After waiting nine hours for the historic second session of the constituent assembly to begin on Wednesday to declare Nepal a republic, many of the dehydrated and famished honourable members must have wondered what they had got themselves into. Not that things were any better over at Baluwatar where the leaders of the seven parties spent the whole day haggling about the powers of the president over just tea and biscuits.

Those talks were deadlocked over whether or not the ceremonial president should also officiate as the head of army. Never mind that division of powers between president and prime minister is debated over years in other countries, and we were trying to figure it all out in the course of an afternoon. But given Chief Katuwal's absolute rejection of anyone but a non-Maoist president being the titular commander-in-chief, there was never any doubt which way this would ultimately go.

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There is nothing like live television to bring out the best traits of Nepalis. The cameras were rolling all day at the Great Hall of the People where a whole row of elected constituent assembly members had got so sick of waiting they had drifted into coma. A female member from Baglung was spread-eagled as if in a dentist's chair and was snoring away. The honourable member from Sarlahi-3 was busy snapping pictures on his camera phone of colleagues dressed in full ethnic regalia. Others got tired of sitting in the uncomfortable chairs, and squatted cross-legged on the carpet in the aisle to chew the fat. Memo to CA Secretariat: Get a faster photocopier.

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Far be it for the Ass to poke fun at the personal hygiene habits of peers, but on full display on the floor of the assembly were various nose grooming techniques of the 575 members. The variety in the modus operandi for nose-picking among us Nepalis, it seems, is matched only by our ethnic, caste, religious and linguistic diversity. While some on the leftwing of the august assembly indulged in dreamy, circular forefinger manoeuvres, backbenchers used the overgrown nails in their pinkies for deep excavation work. Snooty centre right assemblymen achieved even greater success by quarrying large nuggets from deep inside their nasal cavities by deploying their big fingers like pneumatic drills, unaware that it was all on candid camera and their every movement was being beamed live nationwide.

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It's not even been a day since we have been formally declared a republic, but we already know what it feels like to live in a "gone tantra".

Everything is gone: there is no water in the taps, no oil in the pumps, no planes in the national airline, no banknotes in the Central Bank, no king in the palace, no food in the food corporation, no constitution in the country and no government. And while there are no text books in schools, the Ministry of Education is already promising one laptop per child.

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Looks like Kingji is now going to get a two week reprieve to vacate the palace. Fair enough, the movers will need to start packing and carting off a whole load of stuff. G swung it by playing double-crossed victim pretty well and deftly leveraged the written promise he'd extracted from the parties in April 2006 not to scrap the monarchy to extract personal concessions.

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Governments may come and governments may go but there will always be survivors. Some royal ministers are quite smoothly making the transition to being Maoist sympathisers. Tycoons who prospered under the Royal Son-in-Law and later enjoyed the patronage of the First Daughter are now helicoptering around with Awesomeji promising to help him achieve his annual 25 percent economic growth rate. While the NC and UML were scrambling to find people to fill their quota of the 26 nominated members of the CA, Lotus Flower put forth the name of Sitaula Baje. It was as we suspected all along, after all.

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Anything for a day off. After enjoying three days off last week, the Home Ministry had decided to take back the three-day republican holiday it has announced for this week. But better sense prevailed and the holidays were re-instated. It seems the Supplies Minister convinced the cabinet that this was the only way to reduce demand for diesel and petrol while at the same time getting over our republican hangover.