Luck, opportunity & talents: Definitions of Hari Bansha Acharya

KATHMANDU, Aug 4: “It’s due to my sheer luck that I’ve reached where I’m today,” says Hari Bansha Acharya. “Otherwise I was very naughty, and managed somehow to pass my exams by hook or by crook. But failing my SLC examinations twice was a real low point.”[break]



Acharya is a natural born actor who justifies each of the roles given to him in just the right way. Pairing up with Madan Krishna Shrestha as the MaHa Duo, he’s done a lot of work in the media that are unbeatable. But the invincible talent was as happy-go-lucky as any other teenagers in those days.







“I was in love with the mirror when I was a teenager,” he says. “I used to adjust more than one mirror in such ways that I could see myself entirely and admire what I saw of me,” he says nostalgically, admitting that he thought he was the best looking person around. “But when I look at the pictures now, I look funny with those sunken eyes.”



He recalls backbiting middle-aged people, thinking that they looked awful. “But as I’m 51 now myself, I think I look as good as I looked then and I’ll still look good when I’ll be 80,” Acharya says proudly.



Beatings from teachers were more than normal to teenager Acharya. “It was justifiable because I used to attend school only about 10 days a month,” he says. Troubling his sister, who was his only guardian, was something he did aplenty.



Talking about his girlfriends, he says that they were all “one-sided.” He blames his unemployment, lack of enough money, and especially the lack of a motorbike that deprived him of having any girlfriends.



“In my days, girls used to look for guys with motorbikes, and I also discovered that in the generation before me, girls were courted by guys with bicycles,” he says, laughing.



“Roaming around on the same streets were all we had got to do when we were teenagers,” says Acharya. He laughs at his antics of those days, trying to look dangerous whereas he was so thin that a light punch could knock him down.



But there were a few things he managed to do really well. One of them was to watch the newly changed movies on the very first day’s first show. “We had to do that for our prestige,” he says, without duly explaining what he meant by that.



“That was nothing compared to the fact that we even went to Patna in India to watch movies,” he says, mentioning the fact that the movies once released in India would take about a year to reach the cinema halls in Nepal.



And again, going to India to watch four to five movies in a day in different theatres was nothing at all in comparison to the attention he used to get after coming back to Kathmandu.



“We used to gather on the playground in front of our school and I used to tell them the stories of the movies with actions,” he laughs, remembering how the stories of five different movies he watched in a day used to get mixed up, but he somehow managed to handle the narration.



“I also sang some lines of the songs that were in the movies,” he says. And above everything, he was paid by his friends for telling them the stories.



“There was a pond inside the Bhrikuti Mandap, and it was our recreational address where we used to swim,” he says. As the caretakers there didn’t like them and wanted them to discontinue swimming in that pond, Hari Bansha’s gang once left a dead dog in the water. “It was so hideous of us, but we threw the carcass away and swam in the same water anyway.”



Well, everything else aside, there is no comparison to the outstanding acting of Hari Bansha Acharya as the inseparable partner to Madan Krishna Shrestha, and we hope to see more of him on screen in the days to come.

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