Ajaya N Mali This paper will analyse modern life in Kathmandu through French Marxist Henri Lefebvre’s interpretation of alienation and the festival. Lefebvre, in his critique of modern urban life, speaks about the alienation present in the lives of ordinary people. Lefebvre contends that modernism, which capitalism has ushered in, is inherently alienating because of the lack of control that individuals have on their lives and their inability to escape the drudgery of the daily routine, which is itself controlled by the capitalist economy based on mass consumerism. With the rise of uniformity in urban space and the daily routine as well as the patterns of capitalist consumption, aspects of pre-modern life, like festival and style, decline. The festival refers to the gaiety and independence individuals experience in their daily…