To tell you frankly, I’m getting sick and tired of listening to many of you who have held forth at every possible wedding reception in the past week praising to high heavens the end to load shedding, and raised a toast to Comrade Cool Man. Some of you are already talking about selling off your generators to the next generation, while others have mothballed their inverters.
Thankfully, people like you are in a minority and an overwhelming number of Nepalis are perfectly happy to have become creatures of darkness. We have hole-heartedly got accustomed to load-shedding because we see its brighter side. You may well ask, so what are the positive aspects of power cuts? Whoa, not so fast, can’t you see I’m thinking?
First of all, as a donkey who is ass-first, permit me to be a bit cynical about this euphoria sweeping the nation. Don’t you know that there is no such thing as a free lunch in Nepal? We always look at a glass as half-empty because it is not full, and no amount of wishful thinking is going to change that.
There we were making great strides in taking advantage of our return to the pre-industrial age, when along comes Mr Cool Dude and wrecks it all. Our tourism industry was selling Nepal as the last country on earth without electricity, and all that promotion budget has now been wasted and we have to go back to the drawing boards.
Cutting off power to the people for 108 hours a week was the single most outstanding achievement of the Feudal Republic of Nepal, and we must find ways now to restore powerlessness to the country.
Thank you for waiting, here is a list of what we have lost by eradicating load-shedding:
- Nepal has been struck off the list of failed states.
- We cannot star-gaze anymore, we can only navel-gaze.
- Instead of engaging in our national pastime of playing interactive games with each other in the dark, Nepalis will now be fondling the remote. As a result, the country will have below replacement level fertility and there will not be enough young people to take care of our ageing population.
- Nepal Tourism Board will have to scrap its slogans designed to market our powerlessness: ‘Once Is Not Enough, Take Another Trip To the Dark Ages’, ‘Visit Nepal -The Heart of Darkness’, or ‘Be a Torch-bearer in Kathmandu’.
- The sale of Nightvision visors will plummet since people will no longer need these to find their way from the bedroom to the bathroom and take accurate aim in the general direction of the waterloo (Important Reminder for Male Nightvision Customers: As a Courtesy To Fellow Passengers Please Don’t Forget to Lift the Seat.) Kids will have no excuse not to have finished homework, and the medical-industrialist complex will lose business because motorcyclists won’t be colliding with road-dividers in the dark anymore.
- The proposed 17-storey skyscraper on Purano Bus Park was all set to be a symbol of national pride and be listed in the Guinness Book as the Tallest Building in the World Without a Functioning Lift. But since we now have 24-hour electricity we will have to be satisfied with it only being listed by Guinness as the Ugliest Erection in South Asia.