Jhiti gunta (personal baggage) has made the airport one of the prized appointments for civil servants. Successive ministers have ensured a steady inflow of funds for the party by managing this trade. The new Order is a continuation of the traditional practice of making new laws to perfect new ways to extort money from traders flying in with price tags still dangling from their Raybans. The new Order has some interesting provisions. The law accepts the fact that a traveller may have an unauthorised source of convertible foreign ex-change. So if you have bought some stuff from the money you sent by hawala-do not worry. There is nothing that can't be solved with the right amount at the right place at the right moment. If you have stayed abroad between 15 and 30 nights (important point: nights, not days) you will get an exemption for goods of total value of Rs 1,000 and if your stay is more than 365 nights you can get an exemption worth Rs 6,000. So at today's dollar rate you have an exemption of an astronomi-cally mind-boggling amount of $85. "Travellers should not show up oddly at the Customs Office (for example by wearing more clothes than needed according to the weather, or carrying more than one piece or pair of watch, camera, goggles, etc.)." So the Custom Officer will now have the right to subjectively decide whether you have showed up evenly, or oddly. You can bet your last rupee that he will decide that you have dressed oddly and require you to leave that bottle of Red Label to compensate for your wrong sense of dress code. Foreigners can bring into Nepal a movie or video camera, a portable music system and ten pieces of recorded and blank cassettes, one perambulator (that one again) and one tricycle, one used fountain pen, and one set of dot pens or lead pencils, one used watch. So, tourists better not have digital cameras, CD players, portable DVD players, CDs, no VCDs and of course no bicycles. Otherwise, the guardians of our revenue service will grab you and turn you into a source of personal revenue generation. Of course, if you just have one erambulator, you can get in scot-free. Lest I be accused of ridiculing the new Order, let me add hastily that I am ridiculing it. I am asking for it to be scrapped forthwith. It shows a poverty of imagination, a penchant for petty harassment of our own citizens, a rent- seeking mentality that has turned a place we euphemistically call an "international airport" into a den of thieves. Why don't we just ban the important of everything? You are just not allowed to bring anything into Nepal as personal baggage. Period. That would be much more honest. There are more than 150,000 Nepalis traveling abroad each year, and we have to bear in mind that all of them are not smugglers. The fact that we have such rules turns each and every Nepali into a criminal as soon as they step out of the plane. Next time you feel sadistically inclined towards the customs officials on landing at Katmandu, relax, take a deep breath, pop your blood pressure pill and have the Dasain pocket money ready.
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