| ashu |
Posted
on 17-Dec-00 10:38 AM
As mentioned on this Web site a few weeks ago, the
Nepali Sahitya Initiative (NSI) has taken off at
Martin Chautari.
The purpose of the NSI is to conduct open, informal, substantial and no-holds-barred discussions - once a month -- on a selected famous text of Nepali Sahitya.
Each of these monthly sahitya discussion would be run by NON-sahitya-kaars who are -- by professions -- bankers, engineers, computer programmers, businesspeople, lawyers, doctors, travel agents and so on in Katmandu.
This sort of discussions about Nepali Sahitya need to be undertaken by intelligent
NON-sahitya-kaars, because, I, for one, am tired of watching Nepali sahityakars'
"hjacking" the sahitya ko agenda by making Nepali sahitya unnecessarily
complicated for and inaccessible to the rest of us.
The first NSI program, a discussion on "Siris ko Phool" -- Parijat's famous novel
about sex and existentialism - took place last Tuesday amidst 32 participants, many
of whom were first-time readers of the novel.
In the discussion, some of the readers felt free to persuasively dismiss the novel as an example of really bad plotting, while others came up with 'tagada' arguments in defense of the novel.
Either way, the result was that, for almost two hours, the discussion was incredibly fast-paced, lively and exciting. So much so that even the famous Nepali poet Manjul
admitted that he had never been to such a lively sahitya-discussion, that too, one
run by NON-sahitya-kaars!!
Special thanks to Sangita Pandey for leading the discussion; to Ajit
Baral for striking deals with publishers to sell copies of the novel
through Martin Chautari; to Bhaskar Gautam for preparing background materials
on Parijat; to Manjushree Thapa for asking all the right questions, and to writer Khagendra Sangraula and to researcher Mary Des Chene for inspiration.
For January, the book to be discussed is: Indra Bahadur Rai's famous novel: "Aja Ramita Cha."
Guests to this Web site may know that this Initiative is sort of a CONTINUATION of informal Sahitya guff and stuff some of us
used to do in Boston.
oohi
ashu
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