Strange things start happening to a nation during its march towards development and progress when the minimum temperature drops below two degrees Celsius. We come up with ingenious ways to keep warm. We gird up our loins with renewed vigour to safeguard our national manhood. And in the absence of central heating, we will set fire to our rafters to heat our homes. There is nothing like working up a rage to keep our patriotic cockles warm. So now that we have raised the ambient temperature of this country to boiling point, and we can think more clearly, it is a good time for us to make some new year's resolutions so that we can become the Switzerland of Asia by December 2001:

1. We hereby resolve that henceforth we shall all turn our mobiles off during seminars and workshops even if the seminar and workshop is on the National Information Technology Policy.

2. In the new year we shall refrain from our national pastime of picking our noses in public, and if perchance our fingers involuntarily start excavating the nasal orifice we shall wash our hands with soap. (Only soap, since water is going to be even more scarce in 2001.)

3. We shall try to meet our national bandh target of 26 shutdown days in 2001 to ensure the government machinery is well-rested, and functions smoothly.

4. The creaky government machinery also needs to be lubricated and all citizens shall in the coming year endeavour to grease every passing palm so that the task of nation building can progress in high gear and without any major hiccups. Motto for coming year: Leave no palm ungreased.

5. We shall not stand idly by in 2001 should Gwyneth Paltrow ever cast aspersions on our independence, self-rule, self-determination, freedom, life, liberty and pursuit of mayhem, self-sufficiency, self-reliance, sovereignty and self-aggrandisement. We will stone the Bhaktapur trolley buses and make complete arsons of ourselves unless she apologises forthwith.

6. And don't even think about slandering our one-and-only Mt Everest by saying it is getting shorter by 1 cm a year, or that Tenzing is a Tibetan, otherwise we will block all southbound traffic at Tundikhel during rush hour and burn Sir John Hunt in effigy at Bhadrakali.

7. We resolve in the coming year to nationalise all garbage piles. Private rubbish piles will fly black flags in protest to demand that they be nationalised by next Friday. If that demand is not met, we vow to henceforth stop throwing garbage on the streets.

8. During the coming year we shall carry out tyre bonfires in front of urinals and other public facilities to express our revulsion against Bollywood, and then go home to watch Kahin Pyar Na Ho Jaye for the ninth time.

9. We will not work harder than we have to, we will not do today what we can do tomorrow, and we will hold our heads high in the international community and tell all foreign hands that they needn't bother trying to destabilise our country, we're doing that just fine by ourselves.