A survey this week in The Economist has Kathmandu on a list of cities that has become even more liveable in the past year. I can hear groans from the audience and know many of you pooh-poohed the survey and made it the butt of jokes at parties last night. What’s so funny? Yes, you the follicular-challenged guy at the back, wipe that grin off your face.
The Economist is a serious magazine, it doesn’t make things up as it goes along like the Nepali Times. And this was a credible survey carried out by folks who know a thing or two about living in the Turd World. As far as The Ass is concerned, the fact that Kathmandu went up a couple of notches on the 2015 Global Liveability Rankings of the Intelligent Economists’ Unit overtaking cities like Donetsk and Damascus was not at all surprising. We had it coming. And it is to the credit of our city fathers at the Kathmandu Metropolis that we have managed to do this quietly, without tooting our own trumpets and making a big song and dance about it. At this rate, Kathmandu may one day be the most utterly liveable place on the planet.
However, this is no time to rest on our laurels. We cannot be complacent. There is serious competition out there, and we have to doubly redouble our efforts to aspire even higher on the Liveability Index next year. We have to be systematic about this and pay attention to improving these attributes that have made Kathmandu what it is today:
1. Garbage
We are doing well by closing down the Sisdole Landfill site from time to time and letting trash collect on street corners, but we have noticed a worrying trend whereby the KMC is actually going house-to-house collecting domestic garbage. This will not do. Let the stuff pile up and create a big stink, especially along our World Heritage Sites so that we can show the international community that we are a resilient people and made of sterner stuff.
2. Pot Holes
First of all, we have to change the nomenclature. Yes, we used to have potholes 20 years ago, but times have moved on and the potholes have become sinkholes that can swallow up medium-size SUVs whole. Keeping our streets in a permanent state of disrepair is an ingenious way to preserve Kathmandu’s rustic old world charm as a tourist attraction and also to keep traffic accidents down. Let’s face it: tourists don’t come to Kathmandu to see clean smooth asphalt roads with functioning street lights, they can do that in Singapore. Let’s protect the craters on our roads that are our unique selling point.
3. Bands
We have perfected the art of shutting the country down and are now even better at it than the Bangla inventors of this clever way of staying home and not going to work. At last count the country had been shut down for 866 days in the last five years. That means we have stayed home for two-and-half years since 2010. Beat that, Donetsk. And if there is no chukka jams we organise traffic jams so that even if Kathmandu isn’t shut down, you can’t get anywhere anyway. There is actually a website that keeps track of bands, there are Facebook pages and even a Wikipedia entry devoted to it. The way it works is this: if some disgruntled party wants to show that it means business to a gruntled party, it requests the public to kindly desist from using vehicles and opening shops and as an inducement to do so will dragoon a couple of taxis in the morning and set fire to them with the drivers still inside. The organisers will then declare this non-violent form of civil disobedience a success and thank the public for being so cooperative. Unfortunately, every date for the rest of the year has been booked by various disgruntled parties for bunds, and the only date still open is October 27. Any takers?
4. Sewer
What gives Kathmandu its distinctive ambience and aroma is the Bagmuddy River. Nepal’s capital may have been declared open-defecation free, but it still has a Sewage Canal running past our religious sites. Holy shit.
5. Cholera
Which is why we grab world headlines from time to time with our cholera epidemics. All this is part of Kathmandu’s successful micro-fauna conservation effort to prevent the Vibrio cholera bacillus from becoming extinct by carefully preserving its natural habitat.
6. Time
And to make Kathmandu even more liveable we have done what North Korea has done by resetting Nepal’s time zone. We are now going to be 150 years behind GMT.