Nothing doing

Thanks to the Nahal-Depal faction of the Nepal Commissary Party, those of us nostalgic about this country’s glorious past could on Thursday once more relive some of our fondest memories of a wholesome, old-fashioned bund.

Once again, there was the familiar smell of a tyre bonfire at the Thapathali intersection, the uplifting sight of heroic agitators cremating a vegetable vendor’s bicycle in order to defend the Constitution, and a taxi undergoing spontaneous combustion in Gongabu. Hadn’t realised how much we missed the good old days, but here we are: back in the roaring nineties once again.

Those who say Nepal has been pushed back a decade are wrong: we are exactly where we were 30 years ago. Just as Sir Issac Newton so eloquently put it in his Third Law of Thermodynamics: ‘A nation at rest will continue to remain at rest even if the ruling party has a two-thirds majority.’

A political lockdown is proof that we live in a vibrant democracy, where every citizen has the right to hold and express a dissenting point of view, and is free to make a complete arson of himself or herself. We can all rejoice that an important part of our traditional heritage that was about to be relegated to the dustbin of history has been carefully revived for posteriority.

Just as we were beginning to feel that Nepal’s lock-tantra and gun-tantra were in danger and our freedoms were in serious jeopardy, came resounding proof that it is alive and kicking ass.

We are still a dynamite between two boulders, as Unserer Führer once proclaimed when he was still preparing for trench warfare with India. The only difference is that the gelignite stick is now between his two hind cheeks.

Since both Comrade Awesome and Comrade Oily are in complete agreement about wanting to destroy the country, why don’t they do it together? Why fight about it? It would save time, and much of their ill-gotten wealth, if they pooled their resources to make things worse by organising future shutdowns jointly.

Thanks to the Supreme Leader and Dear Leader, we are marching resolutely to restore our hard-won demagoguery. Being a never-colonised, sovereign nation, Nepalis will not tolerate foreigners trying to destabilise us. We are perfectly capable of wrecking this country all by ourselves.

Forcing the country to stop for a day on 4 Feb was such a master-stroke. Thursday was a relief because we could all stay home comforted by the knowledge that a country that was already at a standstill was brought to a complete halt.

Here are some of the other achievements of the bund:

With offices closed, bribes were not transacted and corruption was controlled to a certain extent.

There was a 24-hour moratorium on kickbacks.

Slow-down in Fast-track projects reduced their negative environmental impacts.

Because meetings and rallies were put off and public transport was off the roads, thousands of Nepalis who would otherwise have been infected with coronavirus were not.

Nepal’s petroleum import bill came down a notch, reducing our per capita carbon footprint to the targets set by our Nationally Determined Contribution.

Air pollution in Kathmandu on Tuesday came down to the ‘Good Enough to Breathe Without Dying Level’.