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A 94th Academy Awards that steadily maintained a buoyant spirit was rocked by an unbelievable exchange after Will Smith took offense to a joke made by Chris Rock about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, Associated Press reported.

After Rock joked to Smith that he was looking forward to a sequel to “G.I. Jane,” Smith stood up from his seat near the stage, strode up to Rock and slapped him. After sitting back down, Smith shouted at Rock to “keep my wife’s name out of your (expletive) mouth.” 

The moment shocked the Dolby Theatre audience and viewers at home. At the commercial break, presenter Daniel Kaluuya came up to to hug Smith, and Denzel Washington escorted him to the side of the stage. The two talked and hugged and Tyler Perry came over to talk as well. 

Smith is widely expected to win his first Oscar later in the ceremony.

Up until that moment, the show had been running fairly smoothly. Ariana DeBose became the first Afro-Latina to win an Academy Award for supporting actress, while Troy Kotsur became the first deaf actor to win an acting award, according to the Associated Press.

After record-low ratings and a pandemic-marred 2021 show, producers this year turned to one of the biggest stars around — Beyoncé — to kick off an Oscars intended to revive the awards’ place in pop culture. After an introduction from Venus and Serena Williams, Beyoncé performed her “King Richard” nominated song, “Be Alive,” in an elaborately choreographed performance from a lime-colored, open-air stage in Compton, where the Williams sisters grew up.

Hosts Wanda Sykes, Amy Schumer and Regina Hall then began the telecast from the Dolby Theatre. 

“All right, we are here at the Oscars,” began Hall. Sykes finished: “Where movie lovers unite and watch TV.”

Sykes, Schumer and Hall breezily joked through prominent Hollywood issues like pay equity — they said three female hosts were “cheaper than one man” — the Lady Gaga drama that Sykes called “House of Random Accents,” the state of the Golden Globes (now relegated to the memoriam package, said Sykes) and Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriends. Their most pointed political point came at the end of their routine, in which they promised a great night and then alluded to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, Associated Press reported.

There are around 300 souls working at this brick factory in Bungamati, Lalitpur. The majority of them are women who hail from outside Kathmandu—and there is a sizable number of Indian workers. Many of these laborers come to work with the entire family in tow, and it is common to see children helping their parents. Most of these children, I learned, did not attend school. 

As more and more Nepali men are leaving the country in search of jobs, the women who remain behind have been forced to work as wage laborers, as in this brick factory. The work is demanding, the hours are long, and the pay is scant. During 8-9 hours of daily work, the most demanding part is hauling big stacks of bricks on one’s back for storage or for loading onto trucks for selling. 

A worker earns between Rs 600 and Rs 800, the final sum depending on the number of trips they make carrying the bricks. Several studies on these factories have found that the workers there are highly vulnerable to respiratory illnesses like pneumonia and asthma. Workers carrying cooked bricks out of chimneys and those laboring in small workplaces are particularly vulnerable. With no health insurance, falling ill can often be a death sentence.

If you are into TikTok, chances are, you have spotted this guy on your feed, showing his cooking skills in stylistic slow-motion videos.

Subash Shrestha, who goes by the username @subasx on TikTok, has racked up 911k followers. One of his recent videos clocked 177 million views and 8.2 million likes.

Son of a restaurateur couple, Shrestha is a trained chef who’s worked in Abu Dhabi and Macao. He fell in love with cooking when he was a young boy, having spent most of his childhood in his family restaurant and at home watching cooking shows on TV.

Shrestha says he was a chubby kid who loved eating, and inspired by his parents, it didn’t take him long to learn to cook.

“I started helping out in the restaurant kitchen from the time I was a kid,” shares the now 28-year-old. “My mother loved my cooking and she used to tell me that I’d one day become a great cook.”

After completing his plus-two in computer science, Shrestha got enrolled into a Bachelor’s degree program in Information Technology. But he soon realized IT was not his cup of tea.

In 2012, he dropped out and decided to take a diploma course in cooking at Master Chef Institute, Kathmandu. At the time, says Shrestha, cooking wasn’t a common career option in Nepal. Still, he thought there was no harm in getting trained in cooking, an important life skill.

During the eight-month-long course Shrestha not only honed his culinary skills, but also discovered that cooking was the career path he wanted to pursue.

After getting his diploma, Shrestha started applying for jobs at restaurants and hotels in different countries. In 2013, he got an internship offer at Andaz Capital Gate, a five-star hotel in Abu Dhabi.

Leaving home at the age of 20 to go work in a different country was a nerve-wracking experience, says Shrestha.   

But the risk paid off. “In Abu Dhabi, I learned what it was like to be a chef,” he says. “Watching senior chefs work with such patience and love for their dishes was inspiring.”

Shrestha worked and learned the tradecraft from senior chefs at Andaz Capital Gate for two years before he got a better offer from the Dubai-based Somewhere Hotel. There, he only worked for only six months but still learned a lot about Italian and Mediterranean dishes. Shrestha then worked at the Marriott Hotel for two years.

“Working in many places in Abu Dhabi taught me a lot. I got to learn, explore and experiment with different dishes, which would have been impossible had I stayed put in a place,” he says.

Shrestha’s spirit of exploration and experimentation took him to Macao, China. He had been working at Sheraton Grand Macao Hotel for 18 months when covid hit and he had to return to Kathmandu.

It was supposed to be a two-month leave. But international lockdowns and travel restrictions wouldn’t let him leave Nepal for the next two years. And it was during the lockdown that Shrestha’s TikTok journey began. 

He utilized the lockdown period to spend more time with his friends and family and treat them with new dishes.

“The idea of creating TikTok videos started as a fun experiment with my 16-year-old neighbor, Shashin Chamling,” Shrestha says.

The first video they posted was of Shrestha making a pizza that would go on to get more than 300k likes. Neither Shrestha nor Chamling expected the video to explode on TikTok.  

“I knew there were some TikTok creators who posted cooking videos,” he says. “But we weren’t interested in making regular cooking videos. We figured entertaining food content was what the Nepali TikTok-sphere was missing, and we gave just that to people.”

Chamling, now Shrestha's creative partner, vividly remembers the day they made the first video.

“It was Dahi Chiura Khane Din and we filmed the video on pure whim,” he says. “To our surprise, it went viral.”

They duo regularly post TikTok videos @chefsubasx. Chamling says he has learned a lot about videography while creating TikTok content with Shrestha.

 “I’ve known Subash dai all my life and it is fun to be around him,” he says. 

The popularity of the TikTok channel was an eye-opener for Shrestha, who is now exploring other social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube.

Now Shrestha is planning to go to the UK to work as a professional chef. His ultimate dream is to open his own restaurant.

“As a chef, I think about how I can enhance the food we eat every day,” he says.

Cooking for people gives Shrestha great joy. It also gives him the permission to be creative. TikTok was one way of expressing his creativity that he discovered fortuitously—for which he says he is ever-so-grateful.  

I’ve been having a string of bad luck with books. I’ve read some really crappy novels and it’s put me in a bad mood. I had saved the second book in the ‘Before the Coffee Gets Cold’ series for times like these. I had enjoyed the first book, which had felt like a warm, comforting hug. So, naturally, I expected the second book to get me out of this reading rut. But I’ve only sunk in deeper. The stories in ‘Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the Café’ felt forced and repetitive. It was, I feel, an unnecessary extension of a good book. As the first book was an instant bestseller upon its publication in 2015, the writer and publisher probably thought a sequel was in order. But too much of a good thing, I guess.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold tells the story of a café in Tokyo where customers are given a chance to travel back in time. But there are some conditions of time travel: They must sit in a particular seat and not get up—they will be forcibly brought back to the present if they do so. And they must also return to the present before the coffee gets cold, else they will forever be stuck in the past. There are four stories: There’s a woman who goes back in her past to confront the lover who left her, a wife who wants to get a letter her husband wrote to her before his memory started to fade, a pub owner who is estranged from her family but wants to see her sister one last time, and a mother who travels 10 years into her future to get a glimpse of the daughter she never got to meet.

Tales from the Café picks up where the first book left off. There are four more stories in this one. There is the man who has raised his best friend’s child as his own, another who missed his mother’s funeral, a lover who travels to the future to see the woman he couldn’t marry, and a detective who wants to give a birthday gift to his wife. There is a lot of potential there but the rehashed stories evoke a strong sense of déjà vu. It’s the same issue but with different characters. The appeal is lost. The repeated mentions of the café rules also take away from the stories.

I was shaking my head, saying okay, okay, I get it. The only good thing about the book is that you get to know more about the people you meet in the first book—those who run, work in, and frequent the café. So many questions that I had about the café and its people after reading the first book was answered in the second one. But apart from that, there’s nothing new in this one to make it engaging and worthwhile.

2 stars

Fiction

Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the Café

Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Translated from the Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot

Published: 2017

Publisher: Sunmark Publishing, Inc.