OFF THE BEAT

Cultivating patience
Suddenly Girija is no longer on the offensive. See, he does not want to talk about the government’s performance any longer nor does he have anything against UML’s stand on the Maoists.

Ever wondered what could have made Girija so soft? Guess it’s just the waiting he has to do before Kishunji steps down. NC wallahs close to him say -- he’s cultivating patience in his old age, since he was never known to be good at the waiting game.    (JBR)  

 Dog awareness
Seems a kennel club in town has duly realised the pang of a dog’s bite. Look at every other house in the locality and you’ll feel, if you care, the intensity of the club’s awareness to make the people become really aware of dogs. While door marks in the past indicated that one really had to beware of “dogs” inside, the club’s present move to manage the affairs just by the word saabdhan testifies that the house might even belong to ladies and gentlemen. Thanks to dog awareness. (CK) 

Complex issue
The contest for gubernatorial job has proved to be a cliffhanger. While Finance Minister Mahesh Acharya is “looking for a clean face” (read not clean-shaven but someone other than Dr Tilak Rawal) the latter, although an alter ego of Sher Bahadur Deuba among others just ignores FM owing to a superiority complex. But what are the mafia up to? How long will it take before they intervene so that our government can “forge ahead in the task of nation-building”, as promised?  (DL)

 Snobbery
Some tabloid weeklies here have desperately missed a rare occasion to cover a pop star from the West. Although less known to the local audience, local scribes thought it was a great failure on their part not to know whether the pop singer spent his millennium holiday in Nepal. Methinks the poor guys who hardly know anything about swadeshi artistes have only exposed their cultural snobbery by being extra-sensitive about a strange bideshi singer. (KC)  

 Lake prospect
Hi tourism guys! Have a sigh of relief. What if the government has been constantly indifferent towards promoting tourism bases in this Shangrila of yore? You’ll soon have a volley of white-skinned couples awaiting your service in Fewa lakeside. Doesn’t the recent honey-moon flair of a European duo indicate the same? And I bet there will be many more to follow suit. Don’t worry that the lake is dirty. What counts is cash in your pockets, no? (SW)

Red all the way
No, this is not a case of Left parties staging a dramatic electoral comeback. Elections have not been announced as yet, either. Instead, this has got to do with legalising prostitution since consensus among activists seems to be that legalisation alone can be expected to give the flesh trade a human face. If the idea indeed receives a nod from Prime Minister K P Bhattrai, expect an additional row over possible redlight zones even while the issue of a garbage dumping site is yet to be resolved.(DB)

 Height fall
It was indeed a shocking surprise to know from a newspaper the other day that the height of the mighty Everest was reduced by 400 meters, notwithstanding the recent international hype of its going up by about two meters. Luckily, however, as the slipped statistics, naturally, could not match with established facts, the Height was firm in its new pose of 8850m, no matter that local authority still could not measure it with their wooden scale.         (CK)

Musaghar or murdaghar ?
Relatives of Shyam Karki ended up with the corpse of Tanka Bishwakarma when they visited Bir Hospital’s mortuary the other day.

And kin folks of Bishwakarma neither found the right corpse to perform their last rites. Hospital staff fear giant mice that roam about the murdaghar might drag away the corpse itself, let alone the name tags. With this, hospital authorities must be pondering on how to modernize the mortuary. Better late than never. (LYNX)

Lalitpur Y2K OK!
Lalitpur Submetropolis Mayor, while vowing to overtake Bhaktapur last week, expressed his keen determination to give more traditional charms to his medieval town. Not until, he abruptly boasted to set up Japanese-style toilets in the fine art city’s major thoroughfares. Wonder how it looks like when hi-fi technology blends with indigenous tradition. But going by the Mayor Saab’s future plans, all those present judged his idea as Y2K OK. Don’t you think so?                        (SJS) 

NESA flays Gurung’s abduction

-By a Post Reporter

KATHMANDU, Jan 28 - Nepal Ex-Servicemen’s Association (NESA), the pro-Nepali Congress organization of the ex-British Gurkhas, today flayed the alleged abduction of its president Major Dipak Bahadur Gurung and demanded that the culprits be punished.

Gurung claimed he was abducted in broad daylight while returning from the District Court at Charkhal by members of a rival Gurkha ex-servicemen’s organization on Jan 26. He was later rescued by the police seven hours later from the office of Budhathoki Builders and Constructions at Putali Sadak.

“I was at the court to present my witness in a case charging Padam Bahadur Gurung, president of the Gurkha Army Ex-Servicemen’s Organization (GAESO), and Lal Kaji Gurung, for defamation. They had accused me of sycophancy with the British   in an article on a local weekly last year,” Gurung told reporters at a press conference today. “On my return I was abducted by around 50 members of GAESO who continuously chided me for being the one responsible for the present pension disparity.”

According to Gurung, he was made to write and sign two papers saying he had resigned as president of NESA as it had merged with GAESO. Another paper, he said, contained statements apologizing for calling GAESO communist-aligned and that he would pay Rs 500 million if he ever says so again. Video recording were made while he was made to read such statements, he said.

“We support the demands of GAESO which are equal pension, right of abode, and education for the children of Ex-Gurkhas. It’s only that we want to achieve it through diplomatic means,” said Gurung at the press conference.

“If we choose the right channels of negotiation rather than agitation, the British will no longer increase pension. The rise in pension from April is only on its first phase,” he said.

GAESO officials, meanwhile, could not be reached for comments this evening despite repeated attempts.

Mahabharata on canvas

-By a Post Reporter

KATHMANDU, Jan 28 - There are blocks that hide coloured cloth, photographs of Bollywood artistes hiding behind mood-colours, giant colour wheels that seem to be anticipating darts, grey paintings that feel the black-and huge-red cloths that hang from the ceiling depicting the Mahabharata epic.

These works are of four artists from Austria who have come down to Nepal to exhibit their work in the Nepal Academy of Fine Arts, NAFA starting today. The artists, Ona B., Georg Salner, Jakob Gasteiger and Herwig Steiner, will be exhibiting their work for the next month, till Feb 22.

The artists express themselves in various mediums. There is Ona’s installation on the conflict of the Pandavs over Draupadi, Salner’s boxes of colours and actresses’ photographs, and Steiner’s colour wheels and red movement on paper by Gasteiger. All have one thing in common: they’ve drawn their inspiration from Hindu mythology which also gave birth to the eccentric colours.

The exhibition, according to  Austrian Ambassador to Nepal Dr Herbert Traxl, is a new dimension in new colours. The exhibition was inaugurated by Education Minister Yog Prashad Upadhyaya.

Vegetable sellers protest ‘police atrocity’

-By a Post Reporter

KATHMANDU, Jan 28 - Vegetable sellers at the capital’s Kalimati Vegetable Wholesale Market staged against “police atrocity” in front of a nearby police station this morning demanding strong action against a police personnel who, they said has beaten up one of their colleagues “brutally”.

According to the sellers, Assistant Sub Inspector (ASI) Bal Bahadur Thapa brutally has beaten up Kumar Kunwar of Panauti, Karepalanchowk, after taking him into custody following a dispute over vegetable prices early Friday.

Kumar, who appeared to have been kicked with boots, was lying unconscious till Friday afternoon. Eyewitnesses and vegetable vendors said, the dispute erupted after Kunwar demanded that the wives of police officials clear their debts.

Kunwar, who was immediately rushed to Bir Hospital for medical treatment by his uncle last night, was refused medical treatment by the doctors. Family sources said, the doctors refused to handle a “beating case”. Police have also been accused of snatching away Rs 25,000 from Kunwar.

The crowd of the agitating vendors was dispersed only after senior police officials assured them to provide medical help to the victim and punish the guilty.  Police sources said, ASI Thapa had previously beaten up a driver who was taken into custody for driving under the influence of alcohol.

Man killed for guns

-By a Post Reporter

KAPILBASTU, Jan 28 -Some unidentified assailants attacked and brutally killed Dr Ekwal Ahamed Khan Thursday night in his home here and looted two twelve bore guns and other weapons, police said. 

According to police, some masked men attacked Khan with sharp weapons about eight O’ clock in the evening. Police suspect the attackers to be Maoist guerillas.

When Dr Ekwal’s neighbours and villagers came to know about the incident, they took the body to the Mahendra Highway and blocked the road for more than three hours.

The agitated crowd also set fire on four passenger buses. Police had to make two rounds of blank fire to control the situation, police inspector Gambhir Jung Lohani said. Fire fighters from Rupandehi were called to put the fire out.

Dr Khan was a Ph D in Agriculture and worked in his own agricultural farm. His dead body was handed over to the relatives after doing postmortem.