The Amriki Money

It seems that our political parties can take ‘black’ money from our fake VAT-bill byaparies, slimy contractors, manpower companies and mafias from every other sector but when it comes to taking money from bideshis, they either seem to choose one of our chimekis. Our Emperor has good connections with the Chinese byaparis while our Congressi wallahs have the same with the Desi byaparis. We, the people have no connection, therefore we go to foreign lands to work for their byaparis there.

Our government also takes foreign money in name of foreign aid, loans, grants and what not. But it seems that taking the ‘Amriki’ money today will make us look bad on our chimekis. Our netas from the ruling party tell us that taking Amriki money would make us a part of the Amrikis’ strategy to counter China. 

Who cares? It seems that only our politicians worry about making our chimekis happy. We, the people send our kids to universities in India and China with our hard-earned money unlike our politicians, civil servants and byaparis who send their kids on scholarships provided by the Chinese and the Indian government.

Our politicians want the United States to clarify whether US$500 million MCC grant is part of their Indo-Pacific Strategy. The United States is not asking Nepal permission to build an air base or station thousands of their security personnel. If that was to happen then both our chimekis would probably shut down their borders and give us a hard time but we will always have Uncle Sam as our backup. Yes, if the Amrikans think we are helping them with their foreign policy nataks then don’t be surprised if we get food and fuel transported every hour with their military aircrafts.  

And our netas can get free Cadillacs and even better bullet proof vehicles like the ones President Trump rides around in. And we cans also have our own Nepali ‘Secret Service’ so that those providing security for our so-called pick pocket VVIPs would no longer show their guns and have sirens blazing when our clowns ride around town. 

The  ‘Yeti’ kanda is getting lots of coverage in the media. It’s not only the ‘Yeti’ folks who are minting tons of money from government contracts and what not. It’s thousands of byaparis who are near and dear ones of our netas who have made billions of Rupees by paying less rent or evading taxes everywhere. 

Let us not blame the byaparis alone. If you are a business person then the first thing you want from your business is to make a profit in a legal manner.  If we had an effective tax system then all of our byaparis would pay ‘real’ taxes and even get some tax reliefs for hiring thousands of people and even government loans for providing much needed tax revenue to the State. 

But in this land of ours, it’s the other way around. Our tax department wallahs themselves tell our byaparis how much taxes are to be paid to the State which is peanuts and how much to them and how much to leave aside for our netas. Even a monkey in Pashupatinath can do the math. The country gets not even 10% while the rest goes to the chors running the country. No wonder the nation is broke while our thulo manches drive around vehicles worth Karods.

We have corrupt politicians who want to make money by any means possible and we have corrupt civil servants who help them to engage in such acts. We must be stupid like our netas to think that the billions of Rupees India and China provides Nepal every year in loans, grants and other nataks is because they want to help us as chimekis. 

Both of them want to fulfill their self-interest and our politicians and civil servants play along just because they want to make an extra billion Rupees and get freebies for them and their kids. These cheap beggars should know better. If you really want to go on a begging spree then at least beg for something bigger, better and something that will be useful for the country. 

Don’t go on begging for cycles and ambulances from India. We can afford that. If the government doesn’t have any funds for such stuff then ask the people and we will gladly donate a few Rupees and millions of us can give our poor government something to buy such stuff. 

Why is our government making us look bad by asking the Chinese to rebuild the Durbar High School or the Indians to build some other schools around the country? We would have been proud to donate and build our own government schools and have our grandparents name on the donation list then see some other countries ‘on your face’ promotion of their so-called aid. 

We can even help to rebuild Singha Durbar itself if the government ask us from donations. Why has our own government forgotten its people? All of us pay taxes except our politicians and political parties. We, the people can forego one plate of momo every day and fund some of our programs as well. The government is poor because it is not strong enough to collect the ‘right’ taxes from our byaparis and landlords. 

Whoever is paying taxes on the actual rent received from his or her premises in Durbarmarg should be made the next Finance Minister. At least he or she will be honest and smart enough to figure out that the way to cut trade deficit and even save some money in our foreign reserves is not by reducing the amount we can spend when we go on vacations or for study purposes overseas but by investing in agriculture, hydropower and tourism for starts so that we can buy our own cheap onions, we can sell our electricity to our chimeks and we can get tens of millions of tourists and make a whole tons of money from the bideshis.

Well, let’s get back to the MCC story. We became eligible for the grant back in 2002 when Georgie Dubya was living in the White House and it took us another 15 years to sign the agreement and it can only be implemented if our good for nothing parliament ratifies it. Our netas think that if we take the money then we become a part of Amrika and will have to go to war with China. Well, that’s not the real reason. The truth is our netas shit their pants whenever they get a call from the Chinese or the Indian Embassy. 

The Amriki Ambassador Randy Berry (he should change his first name to Rabi or Ram or just plain old Ronny while serving in Nepal) tells our netas that MCC is part of the Amriki policy but it doesn’t require membership or some other natak. Our netas think we are better off if we take billions of dollars in loans under China’s Belt and Road Initiative but we will sell ourselves to the devil if we take half a billion dollar grant from Berry’s homeland. Maybe, our netas should clarify to us why they are not that interested to ratify the MCC thing instead. Have they taken any dough from the Chinese or the Indians or every other bideshi except the Amrikis?

The grant could be useful for our hydropower, infrastructure and other development works. And if the Amrikis are giving us half a billion dollars then they should be allowed to audit the expenses and terminate the agreement if they see nautanki nataks well. If you are giving me a thousand Rupees to buy cakes and ask for a receipt then what’s the problem? Well, the problem is with our netas and civil servants. These buffoons are used to buying Rs 8,000 pen drives that sells for meager Rs 400 in the market.

If our netas and the civil servants had any knowledge of foreign diplomacy then it’s the right time to rename the UN park to ‘President Trump Park’ and even ask the Amrikis to fund it and give us a dozen fighter planes and a couple of nukes as well. Maybe, that would make our chimekis love us more and also get us Microsoft, Google and other tech companies to come to Nepal and provide jobs to thousands of our young folks. But our politicians are nincompoops. God bless us all.

Guffadi is a grumpy old man who blogs at guffadi.blogspot.com. You may contact him at maguffadi@gmail.com

Our National Game

The SAG is done and let us congratulate our Nepal Sports Council folks and the people at the Ministry of Youth and Sports for getting the job done. Let us hope that our athletes will get better perks, facilities and will be able to take care of their families as they devote their time, energy and everything else to make us all proud. 

I think our organizers spent more money on drones and firecrackers instead of taking care of our athletes. We did hear stories about how our athletes had to borrow guns for their shooting events. Well, that’s how it is in this land of ours. 

When you start putting aside chiya kharcha from the total budget then it’s always the thulo mancheys who get to pocket the dough while the real workers or in this case athletes have to be happy with peanuts. Let us all be happy for our vendors and theke-daars who made quite a bundle from the 500 Karod budget. Let us leave something for our athletes as well.

Our government has announced Rs 900,000 for our SAG gold medalist, Rs 600,00 for the silver ones and Rs 300,00 for the bronze winners. We really must find out who came up with this figure and give him a million Rupees prize instead.  

Why not 1 Karod for the gold medalist, 50 lakhs for the silver and 25 lakhs for the bronze? We won 206 medals this time. Don’t tell me that this government doesn’t have funds to award at least 100 Karods in cash prizes to our medalists while it spends billions of Rupees for political cadres in the name of development funds for youth and other nataks?

We are not going to win any Asian Games medals anytime soon and Olympics might take another century. The last time we won an Olympic medal was in South Korea and we got a bronze and it was an exhibition event then. But still a bronze at the Olympics is a great achievement in itself.

So, less than a million Rupees for a gold medalist is a slap on the face for our athletes. A political cadre gets a million Rupees for burning tyres and destroying public property and then getting shot by the police. I think we should just ask our athletes to take party membership of whoever is in power so that they can get access to better facilities and pay since our netas only seem to favor their cadres when it comes to sarkari funds.

Our netas spend Karods of Rupees on medical treatment here and abroad. Our athletes do all the hard work while our sports officials make all the moolah. It’s been the same story since the 90s. Now, SAG is over and we have to go back to the daily grind. We may not have to deal with road closures for the SAG or odd and even nataks for a while but we have to go back to our national game which is ‘politics’.

Price of onion is not going to go down anytime soon. Chinese onion don’t taste good as he Indian ones and the Desis are in no mood to life the onion ban anytime soon. Maybe, it’s time our PM Oli won some brownie points from all of us by at least providing one onion per each household to all Nepalese till he stays in Baluwatar. 

Our Emperor is waiting patiently for his stay in Baluwatar but it’s not happening anytime soon because Oli Ba is a fighter. He really is like Rocky Bilbao. When you think he is done and out, he just comes back into the ring and give us a little bit of action. We wish Oli well and hope he will be in good health soon but our Oli government needs to relax and maybe take a break for a week and go to a resort nearby and look back since they came to power. 

Yes, maybe our government should hire real consultants who can give them at least a few solutions to our country’s problems. We really need to focus on how to reduce the trade deficit with our chimekis not by cutting down on how much dollar we can take abroad for studies, vacation and medical treatment but by promoting our small businesses who offer jobs to millions of Nepalese instead of only favoring tax-evading big business houses.

We will never know who was behind the 33kg gold smuggling nataks? We might never find the killers of Nirmala but our Oli government needs to get on the right track and do what it was elected to do. We voted for them because we wanted stability but the party itself is not stable. 

We don’t even know when our Emperor will just decide to ditch his present lover and embrace another one just to stay in power. It has happened before and we are pretty sure that it will happen again. But until the break ups and make ups happen, let us pray that our PM will be in good health and we can at least be able to afford a kilo of onion so that we all can be in good health as well.

Guffadi is a grumpy old man who blogs at guffadi.blogspot.com. You may contact him at maguffadi@gmail.com

SAG is here

First of all, let us wish our PM a good recovery so that he will at least be able to attend the closing ceremony of the 13th South Asian Games (SAG).  We have to give it up for our folks at the Nepal Sports Council and the Ministry of Youth and Sports for doing their best to host this event despite all the problems in this land of ours.  

Let us not only blame our Oli government but all successive governments since we became a multi-party democracy have been ignoring the youth and development of sports in this country.

We only have one national stadium that too built during the days of the Pancheys. In the past 30 years, our government could have built at least one bigger venue enough to fit half a lakh people but I guess all the money meant for youth and sports only went to our civil servants, cadres and cousins of our clowns instead. 

We may still hate the Pancheys for everything that went wrong then but we can’t keep on blaming them or the monarchy for all the problems since 2006. Our netas should own up their mistakes and work together to make it right instead of blaming it on each other or even the public for all the chaos in this land. Maybe, our netas can show us that they are also human by going to a club at midnight and having some good old fun rather than drinking whiskey and going after government employees.

We hosted the first SAG in 1984 and then the second one in 1999 and now twenty years later, we are hosting the 13th SAG and we are still using the same old Rangasala for our opening and closing act. And instead of our own government building stadiums in all seven provinces, we have a comedian who is doing all he can to build an international standard stadium in Chitwan. 

I think we should just let a few hundred comedians run this country while our politicians can participate in comedy shows across the land. That way, our politicians can at least be proud of the fact that they are making an honest living rather than using their shitty brains to engage in more corruption than ever.

Our government allocates a few billion Rupees for sports development in this land and so far we are still waiting for the cricket ground in Mulpani and we all know that most of the venues will probably need repair and renovation in matter of months after the SAG. This is the land which sends more officials than athletes to international sporting events. 

There are hundreds of sports associations and most of them are headed by folks who have never even played Dandi Biyo in their lives. And the heads of these sports association go overseas more than once a year to attend conferences and sporting events while the real athletes are even forced to pay their own airfare even in the events they have qualified and are entitled to free tickets and other perks.

Our athletes have been getting the shaft forever. It’s time we honor our athletes who have made this country proud.  Baikuntha Manadhar won us three SAG gold medals in marathon. The guy is 66 years old and he gets nothing. But the guys who have stolen from our state treasury get free health care, free vehicles , free security and boras of freebies just because they are stupid netas who have managed to trick us all into voting for them. 

We can’t blame our chors because we are the ones who voted for them. So, all we can do for now is admit our mistakes and vote for another chor the next time around because the current chor in the kurchi will have made enough in the next three years.

If Manandhar was an Amrikan, then he would be like at every Independence Day Parade or all big parades in that country. He would have made millions of dollars from endorsements, book deals, movie rights and what not.  Let us honor the man and all those athletes, men and women who have made us all proud as athletes. 

Our Sports Council and the Ministry and the so-called Olympic Committee wallahs should be ashamed of themselves. Our athletes get paid peanuts and our coaches do it for the love of the game. Our officials are the ones who are having all the fun because most of them are affiliated to our major political parties. That’s how the system works in this land. If you want to steal government funds then you must be part of the government. 

It’s about time sports in this land be under the President’s authority or we have our athletes under government’s payroll and help them to play their sport while providing enough for their families as well. I think we can just go ahead and tax our alcoholic and tobacco products to the max and make it the most expensive in the world. 

Yes, let us be number one for once. Let’s beat Bosnia and be the number one country in the world with the highest tax on cigarettes. We can put that tax money for development of sports and our youth. But of course, we have already seen the good use of our vehicle taxes in this land. I think it’s time to bring the Liglig race back. Yes, whoever wins the race can be our King or Queen for a year. After all, aren’t our buffoons who now sit on the Kurchi think of themselves more than Kings and Queens?

Guffadi is a grumpy old man who blogs at guffadi.blogspot.com. You may contact him at maguffadi@gmail.com

Retire at 60

Our hardworking civil servants will soon be retiring at 60. The current retirement age is 58. But those who oppose the government might not even get their pension. Yes, our Oli government is coming up with all kinds of laws to stifle dissent. If our comrades had their way then even their own party members who have been vocal against the government would land up in jail. 

If you are a civil servant then just continue to do your job and not go on YouTube or post comments in social media that might get our thin-skinned government off the bed. Just be quiet, go to the office and do nothing. Well, that’s what our civil servants have been doing for ages.

We would like to request our comrades that their ‘magic’ book is outdated and they need to revise Marx’s guffs for the 21st century.  If our government had its way then there would be gulags everywhere. Don’t be surprised if our government bans social media someday. 

Gokul dai thinks his decision to ban porn has helped to prevent violence and rape in this land. Prohibition in the United States didn’t stop people from drinking. Instead, the mafia made tons by selling bootleg liquor. People will find ways to get around it. 

Our government must learn that they are certain things they should ban while they should regulate others so that even the government can earn some money. This is the land where our state treasury is dry but the backyards of our politicians and civil servants are filled with boras of cash. You pay a fine of a few thousand Rupees to the State while you add a few lakhs for chiya kharcha to our sarkari hakims. That’s how this system works and no wonder this country is going broke.

Our government should ban cement factories in this land because it will not help us at all. What good is it that we are sufficient in cement and we have urban jungles everywhere while we cannot breathe clean air. Our government should ban all those who are destroying our hills and rivers in the name of construction. Our government should ban corruption, human trafficking and other stuff that makes our lives miserable. 

But instead, our manpower companies continue to exploit our own people. Our sisters are still sold in brothels in India. Why can’t our Oli government pass a law that strips all assets and even citizenship of those involved in human trafficking. You don’t have to hang a person to death just to make us all feed good for a while. 

There can be laws that makes their lives hell. And it’s about time we all saw the faces of those engaged in criminal activities. What’s up with all those arrested for heinous crimes wearing face masks. This is the only country in the world where criminals and tax evaders seem to have privacy rights while the rest of us do not have any rights at all.

Maybe it’s time our politicians did us all a favor by passing a bill that also sets a retirement age for our lawbreakers. Our civil servants have to hang their bags at 60 then why not do the same for our clowns as well?

It seems that our politicians want to hang on till they drop dead. It really doesn’t matter if our civil servants retire at 58 or 60 or 65 because most of them are lazy bums anyway. 

Our bureaucracy has not change a bit in the past three decades. We thought things would get better when our starving democrats came to power in the 90s. But instead, our Congressi government screwed it up and made it a place where their cadres got to enjoy all the perks and power that comes with the positions.  Today, we see political interference everywhere. 

Now, our civil servants will get two more years to do read more newspapers, drink tea and play cards on computer and use Facebook during office hours.

If our government hired an independent body to investigate ill-gotten wealth in this country, then our civil servants would top the list. We only blame our politicians for all the chaos in this country but we tend to forget that our civil servants are the ones who need to be held accountable. 

Our chimeki the dim sum wallahs tell us that we should be engaged in friendly negotiations with our samosa wallahs when it comes to Kalapani. I guess our politicians should now understand that our chimekis are in it together and we don’t really matter at all. Most of the folks in the international community will continue to pay lip service over Kalapani. 

Maybe, we can just play a friendly football match with the Desis or if our government can bring out a political map of Nepal and we can have everything we owned until the British came rolling. Then, our map would show us bordering Delhi. We can’t go to war with India over our disputed territories. Our opposition wallahs can shout all they want but when they are in power, they will also remain silent.  

Maybe, it’s time our hardworking civil servants really did their homework and our honest politicians finally have the political courage to sit down with the Desis and resolve the disputes with Susta and Kalapani. If not, then bring out a law that bans all protests against foreign governments and that would do the trick for now.

Guffadi is a grumpy old man who blogs at guffadi.blogspot.com. You may contact him at maguffadi@gmail.com

Climb the Mountain

Nirmal Purja has done it. He has now set a world record for climbing 14 highest peaks in less than seven months and this record will probably never be broken. Nirmal had an all Nepalese team and this shows that we Nepalese can work as a team and be successful unlike our clowns, civil servants and contractors who never complete their tasks on time and within the budget. People like Purja should get a medal from our Madame President instead of fake VAT-bill byaparis and other controversial figures. 

Purja has a MBE from the Queen in England. Someday,  he might get knighted but I don’t know if he has a British citizenship yet. I think it’s time our government give at least a ‘green card’ to our NRNs abroad. 

Let us even open our hills to the rich foreigners. I think a lot of rich folks from Hong Kong would love to buy our hills and build villas. We can tax them a little bit more if the land value appreciates and they want to take their money back home. If most of the buildings in Manhattan can be owned by foreign entities then why are we scared of foreign investors in our real estate market? 

I think it’s time we follow the ‘Bhutan’ policy when it comes to tourism and just follow the rulebook from China and India when it comes to attracting foreign investors. But of course, the only folks who really don’t want this all to happen are our civil servants. 

Our bureaucracy is bloated and corrupt. I think it’s time to realize that our civil servants have destroyed this country and help our politicians to loot more. We need politicians who have the political courage to take on the bureaucracy. If not, this system will never change. I think it’s time our civil servants took responsibility for their incompetence and resistance to change and do the right thing.

Maybe, our politicians should learn a thing or two from Nirmal and his team. Climbing Everest or any other mountains require mental and physical endurance. Most of our politicians have neither and maybe that’s the reason why we are still stuck at the base camp when it comes to the socio-economic development in Nepal. Purja could not have done it without the help of his team members and our Sherpas are the true heroes of Everest. 

I think it’s time our government set a fixed amount folks need to pay to our Sherpas for helping them to climb our mountains. I think a minimum of ten thousand dollars is a good amount. We need to make Everest more expensive so that our Sherpas are paid better and we can also minimize the traffic jam up there and cut down on the trash as well.

Oli is not feeling well. Let’s hope he gets better soon. I think it’s time Oli fulfilled his side of the bargain and let our Emperor move in to Baluwatar. Our greatest communist government on Earth sometimes forgets that the reason we voted for them was because we thought they could better than the Kangaroos. 

But it seems that even with the two-third majority, our Oli government still acts like they are in the opposition instead. The recent arrest of two artists has led us to question our government’s intentions when it comes to freedom of speech, press and religion. 

Our comrades are here today because they fought against the system that was against our right to voice our opinion. And they should not forget that they may bring out new laws and ban everything in this land but one day, a new player will emerge and our old political parties might be banned as well. 

So our comrades should stop shooting themselves in the foot. Power does not last forever. Elections will happen and Nepali voters are not ignorant fools. We will have no choice but to give the other chors a chance to loot us all again come next election.

We all know that our Emperor is still in the game because he ditched one partner for another. And who knows, he may do the break-up act again to fulfill his own self-interest.  It’s about time our political parties stop supporting their own cadres even when they have committed heinous crimes. This culture of impunity must be stopped. 

The CIAA should be an independent body and report to the President and not our politicians. Our justices should not answer to their political masters. Our civil servant should be able to work without political interference. And sad to say, but this is only possible if everyone reports to the President. And then our Madame President will be too busy to go on foreign trips or attend inauguration ceremonies in town.

Visit Nepal 2020 is round the corner. Nepal Tourism Board should appoint Nirmal Purja as our brand ambassador or maybe we can appoint him as our Ambassador to the UK if he meets the minimum requirement. He could help in bring a million Brits next year. Prabal Gurung should be appointed the brand ambassador in the US. 

He could bring in thousands of his fans and even Michelle Obama and a dozen Hollywood celebrities to Nepal. And we have a Chinese brand ambassador but how about the Desis. Yogesh Dai, please ask Sachin Tendulkar and Rajnikant to be our brand ambassador in India. We could get tens of millions from the North and the South. 

Our Emperor is waiting. He is itching to move to Baluwatar. Will the greatest communist party on Earth break up and we will see a new political set up soon or will the Eh-Maleys give the Maobadis a chance to lead the government. We all know that this ‘unity’ natak will not last long. The question is when will they break up and we will go back to the same old nataks again. It all depends on the smog in Delhi. 

Guffadi is a grumpy old man who blogs at guffadi.blogspot.com. You may contact him at maguffadi@gmail.com

The ‘Xi’ effect

The Chinese President was in town and we got ourselves a few repaired roads and a temporary grassland in Tinkune. Maybe, our government should invite world leaders every other week and we will probably get done with potholes and cracked roads in the city. Xi was here and it was for less than 24 hours. 

If our government was creative and really wanted to promote Nepal then Xi would not be holed up in a five-star hotel. We could have taken him for a mountain flight or even better, breakfast with Oli at Everest Base Camp. Then, we could have asked him to tell his people to visit Nepal in 2020 instead of France, America or other western countries. We could even beat the target of getting 2 million passport-stamped tourists in our land. 

Xi was in India before he dropped for a quickie in Nepal. The Chinese have now invested billions of dollars in India and the Indians have also invested in China. And they both know that our incompetent politicians and chiya-kharcha seeking civil servants have not done their job to uplift this country and its people. 

Our politicians still think we can play the ‘India’ or ‘China’ card against our chimekis but the rest of the world knows that India will always be a major player in our domestic affairs and China has accepted that as well. But our ignorant clowns never do their homework and we fail to get a good deal with our chimekis. 

Our communists look at the Chinese Communist Party and dream of an one-party rule but what they fail to realize that you can’t do that unless you bring an economic revolution in this country and our youth can make a living here instead of going to foreign lands to earn a few Dinars and Ringgits. 

And when it comes to corruption, the Chinese are different than the Indians. They either send them to jail for life or end the person’s life. We are lucky that we do not have capital punishment in this land because if we did then the innocent common folks would be sent to death while the corrupt would continue to have fun.

China will probably take over the world in the next twenty years. India will be an economic giant but will have to deal with inadequate infrastructure, poverty, religious and caste conflict and freely roaming animals on the streets. If India wants to catch up with China then it has to invest heavily in infrastructure and handle its internal conflicts with care. What about us? 

Well, we have to deal with our lawmakers who are actually lawbreakers themselves. Our lawmakers are getting arrested left and right for sexual assault, murder, extortion and other illegal activities. We have no one to blame but our political parties who have sidelined their own honest and hardworking cadres and have chosen slimy contractors and criminals to represent the party in the House.

We have new Ambassadors sworn in for Australia and Spain. What can we say about our government when it goes against the recommendation of its own Ministry of Foreign Affairs and appoints people with no diplomatic or government experience. If you are above the age of 35 and have an undergraduate degree, no criminal record and conflict of interest then you are eligible to be our Ambassador. 

The person who will be heading to Australia is a Dahal. Nothing against all honest and hardworking Dahals in this land but Prachanda is giving your clan a bad name. Winter is coming. If our Emperor had his way then most of the top positions in our government agencies would go to his cousins and cadres. 

And our new Ambassador to Spain is Dawa Futi Sherpa. She is the daughter of late Pasang Lhamu Sherpa, the first Nepali woman to climb Everest. She meets the bare requirement but it helps when your family is worth billions of Rupees and is close to Oli Ba. 

Nothing against Dawa but all she can do in Spain is to visit the office of Barcelona FC and probably invite Messi to play a minute or two of football in Everest Base Camp. We should have sent her to the US or some other European countries and she can promote Nepal and especially target a package to those who want to climb Everest. And her relatives own Yeti Airlines and other reputed tour and travel agencies. 

Would it be a conflict of interest or maybe that would help us bring in an extra million high paying ‘climbing’ crowd? There is nothing wrong with sending byaparis and near and dear ones to foreign lands as Ambassadors. The Amrikis do it. Many major political donors, who are mostly byaparis there get appointed as Ambassadors. So maybe we are just following the ‘US’ model instead of the Chinida model where they send the best of the best to represent their land as Ambassadors.

And the future King and Queen of England are busy visiting Pakistan. Where did we go wrong? We got Harry while his big brother has no plans to visit our land. I think we are getting disrespected by the House of Windsor. This is what we get for more than 200 years of loyal service to the Brtiish Crown by our brave gurkhas?  

I think Prince William only wants to visit places they have colonized. If Prince William had an ounce of respect for the Gurkhas then he should visit Nepal with his Mrs and tell the Brits to ask 2 million Brits to visit Nepal as an appreciation and remembrance of thousands of young Nepali men who lost their lives fighting for the British Empire in the two major world wars.

Suraj Vaidya dai should visit the UK, India and Singapore and play TV ads there saying ‘The Gurkhas have saved your ass and now it’s time to move your ass and visit the Land of the Gurkhas’. Suraj Dai can bet the target if he does that! 

Guffadi is a grumpy old man who blogs at guffadi.blogspot.com. You may contact him at maguffadi@gmail.com

All Good Things Must Come to An End

Let us all wish each other a very Happy Dashain and hope that someday Good will finally prevail over evil in this beautiful land of ours. This Dashain has started out with a bang and for us Nepalese, politics is like our national sport.  India loves cricket. The British love football and we love politics more than we love each other.

Everyday, politics is front page news while the rest of the stuff that happens in the country is ignored. It seems that we have more politicians per capita than any other nation in the world.  And it is only our public servants who seem to make the moolah while we can’t even afford to buy onions this Dashain. And every thirty years, we seem to change the players while the system fails to get updated. 

Maybe time has come for us to ignore our politicians and not give them any priority in our media and in our lives as well. Let us not be pissed off at these buffoons and ruin our day. We should just keep on working hard and taking care of our family instead of bitching and whining about our chors and their nautanki nataks.

Mahara Dai started out as a school teacher in Rolpa and is probably the most luckiest Maoist ever. This man liked to keep quiet and enjoyed hot ministries be it our Home Ministry, Finance, Communicaton and was recently our Speaker of the House. And then he forgot all about it and screwed it up. He still had good decade left to have fun in Nepali politics but it now seems that this man’s time to enjoy the freebies is over. 

Where are our women activists and women politicians today? Why is Nepal Police silent? Just because there is a consensual relationship between two adults,  it doesn’t mean that the concerned authorities look the other way when violence and sexual assault take place. But this is Nepal and the thulo mancheys can do anything they want and get away with it.

Mahara Dai should have taken a ministry this time as well instead of becoming the Speaker of the House. Then he would have been busy wheeling and dealing with the Chinese and other byaparis. But he must not have much to do with his current position and had to get out of his government residence and visit his friends elsewhere. 

After all this is the man who once asked a Chinese byapari for 50 Karods. And let us not roll our eyes because 50 Karod is chump change when it comes to buying votes here and there. Yes, politics is expensive and you need notes to win votes so that you can make more once you get to sit on that Kurchi.

Mahara was a school teacher once. He could have done better but like most of our Maoist netas, he too turned out to be just another guy who got swallowed by the corrupt system instead of changing the system itself. His students have become mantris and speaker of the house and hold influential positions inside the party. But the teacher has failed us all. Why are our public school teachers in love with alcohol, guffs and politics?

Most of our politicians are either school teachers, byaparis or lazy bums who made it good by fooling most of the people in their backyard. Our Maoist netas were supposed to change the system but they seem to have fought a decade-long People’s War to change their own lifestyle instead.  

Let us hope our comrades will look back at those pictures when they were scared and not sure if they would make it alive after waging a war against the state. Look at those pictures where a simple meal of baasi bhat in dingy plates was enough for them to lead their movement. 

Look at them yesterday. They were skinny, wore old clothes and weary shoes. Look at them today. They are fat, have rosy cheeks and wear suits worth lakhs, wear watches worth tens of lakhs and live in houses worth Karod. So was this what the Maoist dream was all about? So was this what Mahara taught his students and inspired them to leave their schools and join the Maoist movement? 

At the end of the day, we all know that an assault took place. The lady may now deny everything and tell the world that Mahara is like her father but father’s don’t  show up in a daughter’s room, with alcohol in hand and then drink the alcohol and assault his daughter. 

Mahara still hasn’t finished working on the hisab kitab his party needs to submit to the government when they took all that money in the name of their combatants. Now, he has all the free time and can finally submit the financial details of where all that money went. The question today is not about what Mahara did or did not do. The question we need to ask our politicians is to at least have some respect for the office they occupy. 

We have our mantris acting like bouncers. We have our cadres acting like wild savages. We have those in power wanting more and more from the state treasury while the rest of us have not much to give anymore. We though the Maoists would change this nation for good but they have only changed themselves for good. 

Mahara Dai, it is not too late to apologize and seek forgiveness. You have already enjoyed the fruits of politics. Enough money has been made and your sons are well off as well. 

Now it’s time to become a mentor. Leave politics, be a good teacher and maybe teach your future students that we all make mistakes but we should also be held accountable for it. And who knows, you can inspire others to not make the same mistakes that you have made. 

Guffadi is a grumpy old man who blogs at guffadi.blogspot.com. You may contact him at maguffadi@gmail.com

Constitution Day

We have the best constitution on Earth and we have no one but our great leaders to thank for it.  If it weren’t for our great netas, then the Ranas would continue to build palaces all over the city wasting billions of our Rupees and then it would fall on this ‘great’ government to repair them. 

Look at Singha Durbar today. Our ‘poor’ government can’t even maintain the front gate there.  It is not Oli’s faul. Just blame the Ranas for building such palaces which are now difficult to maintain. So let us demolish them all and build new modern buildings so that our contractors, civil servants and corrupt clowns can all share the chiya kharcha from our sarkari budget. 

The new parliament building which will be completed in five or so years will cost this government more than 700 Karods but if you ask any architect to come up with a bid then he or she can do it for less than half the money. 

This ‘Oli’ sarkar is hell-bent on not only raising our taxes to feed their own hungry stomachs and souls but are also making sure that all projects make them lots of chiya kharcha because they must probably know that, we Nepali voters are not blind like some folks in the West. 

We keep changing the players just for fun and next time around, our comrades might be on the wrong side of the fence. Let us hope that our comrades will see the light soon or else we will have to put up with the King of Dadeldhura next time around.

 If it weren’t for our great netas, the House of Shah would continue to waste 60 Karods of our taxpayers money every year and leave us high and dry. We now know that Late King Birendra was too laid-back while our former King Gyanu Uncle was never really a businessman. 

If he were a business person then he would have hired consultants from Mckinsey or other consulting firms here and abroad. But what did he do? He tried to bring back the mandaleys from the 80s twenty years later. That was like trying to open a institute that teaches how to use type writers when you already have IBM PCs in town.  

And Kamal Thapa is still trying to be relevant today with his nataks. I think Gyanu Unce should just go ahead and open his own political party. Then maybe people like Kamal Thapa and all those so-called “Bring Back Monarchy’ crowd will not get their 15 minutes of talk time at Reporter’s Club.  After all, if Gyanu Uncle is the party head they still think of him as the King then they will always be at the second seat and not in the front unlike today. 

If it weren’t for our netas, Nepal would already have been a failed state and we would have 24 kingdoms and two dozen kings. But, today, we are moving towards peace and prosperity and we have hundreds of Kings who rule over us. But it seems that our netas are still scared of a former King who is now busy wearing garlands and walking around temples. 

Let the man enjoy his free time. He had his chance and he couldn’t hack it but our netas have had theirs and we are still willing to give you guys the opportunity to stay on the right track but it looks our buffoons want to invite the right-wingers back into the game again and again.

It wasn’t hundreds of our lawmakers who discussed, debated and decided to come up with our ‘new’ constitution for our ‘New’ Nepal. It was just a bunch of old fogies who decided it was time to get us a new book because the old one was out of date.  Well, we could have just amended a few things and saved us billions of Rupees but then our netas wouldn’t get their perks and benefits from the state would they?

Our Minister of Disinformation and Miscommunication Gokul Dai is not so cool and our great tabloid journalist thinks he knows more about the press than the rest of us. How can a journalist who becomes a mantri turn his back and be so arrogant and want to curtail press freedom. 

I guess Gokul Dai doesn’t need a job when he is out of power. Our ministers make enough to last seven generations. They can no longer live normal lives, go on a morning walk, buy vegetables and drink doodh chiya at the local pasal after once gets to sit on a kurchi. Then, he or she is a King or the Empress. 

Do you think our Madame President will make a cup of tea for herself and work on  on her memoir once she is out of the President’s House? She will get a free housing, vehicles, security and assistants. But Obama has to get back to the grind. That’s the difference between us and the rest of the world.

If our netas abided by our ‘best constitution then we would not be in such a mess. Our lawmakers are lawbreakers themselves. We have had our constitution since the Ranas left the building but the players used it for their own good and violated the constitution time and again. 

The ‘Oli’ regime is no better. This government has violated our constitution left and right. Our ministers act like bouncers instead of leaders. Poor Yogesh Dai. We want him to be our Justin Trudeau but the man is having a tough time not being viral on YouTube. Another Gyanendra with the extra ‘I’ in his last name is continuing to have his 15 minutes of fame.

Well, I think it will extend for another 15 weeks or even months. I think our Gyanendra Bhai, our YouTube activist needs to tone down a little bit as well. It starts to get boring if you are only bitching and whining everywhere. Now, it’s time to wake up and walk away from the camera and do your thing instead of only blabbering about what’s wrong with our netas. 

If the minister is late to board the aircraft then when he shows up, you and your fellow passengers should clap and thank him for finally letting all of you fly back to Kathmandu. Let us show our politicians, we are peaceful, submissive folks not angry frustrated folks.

This government wants us to stand up for national anthem at Pashupatinath while we cremate our loved ones. It is my constitutional right not to stand up during such times. This government does not want me to go on a picnic or party or in Gokul’s words ‘do not hang out with your girlfriend or boyfriend’. I think we need to ask Nepal Bar Association (NBA) to send their lawyers to teach a thing or two about  constitutional matters. 

It is our constitutional right not to even celebrate Constitution Day and that doesn’t make us traitors.  Our netas should be the ones to preserve, protect and defend the constitution but it is sad that they are the ones who want to attack and destroy the constitution.  Gokul Dai, please do ask your netas to not party and drink like you will drop dead tomorrow during government holidays. We all know what our loafers are up to during off days.

Guffadi is a grumpy old man who blogs at guffadi.blogspot.com You may contact him at maguffadi@gmail.com

The Mantri Dilemma

With the way things are going, Visit Nepal 2020 might not be a success because we still don’t have the adequate infrastructure to handle 2 million tourists because we seem to be quite a step behind when it comes to our airports, hotels and management of tourist sites. 

Well, of course 2 million folks are not going to show up on the same day but with one and only international airport being mismanaged by our civil servants and the pickpockets who do the baggage handling make it worse for all of us.  For most of the bideshi tourists, TIA is the gateway to Nepal and the first impression is not the best we have to offer. 

Be it our immigration department officials and their habit of picking their nose with one finger, and using Facebook on their mobile with another does not leave a good impression on our tourists.

And when it comes to airport taxis, our taxi wallahs must have learned their tips and tricks from somewhere else. We, Nepalis are supposed to be peaceful, hardworking and law-abiding citizens but our taxi wallahs are lazy bums who will break the law and physically assault you to take their cabs if they get the chance. 

Our national carrier is an embarrassment. Why not increase flights to China or Singapore or even India instead of carrying out flights to Osaka for a loss? Nepal Airlines wants to sell its 757 but so far nobody really wants pay the 7+ million dollars for it. Why not just transport the plane in pieces to Bhrikuti Mandap and then assemble it again and  then ask the manpower companies to at least pay something so that most of our migrant workers will aware about air travel before they leave for their destinations. We can also take our kids for fun and the air hostess can hand out candies to the kids for a fee as well.

Our Tourism Minister is a wonderful man. He is young and could one day become our Prime Minister if the Nepal Communist Party gets to run the show for a decade or two. He wears tie and suit and looks good in it as well. We see a little bit of Justin Trudeau in Yogesh Dai when it comes to the nose and facial structure. But it’s a different ball game when one is just another politician and one who gets to become our Mantri.

When one is a politician, you can rant against the whole world, be it your own political party that runs the show or the rest of the fools out there but once you become a Mantri, it’s a whole different ball game. Now, you cannot rant against anybody because you have a ministry to run and then you have to satisfy your cousins and cadres and the mother party as well.

And there are the civil servants who actually run the show. What’s wrong with Nepal? Let us not blame our politicians because most of them really wanted to change the system and fought against the pancheys, monarchy and the ‘corrupt’ system but once they got to sit in the Kurchi, they themselves became part of the system.

Look at Oli Ba and Prachanda. Oli spent more than 14 years in prison and was a skinny and starving fellow when he first got to taste power as our Home Minister more than two and half decades ago. And things have changed quite a bit since then.  Prachanda too wanted to change the system and look where he is today.

It seems that if we only add up the wealth our politicians and civil servants then Nepal would be the richest nation on Earth. How can a civil servant in his thirty years of service accumulate enough wealth to own a mansion in Kathmandu while his or her kids go to universities in foreign lands and then settle down there. 

Our netas have it easier because they don’t need to wait thirty years and be in position of power to make money. Yes, a mantri can make a  minimum of 100 Karods if he or she gets to stay in the kurchi of a ministry for a year. 

We all know that most of our mantris get the cut from transferring and promoting civil servants. Everything has a price in this country. If you want to be the chief of a government agency, then please prepare to pay at least 7 to 10 Karods. And we really don’t know where the money comes from but it surely goes to top civil servants and mantris. 

Yogesh Dai is different. That’s what many of us say and think so as well. But somebody must be giving him the wrong advice. Nijgadh Airport will take a decade or more and there is no point in trying to tell the world that it will be built at any cost no matter what the tree lovers say. I think Yogesh Dai should take a step back and understand that we do not need such a big airport at all. It would be better if we focused on Pokhara, Bhairahawa and Kathmandu instead.  

Who is going to fly into Nijgadh and then take an hour or two hour ride to Kathmandu when the highways are all done? Save the trees, earn the brownie points not only from us, tree lovers but from the rest of the world and we will do everything to nominate you for the Nobel Prize or any other Prize out there. That would be much better than receiving a gold medal from a Korean cult.

And when it comes to Visit Nepal 2020, I think it’s time to fire Suraj Vaidya and maybe ask one of our tourism entrepreneurs to head the committee instead. After all, we all know where the IIFAA awards idea came from. Visit Nepal 2020 does not even have a official website yet. Some travel agency owns the domain name instead. 

Nothing personal against Suraj Dai but we have barely four months to go and our concerned government agencies are not ready for anything. Nepal Tourism Board has more than 150 Karod budget and Visit Nepal 2020 has another hundred and more.  Maybe, we should just invite Rajnikanth, the Emperor of Tami Cinema, Sachin Tendulkar, the God of Cricket, Emilia Clarke, the mother of dragons and Messi, the God of Football in January 2020 to launch the Visit Nepal 2020 campaign.

Rajnikanth can help us to at least get a million tourists from South India. They are better educated, have more money to spend and will eat more rice and chicken and non-veg items than the average Indian tourists who come here, who mostly come on chartered buses and bring their own cooking gas and utensils. 

Tendulkar can play in a charity cricket game with our Nepali cricketers and we could make millions from Indian companies and we can live telecast in Indian channels and make millions more. We can invite hundreds of thousands of Sachin fans to watch the game as well. 

If we can do the same with Messi and for mother of dragons, you don’t even need foreign tourists, I think we can get a million Nepali fans and another million bideshi fans to dress up as dragons and welcome Emilia Clarke to Nepal. 

Guffadi is a grumpy old man who blogs at guffadi.blogspot.com. You may contact him at maguffadi@gmail.com

P for Protocol

I think it’s time our politicians learn a thing or two about protocol when it comes to meeting officials from foreign countries. Our netas should also learn a thing or two about order of precedence so that they would not look like fools. 

With due to respect to government folks from across the border but it’s about time we all saved money by sending emails and using social media to communicate with each other rather than wasting each others’ taxpayers money by visiting Kathmandu or Delhi for a few hours of guff suff. 

Recently, we had the RAW chief in town meeting our former Prime Monsters and netas.  Let us not blame the Desis all the time. Our netas and civil servants are mostly shameless sons of seedless cucumbers who will bend backwards or anyways possible to secure educational scholarships, free medical treatment and other freebies from India whenever possible.

I think it’s time our netas and civil servants show at least an ounce of class and not beg for free lunch from our chimekis. We blame thousands of Indian beggars in our town for making our city look bad but forget about thousands of our own thulo mancheys begging for everything else from the Desis.

The media as usual made it quite a big issue when the RAW chief came calling but who really cares about the media? Our politicians, civil servants and contractors do not care what our patrakars think about them. 

They know very well that they can have it their way and nobody can do anything about it. After all, this is the land where small fishes get arrested for corruption whereas the big sharks take their money to tax havens abroad.  Just look at Rabi. The man is in custody for the death of one of his former colleague. 

Yes, the police has to carry out an investigation and hopefully we will come to a closure and we will know what really happened but it’s really tough for our media wallahs these days. Instead of writing the truth without fear or favor, our government wants our patrakars to either shut up and write nothing or face the music if they write about what’s wrong with our netas and the government.

  

And this is also the land of conspiracy theories and we Nepalese are all busy watching Youtube Videos , Facebook feeds and what not all related to Rabi. Well, Oli try to divert the matter to Rhinos and asked the world to start calling them Gaidas instead but it did not go viral as expected. 

Oli Ba is once again in Singapore and we wish him well. Get well soon and yes, let MaKuNe and Jhallu Baba share the same chair if that makes both of them happy. Just build a bigger chair to fit them two together in the next meeting if possible.

This time around, we had the Indian Minister of External Affairs Subrahmanyam Jaishankar coming to Kathmandu for some chiya and biskoot with our netas. It’s okay with such foreign officials meeting with their counterparts but why should our PM and President waste their own time trying to entertain every foreign officials who happen to visit our land? 

If the President of India comes to town then our Madame President should offer some tea. The same goes for Modi if he comes to town. But we can’t have everyone from across the border show up in the capital and get to do a photo-op with our head of state. Maybe, Modi will be kind enough to meet and greet all of our government officials when they show up in Delhi.

There is nothing wrong with our former Prime Monsters catching up with Jaishankar but instead of going to his hotel room for some guff-suff, it would have been better if Jaishankar had paid the visits to Dr Saheb’s and Deuba’s residences. Jaishankar  is not a clown like most of our netas and civil servants. The Indians do their homework very well and do what is best for their country’s interest whereas our civil servants and netas do what is best for their pockets while the country can go down the drain.

Jaishankar  was once the Foreign Secretary himself and knows how his ministry works inside and out. He last came to our land a few years ago to tell our netas that our constitution was not right and needed some fix-ups. 

Our netas said no and went ahead and then we had the blockade gift from the Desis.  Maybe, our Foreign Minister can learn a thing or two from Jaishankar.  After all, the man served as Ambassador to China for more than four years and was the Desi Ambassador to the US as well. 

I think we should ask Jaishankar to give a class to our civil servants and netas how we too can improve economic, trade and cultural relations with both China and India. And when it comes tto our folks serving in the Indian Army, our government should ask the Indians that if they go to war with Pakistan anytime soon then please do not send our brothers to fight at their borders.

It’s about time India acknowledged the fact that our people have died in numerous wars with Pakistan fighting for India to protect their land its people. So, it’s about time Indian government officials stop bragging about billions of Rupees India give us every year to help us out here and there.  

We have forty thousands of our folks serving in the Indian Army and thousands have died fighting for India. Let somebody do the math. Should India be grateful for Nepali sons fighting for them or should we be grateful for a few ambulances, scholarships and other development projects? I think we both should be grateful we have each other.

Our folks serve in the British and Indian armies and the Singapore Police Force. And the folks who have served before and even now have really not gotten the respect they deserved. It’s time Oli and his government scrapped the tripartite agreement with the British and Indian government concerning military service.

Don’t worry about few hundreds who may not get the opportunity to earn a few extra pounds or Singapore Dollar or thousands who could earn Indian Rupees if they join the Indian Army. If our government had any spine and respect for the History of the Gurkhas then we should let the UN wallahs know as well that either they hire thousands of Nepalis as permanent peace keeping force or we will leave the UN peacekeeping mission as well. 

It’s time we also dole out our own set of demands to the world instead of everybody coming to us with their list of demands. And Oli has started it all with this ‘It’s Gaida, not Rhino’ campaign. You may either like or not like himi but he is as good as it gets. 

Guffadi is a grumpy old man who blogs at guffadi.blogspot.com. You may contact him at maguffadi@gmail.com