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Q.    Who motivates you the most? 
A.    Myself.

Q.    Who would you like to dance opposite to someday? 
A.    The dancer Matt Steffanina.

Q.    What is the hardest part of being a professional dancer?
A.    Training yourself every day and not giving up.

Q.    What do you enjoy doing in your leisure time? 
A.    Watching movies and listening to music.

Q.    What place would you like to visit? 
A.    I’d love to go to Los Angeles one day.

Q.    A quote to live by? 
A.    ‘Find yourself’.

Q.    What is the most precious thing that you own? 
A.    Knowledge.

Q.    A question you wish more people would ask you?
A.    ‘What’s your next step?’
 

Q.    Which is Rahul Shah's favorite genre of music?

    a) Rock    b) R&B/Hip-hop

Send us your answer on our Facebook page. One winner selected by lucky draw will get a Rs 2,000 coupon from Dallé.  

When she started painting on a computer back in 2002, Jaya Sharma did not even know what she was doing was called. She had taken up ‘digital painting’ only because she was depressed. In 2009 Sharma would go on to be the first Nepali artist to put up a solo exhibit of digital paintings. 

Always interested in painting, Sharma had been enrolled for Bachelor’s in Fine Arts degree at Lalitkala Campus. Right before her final exam in 1999, the famous journalist and director Subrat Acharya asked her hand in marriage. “I still remember we had our engagement on the day of my final exam,” she says. 

Her final exam was from 1 pm to 4 pm. But her engagement was then scheduled for 2 pm. She decided to give her exam next year. But when she approached her professor Seema Shah with the problem, the teacher said that she could take the exam at 10 am and then get engaged on the same day. “As a woman, you have to find a balance between your family and career,” said Shah, something that has stuck with Sharma all these years. 

Sharma’s life changed after she got married. “People say artists think freely. But I don’t think that is necessarily true. Whenever I tried spreading my wings, I felt like there was no space,” says Sharma. 

When she moved into her in-laws’ place, she found no proper place where she could mix her colors and paint. “Even though I could not paint anymore, I treasured my color boxes. But when I looked through them, I found that all the colors had been thrown away and replaced with stitching materials,” she recalls. Sharma started slipping into depression. 

Her husband who worked in the entertainment industry would be home only from 1 am to 6 am. She did not want to bother his busy hubby with what she was going through. But when she went into a depression, he realized that he needed to give her more time. 

They had a son in 2001, and by 2002 Sharma had decided to turn her life around. 

She remembered being captivated by the “Paint” icon on computer painting tools. If she could not paint on real canvas, couldn’t she do so on a digital one? But for that Sharma first needed her own computer, and she did not want to ask anyone for money. She sold her jewelry. A tola of gold at the time cost Rs 15,000, and she sold some Rs 100,000 worth of it. “Till now, whenever the price of gold goes up, my family members scold me for selling that gold,” says Sharma. But she has no regrets. 

With the help of her new computer, she first started making greeting cards and turning photos into artwork. Six years after that, one day, her friend Kapil Mani Dixit saw her works and informed her that what she had been doing all these years was called digital painting. He liked her works so much he wanted to showcase them during the 2009 opening of his art studio ‘Apt #8’. There has since been no turning back for Sharma. 

Her husband then encouraged her to try making album covers. Her first commissioned work was an album cover for Narad Khatiwada’s ‘Bidhyanaas’. Then she started getting work from others. She designed a cover for MaHa jodi’s “Dashain” and also a comic book for WWF. “But I soon realized I did not want to work on other’s ideas. I wanted to create a fantasy world of my own,” Sharma says. 

She is now a surrealist painter, “who follows dreams and gets inspired by real objects to create a fantasy world.” Till date she has had two solo and nine group exhibitions of her digital artwork and a total of 53 exhibitions altogether. 

Sharma went back to Lalitkala Campus in 2017 to finish her Master’s degree. She was excited to study with younger people as she could learn from the new generation. But things didn’t go as planned, and she was disappointed to realize that “most people now do not search for inspiration within themselves but more on Google.” She got into fights over copyright with her classmates who copied other artists. 

She says it is easy to cheat and copy other’s works in this digital age: “But if you are dishonest with your work, you will have to pay for it sooner or later.”  

Currently busy preparing for exhibitions in India, Sharma accepts that she has come a long way. “But that doesn’t mean you stop learning.” 
 

You see many souvenir shops in Thamel and Basantapur. An interesting item they sell is masks. In Thamel, you can find Bhimeswor Mask Shop. Paul Wilkinson, a man in his 50s, is a regular customer here. He inspects the various masks on display and buys the ones he likes.

Wilkinson, who is from the UK, has been dealing with masks for the past 20 years. He is a collector as well as a trader of masks, which he says has two main markets—tribal art and practitioner. He sells masks that he buys, mostly from Nepal and Indonesia, to Western shamans. Wilkinson says the masks, which are usually passed down generations, have a certain kind of energy. 

“If you can read the energy, you get information from it, just like reading a book,” he says. Wilkinson has been practicing meditation for the past 30 years and says he has learnt to be sensitive to energy. He says 99 percent of the masks on the market are not as old as the shop owners claim them to be. “You also need to see if they ‘feel’ right,” he says. 

Most shop owners that APEX talked to said customers generally want masks that look old. They further said there are certain techniques to give new masks an antique look.  

Most masks in Prakash Ratna Shakya’s Tibetan Mask Store in Basantapur look antique. “Customers mostly like buying antique-looking masks so even when new masks arrive, I apply a liquid which, when it dries, makes the masks look old in two or three days,” says Shakya. He says he makes the liquid himself using some chemicals. Maybe people think the masks that do not look antique are ‘artificial’, says Shakya, who has experienced a lower sale of masks that do not have an antique look.

Hari Bista, the owner of Bhimeswor Mask Shop, agrees. “People generally like buying antique masks, so the makers give them an old look by applying some black powder or by exposing them to smoke,” says Bista.  

Binod Khanal, the owner of Antique Gallery in Thamel, says the government rule prohibiting the sale of masks older than 100 years has adversely affected the industry. The shop, which opened 45 years ago, sells antique jewelry, masks and utensils. Khanal says masks were the highest selling item 20 years ago, but tourists no longer buy many of them from his shop.

Currently, Antique Gallery has masks that are around 40 years old and these cost between Rs 7,000 to Rs 10,000. Earlier, it had antique masks that cost as much as Rs 200,000. Bista says his store has witnessed a 75 percent decline in the mask business over the last 15 years.  

Wilkinson says his customers generally use masks as a decorative or contemplative object or to ‘embody a particular spirit’. There are masks of certain Hindu gods and demons that dancers wear during the celebration of some festivals. “Sometimes, the wearers get possessed by the character and go into a trance,” says Wilkinson. 

Bimala Deuja, who has been running Prativa Wooden Handicrafts in Thamel for the past 12 years, says customers mostly buy masks because they consider them ‘good luck’. But some people also buy them for decorative purposes. Masks at Prativa Wooden Handicrafts cost anywhere from Rs 800 to Rs 50,000. 

Shakya of Tibetan Mask Store says mostly it is the restaurateurs who want to showcase masks in their restaurants or people looking for gifts who visit his shop in Basantapur. His store sells masks of Kali, Ganesh, Bhairab, Shiva, Garud, Tara and Lakhe, among others. “As far as I understand, my customers see masks just as decorative pieces,” says Shakya.

Driving along the duel carriageway from Kathmandu to Banepa last week I mentioned to my friend that on my first visit to Nepal that area was completely fields. We started to talk about the trolley bus on that route and my friend said, as a teenager, he would get on the trolley bus at its starting point in Kathmandu and ride it to Bhaktapur, turn around, and come back on the next one. Just for fun. For ‘timepass’ as they say here. That got me thinking of ways we used to ‘timepass’ when I was young.

I’m not so old that aeroplanes were a new thing when I was young! But when I was a pre-teen one of the things we used to do as a family on a Sunday was drive to Prestwick Airport, at that time Scotland’s only international airport. So on a Sunday we would get into the family car and drive the three hours or so to get there to go up to the viewing platform and watch planes take off and land! No doubt we had a picnic lunch on the way. We had a lot of picnic lunches in those days cheaper than taking us all to cafes and restaurants!  

I could equate this to people in mountain areas (with the exception of busy airports like Lukla) where the arrival of a plane is quite an exciting thing! We still see locals who have perhaps come from a couple of days walk away from the district HQ where the airport is located, pressing themselves against the fence to watch the planes arrive. I can’t imagine anyone in the West now managing to cajole their protesting teenager to a family outing of a picnic and plane spotting.

Playing outside was another thing that we used to do in my childhood. It was what we did. What our parents did. What our grandparents did. But unfortunately today it’s not what kids do. This practice of playing outside seemed to have stopped a couple of decades ago when people became very security conscious in the West. I remember my aunt coming to visit me in Bardia in 1998, where I used to live. She loved to play with the local kids and they would all hold hands, as kids do. She said that there was no way she would ever contemplate holding a child’s hand in Canada where she stays. If a parent was not present she could not even talk to an unknown child in case it was misinterpreted. This is extremely sad. Especially when you think how babies and children are passed around here and thus grow up without a fear of strangers.  

‘Stranger danger’ aside, my little gang would be found playing outside until dusk. And then up again early to get another round of play in before school. I used to go over to a deserted old house later converted into a country club-so it was a big place where a horse was kept on the grounds. I used to pet and feed carrots to the horse before school. In a deserted field, near a deserted building. With health and safety not such an issue as it is today, I also used to play in half constructed houses. The first two houses we lived in were newly built and situated in housing estates still under construction.  Playing in, under and around half-built houses and on machinery was just part of the game! 

Today’s kids, as well as the safety factor, real or imagined, probably couldn’t be dragged away from their phones, ipad or laptop long enough to get out into the street to play or gossip under the light of a street lamp. They are missing so much!