If anyone had bothered to ask, the Ass'd have told you not to wait with bated breath for the outcome of the "lane dane" in Hatiban between 22 alfa-male leaders of the four main parties this week.

The fact is that they can't be seen to be agreeing so easily even if there is very little disagreement remaining. They have neatly divided up the spoils between themselves, all that remains is to cross the t's and dot the i's. For public consumption and for the Baddies to convince their hardliners, it has to be seen as a very difficult and fraught negotiation. Baddie Chairman has asked CA Chairman till Sunday to come up with an agreement otherwise it all goes to a vote in the assembly. No one wants a vote so you can be sure on Sunday there will be a final agreement on the need to come to an agreement.

It now looks like no one had actually invited the Hoxahist faction led by Baidya, Badal and Deb to Hatiban, but they gate-crashed anyway and started taking the discussions off on a tangent. Henceforth, the leaders should lay down the ground rules that in such meetings all sat phones, mobiles and bugging devices should be turned off. In Hatiban, Comrade God apparently started sending out group SMSs to comrades down in the city that Chairman Terrifico had sold out. The text messages started getting cc-ed all over the place, triggering a chain reaction, and came a full circle to make PKD's smart phone vibrate like mad. If this is what happens with just SMS, imagine if the Gang of Four also tweeted.

Everyone who thinks these figures of famous Commies in Paris Danda should be Nepal's next big tourist sightseeing attraction, raise your hands. Stalin himself must be turning in his mausoleum to find his name being invoked in Nepal to justify Soviet-style federalism. When Baidya Buda Ba said at the Hatiban meeting "Comrade Stalin would have worked towards ethnic autonomy just like he did in setting up autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics" he was greeted with howls of laughter from fellow communists present. It fell upon Comrade Leftist God to remind Buda Ba that Uncle Joe was responsible for the deaths of 20 million people in the Gulags, but no one brought up how many Chinese people died in Mao's own Great Leap Forward. Just goes to show what a time warp our netas live in.

When asked by UNMIN in 2007 what happened to all the weapons, Awesome famously said they had been "carried away by the river". In the Shaktikhor Tape, he boasted to his cadre: "What do they think I am, stupid, to hand over all our guns? And we fooled the UN into thinking we have 35,000 guerrillas." Now, it looks like Chairman Desperado is paranoid that Baidya's Boys have got hold of the guns that were buried. What goes around, as the famous adage goes, comes around.

The number of guerrillas first fell from 35,000 to 19,000 in the cantonments, then to 9,000 after that to 6,500 who said they want to be integrated. Now less than 2,500 want to join the army. Which begs the question, what happened to the salary and allowances allocated in the past five years to 19,000 ladakoos in the cantonments of which the Maobad Party took a Rs 2,000 levy each? And for all those years, 4,000 phantom fighters who were never in the camps also received their money and that entire amount went to the party coffers. And now, because most gorillas don't want to go into the army anyway, the enlarged rehab package is going to cost us tax payers another 9 arabs.

On the week when parliament is for the first time in the history of modern Nepal debating a sexual harassment in the workplace bill, former Maoist health minister Amik Sherchan has disclosed that he used to get delegations of women with various demands who would get all touchy feely and threaten to molest him if he didn't give in to their demands. All we can say is that the ex-minister was in a win-win situation. If he gave in to their demands, he'd probably have got a peck on his cheeks, and if he didn't he'd be groped.

So this is what it has come to: the prime minister's sister-in-law and the Army Chief's brother-in-law are both in the Selection Committee of the Special Committee.