 PRASHANT RAVI |
At the India-Nepal Jamboree in Patna last week, Baburam seems to have had some sage advice for the Indian Baddies. Sit down for talks without conditions with the Govt of India, he told a tv interviewer. Not sure why he said that, after all, he sat down conditionally for talks with His Majesty's Govt many times, way back when.
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The stars of the Patna conference were BRB and Ananta. But while everyone was supposed to fly together from KTM to Delhi in the morning and then catch the connecting flight to Patna, the two comrades were stuck in a Standing Committee meeting in Kathmandu. They took the next flight to Delhi, but missed the connection to Patna and were forced to spend a night at the dengue mosquito-infested Centaur Hotel. Design or accident? Nepali conspiracy theorists in Patna were left wondering whether the comrades used the time to rest and bond or to meet some Delhi biggies on the side.
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Just as the Nepali media is obsessed with who's meeting who at a given time and for how long, the Nepali delegation was busy speculating about who was secretly meeting who. On the return flight, BRB was whisked away from the airport during the three-hour layover while the rest waited for the flight to Kathmandu. Laldhoj was so late he was brought right to the plane just before the hatch closed. Naughty...naughty. Who knows, maybe he was just catching up with JNU classmates. Back home, Awesome must've been getting paranoid, though.
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Wonder what the Indians made of the questions from the floor. While Gagan Thapa directly asked Chieftain Minister Nitish Kumar about 'terrorist groups' based in Bihar and carrying out attacks in the Tarai, Sadbhavana's Anil Jha wondered aloud if the present social justice movement in Nepal could expect India's support, like that for democratic movements in the past. One man's terrorist another man's tourist?
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The man who kept Nepali netas entertained in Patna was tv show host Vijay 'Dishanirdesh' Pandey. While translating Ananta's presentation on federalism, he encountered difficult Marxist jargon and asked Dr Babu for help. Pandey said his 'bourgeois vocabulary' did not equip him with the requisite skills, but he had come with a good stockpile of soviet-era jokes about Stalin that got even the comrades falling off their chairs.
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Meanwhile, back home in Nepal Kangresis in Banepa and Sanepa were coming to blows. The Maoists are beating each other to a pulp, the UML are beating up the Maoists, the Maoists are beating up Kangresis, and Kangresis are beating each other up. Time to call for a ceasefire.
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The astrologers had said the Shah dynasty would end with its 13th incumbent, and so it came to pass that Gyanji was the last one on the throne. However, the more perceptive among us have also remembered another prediction by a southern palm-reader who had ruled that Nepal could have a baby king after an interruption in the monarchy. So it looks like if the current political chaos continues one shouldn't rule out young sri Punch Hridayendra on a restored peacock throne.
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After ex-princess Sitashma's profile appeared on an online match site ttp://www.expatmatch.com/s/view/2050115/s/0 she has revealed that it is a hoax. The princess, who now runs a boutique in Darbar Marg, said: "I don't have time to do all these things but looking at my photo and profile details, I figure someone close to me must have done it." Well, no harm in checking out the applicants.
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