In the critically acclaimed (and award-winning) South Korean drama Parasite (dir Bong Joon Ho), the Kim family is given a ‘scholar’s rock’ by Min, their son’s friend. The scholar’s rock is a rock simply valued for its aesthetics among the Korean rich. Min believes the rock can increase material wealth, and is a perfect gift for the Kim family that is struggling to make ends meet, living in their semi-basement apartment where they have to steal WiFi. The viewer is presented with this bizarre imagery: a poor family receives a gift of a rock. As the son Ki-Woo says, ‘It’s so metaphorical’. Later, the rock floats to the surface as the Kims’ apartment is flooded during a thunderstorm. Their toilet is backing up; shit is everywhere. The Kims struggle to save their belongings, as do their neighbours, desperation, and poverty, writ large on their faces.

On the posh side of town, a rich couple sleep in their vast living room as their son sleeps in a tent on their lawn outside. The thunderstorm has little meaning here. It has none of the menace it poses for the Kims; instead, it is a moment of calm despite the thunder and lightning, a child’s adventure.

On the first day of the Nepali New Year, the Prime Minister similarly presented us with a ‘scholar’s rock’, with his call to sing the national anthem and clap for the frontline workers of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was a bizarre rejoinder to a private sector initiative that imitated the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s go-Corona-go appeal. It was a balm for the wounded urban class that feels locked in and desperate to ‘do something’. It was an initiative made for social media. It was vacuous, and it wouldn’t yield any results, except to soothe our collective selves by allowing us to believe we’ve done something in this ‘war’ against a pandemic.

Thankfully, it failed, for very few woke up at 8 and sang the national anthem. Perhaps our prime minister just does not command the same sort of belief in his citizenry as does his Indian counterpart? For, despite several policies that have hurt the lower classes—ban on cow slaughter, demonetisation, GST, CAA and NRC—the Indian middle class continues to support Modi, as the response to his call to action showed. Oli, to put it bluntly, does not evoke such a following for a simple reason that his government has done little to earn the confidence of the Nepali citizen, one example being corruption during a pandemic. Although few post-1990 governments have evoked any sense of credibility among the Nepali public, this current government stands out in particular, for it is run by an inner coterie that considers itself Omni-potent.

One of the reasons why Parasite evoked such a global following despite its South Korean roots is because the themes it talks about are universal: inequality, not just in wealth, but also in how the state responds to its citizens. Gifting the Kims a scholar’s rock is the same as clapping your hands during a pandemic: a coat of washable paint over tottering health infrastructure and the inequities laid bare by a tottering society. Workers walking hundreds of miles to get home; folks swimming across raging torrents in desperation; the invisibility of thousands—these are the new symbols of class divisions in an era of late-stage capitalism. Everywhere, it is the disadvantaged who are paying the price. In Mumbai, thousands of migrant workers were lathi-charged by the police after they protested the extension of the lockdown (while thousands others walked back, just as here). In the US, while the Blacks are disproportionately dying, the economic impact is hardest on the marginalised working in low paying jobs.

In Nepal, as Covid-19 tests have risen, so have the numbers. The lockdown has been extended, and so will the woes of those at the bottom of the pyramid. It is nigh impossible to see the end of this crisis, even if we know it will end one day eventually. But will it be possible to pick up from where we left off as if nothing happened?

No other film in recent years has held up a mirror to society as starkly as Parasite has. By the end of Parasite, the viewer is in two minds about who the eponymous parasite in the title is. Is it the Kims, who inveigle their way into working at a rich family’s home, or is it the wealthy family, whose wealth is built on the exploitation of the working class? Similarly, it took a pandemic to reveal the deep class divisions our societies had been hiding away. ‘Money is an iron. Those creases all get smoothed out by money’, one of the characters says in the film. It is, quite possibly, one of the most succinct ways to describe civilisation today.