THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

SUSHMA JOSHI When Basanta Thapa of the Himal Association called me up and asked me if I’d like to be one of the jury members of the UK Nepal Climate Change Competition, it sounded easy. “We’ve received three films,” he said. “About seven have registered to send more.” We estimated at the most about two dozen films, each three minutes long, that we’d watch in one sitting. When I rushed in at 9:15am at the judging venue, and said: “I hear we now have 70 submissions!”, Basanta Dai said to me: “Its now 124!” The numbers were incredible, if only because a few years ago one could count the number of filmmakers on the fingers of two hands. As we sat down to watch the first film, I got a tingle in my scalp from the excitement. There were 124 filmmakers in Nepal who were not just interested in climate change issues but who had actually gotten it together to submit films? This, indeed, ws good news for Nepal. This explosion of filmmaking had come not just from access to cheap technology but al...

Sushma Joshi 09/8/14 I became a hippie by mistake. A few days before my 19th birthday, a man approached me in the co-operative house where I used to live in Providence, Rhode Island, and asked: “Would you like to follow the Grateful Dead?” “Yes!” I answered, having not the slightest clue what or who the Grateful Dead were. “Do you know what you’re getting into?” My friend Naomi, who was accompanying me on this venture, asked me. “No,” I said. “But my brother used to listen to the Grateful Dead. They have covers with skulls holding roses between their teeth.” And that was the way I ended up wounding my way across the U.S. in a rattling Volkswagen van, cutting a straight path from Ohio to Kentucky to Illinois to Berkeley to Eugene, Oregon in a gypsy caravan with four hippies, singing and dancing along with one of the most alternative bands on the planet. Never mind that by this time (this was 1992), the Grateful Dead were more mainstream than Bon Jovi. Who cared about their record ...

Sushma Joshi Kathmandu Post, 2009/07/31 Long before it became fashionable in Kathmandu to discuss ways to eradicate caste, class and ethnic boundaries and discrimination, there was one Nepali space where this was already taking place. The hill station of Darjeeling, where the British went to cool off, has retained an institutional legacy of colonialism that even the staunchest post-colonialist would have a hard time criticising. This legacy comes in the form of British-style boarding schools which teach children not just the time-honoured stiff upper lip regarding hardships, but also an absolute levelling of all social hierarchies. These schools have literally transformed thousands upon thousands of Nepali students into intelligent, efficient and law-abiding citizens. Ever wondered why some institutions in Nepal function so well, despite the crazy culture of malingering and corruption? The secret is probably a Darjeeling (or “Darj” for short) alum. I’d guarantee there’s a high likeliho...