Act III, Sundhara

I will be outside Kathmandu, on the road, for a few days. I haven't checked Sunday Post, but it is possible that my article hasn't been published, on account of its crappiness. It does have one phrase which I wish to have published, shown to the world: "the prolonged freshness of feces in the winter." Here, the issue is one of the olfactory and visual persistence or the freshness of feces in public spaces in Kathmandu. Normally--or, in warmer weather--feces that appear overnight tend to dry, brown and contract over the day, and in a few days, become one with the city's overcoat of filth. Not so in winter. Now, dryness comes in patches, and the surface becomes mottled rather than uniformly browned, and its wetness is also preserved: it turns a shiny orange before it turns brown, as if the hemoglobin refuses to oxidise into rust.

Keen observation makes for good writing, I am told, but all I see around me is shit.

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Act III, Sundhara

A busy afternoon around Sundhara looks an infernal mess. The halt-and-sprint frenzy of vehicles coming through Sahid Gate, the wide-eyed scurrying of pedestrians crossing where they shouldn't, the prolonged freshness of feces in the winter, the olive-garbed stampede of baton-wielding municipality police, the joust of peddlers and hawkers, the teary, insistent and sometimes absent eyes of limbless children laid along the post-office walls, all add to the fermented sensory mayhem of the space.

Sometimes during the day, late, perhaps, or just before everything else of interest is about to start—worries, meetings with friends or family, a demonstration outside Tri-Chandra to halt all traffic coming around Tundikhel—it is possible to hear warcries answered by ululations and lamenting, thick footfalls running after the fast patter of rubber chappals. Soon municipality police comes hurrying through, searching for seeming phantoms that melt into the crowd, shaking the moment with their threats, while signalling ululations are relayed to every corner in the neighborhood. Anybody witnessing this frequent and comedic show of municipal efficiency is habitually forced to giggle and gloat in empathy with those that have evaded the reach of city-issued bamboo canes. It is possible to be enthralled to see this dance of the city.

But, sometimes, these tableaux disintegrate into chaos. An end of a fariya comes undone and trips its owner, or a cane finds its mark on a fleeing child's back. A nanglo of oranges must be hard to juggle as a horde of pot-bellied, potty-mouthed men come pouncing, attacking their way through the crowd, putting a yard between themselves and each mall-shopping respectable citizen while, like fabled champions, finding with their canes the scum of the city: the tax-evading, slum-living, sidewalk-hogging, defecating, fast-hawking, rag-picking outsiders. Pressed to a side, fixed into observing, from one vantage their relationship—the gulf between the hunter and the chased, and the sinew that binds them together—becomes illuminated and detailed.

The chase is a farce that mirrors all that is primal and base in our relations: strength towering over weakness, the wretched fleeing for its life while a blood-thirsty horde goes giggling after it. It is an old struggle renewed each day by both parties. The weak says—I will connive to steal from your purse for no other reason than the fact that your draw my mouth shut and give me nothing to eat, will hear nothing I say, and you leave me with nothing to claim. The strong says—I remain strong because I steal your grub and your grit; because I rub out your voice, I can bellow. So the weak moves stealthily in the shadows to spread its wares of piled lime, piled strawberries, piled amala, freshly milled dal around a grindstone, sheaves of pirated DVDs, watches in submerged in water, rechargeable batteries, Cello pens on the sidewalks. It knows from old muscle memory that everything must be arranges in neat, pyramidal piles if upward mobility is to be effected: such shapes alone lift the weak away from the shackling memory of the wallowing pit where they had hitherto perished. It remembers from revolutions and temples. But, the strong knows where gold grows: it grows in the distance between the work done by a weakling and the feed it gets in return for that effort. Therefore the strong guards that distance angrily, as if it is the seedbed for its progeny.

A nanglo of oranges must be hard to juggle while running up a flight of steps, or while begging an alley to swallow you. Sometimes the oranges, so neatly piled, yet excused from rules of ambition, crudely tumble out of formation, fall down steps, fall into not-yet-caked feces, leave a bright, guilty trail behind for the municipal police to follow. This usually brings a short jolt to Sundhara, throwing in its path a hiccupping interruption, occasion for pedestrians to grin at the comedy of oranges falling like marbles down a flight of stairs, and mall-shopping respectable citizens banging into each other's important heads as they try to steal just one orange, or no more than how many both hands will hold, with one more in the bag, (why not?).

Right then, the unshapely, dim-robed metropolitan policemen bang their canes hard on the floor and glare at the citizens picking from the earth the fruits of another person's labor. The ruddy ardor of chase falls away from their faces and they clutch their sides in pain. They are deeply disgusted by the gestures of the people for whose comfort they chase away old women with baskets of peanuts and bags of strawberries. They lack the authority to chase after these thieves, so they watch in horror, looking askance into the alleys where the owner of the snatched oranges has disappeared. Suddenly, they are the fathers and brothers of the same women who set shop on the pavements.

Then the ridiculousness of the chase becomes apparent. Their sides hurt and they want a cigarette to catch their breath. Theirs is a job for jesters, pawns, jokers. They serve the aesthetics of another sort of people, which involves raining lashes at widows from outlying villages. From one vantage, the hunters look bewildered, confused by the cheap greed of pedestrians bending to snatch oranges from the ground and the wail and curses of a looted vendor echoing from an alley. That cry of desperation bonds with the bewilderment, the sense of betrayal on the face of metro-police. Come night, both police and vendor will share same room, same meal. Come tomorrow, they must wear their costumes and head to Sundhara to play out the farce. Thus, everyday Sundhara elevates from being just a mess and in its terrifying essence remains simply infernal.

This Ridiculous World

http://thisridiculousworld.blogspot.com/

This blog is maintained by the Weeds. Lily was a film student at Whitman. She is one funny girl. As in humorous, not ridiculous. The world, on the other hand, is ridiculous.

If you want a knowing chuckle every now and then, visit the link above.

No Updates

for a few days to come. No updates.

The 500 Blows

What is below is tonight's exercise. Let's see if I can start and abandon a story everyday after 500 words. I have started doing push-ups, 10 at a time. 500 words a day seems alright, especially if they don't have to go anywhere.

--
Policeman


Khatri's boys were doing the decent thing by helping out with the neighborhood watch group. Earlier, there had been talks about requiring volunteers from each house. “Drivel,” Tham Bahadur had said. Members of the Committee had been stunned. If Tham Bahadur objected to it, what need was there for anybody else to agree to the idea? It was November already, and the nights were getting colder.

It had been agreed that Khatri's boys could become full time watchmen for the neighborhood. They had been good. The older boy had beaten a junkie to a pulp after being stabbed in the shoulder when a handful of junkies were caught trying to pry loose Bhimsen's water-pump. Even the younger boy was brave enough. Kasaju's daughter in law had stormed into the lane wailing one night not too long ago, when three motorcycles had followed her from her office, trying to kick her green scooter off the road, whooping and yelling obscenities at her.

The younger boy had pushed his bamboo baton into the spokes of a motorcycle's front wheels. There had been witnesses, by now standing at their windows, who saw the bike skid along the road, sending off bright sparks. When neighbors came to defend Kasaju's daughter in law, carrying their canes spiked with nails and naked khukuris, two motorcycles fled, leaving behind two badly bruised men. Their motorcycle was promptly put on fire, and men beat the outsiders senseless before shaving their heads and rubbing the carbon from old batteries on their faces.

Tham Bahadur hadn't gone out into the street that night. He had made no effort to stop the mob either. It had been a difficult few days for him at the office afterwards because one of the outsiders turned out to be the nephew of a policeman from another district. “Where were you when this was happening right outside your window?” the policeman had asked, pushing his face closer to Tham Bahadur.

Because he had to stand in attention while addressing a senior policeman, Tham Bahadur had clenched his jaws and stared at a point in the ceiling just above the flag as he answered. “This wasn't happening right outside my window, sir,” he had said evenly. “More like three houses away. And I was sound asleep.”

“Don't mock me, Tham Bahadur,” the policeman had said, spitting anger with every word. That was a while ago. Karki's boys had continued to patrol the neighborhood. Tham Bahadur found the sound of their bamboo canes tapping on the pavement very comforting. If they were out doing their job, he could sleep in peace. Occasionally, the older boy would blow on his whistle or make a whooping sound, like the sounds Tham Bahadur had made in the jungles in Nayadada as a boy. Sometimes, his aching back would wake him in the early morning hours, and he would wait for the whooping and tapping to approach from the Ganesh temple end of the lane. His warm bed made it easier to imagine the company of many absent loves, and knowing that Khatri's boys were within earshot made him feel less lonely until sleep returned.

Lives of Jawang

I had wanted to write something brilliant with this post, but, as always, when the intention to brilliance is there, I fail. I am like the caveman who knows how to make sparks by hitting two stones together, but can never make a fire. Never a fire. In any case, here is the essay I submitted to The Kathmandu Post. I don't know if it has been published--I have to go out and buy a paper to verify.

---


Lives of Jawang is being shown at KIMFF, Rastriya Sabha Griha, at 3:15 pm, Monday, December 15. It is a work that reaches into mysterious distances to dig for kernels of truth. It is beguilingly a simple fare, but it is folded within itself. This thirty five minute long documentary by Ramesh Khadka builds itself up slowly, eschewing any grandstanding, to let rhymes within the narrative to work on the viewer.

Lives of Jawang is a good work of documentation, and of art. It would be wrong to claim it attains the impossible capacity for pure objectivity: there are lapses, the croak of a voice being piped through a wall, that jolt the viewer back into the seat, away from documented reality. But, that doesn't detract from the viewing experience as much. There is a fog that prevails over the village and its life which softens such intrusions and keeps the focus on motifs that linger in the background, waiting their turn to step into the limelight before quietly retreating into the shadows again.

By the time the contractor at a quarry says of his ilk that, “Chepang ko buddhi nai chhaina: khanne, ukkaune, jhikne, khaidine," the viewer knows just enough about digging and destroying in search of a harsh livelihood that she gasps with the overpowering punch of comprehension. By then, the viewer has seen just enough of the commentator, a Chepang from Jawang, that she can identify within the commentator's voice many shades of abuse and complaints and strains of old fashioned fatalism.
Between the opening scenes which come off as play-acted for the camera, where women ask each other what there is for food, and the closing scenes where the cast of characters has come into its own, we see the villagers forage for food in the jungle, in their aboriginal ways, tracing vines of tubers and yams to eke out a living, and close the narrative arc with men digging boulders out of the same slopes, slowly destroying for a paltry wage the very land that makes it possible for them to live like their ancestors.

Is it justified to ask an aboriginal people to continue their way of life? There is bound to be divisions amongst a people that finds its capacity for tradition tied to its chances of survival as a distinct people. Similarly, there will be those who champion a path away from tradition, towards what counts as normalcy, towards homogenization, which is a necessary step in a multifarious society aiming for the liberty of the atomized individual, where a life unshackled from inheritance is finally possible.

There is a passage in Lives of Jawang where an elderly woman wishes she could ear rice for every meal. She is the native who yearns for the foreign, because there is nothing attractive about the indigenous life to those who have to actually live it, those born into it and without a parachute of escape into another world. The very reason this documentary exists—as a documentation of a disappearing people that are slowly being pushed off the rocky slopes into the tumult of Trishuli—becomes a farce before this realization: this lady doesn't need her story to be told to people sitting in Rastriya Sabha Griha. She needs rice and dal and warm clothes to wear that come from China.

Some of the people speaking to the person behind the camera understand the gaze that is being turned on them, and don't mind a bit of posturing. The unpacking of authentic life for faraway voyeurs is exactly as old as ethnography in film. Villagers in Jhawang also relish the opportunity to address us from the other side of the funnel, understanding that they are personas on screen, unshackled from being persons that must face consequences of their stories and slurs.

Racism is rampant in Jawang, in the way aeons of victimization works its way into the myths and lores of a people. Of course, the traditional robber of the hills, the cunning Bahun, is told of by a village elder. But there is a seething hate present under the surface towards the Marwari owner of a stone quarry that employs young Chepang men. Not only is the quarry physically removing the landscape with which the lives of the Chepang village is tied, presumably to built malls and houses for Kathmandu elite, but the wages for a day's labor of “khanne, ukkaune” are very bad, and there is no regard for the safety of the workers. It isn't uncommon for a worker, who has also sneaked in a bowl of jaand during the afternoon break, to get squashed by a boulder tumbling down the sides.

Lives of Jawang works without much flair or fanfare, but it certainly works, juxtaposing very specific commentaries about life in Jawang. Two modern “evils” rear their heads in serpentine fashion: money and alcohol, but it isn't hard to see that these evils allow Chepangs to break away from the patterns of the aboriginal, for good or for bad. Alcohol requires cash, which requires working for the Marwari they despise, but it brings them out of the slopes and into our world, where it is possible for well-fed, warm and occasionally sober people to sit in a darkened theater and enjoy the pity that wells up when a child hungrily watches a grandmother digging food out of ashes.

Load Shedding

Life is tied to the load shedding schedule these days. I had plans to go to KIMFF the past two days--especially since Diwas got me a press pass--but there was electricity at home all day the past two days, and I spent most of it trying to be productive, or pretending something suchlike and failing. 

I don't get out of bed in the mornings unless there is power, which means I sleep until 9 most mornings, and most nights, I stay up as late as my body permits. Not that I seem to be getting much done, but it seems to make a slavish sense to tie the body to an arbitrary schedule. There is logic to it some where, in some shape I can't discern yet. 

And that's another--I have been feeling increasingly more dumb, uneducated, incapable of new ideas. It might be just that I am less and less impressed with myself, not yet facing up to the fact that I have already begotten a crust of mediocrity around me. 

But, [and this is what I was working up to], it feels a bit different now. I am inching closer to an idea of something that I want to put on paper/screen, working assiduously away from anything else I have done before, although I recognize the impossibility of it. Instead of writing a story, I am going to write a non-story. Instead of plots, there'll be elipses. Instead of characters there will be their absense in a world perfected and populated by them.  Three strands, violence of a different kind with each. A short, short. Minimal dialogues. A menagerie in jars. Flutes. River. Alcohol. Stone and sand and shadows, and ennui settling on pretty eyes. It will be bad, but much before that, it will be badass. Hella! 

Huri, if you're reading this, in a fw days time little will I send you, and you can send me a little.  

Failure to Launch

I need to be doing some serious writing work, which hasn't yet started to bleed freely... Since 9 this morning, I have been sitting at my desk, and this aborted crap is all I have to show for it:

--

Cymbals

I told him to smother the fire with wet burlap to hide the smell. He looked up when I stopped at the door. “You will take care of this?” I said. I had meant it as a question. He took it as an order. It was hard to trust him, but there were things to do, people to take care of.

Outside, everything was normal. Nobody had seen smoke or other signs of a fire. People laughed or argued, depending upon where they stood in the crowded market. The midday sun hid each face in a shroud of deep shadows. If people knew about the fire, they didn't show panic. The flute-seller was picking his teeth near the Annapurna temple. He was leaning against his bamboo pole crowned with three hundred flutes. If it weren't for the crowd of hawkers and their colorful wares, saris and brass lamps, the hands of a thousand gods, he would have stood out as a magician or a trickster. When he bared his teeth to sweep up the muck of his mouth with a pink tongue, I thought he grinned at me.

Because I thought he grinned at me, I walked up to him with a smile. He let a trickle of spit fall on my shoes before looking at my face. “Didn't realize it was you,” he said with the same grin. A punch of foul breath pushed back my head. “You saved the flowers?” the flute-seller said. I took it to be a question. He might have said it as a statement of facts. He tugged at his collar to get comfortable inside his yellow shirt.

The flowers became even more beautiful in the sunlight. The mauve and the pink, the stray buds of white, muted verdure of dry herbs and around their edges a dusting of fine red earth: colors leaped from my hands into the air, as if sprung from a cold lair. The flute-seller wasn't impressed. He crinkled his nose and looked away, at nothing in particular, but at a pocket of disapproval.

“Did you bring the sacks?” he asked.

“I told you I wouldn't,” I said. By then, he had huffed off, bobbing the crown of flutes some height above us. Air passed in or out of the flutes with every stride . Although they couldn't sing, they sighed or whistled staccato notes. “I would never bring the sacks,” I said. He turned around sharply with flared nostrils and a line of sweat seeping across the shut mouth. Pigeons resting on the roofs of shops along the street leaped from their perch and flapped lazily before resettling to peck and mount and nuzzle. I paused to stare a hole into his back, my head bobbing in anger and a gilded, venomous curiosity studying his gait to find a chink in the armor.

“I can smell it on you,” he growled over his shoulder. “You burned my sacks. I can smell it in your breath.”

“It was an accident,” I was becoming defensive. The strap on my sandal broke again. I stood on one foot to push the safety-pin through the strap and the mangled edge of the sandal. He waited to let me catch up, but he didn't turn around. He grabbed a thin, shrill flute into which he breathed in anger, pursing his mouth into an ugly pout, no doubt. Immediately as my sandal slapped the ground, he set a martial pace with the flute for me to follow.

---

I have no idea where this was headed. Now I sit down for another session of fruitless meditation.

Hiatus

I feel it coming, like a dull blade reaching to the bones, slow and painful. I will probably start seeking out certain books by certain men and read certain passages in them before finding a corner in which to mope about it all. Certain books by certain men never fail to touch the right spots in the mind. The heart, after all, is just a bleeding organ, and shouldn't be encouraged too much to go its own way. 

I am behind on my deadline for coming Sunday's article, which I intend to write on Jawang ka Jindagiharu, the documentary about which I said in an earlier port that it is worthy of an entire essay of its own. I sat down to write it, but found it more fun to chat with Diwas and Tuan instead. I am feeling very sapped of any creativity at all, which seems like a corny thing to say, except it isn't. It is like a person, who finds he can't write at all anymore, trying to explain to another person what a block is. Such explanations always come off as excuses, lame attempts at hiding the real defects in ability and character. 

When you aren't feeling creative, you are feeling the burden of the mediocre. If you have seen good work done by others and want to do even better, but in your plate or your page you see sub-standard fare, you know the oppressive mass of mediocrity. It isn't borne of jealousy--it is an acuity of knowledge of what exists as the capacity and creations of your peers, and what exists as limits to your own abilities. 

And I have been feeling mediocre, a feeling that is made worse by the incapacity to imagine the alternative. As a writer, I should be able to imagine a better sentence or turn of phrase, at the most basic level, like choosing a brick that'll fit better into the masonry. I haven't been able to see anything. It could just be December, that damned beast, ramming its way into cranial folds and making me blue. Or, it is possible, I am just plain dumb in the choices I make. 

 

Bikku Kumar Shah

La. Here's a picture for you to download and put on Facebook. Alikati crop gar, ani photoshop ma brightness/contrast/color levels haru adjust gar. Sethji bhayera facebook ma picture narakhnu ta thik haina. Ma sanga Tyke ko pani picture chha, yehin katai, older posta ma.

Blame Nobody

The flowers are here because they are pretty.

I can't find a link to today's article on kantipuronline.com Here is today's article as I submitted it:

Blame Nobody

Frames of War by Prem BK and Kesang Tseten will be shown in the human-rights section of the 6^th Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival, being held between 11 and 15 December, 2008. It is part a bouquet of vignettes and part promotional material for the book A People War. It suffers whenever it stops documenting the recollections and reactions of photographers responsible for the images, and the public who saw the traveling show of the book, and focus on Kunda Dixit instead, and thus sullies the solemnity of witnessing what actually matters.

There are many precious moments in the film: the gravely comedic exchange between a mother and father who correct each other about the date when their Maoist son disappeared, or the brave sermon by the daughter of a disappeared policeman about how the dwellers of huts are as happy as palace-dwellers, and therefore nobody should have her happiness taken away. The true picture of the conflict emerges in exhibition venues and in the vignettes collected in the homes of the bereaved as their rigid cocoon of discomfort is broken by seeing something so familiar as tragedy reflected in the eyes of total strangers.

Never mind Dixit's hammering of the cliché about pictures speaking a thousand words—it is when words come and halt in memory of the burn and terror and deaths and bereavement that filled the rural lives of the protagonists of the war's story that the photographs gain meaning. They come detached from the efforts of those who collected and edited them into a book that is also a travelling show, and become what they were originally meant to be: conduits of empathy, mirrors of the common, careful score of our quotidian fare of injustice and mindless violence.

That violence and injustice are daily staples seems to be a theme shared by Suma Josson's documentary I Want My Father Back. Whenever the narrator isn't saying sentences that make you want to head-butt a wall out of frustration, what we see is a broken string of vignettes about the cotton farmers of Bidharbha, in Maharashtra, for a while now driven to suicide, and evil multi-national companies based in the USA who should be held accountable for their deaths.

There are three vignettes in the film that summarize its intention. A grandmothers sits by her orphaned grandson, who sings a children's rhyme on a charpoy. Looking past the camera, the boy grins happily. This gets his grandmother crying. The boy turns to look at her, and as if punishing himself for the brief lapse away from her grief, his face quivers in empathy. His father killed himself after loans accumulated beyond his capacity to repay.

Illuminated by a naked bulb, two young men talk of the choices before them: suicide or banditry and insurgency. They choose banditry. In another vignette, a father unpacks a suitcase of clothes as the narrator reads a note left behind by the man's daughter, who killed herself in order to lessen the burden of loans on her father to make way for her sisters' wedding. In her note, she asks to “blame nobody” for her death.

Vandana Shiva tries hard to persuade that all evil comes from outside the farmers' idyll—politicians, businessmen, globalization, liberalization, genetic engineering, corporate greed. But this hides a fact: these men and women were not murdered, but driven to suicide. Not just by debt and preying greed of faraway men, but by their neighbors and brothers, by centuries old codification of honor and shame. They chose not to be thieves, and found suicide easier. It is the community that is really evil in this picture.

Both Frames of War and I Want My Father Back seem inauthentic because they purport to be documentaries while being merely non-fiction. Both have dictatorial voices telling the viewer what her opinion should be after watching the documentary. These are inadequate narrators who spend more than necessary portion of the film to establish themselves, and miss the speeches and actions of their subjects. They don't dwell on what is truly profound in the behavior of their subjects because they are too eager to return to themselves.

Jawangka Jindagiharu, by Ramesh Khadka, is far superior to the two documentaries mentioned above, as simple documentation of a people's lives. It isn't merely non-fiction. Yet, it is filled with characters—an entire village of Chepangs living in Dhading—and it reaches into mysterious distances to dig for verity. It isn't a clunky string of vignettes, but a delicate narrative with internal rhymes and echoes, of nature and change, man and his recalcitrant desires, of the cyclicity of ordinariness. It is a film that deserves praise while it is being shown. It deserves an entire essay dedicated to it.

Saturday come

A few days ago, Kathmandu was shut down for three separate reasons: students protesting the fact that bus fares hadn't been reduced although fuel prices had gone down; locals and students from Kalanki/Kalimati protesting the murder by YCL of two young men from their area; and residents of Chabahil/Boudha area protesting against the murder of two teenagers from their area, by parties as of then unknown.

It turns out that the teenagers were killed by their acquaintances over six thousand rupees in cell-phone related debt. I see three problems that compounded to create that incident:

--A teenager not only had a cellphone, but also sold it to his teenage friend for the sum of six thousand rupees. It is unclear if either of them earned any money. Why would a teenager sell his cellphone? How would another unemployed teenager be expected to pay for it? If his parents could afford a phone for him, he wouldn't be buying from his friend.

--What sort of desperation or alienation from the norm and the average sort of reality does a person have to be experiencing to be persuaded to plot to kill a friend for a sum of six thousand rupees? People won't admit to it, but this has racial undertones to it. Which brings me to my third point:

--The intended murder weapon was a home-made revolver bought for three thousand rupees, the price of death of each of the two slain boys. It had been bought in the Terai, where, as does water down a face of stone, weapons from the conflict have trickled down to nest with different groups. Such a weapon was smuggled to Kathmandu, no doubt to be put to use at some point.

It is a tragedy, more so because the kid who didn't want to pay back the debt had the counsel of two older men who incited him to murder. The second kid was an accidental witness who tagged along with his friend to gather the money, perhaps excited about the revelry that would follow. He had to be killed, as such are the needs of banal evil.  

---

Milan, who edited Sano Sansar, has been steadily adding slightest touches of editorial magic to the short film. Most of editing is routine, bound by the set script and severely restricted by the mistakes of other people. Yet, there is always an opportunity, or more, for the deft editor to transform a moment from a dull mistake to an occasion for wonder or chuckle, as the case may be.

I was especially touched when he took a free-standing clip of Sushma giggling, a short cough of a giggle that lasted two heaves of the shoulders, and pasted it over an exchange between two characters egging each other. He timed it perfectly at the first attempt, so that she appeared to be giggling at a joke being told off-screen. The moment had nothing to do with Sushma's acting abilities, because she hadn't acted when she giggled like that--it was a candid moment, where she probably thought we'd use the part where she was doing montage actions of picking and throwing cards, taking a sip of her wine, but she giggled in between moments, and Milan made perfect use of that. 

  

December 6th

Happy Birthday! Best wishes of the day.

I got to watch 3 documentaries ahead of the Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival. One of them is good, but too traditional for Kathmandu: the audience here loves gimmick, doesn't have the acuity of intellect to separate content from vehicle, and will probably like I Want My Father Back, which, in my opinion, is a crap-chute of a documentary, with the chute part attached at your throat, so that crap can be shoveled in. Problem is: it is like a fleshy snake stuck on an elegant spine. The flesh is the corpulence of a hate-mongering Vandana Shiva--for that is what she comes off as, albeit she hate mongers against a form of hate--and a self-besotted filmmaker, who thinks that showing a younger, different woman, Priyanka!, is enough to go to absurd, fabulous lengths to disguise her propaganda as an act of documentation.

Similar is the self-importance of Kunda Dixit in The Frames of War. It is a project about a project that cannibalized the work of many photographers who worked during the war. Again, the real people inching towards the camera to tell their stories, the old frail under the burden of grief they can't shed, and the young as if bursting at the seams with incontrollable rage and need for revenge, are the real documentary, not Kunda Dixit in his office, very thoughtfully transferring data from one computer to next, showing how he had missed the arch of a woman's eyebrow in his first viewing. The movie would improve tremendously if they removed him and added back whatever footage of actual people pouring out their actual grief.

There was another documentary about Chepangs, called Jawangka Jindagiharu, which restored my faith in documentaries. I have always been deeply skeptical of people's ability to tell stories without making them into propaganda pieces. This documentary does that the least of the lot.

It is hard not to sympathize with disenfranchised farmers. It is hard not to rage against greedy corporations, but it is harder for me to listen to a bunch of narrators who patronize the audience and spew whatever crap they want.

I am tired now.