The country is blessed with eight full hours of electricity every single day. With the start of the summer, the trickle of water in KUKL taps is starting to run dry, removing the hassle of people having to sit up whole nights in eager anticipation of a few drops of blue gold. A young woman has been on a fast-unto-death for a whole week protesting corruption, in what is surely Exhibit A of woman empowerment in the country. Hundreds of other women rights activists have been campaigning outside the prime minister’s residence demanding that the government be feted for its untiring effort to safeguard women’s rights. Likewise, political protection for criminals has precluded the need for any Nepali to knock on the doors of an unaffordable judiciary.
With so much going for the country, the incumbent government seems determined to go out with a bang—a long, shiny-black legacy. [break]
“Police arrest 711 hooligans from capital,” thundered a news headline in RSS, the national news agency, a few days ago. Who were these officially-branded hooligans?
The news report explains: “As per the campaign, police cut the hair of those arrested with very long and uncouth hair in the presence of their guardians and warned them not to go around in such get-up, said police.”
That is not all. “Police have kept the records including the name, surname, address, fingerprints, and photographs of the arrestees.”
Nepal is not the only country in the world to bestow long-haired men with such unearned fame. Many American states have ‘special provisions’ for the prisoners who prefer to keep their hair, even for religious reasons. But nowhere else in the world do cops roam the streets with scissors, with the noble goal of trimming “incidents of theft, looting, and criminal activities” through their deft hand jobs.
This sends me back to my schooldays. Maybe because our headmaster was a little short on hair himself, the students were not allowed to wear theirs long. Anything that threatened to touch the nape was a no-no. Those who wanted to make a fashion statement with their hair (as I once did) were paraded before the assembly like cheap thugs, in true spirit of hands-on education. A barber’s chair would be placed in the middle of the playground and the hairy hooligans subjected to hasty snip-snip amidst howls of laughter of the less hairy students.
Like my schoolteachers, the government seems intent on rewarding the ardent devotees of Lord Shiva. Or the Ratis in the making. Witness the hoopla over the appropriate length of skirts for school- and college-going girls. As hemlines have shrunk, the determination to cover up fresh flesh has grown.
Of course, this is no Saudi Arabia when it comes to protecting the weaker sex, so weak that exposing any other organs besides hands and eyes to the Arab sun will wilt their delicate bodies. Men and women are separated on all social occasions. Special care is taken to install an opaque wall between the two chambers to prevent evil gazes from violating the holy divide. Happily, such progressive changes are much in evidence in our neck of the wood of late.
Only last month, a fetching Pakistani anchorwoman barged into a massage parlor in Lahore, a cameraman and two policemen in tow. After raiding the ‘brothel’, she ransacked the parlor and ordered the police to arrest ‘sex workers’. In India, the hallowed wisdom of the three wise monkeys is protected with some ardor by the baton-wielding Shiva Sena and RSS musclemen. Back in Nepal, incidents of vandalism of media organizations for their ‘obscene’ depiction of Nepali women is an unmistakable sign of progressivism in the country.
The million dollar question is: What is next on the government’s plate after it is finished with denuding overworked male heads? If men are to be made famous for their hair, it bears to reason that women get their share of fame for their looks. All those wearing miniskirts and tight jeans must be stripped in public and from here on all Nepali women must be made to wear either Sari or Salwar Kurta, with a pair of ponytails to boot.
The Baidya party’s ban on ‘vulgar’ Hindi movies must be extended across the board. Haven’t they seen the posters of Nepali movies of late!
But the most ingenious idea for lasting fame for the outgoing government would be to extend the load-shedding to 24 hours, which will kill multiple birds with one stone. If there is no electricity, there will be no obscene cinemas and newspapers. Rather than spend all their time in front of TV and videogame consoles, youngsters will take to more active pursuits. The Nepali economy will receive a boost with mainbatti and laltin businesses making bumper profits. Since all other industries will close down, there will also be surplus manpower to plough the forlorn fields.
In the meantime, why not start small? In keeping with the spirit of death worship in the region, all men whose hairline crosses the nape must be summarily executed. What better way to teach the hoodlums a lesson, something they are sure to remember till Kingdom come.
The writer is the op-ed editor at Republica.
biswas.baral@gmail.com
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