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With provincial govern­ments coming into being in the past few days, fed­eralism is actually here. But it will be several years before all levers of devolved power structures are in place, as over 100 laws need to be written. Even in the best-case scenario—as examples from other countries suggest—it will take at least four years to fully phase-in a functioning federal structure. This waiting period may sound long and even appear frustrating, but it is in fact a perfect opportu­nity to enact sweeping reforms that do away with the dysfunction of erstwhile unitary system of governance. For clarity’s sake, let me dwell on one reform issue in each column.

Health, first. Under the devolved power arrangement in the new constitution, delivery of basic health services falls under the jurisdiction of the local gov­ernment. The provincial govern­ment, meanwhile, is responsible for overall health services—of course, leaving aside broader national policies and standards to the federal government. In the­ory, the provincial government is free to shape health policies within its jurisdiction so long as it complies with the broad contours of national policy.

But in reality, health system requires an integrated approach and should not be bracketed into different boxes with competing jurisdiction. Righting the wrongs of the current health system that perpetuates unequal treatment and preys upon patients’ vulner­ability requires substantial poli­cy reforms at the central level—backed by strict implementation and monitoring at the provincial and local levels.

The problem with Nepal’s health system is obvious: public health system suffers from short­ages of hospital beds in urban areas, while in rural areas there are inadequate doctors and shortfall of essential medicines and diagnostic facilities. There are also no financing priorities for different needs of different areas and sometimes global agenda (malaria and TB eradication, for instance) take precedence over local needs. This is the reason hospitals serving the Tharu com­munities, for example, have no stocks of drugs to treat sickle cell anemia—a common condition in this community.

Despite spending millions on public health system every year—roughly Rs 41 billion this year—poor patients still forced to seek basic services in the private system. That puts the per capita government health spending at approximately Rs 3,000 a year. But this number belies the much higher out-of- pocket spending by individuals. A complicated pregnancy can cost a family, on an average, half a million rupees in a private hospital.

Private health system is over­priced, highly exploitative and under-regulated. Anecdotal evidence points to a disturbing exploitation.

Last year, an acquaintance developed typhoid fever. Upon visiting Patan Hospital, she was referred to intensive care unit (ICU) in other hospitals, as there was no empty ICU bed in Patan Hospital. She ended up being admitted at a nearby pri­vate hospital. Five days later she was slapped with a bill of over Rs 100,000, including medicines. She was moved to the general ward after the hospital adminis­tration sensed she might not be able to pay.

Two days after being dis­charged, the fever came back, and she had to be rushed back to another private hospital. She came home after spending anoth­er Rs 35,000 and three days in treatment. In total, she spent a year’s worth of earning, not sav­ing, for the treatment of just one illness. That is a representative picture of our health system, which disproportionately affects the poor.

To address the problem in our health system, the incoming gov­ernment will have to revisit the flawed fundamentals while insti­tuting a mechanism to strictly monitor health services—both public and private. Instead of hav­ing hundreds of scattered health schemes, it should raise the cov­erage amount of the government insurance scheme and simultane­ously curb the runaway private healthcare costs.

Conditions have to be creat­ed such that government issued health insurance card is accred­ited in private hospitals so that patients aren’t refused treatment or forced out of hospital before the completion of treatment.

One of the signs of development is that poor families in the coun­try do not have to take out big loans to take care of their sick. I hope the incoming government with its agenda of shared prosper­ity will pay heed to this cause of recurring poverty.

The author is a Kathmandu-based journalist who tweets @johnparajuli

Drama/Biography

Padman

CAST: Akshay Kumar, Radhika Apte and Sonam Kapoor

DIRECTION: R Balki

If you are a regular movie-goer you may have seen at least some biopics about rebel innovators who question status quo. The latest Akshay Kumar starrer ‘Padman’ is one such film inspired by a real-life innovator. The person in question, however, hasn’t contributed to rock­et science or made another Face­book. He’s a social entrepreneur named Arunachalam Muruganan­tham from rural South India, who achieves fame for his invention of a machine that produces low-cost sanitary pads.

 Padman, the movie, is based not in South India but in a village somewhere in Madhya Pradesh and Muruganantham’s fictional counter­part is named Lakshmikant Chau­han. Understandably, this is done to make the film more accessible to the mainstream audience and make the character more suitable for Akshay Kumar. In spite of these factual liber­ties that the movie takes, the actor’s portrayal of a village simpleton who questions the stigma surrounding menstruation and female hygiene successfully captures the story (and spirit) of the original Padman.

Director R Balki and his co-writer Swananda Kirkire have adapted pro­ducer Twinkle Khanna’s short story ‘The Sanitary Man from a Sacred Land’. When we first meet Laksh­mikant, he is a family man living with his young wife (Radhika Apte), accompanied by his mother and two younger sisters. He, a metal-worker, is the sole bread-winner in the fami­ly. We come to know that he has only studied till the eighth grade but that in no way caps his boundless curios­ity. In an early scene, he takes apart a wind-up toy and fashions it into an onion-chopper, just for his wife.

His normal life is disturbed when he finds out that his wife has been using dirty rags during her peri­ods. To him that rag is unfit even to clean his bicycle. So he brings her an expensive packet of sanitary pads from a medical shop. His wife refus­es to accept them because it would burn a hole in her husband’s wallet. Lakshmikant soon understands that buying sanitary pads isn’t an afford­able option for his household. But what if he makes them on his own?

 Soon he discovers that making inexpensive sanitary pads isn’t like taking apart a wind-up toy or mak­ing an onion-chopper. And the big­ger challenge is to make pads while facing the withering criticism of his own family and villagers. They act offended when Lakshmikant tries to hand out his homemade sani­tary pads to girls. They fume at him for poking at something which is strictly a ‘ladies problem’. Thus his obsession to create low-cost sanitary pads comes at a huge cost: his family disowns him and his wife’s family puts pressure on her to divorce him. Roadblocks keep coming in Laksh­mikant’s way but he is not going to rest until he has actually found his solution.

 As mentioned earlier, the story closely follows Muruganantham’s struggles and unfolds in a linear and straightforward manner, stay­ing true to the real story. But since the makers had lots of material to cover, the screenplay at times feels rushed and many events in the story give you the impression that his suc­cess resulted from a series of lucky breaks and not from his persistent hard work.

In many places, the film’s script is downright lazy, as it uses inner monologues to make us under­stand how a character is feeling at the moment. It is the support­ing cast that breathes life into the average dialogues and makes the clunky scenes work. Radhika Apte is convincing as Lakshmikant’s wife. Meanwhile, Sonam Kapoor is likable in a small yet crucial role.

Padman has its downsides but it is made with sincerity and gus­to. The movie should be cherished not because it’s an Akshay Kumar star-vehicle but because it dares to celebrate and signify the work of a real-life hero.

3 Stars

Title: Sher Bahadur

Director: R Rajbanshi

Cast: Menuka Pradhan, Sunil Thapa, Karma and Rabindra Jha

It’s ironic how the latest Nepali thriller ‘Sher Bahadur’, a movie about burglars getting into
trou­ble when they decide to steal from the wrong man, is itself guilty of stealing the plot of the 2016 Amer­ican film ‘Don’t Breathe’. While the original film tightly grounded itself by packing in some genuinely fresh punches in the otherwise over­wrought horror genre, its Nepali counterpart never makes us fully care about its central characters and gives us many moments of uninten­tional hilarity.

The movie opens with Bihari (Rabindra Jha), an Indian car thief, entering Dharan in a stolen car. He takes the car to a garage where a Nepali mechanic by the name of Kumar (played by Karma) works. Bihari is used to bringing stolen cars to Kumar’s place and Kumar is used to re-selling the cars with fake papers and number plates. Then we meet Maya (Menuka Pradhan), a bar dancer whom both Kumar and Bihari have a crush on. Whenever Bihari is in town, the trio gang up to burglarize rich households.

In an over-extended scene, we see them enter a house in the day dressed like salesmen pretending to sell toilet cleaners. This gives them the opportunity to scan the house for available loot, which they easily rob later that night. Meanwhile, we get to know that Maya is putting together money to take her (missing) sister’s daughter to Kathmandu, away from Maya’s unkind stepmoth­er. Kumar wants to buy a garage of his own. And Bihari’s intent is to make Maya his wife some day.

Soon fed up with small-time bur­glaries that yield them only pennies, they look to score big. When they hear that a blind man named Sher Bahadur (Sunil Thapa) is stashing large amounts of cash in his house, they target him. For them the job is super easy: what danger would an old retired army officer pose, that too if he’s blind and lives only with his dog? But when they break and enter the house, they realize they’ve misjudged him. They soon find out that the man will not, on any condition, forgive those intruding his privacy.

Surely, the premise of burglars getting locked down inside a house and being preyed upon by a mon­ster of a man sets up an intriguing hook for a contained thriller. But director R Rajbanshi wastes much of screen time in establishing the band of burglars.

We are also made to sit through repetitive information on burglar alarms and home security with bor­ing and clunky dialogue exchanges. These sequences are so slow, it kills the built up for the moment when the trio come face to face with Sher Bahadur.

Sunil Thapa’s performance as the titular antagonist is wobbly and inconsistent. He tries to appear scary by grunting and quivering his facial muscles, which honestly aren’t hair-raising but laughter-inducing. The same goes for Rabindra Jha, whose already established forte as a comedian prevents us from taking him too seriously in moments where his character demands emotional maturity.

Even at times when Jha’s charac­ter is running for his life or getting shot at, the majority of the audience members continues laughing. As for Menuka Pradhan and Karma, the two talented actors are wasted, as they mostly sleepwalk through their scenes and mindlessly parrot their dialogues.

‘Sher Bahadur’ falls flat under its shoddy special effects and lackluster acting. It is inconsistent and messy throughout and is guilty of a cardi­nal sin for a thriller: lack of any com­pelling terror or suspense sequences to get your adrenalin rushing.

Rating: 2/5

“Kuire”, whispers the girl in front to her friend. Yes, it is always a bit of a shock when I go out of my ‘local’ area. I mean, I’ve lived in Kathmandu longer than I have lived in any other town. That makes me a local right? Beep! Wrong! Being female, tall and blonde definitely sends out the sig­nal ‘not local’. And yet I know the back roads and short cuts better than most taxi drivers; was in Nepal during the whole conflict; stood in the street to watch the funer­al procession of the royal family, and suffered the curfews, bandhs, load-shedding, earthquake and blockade just like the rest of the population. But I also have skipped the queue to get into Singha Durbar, been offered a seat on a full bus (not often mind you!), am royally treated at restaurants, and trusted by my boss­es and clients alike. On the down side, I am frequently overcharged for fruit and vegetables, have to pay more for the same hotel room (why?) than locals, and cannot walk through Thamel without getting Tiger Balm and a sarangi thrust in my face. “Kuire”, shouts the little boy in the street. His mother and I smile at each other, me through my teeth. Such is life.

Based on the fact I am not local, I will be writing this weekly col­umn giving some insight into the life of an average ‘non-local’ in Kath­mandu. Which brings up the ques­tion—‘what is an average non-local?’ For want of a better word, let’s use ‘expat’. Yes there are all sorts of racial connotations attached to that word but…

Come in all shades

There are several kinds of ‘expats’ in Kathmandu. There are those who are married to Nepalis, many of whom have been here for decades and have grown-up children and even grandchildren. There are some who have only been married for a short time and are desperately trying to get a visa for their spouse to their home country. There are those who came in the mists of time to study Buddhism and dharma. There are those who are young and enthusiastic volunteers. There are those who are working on a two- or three-year contract with the UN or some INGO, climbing the career ladder. Then there are those like me, who don’t fit into any category and who don’t look at Nepal through the rose colored glasses of ‘newbie-ism’, Buddhism, or any other ‘ism’. We are an anom­aly and are quite unique. “Kuire”. Yes, perhaps.

So let’s get this party started by outlining a typical 36 hours in the life of a neutral category expat. Able to afford the luxury of a taxi across town, I’m off to visit a farm on the outskirts of the city. This is an organized trip so it is both social and educational. Quick catch-up coffee with a friend returning from her Christmas break (we decide we can’t afford the food prices in the restaurant despite the fact it is aim­ing at a local clientele).

Off for a meeting, which is com­fortable since it’s with another expat and we are both in sweaters and jeans (unheard of if we were in the West) in the chilly weather.

This is followed by shopping in a large supermarket. Yes, definitely the owner needs my money less than the little pasal on the corner but it has what I want. Get home to discover a long-standing client has sent four urgent pieces of work that need to be completed by 5pm. It’s already 4.15. My client of course leaves the office promptly at 5pm and does not have access to his emails. Some confusion takes place and finally the work is sent to the correct people at 7pm. Is the solar water still hot? Lukewarm will do, so step in. Lights go out. It’s fine, I know where the soap is….

Saturday morning off to a mar­ket catering almost exclusively to expats. I cannot afford the prices and have never heard of some of items—but seemingly they are the latest thing in Australia and Ameri­ca. The staff in the coffee shop look stressed at the sudden influx of peo­ple wanting lattes, cappuccinos and, what’s that—a baby cappuccino?

My phone rings—the person I met with yesterday is having an emer­gency work problem which she hopes I can solve. Despite the fact we have only met twice, and never actually worked together, we are both Westerners so we have a bond of trust between us.