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With the arrest and charging of Harvey Weinstein, for­mer film producer, comes a bittersweet victory for Hollywood and women in general. Him and the likes of Bill Crosby are high pro­file abusers, using their positions to exploit women. They are not the first of course. Abusers range from DJs, actors, and singers to an Olympic athletes’ doctor, members of the UN peacekeeping force, and development workers. But to my mind—and I expect criti­cal and strong feedback here—actors, directors and the like are idolized for their looks, fame, money, ability to progress ones career etc, by the women they subsequently abuse. These women may not be nearly as vulnerable as those being abused by doctors, peacekeepers and others in a position of trust. Now before you start punching the newspaper, let me say I in NO WAY condone any act of violence, physical, mental, or sexual against any female (or male). I also fall into the #metoo category, twice over (discounting the ‘small stuff’). What I am saying is that those who are physically in positions of trust, such as doctors and peace­keepers, are generally in close con­tact with people whose very lives are precariously in their hands. There is something particularly abhorrent about that kind of advantage taking.

As #metoo, correctly, intensifies is there a line to be drawn any­where? When does sexual innuendo and light teasing become sexual assault? There is not a single female on this earth who has not suffered some kind of teasing; and probably frequently. But what is seen to one woman as easy-going banter from a col­league is viewed as sexual abuse by another. I wrote in an earlier column about being verbally abused by a young guy on a scooter. To me it was just annoying and silly. Yet to the young Nepali girl who grabbed me by the arm when he started verbally abusing her, this was sexual abuse, and terrifying.

I’m reading today that Morgan Freeman has also been accused under #metoo. His ‘sexual abuse’ of colleagues was to his mind jokes and compliments. Being that he is 80 years old, he will have grown up in a society where joking and com­plimenting women with the likes of “your legs look fabulous in that short skirt” (my words), was per­fectly acceptable. But as time has gone on, this kind of comment is not only uncomfortable, but labelled “sexual abuse”. Men must now take care not to offend women by saying or doing anything that can be construed as abuse. Again I ask, is there a line to be drawn and where do we draw it?

Something those in Asia will find extremely strange and hard to understand is that in the West you cannot even talk to a young child that you do not know lest you be accused of child molestation. Ear­lier this week there was a child of about four crying on the stairs of the venue I was in. Naturally I stopped to ask why he was crying and where was his mother. If his father had not turned up at that point I would have lifted the child off the stair and tried to find someone who knew him. This kind of thing cannot now be done in the West without risk­ing being accused of kidnapping or abuse. Where do we draw the line?

Which brings me to another ques­tion—when is art, art, and when is art, pornography? This is certainly an age-old question but in the days of social media when is it right to post so-called art pictures which are, to the majority, merely porn? If someone, who is not a photogra­pher by profession, takes semi-nude pictures of (consenting) strangers on his phone and posts on social media under the heading “art”, is it art or is it pornography? Are we so numb and jaded by erotic imagery that we don’t even care? Where do we draw the line?

Horror

SUNKESARI

CAST: Reecha Sharma, Rabindra Jha, Sunny Dhakal, Lauren Lofberg

DIRECTION: Arpan Thapa

1 Star

Director Arpan Thapa and lead­ing lady Reecha Sharma would want us to believe that with their latest project ‘Sunkesari’ they have a lot at stake and that they have defied filmmakers’ reluctance to tap into the most unpopular genre in Nepali cinema: horror. But to think of ‘Sunkesari’ as a path-breaking genre piece would be a grand error of judgment. It is so dull and ineffective that it rightly earns a place in the can alongside other trashy wannabe horror films like ‘Awaran’, ‘Ek Din Ek Raat’, ‘Zhi­grana’ and ‘Vigilante 3D’. As in the aforementioned movies, ‘Sunkesari’ deploys the same textbook tech­niques of unmotivated jump scares, swinging doors, sliding blankets and heavy background scores to scare audience. But there is no convincing story to hold them all together.

The entire film is set in Austra­lia. When we first meet the titu­lar character Sunkesari (Reecha Sharma), she’s curled up in her bed, going through a bad breakup. She appears depressed, maybe slightly suicidal and utterly unsocial. Then her overtly concerned friend walks in, gives her a few minutes of pep talk and finally makes a suggestion to help her move on. And what does she suggest? That Sunkesari spends some time away at a large tourist mansion which hasn’t offi­cially opened up and where prob­ably she’d be the only guest. Good friends (unless they are sadists) would perhaps not give you such ludicrous ideas, especially not if you are emotionally unstable.

But this film stays outside the sphere of common sense and main­tains a level of brain-deadness that is hard to cover up. So Sunkesari, who actually needs to be on a 24-hour suicide watch, goes to the man­sion. There she’s welcomed by a butler, Yadav (Rabindra Jha). The only working staff of the mansion, Yadav, we’re told, is an illegal Nepali immigrant. Why anyone would trust an illegal immigrant with no work experience to run a multi-million property is never mentioned.

After that, as is typical of the haunted-house story template, Sunkesari and Yadav are tormented by creepy noises, doors that shut on their own, loud banging at night and ghostly figures. Later, a young cou­ple on honeymoon (Sunny Dhakal and Lauren Lofberg) checks in. Their arrival only aggravates the situation. Also from then on the film turns into a ham-fisted display of bad acting and direction.

There is no love and regard for the genre in Arpan Thapa’s direction. His carelessness is evident in many places but mostly while trying to balance dread and anticipation, which are the most important ingre­dients of any horror film. Devoting an entire parallel comic track on Rabindra Jha shows how desperate Thapa is to make it mainstream. But his decision misfires.

Good production design and camera work can never conceal a bad screenplay. Thapa’s writing is unfocused and sketchy. It’s strange that the investors backed such a poor story. One of those backers is Reecha Sharma herself. I last saw Sharma hamming it up in ‘Kohalpur Express’, in what I consider the worst performance of her career. She’s more bearable in ‘Sunkesari’ but her character’s shallowness and passivity limits her to dead-eyed act­ing with much sulking and staring. The rest of the cast is forgettable.

‘Sunkesari’ is an amateur horror film lacking finesse, both in terms of storytelling and technical craft. The film is a lesson for other would-be horror filmmakers to look beyond outdated model of cheap thrills and jump scares.

During the event organized in the City Hall to announce the formal unification of the two parties—CPN-UML and CPN (Maoist Center)—on May 17, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli argued that ‘flying a jet plane requires two pilots’, in an attempt to justi­fy the provision of two chairmen in the new unified party, Nepal Communist Party (NCP). Those who closely follow Oli’s peculiarly quotable quotes know better than to take them at face value. His use of the jet plane met­aphor carries more meaning than one would generally think. While it is true that a jet plane has two pilots, the power dynamic between the two is not of equals. One is a captain and the other is a co-pilot or the first officer. There are no prizes for guessing who between the two NCP leaders is the captain at the moment.

The smooth cruising of the new NCP jet certainly faces many chal­lenges, the primary one being the topsy-turvy relationship between the two pilots. This is not the first time that the two have had grand plans for party unification; during Oli’s first tenure as prime minister in 2015-16, the two leaders had extensive discussion on forming a single party for all the left forces of the country.

But the plan soon fell apart as personal relations between Dahal and Oli took a bitter turn, and Dahal joined the Congress camp, ousting the Oli government. Those familiar with the developments then say that Dahal felt deeply humiliated by Oli’s regular jibes, particularly ones suggesting that he would protect Dahal, a veiled reference to conflict era cases and personal property that Dahal is said to have amassed.

But as they say, politics makes for strange bedfellows. The rap­prochement this time was a cul­mination of political necessity and their personal ambitions. In a way, it was a writing on the wall.

Political necessity

Oli knew that without the Mao­ists’ support, his party would not return to power. The Indian design to keep him out of power by encouraging the Maoists and Nepali Congress to stick together is an open secret.

For Dahal, as the local elec­tions showed, without a decent seat-sharing arrangement, his party would see the worst per­formance in national elections since entering mainstream poli­tics in 2008—destroying any legit­imate claim for remaining at the helm of his party. While Nepali Congress and Sher Bahadur Deuba remained non-committal about a 60:40 seat sharing, Oli was eager to pay the price for an electoral alliance.

Personal ambitions

Both Oli and Dahal are keen to leave their mark behind. At this juncture in Nepal’s history, both realize that they need each oth­er to get things done their way. The only question is how far their ambitions converge and at what point they begin to diverge. Temperamentally, they are far from similar, yet both have a tenacity that makes them each other’s comrade-in-arms in an unusual way.

Oli cultivates loyalty to a point of sycophancy and goes out of his way to protect people who are close to him—and whose support­ers worship him, while detractors mock and loathe him. Dahal is charismatic but utilitarian; his closest supporters often remain unsure about where they stand with him. In fact some of Dahal’s harshest critics are those who have worked closely with him in the past.

Both Oli and Dahal are very decisive and can bend the party to their will.

Writing on the wall

Both have seen the writing on the wall about Nepal’s moment in the sun as post-blockade Nepal-In­dia relations have unwittingly accorded Kathmandu a degree of strategic autonomy in dealing with third countries, particular­ly China. If handled correctly, the current geo-political envi­ronment provides Nepal tre­mendous leverage in attracting development finance and increas­ing connectivity and trade with both its neighbors.

Despite rhetoric to the contrary in the Indian media, New Delhi appears to have concluded that India stands to gain more from engagement and cohabitation with Beijing than by aligning with Washington—given the current US leadership or lack thereof. Increasingly, the concern in New Delhi seems be over the potential warming of ties between Mos­cow and Islamabad, its nemesis numero uno—and some sort of China-Russia-Pakistan alliance.

Against this backdrop, Oli and Dahal, by taking a broad view and discarding short-term temp­tations, decided to push on with the unification. The flexibility, finesse and dogged determination both leaders have shown this time is a rare sight in Nepali politics. But only time will tell if it will last.

Twitter @johnparajuli

Being British I’ve been brought up to form an orderly queue from day one at nursery school. And it seems perfectly natural to line-up for everything—for your lit­tle bottle of milk at primary school, right through adult life and queuing in banks, for buses, in shops… for just about everything. No one tries to ‘jump the queue’ and if someone is busy looking the other way when it’s their turn, we will not try to rush forward, but we will let them know now is their time to be served. Here in Nepal I have really only seen orderly lines in two places—the ‘priority’ section of my local bank and in the theaters. Yes, most banks now have a ticket system but that is enforced queuing, not willful wait­ing one’s turn.

In the days when the Gurukul Theater Company had its own prem­ises, somewhere near Battisputali, I was surprised and delighted to see they had trained their theater-go­ing audience (of mostly under 30s) to form neat lines and wait patiently until the bell rung and the door opened. This was adopted by other theaters. Perhaps those young drama enthusiasts thought it was part of the whole drama experience. Yet it was not something to be incor­porated into daily life, as if others did not know about this magical thing called a queue, more usually know as a ‘line’ in Nepal.

I was reminded of this recently while attending a theater I had not been to before. They mixed it up by having two ways to enter the main stairway to the theater hall. To my mind that would require two queues, flowing together like the slipway of a British motorway. But no, queuing in that theater seemed to have gone the way it is elsewhere in Kathmandu. Chaotic.

Someone (no doubt a beddeshi) did a little survey on how efficient was the system of a shop keeper serving several customers at once, rather than taking them turn by turn. It turns out that if there are, say five people to serve, and each one will take two minutes to deal with, then the shop keeper spends 10 minutes to serve the five people regardless as to whether he does this one by one or tries to cover as many as he can at the same time.

You know the scenario—customer 1 asks for eggs, customer 2 asks for tomatoes, customer 3 asks for biscuits. While the shop keeper is putting the eggs into a bag, he is throwing the tomatoes onto the scales and asking number 3 what kind of biscuits he wants. Meantime customer number 4 enters and asks for some beer. Eggs are now laid aside while he hands beer out of the fridge and eyes the biscuits.

Tomatoes are weighed and head­ing for a bag when customer 5 enters the shop. She’s after onions which she wants to select herself but she needs to have a conversation about the quality first. Meantime the egg customer is finally handing over the money and receiving the eggs and the biscuit customer has made his selection. The beer guy hands over his money and change is sought for both him and the egg customer. Finally the egg customer has got both eggs and change and is head­ing out of the shop while the onion conversation goes on and the bis­cuit customer is patiently repeating her selection.

Then enters a new customer, this one is a little influential in the street and of course gets priority. And I’m standing at the back, dizzy and frus­trated by now, and decide to go to the less busy shop next door… Yes, the shop keeper spends the same amount of time but for the quieter, less pushy customer, they can wait eight minutes for their two-min­ute transaction despite being first in ‘line’.