Sarana Shrestha is a 20-year-old artist based in Kathmandu. Unlike many artists who seem to have a knack for drawing and colors, she started to draw only about three years ago, when she took a gap year after her 10th grade. But if one were to look at her portraits and other artworks, it would be difficult to believe that she’s fairly new to this craft.

Divya Mittal, a clinical nutritionist at Tesla Diagnostics Clinic, has been exercising and meditating ever since the lockdown started. And this is something she plans to continue even after the lockdown is over and fears of the COVID-19 pandemic starts to wan.

Consider growing up in a household and surrounding where as a young person you must do nothing but excel in your studies because when you grow up, you have to become a salaryman with a good stable job. There is no time for “distractions” like art, music, sports or anything even remotely different from the definitions, theorems in books and the syllabus.

Like many Nepali children, I grew up watching Bollywood flicks. As a child, I used to come home from school and flick through the channels and there would always be some film or the other would running on TV. And all the films had the same old premise: A morally good guy (the hero), the pretty subdued heroine, the over-the-top villain and, sometimes, a comic sidekick. At the time, I never found anything wrong with it. Almost all films were made this way (and even continue to be made to this day) and so there was never a way to compare and decide whether or not this was an accurate representation of life. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to notice how films have gone on to shape our ideas of masculinity and femininity.

As a travel guide, Eric Awale, from Patan, Lalitpur, is living his dream life. His job is something many of us would like to have ourselves—he gets to travel all over Nepal, meet new people, research about the history and culture of Nepal and, what’s more, he makes a decent living doing it all. However, Awale argues that the life of a professional travel guide and a traveler isn’t only the stuff of dreams. It is hard work.

In October 2018, Shyrus Rijal got into a serious bike accident. The injury was so severe that people around him thought he wouldn’t make it. But luckily, he did. However, the accident changed his everyday life: he was bedbound for months. He couldn’t go to school, he couldn’t meet his friends, and he couldn’t do anything he wanted. This sudden pause in his life and his inability to do daily activities left him in a slump and he began to feel like life would never get better.

Sandipa Tamang, interior designer based in Lalitpur, has been trying to limit her internet use as much as possible. Apparently, there was an incident that has made her a bit skeptical about privacy issues online. “I was talking to my friend about something and when I opened the internet later, a webpage showed me suggestions regarding that thing which left me a bit a paranoid,” she says. She says though this could be a coincidence, it has her thinking twice before entering any personal data on the world wide web.

March 13: Dikpal Thapa fell in love with cameras when he saw one for the first time in his father’s hands during a trip to the zoo. It was a typical film camera that was popular at the time. When he found out that all the pictures he’d seen in photo albums were taken by that small device in his father’s hand, he decided at once to learn how to use it.

Now that Bong Joon Ho with his “Parasite” win has finally displaced the Hollywood dynamics, there is another foreign director who deserves audiences’ attention and appreciation and that is Yorgos Lanthimos. This Greek director is truly a master in storytelling as well as making films that are eerie yet fascinating at the same time. I happened to watch Lanthimos’ “The Lobster” by accident on HBO and its absurdist, black comedy, absolutely weird premise mesmerized me and since then I’ve been passionately following Lanthimos’ works.

March 13: Anyone who likes to make an effort with their outfits knows just how powerful jewelry can be. Be it rocking an elaborate earring for a wedding or opting for simple hoops for a casual night out, jewelry is there to make a statement—both powerful and subtle. And so, jewelry is something that’s quite essential you could say. Teenagers, however, seem to prefer simple, classic designs that can spruce up an outfit with minimal effort, and they tend to gravitate towards items like earrings, bracelets, and scrunchies.

Manu Karki lives a zero-waste life. When moving into her current home, she spent weeks hunting through different shops to find a metal dustbin rather than go for the easily available plastic ones. She is a vegetarian who is slowly transitioning to veganism. Most of the things she uses are non-plastic, she would rather thrift her clothes than buy new ones and she is willing to do everything in her power to be an environmentally conscious person.

Traditionally and culturally speaking, our clothes and the dressing style are heavily dependent on natural fibers. Moreover, our parents and grandparents have always been wearing tailored clothes and this wave of fast, ready-made fashion only started a few decades ago due to the advent of globalization. However, now we know just how non-ecofriendly and straining readymade, fast fashion can be. Maybe this is why fashion-forward people have started to drift more towards customized and tailored products that, along with being sustainably made, are cruelty-free and minimalistic in nature.

Have you ever gone to a cafe or a restaurant and ordered a drink only for it to come with a plastic straw shining brightly in all its non-reusable glory? And, of course, seeing the straw you’re overcome by this enormous sense of guilt on not playing your part in saving the world from plastic pollution.

Rojita Buddhacharya, a freelance journalist based in Kathmandu, is afraid of the dark. She says it’s because of all the ghost stories she heard as a child.

Apart from Thamel and Freak Street in Kathmandu, Lakeside in Pokhara also houses several chic and modern tattoo parlors where people from all over the world come and get inked. But with a parlor at every corner, many tattoo artists say that it’s difficult to stay relevant and sustain their businesses.

In recent times, the Nepali music scene has seen a rise in indie, lo-fi songs/music created by urban youths. These songs are often independently produced and tend to be more personal than those dominating the mainstream. One such artist, trying to make a name in this small but well-loved music scene, is Oasis Thapa.

Nikesh Rai has been playing basketball for over a decade. And he confesses that there’s nothing about it that he doesn’t love. He loves every aspect of it—the training, the actual game and everything in between. Rai was even a part of the under 19 team that played in the regional tournaments.

Deciding to watch a series requires a serious investment of time. You have to wait for episodes to show up on Netlfix or the television, and if the show becomes popular, producers make sure it never ends.

If you are one of those “Architectural Digest” fanatics binging through each and every celebrity home tour, then you are probably already familiar with luxury living—at least on the screen. These celebrity houses are filled with centuries-old artifacts and paintings and consist of furniture only the French can pronounce. But, most importantly, they show us just how creative and unique living spaces can be. But can we, non-celebrity folks, make a “Xanadu” of our own fitted with all sorts of luxurious items one can imagine? Sandipa Tamang, founder of Decor Debute, an interior designing firm, answers in the affirmative.

Greek tragedy is an art form that reached its peak during the Greek Golden Age of the fifth century and influences literature even in the present day. Initially, tragedy was a term that was designated to a certain type of drama presented at a particular Athenian festival held in honor of the god Dionysus. In those days, plays had to follow strict guidelines to be counted as a tragedy: they were mostly characterized by seriousness and dignity and involved a great person who experienced a reversal of fortune.