Or so it seemed. Houses were being brought down, quite literally, to the streets. An old lady, whose house adjoined the main road, was screaming in vain at the policemen to stop. [break]
When they refused, she stood in front of the bulldozer and challenged the driver to run over her. She was promptly overpowered, quite easily, handcuffed and bundled into a police van, possibly taken to Hanuman Dhoka and issued a fine for disturbing the peace and probably released a couple of days later.
Together with other spectators that had gathered to see the carnage, I had watched in silence and a bit of shame as this lady appealed to the traffic police, explaining that she couldn’t possibly vacate the house as she lived by herself and had nowhere else to go. But of course, these days the police in Kathmandu don’t seem to have hearts.
This policeman in question continued to ignore her until she called him a corrupt, big, fat and the worst word in the world.
Fair enough, you might think. We, the old lady included, pay the policemen’s salaries.
They are, therefore, quite literally our servants, and she is allowed to call them whatever she wishes to should their behavior be unreasonable and stupid.
It seems not. Because the policeman refused to listen to her repeated pleas for more time and instead gave her a stern rebuke for calling him names, warning her of greater consequences. But it wasn’t offensive.
The policeman in question was big. He was fat. And if he was going to throw an old lady onto the street, then he was also the worst word in the world. And anyway, how can it be against the law to abuse unreasonable state officials? At this rate, you would not be allowed to call a useless idiot who is a Member of Parliament and one-eyed a “useless one-eyed idiot MP.”
For example, I am employed by this newspaper, and when I say or do something with which you disagree, you are perfectly entitled to write to me saying whatever comes into your head.
Indeed, if I rang the police every time someone called me the worst word in the world, I would get the Best Customer Award from Ncell for footing the highest bill every month, as if their prices aren’t steep enough already.
What worries me then is that the country is completely out of control. Imposing whatever law it sees fit whenever, and then hammering anyone who dares to even disagree.
With a President and his first family now living in a former palace, a bemused Vice President who looks reasonably bored and a Prime Minister and his “advisors” in place, you would naturally imagine that they won’t allow things to get this bad.
Unfortunately, not so. Because, as I write, the foreign debt carried by Nepal is countless times higher than the country’s entire GDP.
Of course, the government could get round the problem by increasing taxes, but what’s the point when everyone is seeking to loot the state coffers with fake VAT bills and the last two Finance Ministers lack you-know-what to take them on? Or everyone’s unemployed, so no one’s paying tax anyway. Of course, Nepal Rastra Bank could print more money, which will lead to massive inflation.
A bottle of beer will cost 1,000 Rupees, so the Rs 100,000 savings you took out of the bank in the last few days of solvency and hid under the stairs is not going to be enough to buy even 25 kgs of “jira mansuli” rice. It’ll be goodbye to Jhamsikhel nights, hello Zimbabwe!
This will cause this government, and the next one that will be formed after, to be toppled by intra- and inter-party feuds to borrow cash which they won’t be able to repay.
So they’ll go bust as well. Which means the police and the army won’t get any money, so when civil disobedience begins and because by then everyone will either be corrupt, frustrated or settled in a foreign country, there will be no one on hand to sort it out.
Five years ago, I was elated to see the new breed of politicians when they proclaimed they’d make our lives better because we assumed they were different from the incompetent ones who were already playing the field as they themselves had suffered a great deal already, fighting a bloody war whilst living in the jungles for years.
It seems five years later we gave them all up to save a few unethical and extensively greedy leaders who are boring, ugly, pointless, and to me personally, just plain disgusting.
If there is such a thing as God, I bet He’s sitting up on a cloud right now, wondering if perhaps His best species haven’t gone completely mad.
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