With malice to none
The husband, the wife and the VDC Chairman

I like jokes. I firmly believe that these small pieces entertain you and make you to feel better and comfortable. If I were the nation's Prime Minister I would have through a decree made reading and listening jokes mandatory. However, I would have left it to the mercy of the listeners as to how many he or she could digest the jokes at one stretch. This is guided by the feeling that not all can laugh for long. Though the habit of laughing is considered to be a tonic by today's medical science, but too much of that might cause abdominal stress and create unnecessary problems such as gastric, peptic ulcer and the likes.

Any way, I like jokes because the jokes possess some hidden message in it. It requires a cool mind to understand the hidden messages contained in it. But then my " creative" mind wishes to equate with the existing scheme of Nepali things. In doing so I wish to expose the naked realities which one way or the other had been affecting our society.

Today, I have a very nice piece of joke in these columns which perhaps you all will enjoy. However, at the end of the joke I will pose you some questions.

In a remote district of Nepal there lives a couple. They had been enjoying their life comfortably because they were recently married. The husband loved his wife too much and took extra care in order that his wife could feel that her husband was the one she had been longing for during her teenage. The husband was indeed a very innocent person.

Close to the house of this family lived the Village Development Committee chairman. The two families soon became very close to each other.

After a period of nine months or so, the wife of the innocent husband reported labor pain. Listening to this the husband got excited and began imagining the impending life with the entrance of a newly born child in his house. This was only but natural.

The wife got admitted in the nearby health clinic. Out of love, the husband asked the doctor whether he could devise any mechanism so that the labor pain could be shared by the husband. In asking so the husband was guided by the fact that after all it was he who has caused this pain to his lovely and charming wife.

The doctor got the point and said that yes! He had some techniques which would allow the husband to share the labor pain. In the process the doctor said that he possessed capsules of four different grades in terms of effectiveness: the first if swallowed by the husband would reduce his wife's pain by 25% and the second would make it 50% and similarly the fourth would reduce the pain by 100%.

Listening to this, the husband wished to begin with the first capsule which were to reduce the labor pain of his wife by 25%. After swallowing the first grade capsule, the husband felt no change in him. His wife lying on the other bed too was feeling comfortable. Prompted by his desire to minimize the labor pain of his wife, the husband pleaded the doctor to allow him to swallow the 50% grade capsule. No effect. The husband was easy looking. He them requested the doctor to allow him to swallow the fourth grade capsule straight as he did not wish to let his wife to feel the pain at all. This meant that he wished to bear the total pain on behalf of his dear wife.

On time the labor pain was there but then the wife easily gave birth to a lovely kid with masculine gender.

The husband even after swallowing the 100% grade capsule suffered no pain at all. The doctor who administered the capsule got perplexed. Whatever had happened was against medical science. The capsule must have worked but it didn't. Why? The doctor questioned himself but had no answer.

Next morning the wife was discharged from the hospital. The couple proceeded to their lovely home. The wife thanked her husband for the sagacity and magnanimity, which he exhibited in order to reduce her labor pain. But Jesus Christ! As the couple came closer to their front door in the house what they see is that the VDC chairman was already dead apparently out of excessive and unbearable pain. What the couple could see that the stomach of the VDC chairman appeared like a fully blown balloon.

My questions now: The husband signified whom in today's Nepali system of governance? How we should take the wife who apparently has betrayed her innocent husband? And finally what of the VDC chairman? Who is the layman; who has been cheating us for long? And finally who is the real criminal in our own context. And what about the doctor? Could he be a culprit as well?

I need no answers. Just think a minute over the hidden message in this joke, which serves my purpose.

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