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The Newest ‘Godzilla’ Film Is Stranger Than Fiction
Effects artists annihilate cities in movies all the time. Tokyo really was destroyed, a reality the best Godzilla stories have always taken seriously.A mighty monster stomps across the skyline, scaled and unstoppable, leaving destruction in his wake. Bridges, skyscrapers, electrical towers: Nothing can withstand his might. Every step produces a shock wave, every breath a firestorm. He swats away missiles and artillery shells like so many gnats. Civilians race before him through the streets, necks craned upward in terror. Godzilla was hardly the first movie monster, but he is undeniably the king. Across almost 40 feature films, the aquatic kaiju has gone from inscrutable menace to heroic savior and back again. Even the casual movie viewer can picture the formula: rubber-suited men wrestling above miniature model cities while puny humans look on with horror and begrudging respect. These rampages have become quaint and kitschy, safe enough to be parodied by Austin Powers and Pee-wee Herman.Yet for the Japanese audiences who saw Ishiro Honda’s “Gojira” in 1954, the sight of annihilated cityscapes would have been quite familiar. Just after midnight on March 10, 1945, a fleet of American B-29 bombers firebombed Tokyo, targeting the city’s wood-built low-income neighborhoods with napalm. The firestorm rapidly spread, and over the following hours at least 100,000 people died, “scorched and boiled and baked to death,” in the words of the operation’s mastermind, Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay of the Air Force. Survivors recalled rolling banks of fire. Temperatures so high that metal melted and human bodies burst spontaneously into flame. By Aug. 15, this strategy had expanded to 67 cities and included the dropping of two atomic bombs. It’s been estimated that 400,000 Japanese civilians were killed and that nearly nine million more were made homeless. Honda’s film directly calls up these events. His Godzilla is a prehistoric beast, a dinosaur awoken from a subterranean chasm by underwater hydrogen-bomb testing. The monster acts with the implacable, impregnable logic of a natural disaster. His destruction of a village on remote Odo Island resembles a typhoon or a tsunami. When he finally reaches Tokyo, humans can do nothing as he rages, torching streets and crushing train cars in his teeth. Shooting in stark black and white, Honda frames the monster against a horizon of fire, like the annihilated cityscapes of the very recent past. Godzilla would go on to fight a giant moth, a three-headed dragon from outer space and King Kong. But the same traumatic kernel has always remained at the core of his appearances. At the start of Takashi Yamazaki’s “Godzilla Minus One,” released this fall, Tokyo has already been destroyed — by Allied firebombing. It is 1946, and the kamikaze pilot Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) has returned home to a leveled landscape. His parents are dead. So are the children of his neighbor and the families of just about everyone he meets, including the plucky thief Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and Akiko, a baby orphaned by the bombing. As it happens, Koichi had a run-in with Godzilla in the last days of the war, but he is less concerned with monsters than he is with finding warm clothing and food for Akiko, who is malnourished — and with his guilt over surviving his suicide mission. He cannot make peace with the world or with himself. As he tells Noriko, “My war isn’t over.” For all the seat-shaking power of Godzilla’s roar, there is no sound more unsettling than an air-raid siren. Yamazaki’s film resembles, at first, many postwar melodramas, depicting a generation of men so traumatized by their experiences that they do not know how to move on with their lives and a society struggling to shake off a wartime culture of death. Koichi takes a dangerous job clearing mines left behind by both U.S. and Japanese forces, a lethal embodiment of the war lingering long into peacetime. It is this work that reunites Koichi with the monster of his nightmares. In this film, Godzilla is a deep-sea beast given powers of regeneration and destruction by the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests. These powers embolden and enrage the animal; even launching its catastrophic heat ray seems to scorch the creature from the inside, making each attack a mutually destructive act. Godzilla’s assault on Tokyo’s Ginza neighborhood recalls the 1923 Kanto earthquake, with each step splitting the earth and even the brushing of his tail causing buildings to crumble, crushing hundreds beneath the wreckage. Yet this is all prelude. When the army finally arrives to drive Godzilla back, the creature charges up its fiery breath, letting loose a thermonuclear blast that flattens the city, murdering thousands in an instant. The creature roars, and Yamazaki’s camera pans up to reveal a mushroom cloud blooming in the skies over Tokyo.It is an immensely discomfiting moment, and something about it reveals why Hollywood’s numerous attempts to bring the monster to America have never creatively succeeded. Beginning with Roland Emmerich’s 1998 “Godzilla,” the monster has flattened New York, San Francisco and Boston, to increasingly dull effect. Emmerich’s bombastic approach to destruction renders the action glib and meaningless. Honda shows us a cross-section of Tokyo society to underline all the life about to be lost; Emmerich’s misanthropic disaster epics, from “The Day After Tomorrow” to “2012,” marshal large casts in order to gleefully pick them off. So many Hollywood blockbusters these days end with a beam of colored light shooting into the sky and the whole world in peril. Thanks to teams of overworked effects artists, it is easier than ever to snap your fingers and annihilate entire cities, to make the deaths of thousands, even millions, seem banal. No American city has ever directly experienced the catastrophe of modern warfare, and you feel filmmakers grasping at the same examples over and over again. Zach Snyder invokes Sept. 11; “The Batman,” from 2022, ends by blowing Gotham’s levees, as if the city were New Orleans. Yet all this imagery feels cheap, deployed as a backdrop to the superheroic deeds at center stage.Tokyo really was destroyed, a reality the best Godzilla stories have always taken seriously. “Minus One” stays with the human victims as they race through the streets, horrified that their home is being destroyed, again, and so soon. Where Emmerich’s film exults in the carnage of laying waste to a city, Yamazaki’s insists on the damage, the destruction that recurs, returns, revictimizes. And he grounds it in very real terror; for all the seat-shaking power of Godzilla’s roar, there is no sound more unsettling than an air-raid siren. The writer W.G. Sebald once argued that the destruction of German cities from the air was so extensive that it left almost no imprint upon the popular consciousness. The bombing could be captured in statistics and generalizations but never as “an experience capable of public decipherment.” Faced with such mass destruction, the individual experience shrinks, until even those who live through war choose not to recall it. A similar thing could be said of our cinematic depictions. When a city is annihilated with a deadening wipe of one digital hand, it implies something foregone, even natural about the process. Indeed, LeMay’s forces modeled their firestorm on the one caused by the 1923 Kanto earthquake, and in the testimony of survivors the conflagration takes on a life of its own, a ferocious beast attacking from all sides. But there is nothing natural about the destruction of cities in wartime. Such devastation must be planned, ordered and executed, conscripting thousands to kill many thousands more. Someone has to build the bombs, and someone else to drop them from on high. There are homes below, schools and parks and hospitals, the topography of an entire life, buried under the rubble. When these images appear on our screens, it’s worth remembering: For some, this is spectacular fantasy; but for others, the horror is entirely too real.Source photographs for above: Toho Co. Ltd./Prod DB/Alamy Stock Photo.Robert Rubsam is a freelance writer and critic. More
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Documentary on New York City’s 1970s Fiscal Crisis Wins Film Prize
A documentary about the city’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s, co-directed by the son of one of its saviors, wins the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film.On Oct. 29, 1975, Mike O’Neill, the editor of The Daily News, and Bill Brink, the managing editor, returned from lunch and asked whether President Gerald R. Ford, while addressing the National Press Club in Washington, had agreed to help New York City avoid bankruptcy.The editors were read the definitive sentence from Ford’s address: “I am prepared to veto any bill that has as its purpose a federal bailout of New York City to prevent a default.”As I recall — I was a reporter and editor at The Daily News at the time — Brink initially summed up the president’s rejection with what was sometimes quaintly described back then as a two-word barnyard epithet. Then they refined the hulking front page tabloid headline, a cri de coeur that encapsulated Washington’s response to the city’s plight and that would help cost Ford the presidential election the following year, ultimately becoming a metaphor for New York’s resilience: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”Those days of urban desolation, despair and painful recovery a half century ago are captured in the forthcoming documentary “Drop Dead City — New York on the Brink in 1975,” which on Monday was awarded the fifth annual Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film.“Drop Dead City” was directed by Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn, a filmmaker and musician who had a unique perspective: It was Michael’s father, Felix G. Rohatyn, an investment banker, who was recruited in 1975 by the heroic Gov. Hugh L. Carey of New York to help stave off the state’s municipal bankruptcy.Michael Rohatyn was only 12 when his father helped save the city. Perusing the old footage from that time and filming 200 additional hours, he said in an interview, “I was very moved to see his charm and his intellect right there on the surface. I think he would be really proud of the film. He might think there’s not enough of him in it, and he might be right.”Felix G. Rohatyn, who helped rescue New York City from insolvency in the 1970s, was the father of one of the filmmakers.William E. Sauro/The New York TimesThe prize, awarded by The Better Angels Society, the Library of Congress and the Crimson Lion/Lavine Family Foundation, and funded by Jeannie and Jonathan Lavine, includes a $200,000 grant for final production and distribution of the film, a sum that, the award-winning documentarian Ken Burns recalled, was more than the entire budget for his first film, on the Brooklyn Bridge, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1982.“Drop Dead City” serves as a vivid reminder for today’s negativists of how bad the bad old days were. The contrasting scenes are poignant: a theater poster for “Man of La Mancha” — the Impossible Dream — and streets clogged with cabs juxtaposed with the carcasses of burned-out buildings, abandoned skeletal public works, graffiti-shrouded subway cars, and mobs of justifiably choleric municipal workers whose promise of lifetime civil service job security was suddenly jeopardized. Its protagonists were mostly men with long sideburns in smoke-filled rooms, palpably fearful over the uncharted consequences if the city could no longer fool some of the people all of the time to pay its bills.Who would have first claim? The bondholders from whom the city had borrowed? Or the police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers and teachers on whom New Yorkers depended every day? Or the beneficiaries of public assistance who depended on the city?And who would bear the blame? Former Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, whose worthies conceived of “moral obligation” bonds to enable more borrowing for good causes? Former Mayor Robert F. Wagner, who was re-elected in 1961 after granting the unions collective bargaining rights? His successor, John V. Lindsay, undone by the cost of good intentions? Or his successor, Abraham D. Beame, who had warned against fiscal gimmickry when he was the city’s comptroller but sanctioned it anyway by voting for the unbalanced budgets, only to find that the buck stopped with him when he was elected mayor?And who should bear the brunt of the sacrifice? Public officials had long maintained low mass transit fares, free tuition at City University and other services, and had granted organized labor generous benefits not only to get re-elected, but to preserve the city’s legacy as a global beacon of opportunity. Bankers should have known that the city was selling tax anticipation notes without having the slightest notion of how much tax revenue was anticipated, even as they reaped hefty commissions on each borrowing that sent the city deeper into debt.“They made the accounting sexy,” Burns said of the filmmakers. “They made the people who get dismissed human and dimensional. The headline became the haiku of the fiscal crisis.”Hundreds of films were submitted to the Better Angels Society, a nonprofit organization whose goal is to educate Americans about their history through documentaries. It winnowed the submissions to six and presented two to Burns and to Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress. The runner-up was “The Disappearance of Miss Scott,” directed by Nicole London, which recounts the story of the jazz pianist and civil rights pioneer Hazel Scott, who went into exile during the Red Scare of the 1950s.The mid-1970s evoked by “Drop Dead City” are even more distant from today’s audiences than the ancient history of the 1929 stock market crash was from New Yorkers who lived through the city’s fiscal crisis. But, as Hayden explained, what gives the film vitality and relevance is that “it puts history at the forefront.”“Drop Dead City” deftly melds archival footage of frustrated and gravely conflicted negotiators, ordinary New Yorkers and aggrieved rank-and-file union members with candid reflections by the surviving protagonists. Unfortunately some, like former Deputy Mayor John Zuccotti, didn’t survive long enough to be interviewed on video. (Zuccotti died a day after the filmmakers spoke with him off-camera.)Viewers might also have welcomed more of Felix Rohatyn’s pithy observations. (He once likened default to “someone stepping into a tepid bath and slashing his wrists — you might not feel yourself dying, but that’s what would happen.”)The city came so close to default that a declaration was signed by Mayor Beame’s shaky hand, but never invoked; it later hung in the home office of the New York corporate lawyer Ira Millstein.Asked at the time, though, whether an agreement with the municipal unions and the State Legislature to fend off bankruptcy would survive, Felix Rohatyn replied: “I don’t give odds any more. I think it has to work.”But Rohatyn was aware of the costs, predicting that the sacrifices inflicted to satisfy the banks and the Ford administration would mean that even if New York survived, “this city will be a much lesser place.”Yost, the film’s co-director, explained why, even though New York remains very much alive, “Drop Dead City” is still very relevant.“Intellectually, it’s resonant at a time when we’re all at each other’s throats,” he said. “That was a moment when it could have gotten ugly and rude like New York, but seemingly irreconcilable things came together to keep the city from going over a cliff. To me that holds a lot of lessons for us today.” More
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Amid Barcelona’s Big Music Festivals, Small Venues Struggle
On a recent Friday night, a few dozen 20-somethings piled into Sidecar, a well-known concert venue in downtown Barcelona.The small space, with a low vaulted ceiling, was only half-full, but onstage, the singer Íñigo Merino and his band were determined to show their audience a good time. The crowd sang along to Merino’s catchy pop songs, which he interspersed with anecdotes, jokes and personal stories.“Music used to be just a hobby, but when I wrote this song I started thinking ‘Why not give it a chance? It could be something beautiful,’” he told the crowd, to cheers of “Bravo!” Then he launched into “El Último Portazo” (“The Last Door Slam”).Barcelona is known around the world for its nightlife, and huge festivals like Primavera Sound and Sónar — which begins Thursday and runs through Saturday — draw hundreds of thousands of visitors to the city each year. Yet small and medium-sized concert venues are struggling.Capturing the performance at Sidecar in Barcelona on a recent Friday night.Maria Contreras Coll for The New York Times.The singer Íñigo Merino performing at Sidecar.Maria Contreras Coll for The New York TimesThe Association of Concert Venues of Catalonia, a trade body, estimates that in the past 20 years, 220 nightlife venues have closed in Barcelona and the surrounding metropolitan area. In a city of 1.6 million people, the total estimated capacity of its 198 music venues is less than 50,000, the venues association says.And local musicians say they are running out of places to play.The number of visitors to Barcelona soared in the past two decades, resulting in complaints about noise and overcrowding from residents. Under the left-wing mayor Ada Colau, the city has prioritized locals’ quality of life, limiting the number of tourist-related businesses, including nightlife venues, that can open in many parts of town.“The city doesn’t issue licenses to set up new concert venues, and the existing ones are under threat and disappearing,” said Carmen Zapata, the manager of the venue association. “Barcelona has four music schools, and lots of musicians graduate every year, so we need small and medium-sized venues to absorb this whole scene.”Thanks to its weather and beaches, the city has become a popular location for music festivals. Last summer, five big festivals took place in the city. Those events, which were attended by more than 800,000 people, received funding from City Hall and the regional government of Catalonia. Festivals like that are able to pay artists much bigger fees and demand exclusivity in the region, sometimes even for Spanish artists.“Spain never had a very established culture of concert venues like in other countries, and now it has become a country of festivals and mega-festivals,” said Coque Sánchez, who runs Freedonia, a nonprofit music venue in the Raval neighborhood. “We also know that there are now artists who go straight from Spotify to performing in festivals, without passing through concert venues.”“We are passionate about live music, but nobody does this because they make a lot of money,” said Sidecar’s programming manager.Maria Contreras Coll for The New York TimesSidecar, the concert venue, celebrated its 40th birthday this year and is beloved by locals for its programming of mostly Spanish and Catalan indie-rock bands. But like many other live venues in Barcelona, it also puts on club nights, with D.J.s rather than bands, in order to survive. Fátima Mellado, who is in charge of production and programming at Sidecar, said hosting concerts was not a sustainable business model.“We are passionate about live music, but nobody does this because they make a lot of money,” Mellado said.In the neighborhood of Gràcia, the venue Heliogàbal has been booking emerging bands since 1995. The acts that have performed in a tiny corner of the bar include Rosalía, the Barcelona singer who went on to become a global pop sensation. She played at Heliogàbal in 2015, two years before she released her debut album.“We have never wanted to grow because we prefer this small format,” said the owner, Albert Pijuan. “It’s a completely different experience. You get goose bumps because you’re so close.”Despite its popularity over two decades, the venue almost closed down in 2016 when it received hefty fines for staging concerts without a license. It survived thanks to a City Hall initiative called Espais Cultura Viva (Live Culture Spaces), a new venue classification that makes it legal for existing bars, restaurants, bookshops and other small venues to host live music performances — but only until midnight, and only if they meet a series of requirements, including soundproofing.“The aim is to legalize these venues that are providing a cultural service,” said Daniel Granados, a cultural official in City Hall. He said around 25 establishments had signed up since the program was introduced in 2019.Heliogàbal, in the Gràcia neighborhood of Barcelona, has been booking emerging bands since 1995.Enric Sans/HeliogàbalPijuan said he had invested hundreds of thousands of euros in soundproofing and other upgrades to Heliogàbal, around half of which was funded with subsidies from the city and regional governments. The venue also has commercial sponsors, which help it stay afloat, and has even started hosting daytime concerts during “vermut,” the traditional pre-lunch apéritif hour. But he said these measures were not enough to guarantee the venue’s future. “We can’t understand why we are still struggling after 28 years of having shown that our project is attractive,” he said.Pijuan said he felt that having supported so many local musicians in their careers, venues like his should receive more recognition and government support. “When posidonia disappears, there is no life left, the sea is dead,” he said, referring to a protected Mediterranean sea grass that flourishes off Catalonia’s coast. “Small venues play this role in the musical ecosystem.” More
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From Rap Star to Engineer to Young Mayor Demolishing Swaths of Kathmandu
A music idol in his early 20s and then an engineer, Balen, 33, next won an upset victory as mayor of Nepal’s capital, inspiring a wave of young politicians. Now, he’s tearing down parts of the city.KATHMANDU, Nepal — Before he aspired to Kathmandu’s highest office, Balendra Shah appeared on the city’s rooftops, a singer facing off in rap battles or filming music videos.His songs, which focused on poverty, underdevelopment and the rot he saw at the root of Nepal’s entrenched political culture, drew an avid following among the country’s youth.One song, “Balidan,” meaning “sacrifice” in Nepali, has drawn seven million views on YouTube.People supposed to protect the country are idiotsLeaders are all thieves looting the country“There’s a diss culture in hip-hop music,” he said in a recent interview. “I used to diss politicians.”Now he is one.Balen, as he is known in Nepal, made an unlikely bid for mayor of Kathmandu, the Himalayan country’s capital, last May.He campaigned on his popularity as a rapper while also playing up his training and experience as a structural engineer, pitching himself as a competent professional rather than a professional politician.On top of his trademark black-on-black blazer and jeans, paired with small, square black sunglasses, he appeared on the campaign trail draped in the flag of Nepal. A complaint made to the country’s election commission that he was disrespecting the flag only increased the buzz around his run.Balen, wearing his trademark black-on-black blazer and jeans, paired with small, square black sunglasses, in Kathmandu, in November.Saumya Khandelwal for The New York TimesA political novice, Balen, who just turned 33, ran as an independent — rejecting an alliance with any of the national political parties that have dominated elections and traded power for years.He won in a landslide, trouncing his two rivals, both major-party candidates.Political commentators say Balen’s upset has inspired a wave of young, independent candidates across Nepal — including an e-commerce entrepreneur, a doctor, an airline pilot and another hip-hop artist — to take on a political class perceived as corrupt and incompetent, and dominated by men in their late 60s and 70s who have held office for decades.Like Balen, these young candidates promised to address the chronic underdevelopment of Nepal’s economy that sends hundreds of thousands of working-age people overseas each year. As Balen rapped in “Balidan”:While we sell our identity abroad government employees get 30k salary and have properties in 30 different placesWho will pay the debt of people working seven seas away?Young Nepalis at the airport preparing to go overseas for higher studies or employment in April of last year.Saumya Khandelwal for The New York TimesHundreds ran for seats in Nepal’s Parliament in elections in November, with a group of young professionals quickly forming a new political party just before the elections; it ended up the fourth largest in Parliament.Analysts called it the “Balen effect.”“It’s a kind of revolution against the politicians,” said Bhim Upadhyaya, formerly the government secretary, Nepal’s top bureaucrat, and an early adviser to Balen’s campaign.Balen’s electoral success “has really influenced a lot of young people,” said Toshima Karki, a 33-year-old doctor who was among the new winners of a seat in Parliament.Balen’s electoral success “has really influenced a lot of young people,” said Toshima Karki, a 33-year-old doctor who was among the new winners of a seat in Parliament. Saumya Khandelwal for The New York TimesThis sudden influx of youth into Nepal’s politics may not yet translate into meaningful change, and one year into his mayoralty, Balen himself has earned mixed reviews. Some complain he showed more sympathy for the poor as a performer than as a politician.The country’s seemingly intractable political instability hasn’t made it any easier to address its crushing unemployment, or to perform the basic work of government — fixing potholes, providing drinking water, equipping public schools.Yet it was this unsexy bricks-and-mortar work of municipal government that Balen said inspired him to seek office.The son of an ayurvedic doctor and a homemaker, Balen said he found artistic inspiration on bus rides home from school, observing the poverty on Kathmandu’s streets that contrasted with his own comfortable upbringing.Repair work at a demolition site in Kathmandu in November. Saumya Khandelwal for The New York TimesInitially, he wrote poetry. But after high-speed internet reached Nepal, and he discovered Tupac and 50 Cent on YouTube, he began composing rap lyrics.While American rappers inspired his music, his sense of fashion was his own. In his first major rap battle, in 2013, he looked more like a bard, wearing a black vest over a white shirt with billowy sleeves.That rap battle put Balen on the map as an underground idol, and he gained a following of young people in Nepal and in the diaspora with a string of hits mixing classical Nepali music with modern beats.But rather than making music full time, he decided to pursue another passion as well, and completed a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in Kathmandu, then a master’s degree in structural engineering in India.Entering politics was always part of his plan, he said.A video of a rap battle playing in an office of a recording company in Kathmandu in November. Saumya Khandelwal for The New York TimesWhen an earthquake struck Kathmandu in 2015, claiming 8,702 lives and causing about $3.8 billion in damage, Balen was working as a civil engineer. He and his colleagues worked on the reconstruction of 2,500 homes.The experience deepened his resolve to enter politics. In his mayoral campaign, he promised simple but — for Kathmandu — elusive goals: clean water, better roads, reliable electricity and better sewage management.Since taking office, his government has opened local health clinics and given high schools money to expand vocational training and supply free menstrual products.Many plans, however, have yet to be put in place.As mayor, he has been particularly vocal about the dearth of drinking water in Kathmandu — one of the world’s rainiest capitals — but where most people rely on trucked-in water. He describes the disparity as a “man-made disaster” caused by rapid development insensitive to the fact that the city’s ancient water spouts, which about 20 percent of the population relies upon, began to dry out when the valley’s wetlands were paved.Mr. Shah visiting a building site, in Kathmandu, in November.Saumya Khandelwal for The New York TimesNearly a year into his first term, “there is no concrete result yet” in restoring the spouts, acknowledged the mayor’s secretary, Bhoop Dev Shah.What Balen has succeeded in doing — but not without controversy — is to tear down illegal buildings, both commercial and residential, constructed without proper permits.As mayor, Balen canvasses large swaths of the city every day to assess the status of his engineering projects. Although he rarely gives interviews, he recently invited a New York Times reporting team to accompany him on one of these tours, and he defended his methods.“In Kathmandu, there is no proper planning,” Balen said from the back seat of the black S.U.V. in which he travels around the city. “We can say a city’s developed when it has parks. Now Kathmandu is a concrete jungle.”He’s confident he can fix this. “The only structural engineer we have in Kathmandu Municipal Corporation is the mayor,” Balen said of himself. “In that way, technically, it’s easy for me to execute our plans, and I can do it my way.”Mr. Shah making his runs in the city in a black S.U.V.Saumya Khandelwal for The New York TimesNot everyone is on board with his approach, which has eased Kathmandu’s notoriously snarled traffic but has also brought criticisms that the projects have hurt the poor — especially his moves to clear the crowded streets, parking lots and sidewalks of cart pullers, itinerant vendors and the shanty housing of squatters.“Using police and removing the people without giving any alternatives is not a way to work,” said his onetime adviser, Mr. Upadhyaya. He added, “It’s inhumane.”On the recent inspection trip, the mayor’s convoy navigated to a group of apartment blocks around a partly excavated road and an open sewer. Here, the mayor had opted to clear some apartment buildings to build a road wide enough for vehicular traffic.Mr. Shah inspecting a sewer being built in Kathmandu in November.Saumya Khandelwal for The New York TimesSahin Wakar, 40, and her husband live in a house partly destroyed by a demolition crew ordered by the mayor’s office.“We accept it if it’s for betterment,” she said.The mayor, too, was sure the disruption was worth it.“To build something amazing,” he said, “we need to clear the site.” More
