The year has got off to a flying start with two Nothing Doing days already. This bodes well for 2001, and Nepalis can now look forward to an easy-going new millennium in which there will be plenty of lazy days that can be devoted to cleaning up our nooks and crannies, something we have no time for in the mad rush of a normal office day. There will finally be time on our hands to extract wads of lint from inside our belly buttons which can be sold in bulk as raw material for our nation's dollar-earning pashmina industry, we can use matchsticks to mine for globs of wax from deep inside our ear shafts, and we can at last gain access to hard-to-reach blackheads and squish them before they are ripe for eruption.
I don't know what you did on January 1-2, but I did nothing. I was bunned. Doing nothing is finally going to save our landlocked Himalayan kingdom of high mountain ranges, beautiful natures, and much floras and faunas from self-destruction. We mess up everything we do, so not doing anything lessens the chances of doing something wrong. In the same manner, the chances of our rulers doing the right thing are so remote that the leftist opposition thinks it is a much better idea to have them just sit at home and not lift a finger. That way the likelihood of someone somewhere wrecking something is reduced. Through trial and error over the past 50 years we have finally hit on the right formula for governance in our country: it is better to allow our rulers to goof off than to have them actually rule. For example, if our Minister of Rumour and Miscommunication had stayed home to exhume ear wax with a matchstick instead of trying to declare war on India, this country may still have some spare tyres left. What a relief it was, therefore, that on Monday and Tuesday we could snore away in the comfort of our own homes, snug and cosy in the knowledge that nothing was going to go wrong, because not one person in this glorious land of ours was actually doing anything.
It should therefore be every Nepali's patriotic duty (not just the patriotic duty of the nine bums) to find creative new reasons to declare bandhs in 2001:
February: Old Diesel Bus Owners will protest the rising concentration of oxygen in the Valley's air. The capital's residents demand their normal daily dose of diesel soot particles in the 5-10 micron range.
March: An alliance of seven student unions threaten to declare a Valley Bandh to demand that the government make available more tyres for their flaming street barricades.
April: Hotel guests throughout Nepal go on a week-long strike to demand that their right to tip waiters and staff be restored. They threaten to stay on in Nepal indefinitely so that hotel occupancy will be 100 percent for the rest of the year.
May: Petrol-pump shutdown to demand right to dilute diesel by adding pure Himalayan spring water.
June: Journalists pen-down to protest increased workload caused by Congress infighting.
July: The Rotary Club of Chapagaon (Revolutionary) declares a three-day bandh to demand more bandhs because Rotarians don't have enough time to keep their nooks and crannies squeaky clean, and the drop in the number of Nothing Doing Days is seriously affecting the pashmina industry.
