You know a country is starting its long slide downhill when revolutionaries can’t even shut the country down properly anymore. Where is the ruthlessness and nastiness that the ex-gorillas showed when they were fighting for our liberation in the jungles?
Today, we Nepalis are forced to be underwhelmed by a feeling of nostalgia for the glory days when the Mao Baddies could blockade the capital for weeks on end, bring the royal regime down to its knees and make the people quake with fear. Where is that can-do attitude to further the revolution by purging the bourgeoisie and working for the downfall of running dog capitalists and their imperialist henchmen and henchwomen?
The comrades followed Mao Zedong by the book in those days, taking very seriously his famous dictum that “you can’t make an omelet without first counting the chickens before they are hatched”. No revolution can be brought to its logical conclusion without the sayings of the Great Helmsperson, which is why the comrades took very seriously other Mao diktats as follows:
- “A revolution is not a dinner party, it is an orgy”
- “Political power flows out of the barrel of whiskey”
- “War is politics with the bloodshed of the
toiling masses”
- “Let a hundred flowers bloom before we pluck them”
- “The people are the sea and the revolutionaries are fishy”
- “The party can’t advance without making mistakes, and we intend to make many more of them”
- “All reactionaries are paper tigers which have aphrodisiac properties”
- “With the People’s Army, the people have nothing.”
- “A thousand mile journey begins with the first national shutdown.”
It grieves me to say this, but the Dash Baddies seem to have forgotten all these wise sayings. Mao must be turning in his Maosoleum and shaking his head looking at how we have abandoned the Great Leap Forward into the Deep Abyss as his Nepali protégés organise half-assed bunds like the one on Tuesday. This is giving Nepal a bad name, once known in the 1990s as the Hartal Haven of the Subcontinent. Perhaps the Dash and Cash need to pick the brains of eh-maleys and kangresis about how they organised seriously strict bunds back in their hoary days.
But all is not lost. There is still time for the comrades to try to make a better Mao’s trap. Just to show how it is done, the Ass would like to declare New Year’s Day 14 April a model bund. There, I said it. Spread the word folks, and let’s show our amateur revolutionaries-gone-soft just how to bring the country to a standstill like they really mean it. Here are some useful hints to prevent future bunds from turning into damp squids:
1. Cremating a stationary taxi on a remote section of the Ring Road is too half-hearted. The whole point about a bund is to spread terror, and the comrades in Banepa had the right idea by throwing a LPG cylinder into the fire on a street barricade on Tuesday morning. Boom.
2. Make sure the media is there to cover your terrorist act and disseminate pictures of petrol bombed buses. Otherwise what’s the point, right?
3. Be proactive by stopping anything that moves. If taxis and buses aren’t allowed why should bicycles, tricycles, perambulators? Some people are still defying bunds by taking helicopters to their destination, incinerate some choppers while you’re at it.
4. Lightning Strike: Work stoppage without warning, doesn’t strike the same place twice.
5. Lucky Strike: A strike which achieves its result as a result of a fluke and not because of the force of its logic.
6. General Strike: Work-to-rule by top army brass.
7. Three Strikes: Means you’re out.
8. Transport Entrepreneurs Strike: Bus owners go on warpath burning buses to protest a transport strike. Only in #Nepal.
9. Gas Station Strike: If the government doesn’t let us commit adulteration of diesel, we will close down our pumps indefinitely.
10. Pre-emptive Strike: Announcing your banda before someone else announces his banda, also known as ‘The Early Worm Ends Up in the Bird’s Gizzard’.
11. Relay-
hunger Strike: Ingenious and non-violent way to get govt to meet your demands by skipping breakfast once every three days.
12. Hunger Strike: This is what a majority of Nepalis have been doing for the past few centuries.
13. Pen-down Strike: This column is henceforth terminated in defiance of the Essential Services Act since it is a damp squib.
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Great Leap Forward Year, Ass