Come winter ....


Kathmandu dips in mercury and drinking water, dips in light and power, dips in air quality, and rolls up rivers into sewers. Yet, one must go unless the wet

monsoons of only six months put on show. Yes, one must go on - even if there is no water in the kitchen and wash-room, and there is no midnight’s sleep for a couple of pails of water on the roaring pump.

Thus go by here the workdays

of about five million people in houses and fields, schools and colleges,

workshops and seminars, offices and factories, malls and stalls. The show must go on because life keeps on going, indeed! No civilian rather underpins a claim, and no civil charter is supreme. Claim but what against the lame defense: dry monsoons full of pains; no water, no light and no power until the rains?

It has more brains after a leader entertains, “We’re badly over making the law of new Nepal,” while the Authority intends groundwater sinking deep in Kathmandu. So go again to the Dark Days with kerosene lamps and candle lights. And no use if the students decry - damn all; damn all such; why do homework and examinations come?

Whenever the winter approaches very year, one prays, “Pashupatinath, Save Us!” The new politics and

the Holy Him! So what if the babies whimper in their cold beds, and the olds groan!

Nepal is a very poor country

peopled by the very rich. Because democracy is full of choices, provision all by yourself to the last choice - put a deep boring, an extra pump, an overhead tank and filter, an inverter or generator, and so on. Put and pay but never say - altogether your provisions pour billions.

Twenty years ago, an interim prime minister had said, “Kathmandu can wash its streets three times daily like Singapore does.”

It was for the Melamchi that still many hold the dreamy spell of an afimchi (opiate). Life has to move on irrespective of what was declared as political leaders are famed at doing that is nothing.

The street keeps on my handshakes this morning, too, no matter the wash-room had no water. If winter comes, can rains be far behind? There is no looking back but the forward movement as never before.

And so the cycle continues.