Madam Chair, Respected Sofas, Indistinguishable Dignitaries, Esteemed Desks, Honorific Ministers, Your Excellence the Donors, Male Members of Media Organs, you Venerable Self-appointed Guardians of this Country’s Morals, Ordinary Fellows, and last and also the least the latecomer gentleman at the back who is distracting everyone. Yes, I mean you, near the door in the golf cap.
Ladies and Gentlemen, it is with great pride and prejudice that I take the opportunity to address this Six-Day Interaction Programme on ‘Inclusive Growth and Sustainable Development of Grassroot Constituencies Through Gender Mainstreaming, Capacity Building and Empowerment using a Local Multi-Steakholder Bottoms-Up Approach and a Paradigm Shift in Their Agenda-Setting Role in the Context of Economic Globalisation and Elite Capture’ organised by GONe in corporation with FEDUP, UNDO, USURP, DEFEAT, HERPES, INSECT, DANDA and FINITO. So, now that the esteemed cameraperson from Nepal Television has finally arrived, we can get on with the formality of declaring open this talkathon by asking the Chief Guest Comrade Awesome Possum to please beat around the bush for as long as it is humanely possible.
“Thank you. Nepal’s democracy has come of age, and one vivid proof is that geriatric revolutionaries like me can give obsolete speeches like these and you don’t really have to listen. Which means I can go on and say the most outrageous things because you have all tuned out by now here in the audience and in living rooms across the country, where many of you have already used that greatest of democratic tools, the remote control, to flick it to Diya Aur Baati Hum.
As you all know, I live in a parallel universe which is why I am now declaring the establishment of a parallel government with myself as prime minister, president and home minister. See, that didn’t even cause a flutter. Goes to show that you all don’t really care.
In 2010, I was removed by wireless. Today, Jhusil Da would not have the cojones to push for a vote on the constitution if he wasn’t listening to instructions from AIR. And I have decided to go back to war because no one has told me via Akashvani otherwise. And what’s the big fuss about nominating Lahr Kyal Kamred to the CA, we are just doing what the knagresis and eh-maleys did before us: making asses of ourselves. OK, OK, we also couldn’t say no to the five corrodes.
It is when a revolutionary party graduates from a two-line struggle to a five-line struggle that you know it is entering the political mainstream and Nepal’s democracy has come of age. It is our deliberate strategy to speak in tongues and send out confusing signals through five different splinter groups of our vainglorious party. It is because of my respect of pluralism and my tolerance of dissenting voices that we now have nearly half-a-dozen parties in this country that swear by the Great Helmsman Mao Tse Tung. It gives me great pride to say that Nepal has the highest per capita Maoism and Stalinism in the world.
The other sign that a country’s democracy has graduated from adolescence to full-blown senility is that our citizens won’t take ‘no’ for an answer anymore. When I tell them to come out on the streets on 28 February, they will. And it’s a good thing this is a Great Leap Forward Year, otherwise there wouldn’t be a February 28. Haha, clever, huh?
In our mature democracy, we don’t need to prove anything to anyone anymore. Gone are the days when we performed archaic rituals like forming militant unions, bashing up media bosses, and carrying out abductions and inductions. We don’t extort anyone anymore, we just wire in three-and-half arabs from the Virgin Islands.
With that, I would like to end my two words so that I can get back home to watch myself on the evening news. You, in the golf cap, wake up.”