Saturday’s rally is supposed to be
opposition sabre-rattling to scare the sheets out of the unruling coalition, but it looks like all our Young Commies are going to be doing is some bamboo-rattling. The party has ordered 100,000 batons and many bamboo groves on the city outskirts have sacrificed their existence in recent days to further the glorious proletarian revolution.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Interior Design has acted promptly and effectively by classifying bamboo sticks as lethal weapons under the rules of warfare of the Geneva Conventions, and declared that anyone found carrying them on Saturday will be arrested on the spot. However, burning buses, vandalising shops and beating up motorcyclists are all ok, and police will not intervene because those are deemed legitimate forms of free expressionism in our democracy.
Comrade Awesome Possum’s intention is to give one of his fiery 2-hour speeches, promise fire and brimstone and threaten to turn K-Town into Soddom and Gonorrhea if he is not taken more seriously henceforth and heretofore. He has chosen Saturday because it is a holiday so there will be a bigger attendance of people watching and waiting from the overhead bridges to see if he will once more break into tears while remembering the ultimate sacrifice of his comrade-at-arms. Baddies have threatened fellow-Baddies of unspecified punishment if they don’t join the long march, and Chairman Lotus Flower is showing his own commitment to take the revolution to its logical conclusion by not staying home over a bottle of Blue Label to watch the England vs Sri Lanka cricket match at the ICC World Cup on Saturday.
In fact, it will be Nepali patriotism and our historic aversion to cricket that will make the rally a grand success. We in Nepal have to thank our patron deity that we fiercely resisted all attempts by the East India Company 200 years ago to get us to learn to play cricket, which is why we were never colonised by leg spinners and were never under the imperialist yolk. From Nalapani to Kalapani the English tried to catch us out in deep square leg with two wickets and nine balls to spare in the final round-robin match, but to no avail. Over the last two centuries, we Nepalis steadfastly refused to get hooked to cricket as a matter of national pride. We stuck with our national game:
Leg Pulling.
But things are changing. It is an indication of how much our sense of ultra-nationalism and pseudo-patriotism has eroded that we Nepalis have forgotten our history and geography and are now cricket fans. This is an imperialist plot and a grave conspiracy to undermine Nepal’s sovereignty and independence. Why else would the ICC, under the influence of Indian expansionists and running dog comprador of international capitalism, time its matches to exactly coincide with the UCPN-(M)’s glorious show of farce?
In large parts of Nepal people would rather eat cricket than play it. And there are still patriots among us who can’t make head or tail of the game. But, we have to move with the times, and if Nepal is going to make it to the next World Cup we better brush up on cricket. And the YCL can start by weilding cricket bats instead of bamboo sticks. After clocking an average of 12 hours a day carefully watching the ongoing ICC Cricket World Cup I have become somewhat of a pro, if I may say so myself, and can now explain the nuances of this complicated game to fellow Nepalis:
1. Cricket is actually a very simple game: a bowler throws the ball at about 550 mph at a guy holding a bat to try to knock off both his tentacles from a distance of 50 ft.
2. Like in all sports, there are some simple precautions that need to be taken so no one gets hurt. Therefore all cricketers who value their crown jewels wear groin guards to prevent themselves from being inadvertently castrated by a beamer.
3. Cricket players take food and drinks seriously, and every game has a Luncheon Break of a 40 minutes and two Tea Breaks with Samosas of 10 minutes each.
4. Under Section E, Chapter VII, Verse 235 of ICC Rules: Where an innings concludes within 10 minutes of the scheduled or rescheduled time of the Tea Interval, or it falls at, or after that time, or when less than two minutes remain, play will continue but only if it doesn’t start raining, in which case play will be suspended until the sun comes out tomorrow, which is only a day away.
5. As in Nepali politics, Fair Play and a Level Playing Field are the hallmarks of cricket. Players can hurl racist epithets at each other, throw tantrums and chairs from deep square leg and/or silly point and even kick the umpire in the gonads. Which is why the umpire should also wear proper cricket attire, including groin guards.
Read also:
In an agitated state, Editorial
Tables turned, Anurag Acharya
Show of strength