edge with nervousness and excitement, was a group of very young Nepaliwomen. After her talk, I went up to them and discovered that they were an all female team about to attempt Mt Everest. The glow they had in their eyes reflected the boost of energy we had received from an inspirational woman.   “Look at this slope. Isn’t this an easy one? Wouldn’t you just love to be up there?” she asks the audience, pointing to a slide with a gentle slope. And yes, after listening to Arlene, we can almost imagine ourselves halfway up a high altitude mountain slope. Tall and grey-haired, Arlene is distinguished and yet still full of childlike enthusiasm for her two passions—mountaineering and chemistry. A chemist who got her PhD during the Seventies, when th...