One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest in Kathmandu

[Kathmandu, 10/18/25]

Just a two minute walk from my room, already so settled, is Four Square Coffee with breakfast burritos on its menu! All over Kathmandu are businesses with “paradise” or “heaven” in their name, but I’ve reached the highest and most blissful one possible. At 6:55AM, I await my egg, cheese and bacon bundle of love, just ordered. Across the street is a Hindu god, one of 33 million, with peda and banana slices smeared against his mouth, so he must be Vishnu. A bicycle rickshaw driver is ringing his bell. That’s a sound you hear all day long here, for gods are everywhere.

Up since 1AM, I’ve wandered around plenty. At KTM Burger, there’s a flyer advertising One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, as directed by Sajag Rana. A professor of English and communication at the Kathmandu College of Management, Rana has also directed Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, so he clearly has a very dark take on American society.

One Flew must have been one of the first TV movies I saw in the States. In Saigon, I had seen Planet of the Apes and The Poseidon Adventure. These three flicks prefigured today’s USA. In Poseidon, you have all these white people caught in a capsized ship. Frantically, they must claw their way to the bottom, just to reach sea level!