‘Get out of my house.’ ‘All my sickness is because of you.’ ‘You’re a millstone around my neck.’ Arundhati Roy heard these admonitions from her mother over and over throughout her life.&nbsp; This must be a singular, yet universal experience. There must be very few daughters who make it through life unscathed by their mothers. And vice-versa.&nbsp; How many of our mothers look at us and see in us the potential of all of the lives they could have lived? How many resent us for it, or want us to live those lives in their stead? And how many of us look back at our mothers and imagine what they would have achieved had they not been expected and assigned to play the role of wife, daughter-in-law, mother — had we never existed in their lives? How many mothers project their experiences onto their own daughters and continue the cycle? No daughter seems to escape it — no matter how well-behaved, docile, unruly, or rebellious. Certainly not the child who would go on to become a Booker prize-winning author. Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me chronicles her complex relationship with her mother Mary, or Mrs Roy, as her educator mother had her two children refer to her. In December, Arundhati Roy was in Kathmandu to sign books and briefly interact with readers at two bookshops in the city. She describes a childhood overshadowed by her mother’s volatility towards her and her brother. Mary herself was raised by an abusive father to escape whom she married the first man who proposed — Arundhati’s father who in her mother’s words turned out to be an alcoholic ‘Nothing Man’.&nbsp; Mary left her husband in Assam and eventually wound up with her two children in her town of Aymanam in Kerala, encountering other family members along the way who did not treat her, or her children with respect. The trauma and cruelty her mother endured could not be contained in her body, and spilled out onto her two children, towards whom she was physically, verbally, and emotionally abusive.&nbsp; While she treated her children with disregard, she would build a school in the nearby town of Kottayam from the ground up, educate thousands of children, take up a legal fight that led to the Supreme Court granting Syrian Christian women in India equal inheritance rights, and uplift many orphaned children and women in Kerala.&nbsp; Arundhati lived with both her mother’s brutality and brilliance. And like her daughter, readers must reconcile the indefensible parts of Mary Roy’s personality — the cruelty of calling her nine-year-old daughter a bitch, or shooting the family dog that mated with a stray — with her unyielding drive to educate thousands, fight for equal rights, and challenge the way her world viewed women.&nbsp; Mrs Roy had little kindness for her own children, but plenty for the students, children, and women whose lives she shaped, and made better. And her kindness was not rooted in empathy, but in anger at the hand she had been dealt in life. Eventually, Arundhati decided to temporarily cut all contact with Mrs Roy — not because she did not love her, she writes, but so that she could continue to love her. Her desire to get away from her abusive mother, and her fascination with the ideas inspired by the architect who built her mother’s school, would lead her to the Delhi School of Architecture at age 16. In Delhi, Arundhati became roommates with Hisila Yami before she and her Maoist ideologue husband Baburam Bhattarai went underground to lead Nepal’s decade-long armed struggle. &nbsp; But architecture was not her calling. In Delhi, the heart of India’s statecraft, Arundhati came into young adulthood against a backdrop of the country’s changing socio-politics, which began to take a turn for the hyper-nationalist, Hindu supremacist community that it has now largely become. The winds of those changes have now blown into Nepal. In the city, far from her mother, Arundhati met the man who would become her partner of many years, collaborating with him on several films and screenplays before finding the language (‘I needed to hunt [language] down like prey,’ she writes) she needed to become the writer she is now.&nbsp; She went on to write her Booker prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, but the wealth and status the book brought her did not sit comfortably. So she smashed her newly-built gilded cage, as she describes it, and became more political. Contrary to norm, she published several works of non-fiction, and would only publish her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, in 2017, 20 years after The God of Small Things. &nbsp;&nbsp; Her fierce opposition to India’s nuclear policies, to a dam that would displace millions of indigenous people and ecologically damage the Narmada Valley, her championing of Kashmiri self-determination, and her time spent with Maoist rebels in the forests of Chhattisgarh as they took up arms to defend their land and resources against corporate interests made her an enemy of the state.&nbsp; Meanwhile, being raised by a single mother had never sat well within her Syrian Christian community. ‘I wasn't Christian enough. I wasn't Hindu enough. I wasn't communist enough. I wasn't enough,’ Roy writes in her memoir. For all her love for India, the nation did not seem to reciprocate. The circumstances might be different, but it might strike a chord with readers in Nepal, many of whom marched on the streets in September hoping for a better tomorrow, but were gunned down by the very institutions meant to protect them. It might resonate with those who are not seen as citizens of this nation simply because they might not fit into an imagined idea of Nepali nationhood.&nbsp; Arundhati’s relationship with her mother, who was simultaneously proud and disdainful of her daughter’s accomplishments, continued to be tumultuous until the end of Mary Roy’s life.&nbsp; One of Mrs Roy’s last messages to her daughter before she passed was: ‘There is no one in the world whom I have loved more than you.’ Arundhati muses that her lifelong refusal to stop loving her mother must have finally breached her barriers. One wonders if that final declaration of love was solace enough, apology enough, for all the pain caused.&nbsp; But for Arundhati Roy, her love for her mother and her motherland outweighs the cruelty both have shown her. This, too, must be a singular, yet universal experience.  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/2025122208128_32b171acb09df2184495367b74efd91fe2896b0f5ba75b276e1533276268761c.jpg" data-media-id="editor_0" data-image-id="2025122208128_32b171acb09df2184495367b74efd91fe2896b0f5ba75b276e1533276268761c" data-rendition-name="original" width="1136" height="702" loading="lazy" alt="Mother Mary Comes to Me review"> </figure>

Shristi Karki

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The sins of our mothers

<figure><img width="1500" height="990" src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221108151116/636a655c9c7e80680e059925jpeg.jpg" alt=""/><figcaption>Alam gagged by police officer. Photo: SUVRA KANTI DAS</figcaption></figure>On Day of the Imprisoned Writer 2018, Indian author <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/latest/arundhati-and-shahidul-write-to-each-other/">Arundhati Roy penned an open letter to Shahidul Alam</a>, the renowned Bangladeshi photojournalist who had been incarcerated for over 100 days. ‘Dear Shahidul,’ Roy wrote, ‘I believe the tide will turn. It will. It must. This foolish, shortsighted cruelty will give way to something kinder and more visionary.’Shahidul Alam replies in his book, The Tide Will Turn, a photography and text collection lovingly named after Roy’s letter. Combining sketches from fellow inmates, historical work by Bangladeshi photographers, reflections and political commentary, The Tide Will Turn does more than document Alam’s time in jail and his views: it serves as a curated collection of political art and writing, acting as a critique of autocracy.Alam was arrested and detained on 5 August 2018, shortly after a televised Al-Jazeera interview where he criticised Bangladesh's Sheikh Hasina government for its response to protests by young students demanding road safety. The months after saw a worldwide campaign for his release with mass exhibitions, petitions, demonstrations and letters from prominent figures. <figure><img width="1698" height="1254" src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221108151116/636a65609c7e80680e059926jpeg.jpg" alt=""><figcaption> </figcaption></figure>In Nepal, journalists and students <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/latest/freeshahidulalam/">protested in front of the Bangladesh Embassy</a> in Kathmandu and lit up the city’s walls with projections of quotes and photographs by Alam during the visit to the Nepal capital by Sheikh Hasina for a South Asian leaders’ summit.Alam, still imprisoned, was awarded the <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/banner/shahidul-alam-photo-kathmandu-award/">Photo Kathmandu Award of Excellence</a> on 26 October 2018, both to celebrate the immense impact he has had on generations of Nepali journalists and photographers and as a clear sign of solidarity with one of South Asia’s most prominent photojournalists.‘There is a Bangla saying – “Apnake dhonnobad janie choto korbo na” (I will not belittle you by thanking you),’ Alam writes in his preface. ‘This book is my way of making amends.’Alam dedicates the first part to the prisoners in Keraniganj Jail in Dhaka. Without a camera to document his stay, he uses vivid writing to capture images of his detainment: the surroundings, the guards, his inmates and their stories, and the sparrows he made friends with.The chapter also includes notes, sketches, a mural and even a radio made by inmates who were concerned that Alam ‘a journalist, did not have access to news’. The chapter can almost be read as a standalone, a poignant reflection on <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/banner/shahidul-alam-100th-day-in-jail/">his 107-day incarceration</a>.The longest section of the book provides a detailed historical commentary on Bengali photography, touching on artists who have captured some of the most striking images to come out of Bangladesh, as well as on Alam’s own work. It includes one of his earliest series, which focuses on former sex worker Hazera Beagum.<img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221108151116/636a65639c7e80680e059927jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="1500" height="978">When Shahidul Alam first met Hazera Beagum in 1996, she was a sex worker. Beagum at her orphanage in Adabor Market in Dhaka in December 2014 (pictured right). Photos: SHAHIDUL ALAM<img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221108151116/636a65669c7e80680e059928jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="1185" height="1140">The photographs show Beagum first in 1996 and then in 2014, now running her own orphanage and ensuring that all her children receive an education. With photospreads of select iconic images, the chapter also makes for a stunning collection of Bangladeshi art over a century.The third section of The Tide Will Turn centres entirely on Bangladeshi politics. Alam uses the 1971 Liberation War as a starting point to discuss identity, secularism and the failures of the government, detailing his own experience with the 2013 Dhaka garment factory collapse and the killing of Bangladeshi-American secular blogger Avijit Roy. There is an underlying critique of autocracy running through the book, but it is this chapter that really reveals to us <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/banner/the-death-of-democracy/">Alam’s commitment to free speech and democracy</a>.The Tide Will Turn is best summed up by Alam himself in his letter to Arundhati Roy: ‘The tide will turn, and the nameless, faceless people will rise. They will rise against the entire state machinery.’ This deep conviction that underlies his stunning photography makes for a book that leaves readers with much to ponder.The Tide Will TurnShahidul AlamGöttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2019184 pages, 111 images, Hardback€ 28.00ISBN: 978-3-95829-693-0www.steidl.de<a href="https://steidl.de/Books/The-Tide-Will-Turn-1224303445.html"><img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221108151116/636a656a9c7e80680e059929jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="2328" height="3030"></a>

A photojournalist's powerful portrait from prison

<figure><img width="1024" height="683" src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221108101132/636a22909c7e80680e041795jpeg.jpg" alt=""/><figcaption>Arundhati Roy with Maati Ke Laal in her flat in Delhi. Photo: SHAHIDUL ALAM/DRIK/MAJORITY WORLD</figcaption></figure>Indian author Arundhati Roy <a href="https://pen-international.org/news/arundhati-roy-writes-to-shahidul-alam-day-of-the-imprisoned-writer-2018">wrote a letter</a> to imprisoned Bangladeshi <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2018/oct/15/jailed-bangladesh-photojournalist-shahidul-alam">photographer Shahidul Alam</a> on the 100th day of his incarceration on 14 November, which was also the <a href="https://pen-international.org/">PEN International</a>’s Day of the Imprisoned Writer, 2018. Alam was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/20/bangladeshi-activist-shahidul-alam-released-from-prison">released on bail</a> on 20 November, and he wrote back to Arundhati. Nepali Times brings you both letters below:  --Dear Shahidul,It’s been more than a 100 days now since they took you away. Times aren’t easy in your country or in mine, so when we first heard that unknown men had abducted you from your home, of course we feared the worst. Were you going to be ‘encountered’ (our word in India for extra-judicial murder by security forces) or killed by ‘non-state actors’? Would your body be found in an alley, or floating in some shallow pond on the outskirts of Dhaka? When your arrest was announced and you surfaced alive in a police station, our first reaction was one of sheer joy.Am I really writing to you? Perhaps not. If I were, I wouldn’t need to say very much beyond, ‘Dearest Shahidul, no matter how lonely your prison cell, know that we have our eyes on you. We are looking out for you.’Read also: <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/banner/shahidul-alam-100th-day-in-jail/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Shahidul Alam 100th day in Jail</a>If I were really writing to you I wouldn’t need to tell you how your work, your photographs and your words, has, over decades, inscribed a vivid map of humankind in our part of the world—its pain, its joy, its violence, its sorrow and desolation, its stupidity, its cruelty, its sheer, crazy complicatedness—onto our consciousness. Your work is lit up, made luminous, as much by love as it is by a probing, questioning anger born of witnessing at first hand the things that you have witnessed. Those who have imprisoned you have not remotely understood what it is that you do. We can only hope, for their sake, that someday they will.Your arrest is meant to be a warning to your fellow citizens: ‘If we can do this to Shahidul Alam, think of what we can do to the rest of you—all you nameless, faceless, ordinary people. Watch. And be afraid.’The formal charge against you is that you have criticised your country in your (alleged) Facebook posts. You have been arrested under the Section 57 of Bangladesh’s infamous Information and Communications Technology Act (ICT) which authorizes ‘the prosecution of any person who publishes, in electronic form, material that is fake and obscene; defamatory; tends to deprave and corrupt its audience; causes or may cause deterioration in law and order; prejudices the image of the state or a person; or causes or may cause hurt to religious belief’.Read also: <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/banner/shahidul-alam-photo-kathmandu-award/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Shahidul Alam Photo Kathmandu award</a>, Alisha SettWhat sort of law is this, this absurd, indiscriminate, catch-all, fishing trawler type of law? What place does it have in a country that calls itself a democracy? Who has the right to decide what the correct ‘image of the state’ is, and should be? Is there only one legally approved and acceptable image of Bangladesh? Section 57 potentially criminalizes all forms of speech except blatant sycophancy. It’s an attack, not on intellectuals, but on intelligence itself. We hear that over the last five years more than 1200 journalists in Bangladesh have been charged under it, and that 400 trials are already underway.In India too, this sort of attack on our intelligence is becoming normalized. Our equivalent of Bangladesh’s ICT Act is the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act under which hundreds of people including students, activists, lawyers and academics are being arrested in wave after wave. The cases against them, like the one against you, are flimsy and ludicrous. Even the police know that they are likely to be acquitted by higher courts. But the hope is that by then, their spirits will have been broken by years in prison. The process is the punishment.Read also: <a style="background-color: #ffffff; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: 0.01em;" href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/latest/freeshahidulalam/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#FreeShahidulAlam</a>So, as I write this letter to you, dear Shahidul, I am tempted to add, dear Sudha, dear Saibaba, dear Surendra, dear Shoma, dear Mahesh, dear Sudhir, dear Rona, dear Arun, dear Vernon, and also, dear Tariq, dear Aijaz, dear Aamir, dear Kopa, dear Kamla, dear Madavi, dear Maase, dear Raju, dear hundreds and hundreds of others.How is it possible for people to defend themselves against laws like these? It’s like having to prove one’s innocence before a panel of certified paranoics. Every argument only serves to magnify their paranoia and heighten their delusions.As both our countries hurtle towards general elections, we know that we can expect more arrests, more lynching, more killing, more bloggers hacked to death, more orchestrated ethnic, religious and caste conflagrations— more false-flag “terrorist” strikes, more assassinations of journalists and writers. Elections, we know, means fire in the ducts.Read also: <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/banner/the-death-of-democracy/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The death of democracy</a>, Aditya Adhikari Your Prime Minister, who claims to be a secular democrat, has announced that she will build 500 mosques with the billion dollars the Government of Saudi Arabia has donated to Bangladesh. These mosques are supposedly meant to disseminate the ‘correct’ kind of Islam.Here in India, our rulers have dropped all pretense of the secularism and socialism that are enshrined in our constitution. In order to distract attention from the catastrophic failures of governance and deepening popular resentment, as institution after institution—our courts, universities, banks, intelligence agencies—is pushed into crisis, the ruling power, (not the Government, but its holding company, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh,) is alternately cajoling and threatening the Supreme Court to pass an order clearing the decks for the construction of a giant Hindu temple on the site where the Babri Masjid once stood before it was demolished by a rampaging mob. It’s amazing how politicians’ piety peaks and troughs with election cycles.This is what we are up against, these neat definitions of the perfect nation, the perfect man, the perfect citizen, the perfect Hindu, the perfect Muslim. The postscript to this is the perfect majority and the satanic minority. The people of Europe and the Soviet Union have lived through the devastation that these sorts of ideas caused. They have suffered the matchless terror of neatness. Only recently Europe marked the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht—the event that marked the beginning of the Holocaust. There too it all began quite slowly. There too it began with elections. And there too the old murmurs have started up again.Here we’re going to witness our own scorched-earth elections in the coming days. They will use their fishing-trawler laws, they will jump at shadows to decimate the opposition.Fortunately, we are an irredeemably untidy people. And hopefully we will stand up to them in our diverse and untidy ways.Dear Shahidul, I believe the tide will turn. It will. It must. This foolish, shortsighted cruelty will give way to something kinder and more visionary. This particular malaise, this bout of ill-health that has engulfed our planet will pass.I hope to see you in Dhaka very soon.With loveArundhati <figure><img width="700" height="400" src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221108101132/636a22929c7e80680e041796jpeg.jpg" alt=""><figcaption>Shahidul Alam is released from the prision.</figcaption></figure>Dearest Arundhati,It was a letter I read and reread long before it appeared before my eyes. It was through layers of metal bars that I strained to listen to Rahnuma’s words. At over 130 decibels, the noise made by us screaming prisoners, straining to hear and be heard, was akin to a crowded stadium or a fire siren. As she repeated her words over and over again, I faintly heard, Arundhati. Letter. It was just over a hundred days that I had been incarcerated. A hundred days since I’d slept on my own bed, fed my fish, cycled down the streets of Dhaka. A hundred days since I’d pressed my shutter as I searched for that elusive light.Those words, screamed out but barely heard was the nourishment I needed. Did you write it by hand? What was the paper like? In this digital age, you probably used a keyboard. What font had you used? What point size? And the words. Words that you so gracefully string together. I relished the imagined words. Your words. I missed words as I missed my bed, my fish and Rahnuma’s touch. When they asked me what I needed in jail, books were on top of my list. The first lot of books came in. Mujib’s prison diaries, Schendel’s History of Bangladesh, and the book you’d given me when we last met, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. I’d been meaning to read it ever since we said goodbye in Delhi, but our lives had been taken over by the immediacy of our struggles. Now I had the time.I imagined other letters. The one Shiv Viswanathan had written when Binayak Sen had been sentenced for sedition, or the one Rahgu Rai wrote asking that I be freed. But this one was not to a prime minister. It had been written for me. To me. There are no pigeons in Keraniganj, and sparrows are perhaps too small to carry letters. As I fed them from my window, I could imagine one carrying across a tiny wad of paper, carefully tied to its feet. Paper I would unfold gently, smoothing the creases. It would have been a letter I had read before it was written.I could read your letter, not because I remember you sitting across your wooden table in your open kitchen. Not because I remember you rubbing noses with Maati Ke Laal as she interrupted our chat, insisting on not being ignored. Not because of Sanjay’s book on Kashmir, which we had opened together. My reading relied on our shared legacies, on our collective griefs, on the struggles we both face as autocrats rule our lands. You have Kashmir and we have the Chittagong Hill Tracts. You have ‘encounters’ and we have ‘crossfire’. ‘Goom’ we both share. We both live in what are called democracies, though we know we lack voice.Your book weaves complex characters, the absurdities and the beauty that is India. It finds the calm within the chaos. A moment of kindness, within the grotesque injustice. I look around me and see hijras in the high security cells in Surjamukhi. Occasionally they walk out, their bright saris, glowing amidst the drab clothes of other prisoners. They remind me of your Anjum. Of your Saddam, as I see Koutuk da feeding the cats, making his way to those pretentiously named jail buildings, Jamuna, Meghna, Korotowa and Padma, seeking out the one that might have missed its meal. As I speak to prisoners falsely charged, and left to rot in a legal system that lets people be forgotten, and the Sharbahara man Tipu Biswas, his eyes glowing with passion, insisting on justice even in jail, I am reminded of  your Musa, defiant against the odds.It was here in Keraniganj that I met Badal Farazi, wrongfully charged by Indian courts, and eventually sent to Bangladesh. Ten years in jail for a crime, the courts knew he could not have committed. My government too scared to speak against this utter wrongness of Indian justice. Too scared to upset the big brother. Keraniganj was where top terror Joseph had been. Released through a presidential pardon, whisked away in the middle of the night and sent overseas. In my case it had taken six attempts before bail had finally been granted. They had tried to block my bail just as they had tried to stop me from sleeping on a bed, or getting access to a doctor. Even after bail was granted, they had tried to prevent my release. But we triumphed in the end, and we held hands and sang songs as I left the jail gate. The case still hangs over my head and the threat of bail being withdrawn is the threat they hope will silence my tongue, my pen and my camera. But the ink in our pens still run. The keyboards still clatter.Yesterday we were in Dhakeswari Mandir. It was Taposh and Haimanti’s daughter Riddhi’s ‘mukhe bhat’, her first solid food. As they lit candles and circled the tulshi plant, I wondered if they would dig up the temple because they had heard of a mosque underneath. One more mosque to add to the 500 our prime minister has promised using Saudi money.They swore in the new cabinet yesterday ‘I will faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter according to law: That I will bear true faith and allegiance to Bangladesh: And that I will not allow my personal interest to influence the discharge of my duties as a member of Parliament.’ Given that their very means of being there was based on an election where every rule had been flouted, the constitution abused, to protect their personal interest, this oath was particularly perverse. A slap on our face with sandals, a terrible insult in South Asia. They will sit in their duty-free cars, flags waving. They, the biggest lawbreakers in the land, will sit on boards of banks and schools. They will pass the new laws. They took their oath as a mother of four was writhing in hospital, gang-raped by party faithful, for having the audacity of voting the ‘wrong’ way.But yes, Arundhati, the tide will turn, and the nameless, faceless people will rise. They will rise against the entire state machinery, now reduced to servility. They will rise as they did in ’71. They, who never clamoured for muktijoddha honours, who never claimed benefits for their children, who never wore Mujib coats in public. They, their children and their children’s children, will rise to bring back the core principles they had fought for. We will have secularism. We will have democracy. We will have social equality. We will win back this land.I’ll see you in Dhaka. A humongous hug awaits.Love,Shahidul Dhaka. 7th January 2019First published in <a href="http://www.newagebd.net/article/61212/they-will-rise-shahidul-alam-replies-to-arundhati-roy">The New Age</a>

Arundhati and Shahidul write to each other

This is the 81st episode of Diaspora Diaries, a Nepali Times series in collaboration with Migration Lab providing a platform to share experiences of living, working and studying abroad. I went to Australia in 2008 because everyone was headed there. It was my first time leaving the country and my first job. My college helped me find work as a kitchen helper at a Brisbane restaurant.&nbsp; I did not know that being a kitchen helper meant washing dishes. I was young and did not know how to wash dishes or how to handle the steam, the hot water, and the busy kitchen. The utensils were thrown at the dishwashing station continuously, and water splashed on my face. My shoes and clothes were always wet. It was an on-call job. A couple of days into the job, I was asked to come in when I was at the movies. I refused. They fired me. That was that. I then worked on a farm, picking lemons and oranges. The lemon work was particularly hard because I would get cuts all over my hands. This hustle was not for me.&nbsp; Within a year in Australia, I decided to return to Nepal because the foreign life did not suit me. After spending eight months in Nepal, reality sank in. Nepal was not all that great either. I went back to Australia. On the plane, I befriended a Nepali woman who was homesick and a first time traveler. At the immigration in Australia, the officer noticed my long absence and started interrogating me. He noticed the Nepali woman waiting for me and asked who she was. Without thinking I lied that she was my girlfriend. That seemed to do the trick because he did not want us to be separated. He stamped my passport. She went her way. I went mine.  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20260127130112_5e7bfa6acc5f94d5f1905537e387c2d4169469679ace2b71de368912f3bd514f.jpg" data-media-id="editor_0" data-image-id="20260127130112_5e7bfa6acc5f94d5f1905537e387c2d4169469679ace2b71de368912f3bd514f" data-rendition-name="original" width="987" height="1004" loading="lazy" alt="DD 81 NT"> </figure>  In Sydney, I again found a dishwashing job at a fine dining restaurant. A Sri Lankan colleague helped me learn the job. The pace at which I had to do the dishes was insane but I got the hang of it in two weeks. I always dreamt of one day wearing the chef’s white coat. It commanded respect, I could tell. In addition to becoming good at my job washing dishes, I also had good language and networking skills so I built good relationships with colleagues. There was a need for a pizza chef at the restaurant. It was expensive to hire someone new, and they asked me if I was up for the job. I said yes even though I knew nothing about making pizzas. My Italian colleagues coached me and before I knew it, I became better than others at the job. Soon, I realised that I did not just want to make pizzas. Whatever I wanted to learn, I just asked seniors to take me under their wings and I would help without pay. They would agree but still pay me. It wasn’t a strategy per se, I genuinely wanted to learn. At some point, a Japanese sous chef in my restaurant and I had coincidentally applied to the same restaurant, and there, under him, I got to learn even more. Working with a Japanese chef is really difficult, but you learn a lot. He would sometimes even hold my hand with tongs dipped in hot water when I screwed something up. I worked in a few restaurants after this and was earning well. When one of my colleagues, a dishwasher, was let go unfairly, I decided to leave because I did not want to be a quiet bystander to this act. I returned to Nepal immediately after this.  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/2026012719010_f33ba38bb5f86f1d33262fd0d7ccd09ed01f6cc52148ca3d4cd66c434b695730.jpg" data-media-id="editor_1" data-image-id="2026012719010_f33ba38bb5f86f1d33262fd0d7ccd09ed01f6cc52148ca3d4cd66c434b695730" data-rendition-name="original" width="1200" height="1600" loading="lazy" alt="DD 82"> </figure>  I started a restaurant called Ghumti, but it was struggling. The location of the restaurants was not good and it failed. I bought another restaurant in Darbar Marg. I was managing two restaurants when Covid hit. The rent kept piling up, and there was no revenue. I took a huge loss. I gave them up and returned to Chitwan and started making migration plans. I came across a job vacancy for Alba in Qatar by the famous Enrico Crippa. I still remember the heat when I got out of the airport in Doha, it was like entering an oven. Thankfully, I had a Nepali roommate who showed me around and helped me adjust.&nbsp; The hotel was still under construction, but training had started. We worked really hard for the opening and things went well. In 2023, we even won the Best MENA Restaurant award. But at some point in 2024, the international Crippa chain decided to leave.&nbsp; Some colleagues including the head chef left and I suddenly was put in charge. I had some head chef experience from Australia and had previous experience working in high pressure environments, so I stepped up. We had to start from scratch again, this time as Alba in Raffles, Doha.&nbsp; The name of our restaurant comes from the Alba white truffle, which is the best available and is expensive, selling at around 40,000 QAR per kg. We had heard the official announcement that the Michelin was coming to Qatar, and we worked even harder.&nbsp; Michelin inspections are strict, highly secretive and you have no idea you are being investigated. Even then, we were up for the game. We were ‘selected’ which meant we had potential.  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/2026012719010_bab3a904af69603e9e79f333aeea89b035401c0c8d1750930107f3594ff1f565.jpg" data-media-id="editor_2" data-image-id="2026012719010_bab3a904af69603e9e79f333aeea89b035401c0c8d1750930107f3594ff1f565" data-rendition-name="original" width="1000" height="697" loading="lazy" alt="DD 81"> </figure>  I went to the award ceremony with low expectations. But because they announce the name alphabetically, Alba came first. I was very happy and felt validated. Being recognised as a Michelin one star restaurant is a huge achievement for us. My MD reminded me of a promise I had made of getting a Michelin tattoo if we got the award. I guess I will get it done when I come to Nepal next. My plan is to get a tattoo that captures my journey right from the dishwashing days.&nbsp; I have cooked for Obama, Beckham, Kaka, Trump, 50 Cent, Lindsay Lohan, you name it, because our restaurant is visited by high profile guests. At first, I used to feel the pressure. Now I view all guests as the same. The food you make is the same no matter who is eating it. I love the work. In fact, it does not feel like work. The rush in the kitchen, the atmosphere, the heat, the scent, I live for it. When I am not working, I get bored. It is like an addiction without which I get withdrawals. I want to contribute in introducing Nepali cuisine and ingredients in the worldstage. Nepalis overseas have a lot of potential in the hospitality sector. But my advice to youth is to focus on building a strong base and invest in learning. It is increasingly common for Nepalis to job hop for a salary jump. While other skills like language are also important, it is the hard skills that we really need to focus on. In our field of work, it is the plate that needs to speak.

Sky is the limit

During the 2022 election, populist candidates campaigned with algorithms and were elected mayors. In 2026, they are campaigning with AI-generated memes and videos. Four years ago, the idea that the most potent weapon in the next election in Nepal would be artificially generated clips of politicians beating each other up would have been science fiction. Yet, here we are: at a fever pitch of AI-based political content. Some are generated by the IT cells of political parties, while most are just produced and posted by young tech-savvy supporters of the new candidates. Most of them ridicule older leaders, and the predominant target is former prime minister K P Oli who was forced to resign after the September protests. On 20 January the TikTok account ‘iamfunnyman88’ posted a slapstick video in which former Kathmandu Mayor Balendra Shah is seen accosting ex-prime minister K P Oli with a giant bell (pictured), swinging it in Kung Fu Hustle style in what looks like Patan Darbar Square. Oli is sent splattered on the ground. K P Oli has become a symbol of the legacy parties and their aged leaders, and everything that is wrong with them. Balendra Shah represents the new protest candidate. The two are contesting from Jhapa-5, and it is turning out to be a prime ministerial race for 5 March. In another video, the RSP vs UML clash played out as a high-stakes war from the Mahabharat. Oli is a young warrior with a chiselled jaw and wearing a heavy golden armour ready to lead his followers to battle (pictured). A stylised Nepal flag flutters above him to the accompaniment of filmy dialogue.&nbsp; The videos are everywhere on TikTok, YouTube and Facebook. Many of the posts are hitting over 200,000 likes and 5 million views. Such content seems to be engaging more voters than speeches and door-to-door campaigning at the hustings. The videos are fake, but the numbers, and the attention they command, are very real.  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/2026013014010_ed52fe3248b54eb4f9f391ee718e874a86c1b98297dde203800ad7b114bdacda.jpg" data-media-id="editor_0" data-image-id="2026013014010_ed52fe3248b54eb4f9f391ee718e874a86c1b98297dde203800ad7b114bdacda" data-rendition-name="original" width="2000" height="1000" loading="lazy" alt="Nepal election memes"> </figure>  At first, it looked like the RSP’s digital media presence was a joke aimed at getting easy-to-access publicity via the far-reaching arms of the algorithm. But it is looking like a carefully designed strategy promoting Balen Shah as the RSP’s star player in this election.&nbsp; In 2022, it was just for the mayor of Kathmandu. This time, Balen Shah is already being promoted in these videos as a winner who has defeated the legacy politicians.&nbsp; In previous elections in Nepal, political parties used to spend lavishly on the ‘masu bhat’ strategy — feeding heavy plates of mutton curry and rice to constituents in return for votes. Ideology was swapped for immediate caloric gratification often accompanied by free-flowing alcohol.&nbsp; But surely, the new voter is too sophisticated for this. Politicians insist they have rebooted their operating systems to serve this enlightened demographic. We are talking, after all, about the generation that brought down a government over 36 hours in September.&nbsp; The assumption is that young voters today are too aware and far too proud to trade democratic agency for something as crude as a plate of steaming mutton curry and rice.&nbsp;  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/2026013014014_983476ba334f895b64cd8ea34bd0ad79c1632c428feb119c84477d8e929eb057.jpg" data-media-id="editor_1" data-image-id="2026013014014_983476ba334f895b64cd8ea34bd0ad79c1632c428feb119c84477d8e929eb057" data-rendition-name="original" width="2000" height="1000" loading="lazy" alt="Nepal elections meme"> </figure>  But the question is: are voters today any different? Aren’t these social media memes digital versions of the masu bhat that delivers a dopamine rush to voters? Watching the videos is entertainment that delivers a state of bliss, a protest against what is old but no enlightenment about how to get to the new. &nbsp; The I-cannot-go-a-single-minute-without-checking-my-phone demographic has leaned firmly towards politicians whose main focus is to be a social media star first, and an accountable politician second. More than 70% of Nepalis have smartphones now and most are hooked on data plans. The public has acquired a taste for a different kind of masu bhat - the digital kind. Instead of being made to slurp up the free spicy, fatty goat curry with deep guttural satisfaction, voters are being made to swallow easy-to-digest online clips to make serious voting decisions.&nbsp; After all, it is more fun than paying attention to a candidate’s policy proposals and actually thinking critically about the candidates.  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/2026013014014_eb3a9e0c50f4a47706a6695e78ae41556c3d9754c15d564d42fb0de3f4199999.jpg" data-media-id="editor_2" data-image-id="2026013014014_eb3a9e0c50f4a47706a6695e78ae41556c3d9754c15d564d42fb0de3f4199999" data-rendition-name="original" width="2000" height="1000" loading="lazy" alt="Nepal elections meme"> </figure>  TURNING POINT An important moment for the evolution of this digital masu bhat is the 2020 pandemic. It was just six years ago that the entire population was cut off from physical interaction. The phone screen became the sole mediator of social existence.&nbsp; Technology changes what we see as important, and this prolonged immersion fundamentally alters our perception of reality, training us to accept the flattened, binary logic of the algorithm as a substitute for the complex, multisensory texture of political reality. What is on the phone has started to dictate the questions we ask and the answers we accept. If it is not on the phone, it is starting to look irrelevant. The memes manufacture consent. Gerontocratic politicians habituated to legacy media have not fathomed the implications of this new virtual world. Everyone has been swayed by a good story since the beginning of time. Now, the phone has allowed millions of Nepalis to tell, retell, consume, and remix stories that would traditionally have huge barriers to entry. Consider the vegetable vendor killing time between customers, Gen-Z youth with no memory of the Maoist conflict, or the grandad who cannot distinguish an AI video from real footage.&nbsp; When they finally step into the voting booth, what is guiding their hand? Is it a careful calculus of policy proposals, demonstrated competence, and leadership integrity? Or is it the cumulative impact of those AI-generated dopamine hits they have been fed on a loop? This digital fog of war cuts both ways. In a twist of supreme irony, actual footage of candidates behaving badly is now routinely dismissed as ‘AI-generated’ by their PR teams. This was a convenient get-out-of-jail-free card that Balen’s camp used when a video of him shoving cadres went viral.&nbsp; Meanwhile, completely fabricated tear-jerkers of old leaders like Prachanda weeping are consumed by the public as gospel truth. We have arrived at a point where the inconvenient real is dismissed as a glitch, and the emotional fake is embraced as history.&nbsp; In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord argued that images eventually replace real life. Today’s voters in Nepal and elsewhere are not even consuming the actual meat-and-bones of mutton curry; they are swallowing the 15 second digital imitations of it.&nbsp; Welcome to the age of digital मासु भात.

Nepal’s AI-generated election

We walk past familiar neighbourhoods and wonder how much it has changed. An ongoing exhibition at The Kalā Salon titled Changing Times by The Pagoda Group aims to do just that -- capture ever-changing society within a captivating display of colourful canvases. Brick-lined houses, local tea shops, ancient temples, quiet devotion are themes in Pradhumna Shrestha’s series Shangri-La, much of which is an imagined past filled with nostalgia of the place he grew up in. By keeping people out of the frame, he allows space for what he calls a divine aura to surface.&nbsp; “I was born and brought up here and my canvases echo the nostalgia of cities like Kathmandu, Bhaktapur, and Lalitpur which are dense with myth, folklore, religion, and an ever-present divinity. All of this is truly what is ours, and we must treasure it,” says Shrestha. “Whatever I truly felt in my heart, I translated it into my work.”  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20260128100132_32a8f9e9816595f12ec0da357528feffbb249fd19adbb658c18e72e2b721f9df.jpg" data-media-id="editor_0" data-image-id="20260128100132_32a8f9e9816595f12ec0da357528feffbb249fd19adbb658c18e72e2b721f9df" data-rendition-name="original" width="1280" height="1036" loading="lazy" alt="The Kala Salon exhibition NT"> </figure>  The swirling clouds that drift across Shrestha’s canvases borrow from thangka and paubha traditions, lending the scenes a sense of mysticism and otherworldliness. Within this dreamscape are red circular forms which represent wheels of chariots. &nbsp;The presence of divinity dominates from above, its presence asserted in soft blue brushstrokes below, as if the deity’s gaze itself has seeped into the land. Gods linger as guardians and temples hum with enigma in his paintings. In his much earlier work, Cultural Bond, a lakhe masked dancer bursts forward in vibrant red, dancing against a backdrop of molten gold clouds. The lakhe’s trance signifies protection and where it steps, the evil cannot follow. Hence, the skulls that surround but never fall beneath its feet but, one leg hangs suspended in midair, suggesting uncertainty, raising questions.&nbsp; Is this a symbol of culture and tradition, secure, or is it endangered by modernity? The work captures a society at a crossroads, honouring tradition while grappling with the risk of drifting away from it.  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20260128100132_c78307920acc7b14fb9f469a011043661accec66c230b5e7587bcba0199bcbf1.jpg" data-media-id="editor_1" data-image-id="20260128100132_c78307920acc7b14fb9f469a011043661accec66c230b5e7587bcba0199bcbf1" data-rendition-name="original" width="979" height="1280" loading="lazy" alt="The Kala Salon exhibition NT"> </figure>  In Panchatatva Mandala, Pasang Bikram Lama fuses two mandalas into a single visual meditation, suggesting unity where each colour carries symbolic weight: yellow evokes the soil of the earth, blue flows as water, red burns with fire, and black opens into the vastness of the spatial sky. Together, these elements form a quiet cosmology that speaks of creation and dissolution, of life folding endlessly into death and returning again. Says Lama, “Everyone has a mandala of their own being, and the elements represent their cycle of life.” Mala Shrestha’s works Water of the Divine Mother and The Spirit of Serenity unfold in a dreamy and delicate fusion of nature and religion, suggesting that divine forms are not separate from the natural world. Trees and branch-like motifs appear as origins of sacred sculptures and spiritual presences.&nbsp; Her goddesses, adorned in alluring ornaments, emerge from trunks and streams, painted in aqua green, pink pastels, and rustic browns, as if grown rather than created, affirming that the divine is inseparable from nature and present everywhere.  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20260128100132_1f8cce84b4515a0d6d8b8fc169367bf5d39a7479c2c30038dafe90ec2bb3c4c9.jpg" data-media-id="editor_2" data-image-id="20260128100132_1f8cce84b4515a0d6d8b8fc169367bf5d39a7479c2c30038dafe90ec2bb3c4c9" data-rendition-name="original" width="4032" height="3024" loading="lazy" alt="The Kala Salon exhibition NT"> </figure>  Kishor Nakarmi’s Essence of Nepal, where Gautam Buddha appears embedded within leaves, brick walls, birds, and wilderness, dissolving boundaries between the sacred and the earthly. These canvases radiate calm and their subtlety is enriched by finely observed details. Similarly, Rudra Bahadur Pun captures the vitality of mask dances and ritual movements found in the monasteries of Mustang, weaving together tradition, landscape, and daily life. The essence of the exhibition comes together in Roshan Pradhan’s works. His paintings reflect a contemporary tension where technology collides with ancestral myth and the power of tradition. A fierce Garud rises within a landscape saturated by technological apparatuses, while at its feet a human form representing AI clings tightly, attempting to assert control.  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20260128100132_dc2c1ad4a4cefea6c6c7d02e9ed500309b7c862535247fe6451038e1d053d6b2.jpg" data-media-id="editor_3" data-image-id="20260128100132_dc2c1ad4a4cefea6c6c7d02e9ed500309b7c862535247fe6451038e1d053d6b2" data-rendition-name="original" width="4032" height="3024" loading="lazy" alt="The Kala Salon exhibition NT"> </figure>  In another work, Bhairab confronts a human embodiment of AI in a theatrical standoff, with the deity ultimately prevailing, reaffirming endurance over technological dominance. The human figures in Pradhan’s paintings are drawn from life with his friends volunteering as models, photographed and later translated onto canvas.&nbsp; “Technology has taken over our lives. Many can probably not even imagine life without it now. But, culture, too, is integral to human existence. Our life would be much different without our culture; it is a part of us,” notes the artist. Rather than framing technology as purely antagonistic, Pradhan explores coexistence, and while acknowledging its destructive potential, he affirms his belief in the power of our myths and traditions.  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20260128100132_bc831a663ca8977c39979a363a95bcae5e41cfe624d78152c546579caa3e680f.jpg" data-media-id="editor_4" data-image-id="20260128100132_bc831a663ca8977c39979a363a95bcae5e41cfe624d78152c546579caa3e680f" data-rendition-name="original" width="4032" height="3024" loading="lazy" alt="The Kala Salon exhibition NT"> </figure>  Pradhan adds, “These paintings are also an archive of its time. Viewers centuries from now may read these paintings as records of the age we inhabit. While technology is important, cultural continuity must walk alongside it. Festivals must still be celebrated, oral traditions must be sustained, and our roots must be remembered, especially by future generations.” Curator Sophia L Pande says the exhibition took more than a year to put together:&nbsp; “It responds to a shifting world, seeking to capture both transformation and the quiet fear of loss. Its themes move fluidly across environment, technology, artificial intelligence, and climate change, reflecting the diverse yet interconnected practices of the artists, providing a glimpse into the evolving landscape of contemporary Nepali art.” Changing Times The Kalā Salon Chhaya Centre, Thamel 11AM-8PM

Time, transience, transition

The slow, arduous labour of democracy rarely announces itself with the fanfare of constitutional moments. &nbsp;It proceeds instead through committee rooms, ward meetings, half-attended assemblies, the awkward choreography of speech and silence, and the everyday compromises between aspiration and constraint.&nbsp; The book Nepal’s Federalism and the Pursuit of Deliberative Democracy attends precisely to this unglamorous terrain. In it, Vishnu Kumari Tandon does not ask whether democracy is desirable — an already settled question — but whether it can be made to think, to listen, and to endure under conditions of inequality, historical fracture, and institutional novelty.&nbsp; Her wager is modest yet demanding: that federalism, when tethered to participatory planning and deliberative fors, might recalibrate the relationship between state and citizen without promising redemption. Tandon’s Nepal is neither a site of democratic salvation nor a study in failure. It is a space of trial, where ideas migrate from constitutional text to municipal practice, altered by context, power, and expectation. Democracy here appears not as an ideal form but as a situated practice -- procedural, contested, and unfinished.&nbsp; The book’s quiet achievement lies in redirecting debates on deliberative democracy away from abstract normativity and toward the ethical friction of lived institutions. Federalism arrives in Nepal not as a technocratic reform but as a historical concession, wrested from conflict, exclusion, and prolonged political unrest. Tandon, who is a governance consultant at the World Bank, situates the 2015 Constitution within this unsettled genealogy, treating federalism less as an administrative innovation than as a moral response to longstanding claims of marginalisation.&nbsp; The constitutional recognition of local autonomy is thus freighted with ethical expectation. Yet the book refuses to equate decentralisation with empowerment. Federalism, Tandon insists, redistributes power without dissolving hierarchy. Domination may simply reappear closer to home. The central question, therefore, is not whether local governments exist, but how they govern: whether institutionalised participation genuinely alters the terms on which citizens speak, decide, and contest public priorities. Federalism emerges not as a stable structure but as a field of tension—between autonomy and dependence, inclusion and capture, aspiration and capacity. It is within this unstable terrain that the democratic experiment unfolds.  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20260127090120_62bd86d5cbb0dc9d199b797b2c90a5be37213b6c9236f79220706469cd3689a0.jpg" data-media-id="editor_0" data-image-id="20260127090120_62bd86d5cbb0dc9d199b797b2c90a5be37213b6c9236f79220706469cd3689a0" data-rendition-name="original" width="800" height="800" loading="lazy" alt="Vishnu Kumari Tandon"> <figcaption>Vishnu Kumari Tandon</figcaption> </figure>  UNEQUAL SKIES&nbsp; Participation, one of democracy’s most invoked terms, often risks conceptual exhaustion. Tandon restores its weight by treating participation as labour rather than ritual. Drawing on fieldwork in Buddhabhumi and Dhanushadham municipalities, she reconstructs the choreography of local planning: assemblies, committees, and councils through which proposals circulate, stall, or vanish. Participation here is unevenly distributed. It is shaped by gendered expectations, caste hierarchies, economic precarity, and anticipations of return. Attendance becomes a calculation rather than a civic reflex. This analytical attention to motivation marks one of the book’s strengths.&nbsp; Citizens participate not out of abstract virtue but through pragmatic reasoning, moral obligation, and strategic interest. Participation thus appears neither ennobling nor cynical, but politically intelligible. If participation concerns presence, deliberation concerns voice — and, crucially, whose voice matters. Tandon’s engagement with deliberative democratic theory is respectful yet revisionist. Habermasian ideals of reasoned consensus are treated as aspirational rather than portable, strained by structural inequality. In municipal assemblies, deliberation is patterned by authority: who speaks first, who commands attention, whose claims are legitimised. Marginalised citizens may be present without influence, audible without consequence. Deliberation risks becoming procedural affirmation rather than substantive redistribution of voice. Yet Tandon does not abandon deliberation as a democratic practice. Instead, she broadens its normative horizon. Drawing on second-generation deliberative theory, she legitimises emotion, self-interest, and strategic speech as components of democratic reasoning. Deliberation becomes a contested exchange rather than a purified rationality. The common good, if it appears, emerges provisionally: negotiated rather than presumed. One of the book’s most original contributions lies in its treatment of fiscal decentralisation. Money is not merely a resource but a language through which priorities are articulated and participation structured. The devolution of budgetary authority transforms deliberation into distributive politics. Citizens attend assemblies not simply to speak but to secure roads, water systems, clinics, schools. Voice is tethered to material expectation. This proximity intensifies engagement while sharpening conflict. Fiscal autonomy thus amplifies the stakes of deliberation without guaranteeing its equity. Local representatives emerge as paradoxical figures: empowered yet constrained, accountable yet insulated. Tandon resists binary judgments, showing instead how fiscal decentralisation deepens democratic possibility while exposing institutional fragility. Threaded through the book is a sustained interrogation of the ‘common good’. Revered in theory and suspect in practice, the concept is neither discarded nor sanctified. In unequal societies, appeals to the common good can obscure asymmetries of sacrifice. Empirically, deliberation proceeds through articulated self-interests: neighbourhood demands, caste claims, gendered priorities. Far from undermining democracy, these claims animate it. Self-interest becomes deliberation’s motor rather than its negation. The book thus advances a quiet ethical argument: democracy does not require the transcendence of interest, but its articulation under conditions of mutual visibility. The common good, if it exists, is emergent, fragile, and revisable. Institutions, for Tandon, are moral technologies. Laws mandate participation, but they cannot generate trust, courage, or equality. Procedural compliance may coexist with substantive exclusion. Yet repetition matters. Even imperfect fora can cultivate habits of speaking and being heard. Deliberative democracy, the book suggests, is not an event but a discipline, learned slowly, unevenly, and reversibly. Federalism is less a solution than a condition: one that opens space for democratic learning without securing its outcome. Firmly grounded in Nepal’s political history, the book resists parochialism. Nepal functions as a mirror, reflecting broader dilemmas of democratic deepening across unequal societies. Comparative resonances with Brazil, India, and donor-driven governance reforms are handled without formula or prescription. Nepal is neither an exemplar nor an exception. It is a site where democracy reveals its ordinary difficulties. The prose mirrors the argument: careful, analytic, resistant to grand claims. What lingers is not a verdict but a sensibility: an attentiveness to democracy’s tempo. Deliberative democracy appears less as consensus achieved than as disagreement sustained without rupture. In an age of democratic impatience, Tandon offers a quieter ethic. Democracy must be allowed to think slowly, to falter, and to learn. This book stands as a thoughtful companion to that discipline, reminding us that democratic transformation often occurs far from the centre, in places where speaking itself remains an achievement.  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20260127090112_4bd0fdb8c4ef4e44c21e9cba4ae63a8481ca1d61bb20f716b29f649bcdf1a4bc.jpg" data-media-id="editor_1" data-image-id="20260127090112_4bd0fdb8c4ef4e44c21e9cba4ae63a8481ca1d61bb20f716b29f649bcdf1a4bc" data-rendition-name="original" width="1136" height="702" loading="lazy" alt="Federalism book details NT"> </figure>  Aftab Husain is a Pakistan-born poet and literary and cultural critic. He teaches South Asian literature and culture at the University of Vienna.