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If these are not palpable signs of complete failures of accountability, with government in cahoots with cartels, then we should lobby with the New York-based record setter book of World Records to recognise us as the record holders in the category of highest levels of pain endured while trying to live normally in the capital city. Anywhere else in the world, this sort of urban hardship would have been enough to foment a popular revolt.
To be sure, well-to-do pundits will prattle about that elusively cute quality called resilience that we Nepalis supposedly show in the face of extreme hardships. But as a tax-paying citizen, I'm fed up with the way this or any other government has repeatedly failed to enable the provision, let alone the delivery itself, of basic services. A political process that is numb to people's pain for a long time ceases to be legitimate in any sense. This is the sort of situation we wanted our leaders to avoid when we cheered them on with the shouts of New Nepal only a few years ago.
But instead of getting solutions, we get insults to injuries. The prime minister, who has spent his adult life demonising the free market and blowing up symbols of development such as bridges and schools, recently unveiled his vision for creating 700,000 new jobs in 17 different areas. It's as though the PM thought that if he just waved a magic wand, investors would come flocking, and jobs would appear.
For someone who was so politically clumsy that he ended up courting controversy even on the mind-numbingly simple matter of keeping government information secret, how can anyone hope that the PM can really see sufficiently far into the future to make his plans come true? When nice-sounding grand visions trump many small but iterative steps of unglamorous execution, our future is doomed to look better only in distant dreams, while our present remains oppressive.
The question is: what to do?
Keeping quiet, muttering from the sidelines, minding one's own business and not ruffling feathers all these add up to an option. Leaving Nepal for better opportunities in India, the Gulf and the West has long been the rite of passage for millions of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled Nepalis. The more the able-bodied citizens leave, the fewer there are inside the country to cause trouble in the villages and on the streets.
Finding a way to join the government as an adviser is another win-win option: one can take credit if something good gets done, and blame others when nothing gets done. Then there's the promise of Facebook-style online activism: impassioned status updates and vigorously shared messages, laced with the cloying theme of national unity that give an illusion of a revolution taking place outside one's window.
But for real changes ahead, there is no substitute now for another Kathmandu Spring that throws up alternatives to the present crop of leaders. Such a spring would not be against multi-party democracy. It will be against the same old political parties with the same old netas for their collective crime-like failure to deliver for the majority: a national constitution, followed by sufficient clean water, road networks, electricity, cooking gas, petrol, diesel, and, most of all, a safe and secure future to live as one pleases in one's own country without breaking any law.
