Prachanda once more?

Post my whirlwind visit to Kathmandu, I was back in my flat in London last night thinking that something dramatic will happen sooner than later and here I am now writing this just a few hours after the resignation of Prime Minister Dahal.

The question now is will Pushpa Kamal Dahal once again don his combats and return to his pre peace agreement alter ego of Prachanda?

The resignation was inevitable after the President’s explicit patronage offered to COAS Katwal, a clear undermining of the Prime Minister’s position and authority.

Despite Dahal’s assurance about his commitment towards the peace process, does his decision today mark the beginning of renewed aggression?

Victoria Coren – The Observer

An excellent piece by Victoria Coren on women and dieting in today´s Observer

Who is thicker? A supermodel or a stick of celery?

Being Nepali

So what questions are you going to ask me?

The name of the thirty two million gods?

How many spoons of ghee in the rice pudding?

Whether the awning of Pashupati is gold or silver?

Did Prithvi Narayan Shah, in that story, eat rice or corn?

So what are you going to make me do?

The dance of Annapurna with me clanking the bells?

Or force me into hiding from sunlight four days every month?

And then bow my head to my fathers and grandfathers?

But they have all died and disappeared,

and I did try in time – so,

Will that be enough now?

Have I appeased you and apologized enough?

For being away too long

Have I proved to you yet?

I really am from your land.

I

These fingers, they once unfurled like the wings of a free bird

Like a victorious wave that dived and soared to its nemesis, my tips

The rhythm of a harmonium would wait in line to be heard

As these fingers ignored the skeleton’s stricture, and its hiss.

These eyes, they once rolled to the heavens like a biased dice

Creating ripples in the hearts of those who were too silly to care

They took to stage as an enchantress determined to entice

And left before the applause to stare elsewhere.

These hands, they could once revere, in unison the lifeless deity,

Demanding good riddance for its act as the ingenious impostor.

Sometimes it was an anklet adorning a stubborn red artery,

Sometimes a mirror that caressed and fed the vanity of a prankster.

In retrospect the whole that is -  I -  seems to be possessed not pristine,

Forced to give up its flirtations for the greater good of the machine.

Zebra Crossings

I don’t care for Zebra Crossings,
nobody does, in a poor country,
everybody just wants to cross,
whenever and wherever,
everybody wants to get to the other side,
of things that need to be left behind.

Things were different when I was small,
I cared for things,
I cared for Scouts and badges,
I cared so much that one day, the whole day,
in my pleated skirt and my feathered hat,
I asked people,
to use the Zebra Crossing.

An open letter to Rakesh Omprakash Mehra

Dear Mr. Mehra,

With great expectations, I watched Delhi 6 recently. Before watching the film I did tell myself that even though the film disappoints, I can still rely on the AR Rahman experience. The song Masakali was ringing in my head like a suppressed memory that was dying to appear in front of my eyes. The first two lines of the song relentlessly played tricks with my mind until I could take it no longer and decided that I had to put the song in some sort of a context or make it part of the journey, your own reference to the movie’s somewhat weak plot.

I have to say that I love movies that take me on a journey or movies that weave characters and settings and songs into an intricate entity, without necessarily having a robust beginning, middle or an end. And Delhi 6 started off so well. The adorable grandmother, returning to her homeland to spend her last remaining days and the Homeland that only injects a new life to her age old prejudices and superstitions. The sparring brothers who have a wall that stands between their houses, their lives and their happiness. The perceived local idiot who hides his sensibilities behind a facade of blind faith and belief. The two small kids who go up to the local untouchable/institutionalized prostitute and ask her to turn them into men (one of the most hilarious scenes of the movie) The young woman who sees Indian Idol as her escape from her impending arranged marriage that stems from her structured middle class life and of course the alienated NRI who is searching for his identity in his forgotten homeland.

All the characters make a lasting impression but its the innumerable themes that you try to juggle that causes the movie to falter. You try to showcase the religious and communal tensions, the break down of family, identity crisis, alienation, arranged marriages, the caste system, the struggle of good against evil, prejudice, superstition, alienation against the impressive backdrop of Ramayana. It is a moving attempt but it left me with the sense of emptiness as the climax of the movie sprung on me like an uninvited guest and before I knew it the movie ended.

All I have left to cherish now are snippets of wonderful scenes and now that I think of the movie I feel it would have worked much better as a television series similar to Malgudi Days, perhaps, where you could really manipulate the colorful setting of Delhi 6 and do justice to each of your characters and each of your scenes.

I commend you on your attempt but the next time you make a movie, be fair to your audience and give them the opportunity to really salvage your characters and the chapters in their lives.

A strange world

We live in a strange world.

Here in London, its all about weight watchers and cup a soup diets where one’s life is consumed by counting points and calory intakes. The day to day office life is spiced up by ‘weigh-offs’ and talking about ingenious ways to fool your own body and your mind into thinking that you are full even though your soul is probably starved. But, then who am I to comment for I have found myself at times intrigued by this whole ‘its not really a diet’ phenomenon.

But, what I can do is perhaps put things into perspective for all the women out there on a diet. As you are probably aware the perception of beauty is different in different parts of the world. And in a certain corner of the world girls are actually treated like pigs – poor sucklings who are fattened before the slaughter. In Mauritania, young girls are sent to ‘fat farms’ so that on their return they are more roundly and in some cases obese and thus more eligible for marriage. So while we are obsessed with starving ourselves and the self – inflicted permanent ‘lent’ is the talk of the town, some girls, who live in a part of the world that most of us have probably not even heard of, are being force fed like animals.

It is a strange world isn’t it?

I thought he was a man but he was just a little boy…

Its been a while.

The wrath of panties

The recent assault on young women in a pub in Mangalore by members of the Sri Rama Sena group, an extreme right group known for stirring communal tension on the grounds of religion and its attempts at being the moral police, has created a furor and rightly so.

Incidents like this further go to show that Sri Ram Sena group is actually just a group of hooligans who meet up in their ‘headquarters’  to drink tea  and probably watch porn while raising their ‘moral’  fingers at women who go to the pub.

Anger towards this incident however has been interestingly channeled towards creating a symbolic campaign aimed at the whole of the chauvinistic, women beating, self acclaimed  ‘moral demi-gods’ who have of course, taken it upon themselves to retain the ‘balance’ in the society just the way god had deemed it to be.

And, this is where the pink panties come into play. Approximately 34,000 pink panties were couriered to Mr. Pramod Mutalik, the leader of Sri Ram Sena on Valentine’s day as a symbolic gesture by the Consortium of  Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women. One thing is for sure, Mr. Mutalik will never run short of a fresh change.

Its interesting how women have used underwear as such a strong symbol of dissent which almost always has provoked an immediate response from those who the dissent is aimed at. The only way to explain this phenomenon is because many men are at the end of the day just scared of the woman’s anatomy. They fear the unknown curves and contours that is unique to every woman.

In 2007, a young woman in Rajkot, India, managed to shake up the usually sleepy police authority by another symbolic gesture. After several unheeded pleas and complaints made by the young woman to the Police for being repeatedly harassed by her in-laws for dowry; the woman marched down the main roads of Rajkot, in her bra and panty, armed with a baseball bat and bangles. This show of defiance jerked the police authority from their ineffectual existence into action which resulted in the immediate arrest of her in-laws.

The moral of the blog is, all you ignorant MCP’s out there, beware of the wrath of the panties!

Get Set Gobama!

Thirty Six years after the historical Wade Vs Roe hearing in Texas which legalised abortion in almost all the states in America, Obama, has made a resounding decision to overturn a law introduced by Bush that restricted funding to international organisations that have fought for abortion rights for women.

This decision is firstly a symbolic victory for organisations like Mary Stopes International. But, most importantly it is a clear message to many countries where abortion is still illegal or the legal realm relies on the causes of pregnancy as  opposed to ‘choice’ and often forces women to the back streets for botched procedures, that have a terrible effect on the wellbeing of women in general.

In the context of Nepal, it was only in 2002 that abortion laws were passed allowing women the right to abortion in their first trimester and access to abortion in the first eighteen weeks if the pregnancy was a cause of rape or incest. Before 2002 abortion was considered a criminal act that carried a sentence of over fifteen years in jail.

Obama’s ruling has created an opportunity for international organisations to be well equipped to continue their fight against states that are burdening the lives of women with their antiquated and patriarchal policies.