A volunteer Ass is needed with immediate effect for a newspaper of records in a federal democratic kleptocratic Himalayan republic in which the Buddha was born, and is situated like a yam between a rock and the deep blue sea, and has an area of 156,000 sq km, give or take 500 sq km or so.Applicants must be willing to make complete asses of themselves, and show a demonstrable ability to kick and/or lick hind quarters of the powers that be. No previous experience necessary, since the much-coveted position comes with complete on-the-job training that includes undercover work, sting operations and how not to get caught plagiarising.Incumbent donkey is quitting with immediate effect after 22 years of yeoman’s service to the nation at large to enter politics and joining other jokers already there.There is now such stiff competition from the clowns in government and in-House comedians that the Ass stands no chance against them with its feeble attempts at eliciting lame laughter in this space every week.For proof of the hilarious slapstick show Nepal’s serial politicians offer citizens, just look at the way they outdid even themselves in the past week or so with the torrid love triangle between PKD, KPO and SBD. The bromance blossomed and it was clear that what we were witnessing was the hand of geniuses in tickling our nation’s collective funny bone.No court jester can vie with such professionalism. They had us in stitches. We laughed so hard we cried.That is why we are seeking a replacement Ass for 2023 onwards.QUALIFICATIONS:<ol> 	<li>Post-holder should have customary long ears, must come with a lot of baggage, have endurance and stamina for abuse.</li> 	<li>Must be able to go hee-haw and have a posterior motive to deliver a back-kick without any warning.</li> 	<li>Amazing opportunities for career progression as a part of the illustrious Equidae family.</li> 	<li>Candidate must be homely, convent-educated teetotaler, fair-skinned vegetarian DV-eligible upper caste Ass who is full of him/her/themself.</li> 	<li>Age, gender if any, marital status, eating habits, lack of morals, incontinence and incompetence no bar.</li> 	<li>Should have capability to write purportedly humorous columns with flair and aplomb and not be deterred by a complete lack of feedback from readers.</li> 	<li>Must be a rude dude Has-been Wannabe.</li> 	<li>Must be able to push the boundaries, including in the disputed Limpiyadhura and Susta regions.</li> 	<li>Must have a Diploma in Lampooning and a Bachelor of Arse in Sycophancy from an unrecognised university.</li> 	<li>Candidates need not possess any verbal, interpersonal and communication skills at all, but a criminal record will be an advantage.</li> 	<li>Horses and Mules are not eligible to apply.</li></ol>SALARY: There is no salary, and that is non-negotiable. But the position has in-built perks, life-time medical treatment including liposuction, tummy tuck, buttock augmentation, and rhinoplasty.Apply with brain scan and full body MRI showing recent abdominal contours to prove you have the guts to take up this position.We are an equal opportunities employer. Jenny Asses are encouraged to apply. Everybody deserves a fifth chance.Byeeee.

The Ass

Backside

VACANCY

First the bad news. The planet is on the verge of climate collapse with the mass extinction of species, including us hupersons. We are now four minutes closer to midnight in the nuclear doomsday clock. And if these two disasters were not enough to finish us all off once and for all, it looks like there is a 50-50 chance that an asteroid will hit the Earth in the next million years or so.
Now, the good news: the government will lift the ban on imported liquor in the new year. That is the kind of glad tidings we had hoped for this holiday season to lift up our spirits so we can see the goblet as half full.
But as if things were not already bleak enough, we are swamped with hate mail of late for all the gloom and doom in these pages. Here is one that just came in:
Dear Sir:&nbsp;
I don't know why I am addressing you as 'Sir' when I know for a fact that you are an Ass, and have never to my knowledge been knighted. You could also not be a Sir at all, but a Ladies, in which case, I beg your pardon. But let's presume for sake of argument, that you are indeed a knight of the male persuasion. So what? I am writing to take umbrage at all the negative stuff in your paper. How come you have nothing nice to say about us in government? Do you always have to see the dark lining in every silver cloud? Do you know how difficult it is for us personally every time we pass an ordnance granting blanket amnesty to those accused of war crimes? You better stop censoring the good news about the great work of this Coalition Government with immediate effect, otherwise I am personally going to see to it that the President awards you a medal on New Year’s Day.
- Department of Miscommunication
If you say so. Here is one item of good news that somehow didn’t make it to the news lineup:
No Need To Panic: Govt&nbsp;
The outgoing government has assured citizens that despite the country’s economy going down the tubes there is no need to panic because it is also the incoming government, and we have a head of government who has the most experience being prime minister.
“We have everything under control. We are lifting the ban on imported liquor,” the Minister for Misinformation, who lost the election, told mediapersons. “There is no reason for alarm right now, we will let you know when it is time to panic.”
Meanwhile, the UN has declared Nepal to be the most successful failed state in the world. The Minister was ecstatic: “This is a great honour, but we cannot rest on our laurels. We must rest on our sofas, and go back to sleep.”

Glad tidings

There are alternative truths and it is our duty to objectively report them as well. But, as they taught us in Morale Science class: to err is humane, and forgiveness is the devil’s workshop — or words to that effect.
Which is why when we know we have made an error of judgement, or got our facts wrong, our journalistic Code of Ethics and Press Council rules mandate us to lie low, hope no one noticed, and slyly correct it in the online version.
No erratum is too small to be correctum. It may be a small typo or it could be a major gaffe like mixing up the name of a notorious smuggler with the name Minister of Finance, but we make it a point to set the record straight, warn the unsuspecting public, say sorry, and learn from our mistake so that we can go on to make even bigger blunders in future.
Let us acknowledge that one cannot live life to the fullest without making mistakes, so let us go boldly forth and commit major faux pas, déjà vu and je ne sais quoi. The important thing is to make it a point to rectify the errata retroactively, like these corrections of recent errors in this paper:
* Our Editorial team cannot not make head or tail of the power struggle in the ruling coalition, which is why we goofed up on the name of the prime minister in our op-ed, and referred to him as Sher Kamal Dahal. As everyone knows, the current prime minister’s name is actually the Right Horrible Pushpa Bahadur Deuba. We offer our sincere apologies to both prime ministers.
<ul>
 <li>We have learnt that a headline in last week’s edition of this paper that read ‘PKD Is a Chinese Stooge’ may have caused offence to Comrade Awesome of the Communist of Party of Nepal (Centrist Maoists). The headline should have read ‘PKD Is an Indian Stooge’.</li>
 <li>We have received a complaint from Prof (Dr) Chintamani Ghoos that a list of CIA deep penetration agents in the upper echelons of the Nepal government in our expose based on Wikileaks last week left out his name. We regret the omission. - Ed</li>
 <li>Deeply sorry that the headline ‘Nepal Badly Beaten’ caused Comrade Madhav Kumar Nepal of the Communist Party-goers of Nepal (US) deep anguish. The news item was actually about the ongoing One Day International Match of Tri-series under the ICC Cricket World Cup League-II in Windhoek in which Nepal was bowled out for a paltry 140 runs in 40 overs.</li>
 <li>The Ass regrets that several readers have needed hospital treatment for taking literally a recent column that advised drinking Kathmandu tap water as a guaranteed way to lose weight. Hope you have your shit together now. Any incontinence is regretted.</li>
</ul>
Read also: <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/opinion/self-driving-in-kathmandu/">Self-driving in Kathmandu</a>, Ass
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Errata, etc

Indeed, it will be a huge relief to us who have been driven up the wall by Kathmandu’s anarchic traffic not to have to do the actual driving ourselves anymore. However, the robotic cars with artificial intelligence will need a steep learning curve to be able to take on everything that Kathmandu’s streets have to offer.
We have to recognise, however, that these autonomous autos are programmed for western civilisation, and may have to be reformatted and rebooted to adapt to our road culture.
For example, a driverless car may have been instructed by its maker never to honk. Well, in Nepal, honking is an important part of the precaution we have to take for road safety to make ourselves seen and heard. Traffic Police tried to enforce the no-honking rule once, but gave up when vehicles started bumping into each other. The Almighty in his/her/its/their infinite wisdom equipped cars with horns, and we should follow the polite instruction at the back of trucks to ‘Horn Please’.
The driverless car can be fined Rs6,000 and/or face a 6 month jail sentence if it fails to honk unnecessarily at Baneswor intersection — unless, of course, the robot driver can be programmed to offer a bribe to the office on duty there.
Everywhere else in the world, driverless cars automatically slow down at zebra crossings in order to let pedestrians cross. We can do away with this feature in Kathmandu because (a) the zebras are not there anymore since the white paint is gone, and (b) drivers in Nepal are not longer required to stop at non-existent zebra crossings and it is the robotic car’s responsibility to accelerate and beat pedestrians trying to illegally cross the road before they get to the other side.
Similarly, the straight yellow centreline is just a suggestion, and the smart car has to learn to also drive on the right side of the road, even if it is the wrong side.
Machine-learning and AI will help self-driving cars to deal with street fauna that roam Kathmandu’s streets. Driverless vehicles will find out the hard way that the oxen at Chabahil interaction serve as bovine traffic islands in order to ensure the smooth flow of traffic. Do NOT try to run them down because the computer driving the car can face life imprisonment.
The introduction of driverless vehicles in Nepal will coincide with Google Maps introducing information on traffic jams. This is helpful, but the auto auto will have to relearn the rules governing the only working traffic light in Kathmandu. GREEN means: FAST; AMBER means FASTER; and RED means FASTEST.
Even though an autonomous vehicle does not have a driver, rules are rules and the car will have to pass a driving test at Putali Sadak. The trick is to fail the test because following the rules is dangerous when no one else is following them.
It is also important for the non-driver to learn that in the city a blinking right side light means the vehicle in question &nbsp;is thinking of turning right but isn't sure, it could be left. On highways: blinking the right signal means the car behind can overtake even if there is a hairpin bend ahead.
While stationary, a right sidelight means I am illegally parked in a no-parking zone, but I'm pretending I'm not parked, just gone in for a takeout from Kalinchok Sekuwa Corner and Bar.

Self-driving in Kathmandu

There is no question that Kathmandu has now become unliveable, and we need to think about moving. There is a proposal to relocate the capital so that we can make another part of the country unliveable.Over the years, there have been various proposals about where to relocate. Chitwan was the most obvious choice, given its central location along the East-West Highway, and the possibility of having rhinos roaming the streets instead of cows.Some geographers have proposed Pokhara as the new capital, since it now has an international airport. The only problem being that Pokhara’s urban chaos already resembles Kathmandu’s, and the capital may have to be moved again if we relocate it there.Like Brasilia and Naypyitaw, Nepal could also find a completely new place and build another capital from scratch. We have made some preliminary inquiries, and it looks like the Khumbu Glacier may not be such a bad place. With the climate crisis, it will no longer be too cold up there, and Nepal can go into the Guinness Book as having the capital with the highest elevation in the world. (New tourism slogan: ‘Go To Nepal, Get High’)There are other options:<ul> 	<li>Since the people of the landfill site at Banchare Danda do not want Kathmandu’s trash and have refused our refuse, we can move Kathmandu to Banchare Danda. It is close by, and no one will notice because both places are already garbage dumps.</li> 	<li>One of Kathmandu’s problems is that we have run out of water. Instead of bringing water from Melamchi through an expensive tunnel that could be knocked out of action again, how about we move Kathmandu to Melamchi, right to the source of the water?</li> 	<li>Manang. Since the trans-Himalayan district is now a bastion of the ruling Nepali Congress, it makes perfect political sense to locate the capital in a place with friends in high places. Ministers commute by mule.</li> 	<li>Shifting Kathmandu to Kalapani would allow us to legitimise our claim to the East Bank of the Kali River, and we could also be so far from everything that no one will bother us anymore.</li> 	<li>Relocate Nepal's capital to New Delhi since everything's being decided there anyway.</li></ul>If we do move Kathmandu away from Kathmandu, the question then arises what do we do with the Kathmandu we have? Good point. Luckily for you The Ass already has a clever plan: build a high dam at Chobhar and return Kathmandu Valley to what it was before Manjushree hastily cleft the mountain with his mighty sword without conducting a proper Environment Impact Assessment.The reservoir thus formed would meet all of Nepal’s power needs, and have enough leftover to export to India. Just have to make sure we don’t involve any Chinese contractors.This plan has other benefits: it would solve Kathmandu Metropolitan City’s problems of overcrowding, air pollution and garbage by completely submerging the city. We would also be solving the problem of government corruption because Singha Darbar would go underwater.

Relocating Kathmandu

<img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/2022120710128/639058969c7e80680e0ce1aejpeg.jpg" alt="" width="1250" height="965"/>Don’t be an ass. Get out and vote, even if it is for a serial politician who has been given the chance to ruin this country several times over for the past 25 years. After all, we have to prove the astrologers right and have PM Dubya back on the saddle for his sixth innings.So, stamp your swastika on the Star of David, hammer and sickle, rhinoceros or umbrella. These election symbols were designed for a  time when Nepalis could not read or write, and the Erection Commission  believes that Nepalis are still functionally illiterate.Election symbols are meant for people so they don't vote for the wrong party. The Commgress has a Hammer, or Sickle, or both. And just to be different, the Congmunists have kept the Tree, which has been the NC's symbol since BP's election in 1959. But it may be time to change it to a Cactus.The most recognisable election symbols have been monopolised by the 5-Party Cartel, so the Sun, Moon, Tree, Cow are taken. Smaller parties have had to make-do with the Ox, Water Buffalo, Yak and Uncastrated He-goat. But there just are not enough symbols to go around for the plethora of parties in the fray.And this is where The Ass, in the national interest, springs to the rescue. Our ballot papers should enlarge the pool of election symbols reflecting the country’s flora, fauna and sauna, and the Nepali love for biodiversity and diversity visas.We should be inclusive and not discriminate against certain species. Political parties must set an example by inducting the Scorpion. And if a Yak is ok, why not a Yeti? (See Virtual Reality ballot paper above)Various spheres of national life can also be represented on the ballot paper. Since corruption plays such an important role in lubricating Nepal’s political mechanisms, the Cash symbol will be up for grabs for the party that offers the biggest bribe for it. The party that waged an underground armed struggle for ten years can fall back on the pressure cooker bomb.Memorise these symbols. It will determine Nepal’s future. May the best Jack Ass win.Read Also:<a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/opinion/election-dos-and-donts/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> Elections dos and don'ts</a>, The Ass

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Symbolic elections

The Chief Election Commissar is a busy hombre these days. With the intention of cracking down on violations of the election Code of Conduct, he is tied up firing off  letters demanding explanations from candidates found to be contravening guidelines. In fact, he has been so busy issuing clarifications that he has no time to enforce any of them.In order to help the EC to remind candidates and parties about the dos and don’ts of election campaigning, the Ass assists by recapping below some of the salient points of Clause 46(1) of the Election Commission Act:Don’t: Character assassination on social media is banned with immediate effect. Candidates are advised to also desist from actual assassination of rivals.Do: Under Nepal’s democratic system, mass murderers, plunderers, pillagers, rapists and those accused of other minor offences can campaign openly in broad daylight hours.Don’t: Candidates who have partaken meeting allowances in the past 40 years are barred from either standing or running in elections.Do: Those who have embezzled billions in airport contracts, telecom licenses or in inaugurating highways that never got built may hit the campaign trail along those same non-existent highways.Don’t: It has come to the EC’s notice that a certain candidate wore a baseball cap with his party’s election symbol during a rally in Gorkha-2. The Commissar has asked the candidate in question to furnish an appropriate clarification within 24 hours, failing which the aforementioned cap will be confiscated forthwith.Do: Candidates from the ruling 5-party collision, may be draped with 25 kg marigold garlands provided they are not allergic to pollen.Don’t: The EC takes umbrage at the #NoNotAgain campaign, saying the hashtag contains a double negative that could confuse voters.Do: Even so, established parties are allowed to embellish, exaggerate, falsify, fake, tamper, or lie about their achievements during the last 30 years in office on Facebook and TikTok as long as the jingle has a catchy tune. To set an example, the EC posted on YouTube a melodious song composed by its own talented storekeeper exhorting Nepalis to vote.Don’t: Candidates are not allowed to have stickers with party symbols at the back of the cars that they have hired from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.Do: But the Firstest Lady is allowed to threaten voters to cast ballots only for a Better Half who flies in on a helicopter.Don’t: Candidates found ringing temple bells will be given a stern warning about noise pollution. If they insist on ringing out the old and ring in the new, they will be rusticated on the spot. Playing madal or other traditional percussion instruments is in contravention of the Election Code of Conduct Article (13), Clause (1) and Sub-clause (d).Do: Parties are allowed to use fleets of Boleros to blare their anthems through loudspeakers. The Co-Finance Minister can take part in a Tharu Peacock Dance even if he is making an ass of himself.

Election dos and don’ts

You may not have noticed, but things in Nepal are getting better and better each passing day. Every day in every way, things are improving. And that is mainly because we hit rock bottom, and now there is nowhere to go but up.The other fantastic aspect of living here is that no matter how bad things get, Nepalis don’t waste their time unnecessarily worrying about it. That is because we know that there is always a light at the end of the tunnel, even if it is another locomotive heading our way.The Nepal Oil Corruption may have just increased fuel prices even as the cost of a barrel of crude in the international market has come down, but we don’t complain. No sir, it is not in our national character. We just go and fill up our tanks because the grabberment might hike up the price again effective midnight tonight.Our philosophy is: the situation is soon going to get much worse, so be happy while things are still relatively better. This is why Nepal consistently ranks as the happiest country in South Asia in The World Happiness Index, beating even Bhutan under the reign of His Majesty King Jigme the Overjoyed.No doubt, social scientists are working on PhDs to determine the scientific basis of what exactly it is that makes us Nepalis such a cheerful lot. But the Ass has his own peer-reviewed conclusions:<ul> 	<li>We are not unnecessary risk takers and will elect a prime minister seven times over because the Asstrologer General said so, and even though he (the PM) is a clown.</li> 	<li>We don’t find the overhead tangle of wires at a electricity pole Indra Chok ugly because it shows we are the most wired nation on Earth.</li> 	<li>Nepal has the most holidays in a year of any country in the world. In October we enjoyed two full weeks off — not counting Chhath and weekends. The fact that the Land Registration Office was closed for so long automatically meant we didn’t have to bribe anyone. Nepal also has five Happy New Year Holidays, the highest per capita in the world.</li> 	<li>We always see a silver lining even if there is no dark cloud.</li> 	<li>Whenever we start lamenting that Nepal is the most politically unstable country in the world, we can remind ourselves that Britain just had three prime ministers in three months, and four finance ministers in four months.</li> 	<li>Nepalis will never do today what can be accomplished next week.</li> 	<li>Our problems may seem intractable, but it is reassuring to see that there are bigger problems in the wider world like nuclear annihilation and planet-wide climate collapse.</li> 	<li>Nepalis instinctively know that they would be miserable if there was nothing left to complain about. Thank goodness we have inept leaders, crooked baboodom, stinky rivers, highways that are falling apart. Can’t imagine if everything worked. We would be so depressed.</li> 	<li>Happily, we are just happy to sit around to grumble about how much happier we could be.</li> 	<li>The grass may be greener in Australia, but our grass gives a better high.</li></ul>Read also:<a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/opinion/holier-than-thou/"> Holier than thou</a>, Ass

Why Nepalis are so happy

<figure><img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/2022111414114/63723cf99c7e80680e0c9649jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="1500" height="1337"/><figcaption>Illustration: DIWAKAR CHHETRI</figcaption></figure>Even as the entire nation gets ready for another week of holidays this month, we have to grudgingly accept that Tihar is a discriminatory festival in which some animals are treated more equally than others.Only crows, cattle, pooches and half-elephants are deemed holy enough to be worshiped next week. Not fair. What about the rest of the animule kingdom? Why leave out pangolins? Is there any reason a gnu isn’t god? How come crow is holier than vulture? The ancient Egyptians had feline goddesses, yet Catmandu’s cats do not make the grade to be venerated. Who made these rules anyway?Such politically incorrect speciesism has crept into other aspects of our everyday life. For example, during the monsoon it only 'rains cats and dogs', not trouts and salamanders. Only a bull is deemed worthy of being taken by the horns in a china shop. Mules are stigmatised as stubborn, whereas beavers are extolled as being eager.And what really gets my goat every time Tihar comes around is that the psycho mutt who terrorises our neighbourhood and keeps us awake all night by barking at the Universe gets to be garlanded and fed treats on Monday even though he is such an ass whole.I hereby, henceforth and hereinafter propose to form a political pressure group in the next  Parliament to ensure a fairer and more inclusive Tihar under the new Constitution so that this country’s canine elite is stripped of its divine right to monopolise being man’s best friend forever.As a start, we could begin by cleaning up the English language of all speciesist figures of speech so that no animal is demeaned or diminished, or its feelings hurt ever again. We should purge the language of all animal similes that belittle them, and find alternatives.For example, when we say that current campaigning for elections in November is moving at a ‘snail’s pace’, are we not being judgemental about the velocity of slug locomotion? Think of what an insult it is to stallions in general and Wolf Blitzer in particular when we say that delegates at the Baddie party convention were ‘wolfing down the hors d’oeuvres’. And in describing coalition politics as a ‘can of worms’ we have to be sensitive about offending our age-old grassroots  heritage of vermiculture.Let us replace speciesist language with more politically correct formulations:WRONG: Sher Bahadur Deuba’s fifth term as prime minister is proof that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.CORRECT: If Sher Bahadur Deuba is prime minister for a sixth time, we can be sure the country will go to the dogs. Yay!WRONG: Only those candidates willing to lick the ass of the party president got tickets to contest elections this time.CORRECT: The party president has been a visionary statesman for donkey’s ears.WRONG: The Finance Minister has set aside a lion’s share of the budget in allocations that benefit his cronies.CORRECT: Leopards are generally satisfied with the location of their spots and will not change them even if forced by the Supreme Court.

Ass s

Holier than thou

<figure><img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/2022111414110/63723c539c7e80680e0c9613jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="1500" height="1000"/><figcaption></figcaption></figure>Many of you pulled me aside at a recent diplomatic soirée to ask if it is a coincidence that on the week that Pushpa Kamal Dahal (Prachanda) announced his candidacy for elections from Gorkha district, the Indian Air Force also unveiled its brand new Light Combat Helicopter ‘Prachand’. My answer to all of you has been a decisive and definitive: “Umm. Maybe.”There is a precedent for the Indians naming their flying machines after Nepali objects. In the 1960s Air India's Boeing 707s were named after Himalayan mountains like Nanda Devi, Kamet and Trishul. But soon, they ran out of mountains and christened the rest of the 707s after peaks in Nepal: Lhotse, Gauri Shankar, Dhaulagiri, Makalu, Everest and Annapurna.We don’t know if MoFA at the time issued a note verbale (Latin: Diplomatic aide-mémoire filled with expletives) but we suppose not, since there are no historical records of a war breaking out between the two countries at that time.While naming its new indigenously designed chopper, the Indian Air Force did not, strictly speaking, infringe on the Maoist Supremo’s intellectual property because it cleverly dropped the ‘a’ from Prachanda.But it obviously wanted to piggy-back on the formidable, fearsome reputation of The Fierce One. They may also have felt ownership of the name ‘Prachanda’ since they had given Comrade Awesome a safe house in Noida for most of the war years.Be that as it may, this is an opportune moment for MoFA to fire off another note verbale in a generally southerly direction to show that we will not take this blatant plagiarism lying down. We will take it straight in the chin.It also means no one is safe anymore. The nom de guerre of other Nepali guerrilla commanders could similarly be purloined by DRDO.Comrade Ram Bahadur Thapa must be extra vigilant, since his war name, Badal, could be the next to be taken to name India's new ICBM.The name Prachand is quite appropriate for the IAF’s new LCH since, like the protagonist it is named after, the new attack helicopter has a rotor that makes revolutions. It has stealth properties with reduced visual, aural, radar and infrared signatures, which means it can conceal its true intentions, be anywhere and everywhere at the same time, and it is armed to the teeth with misguided missiles.If the Indian military has hit a writer’s block with nomenclature for its future arsenal, Nepal, could unilaterally offer the following names as a gesture of goodwill for India's new weapons systems:Indian Army’s new Main Battle Tank: BalenIndian Air Force’s new Combat Drone: LaldhojIndian Navy’s new Submarine: INS Arzoo