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Kathmandu,Saturday January 29, 2000 Magh 15th, 2056.
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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)
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