As a Backside columnist, it falls upon this scribe’s lap to urge readers to look at the bright side, stay bullish, be a beacon of hope, and believe that without dark clouds there is no possibility of having a silver lining.Thanks to this unhealthy emergency, we can finally stop worrying about all the corruption, political incompetence, instability, selfishness, greed, wildfires, air pollution, Nepal’s widening trade gap, and the state of disrepair on the Godavari Road. There are now much more serious things to worry about.My fellow-communist columnists are all complaining that the grumblement did this and did that, but did nothing to control the Covid pandemonium. That is unkind. Given the kind of blunders Nepal’s rulers are prone to making, it is good that they have learnt from their mistakes, and have taken a vow of silence and not lifted a finger against the virus. Imagine if they were left to their own devices to make more asinine rules and award more contracts for PCR and vaccine imports to try to fight the virus. There would be chaos.The problem with this country is not that we have a government that does nothing, the problem is that opinion-makers want it to do something, anything. Which is why it is good that Prime Minister Ali is not listening to them. If the grovelment is going to make bold decisions like banning all outbound flights except to the one neighbouring country beginning with the letter ‘I’ that is going through the world’s worst Covid crisis, it is better it does nothing.Historically, the time-tested method of Nepal’s leaders when faced with a crisis is to play dead, and not make any hasty decisions until it is too late. The idea is to ignore the problem, pretend it does not exist — that way there is no urgent necessity to actually do anything. GONE has to learn to live up to its acronym.Nevertheless, given the seriousness of the pandemic, Nepal’s leaders are setting a good example by promoting hand-washing. This is working brilliantly because they have washed their hands off dealing with the pandemonic.Nepal also takes self-isolation very seriously. The best thing we have done is to be asked to be left alone by the international community in this crisis, and that is why we have not lobbied to be on the list of countries that the US is shipping AZ vaccines to, spurned Sputnik, played hard-to-get with the Chinese, and we did not take part in Joe Biden’s Climate Summit for fear that we would actually have to show something we have done to save the planet. All this means that we have cleverly  kept Indian, Chinese and Russian jabs at arm’s length.Now that we have Lockdown downtime each of us has to look at all the things we have to get used to during this incarceration:<ol> 	<li>Gentlemen can grow that hip pony-tail that they always wanted to have. The Ass already has a tail, so this does not apply to me.</li> 	<li>Stop shaving, save on expensive razor refills and foam.</li> 	<li>No need for deodorants, your armpits can be as smelly as you want.</li> 	<li>Ladies can hang around bra-less around the house.</li> 	<li>Gentlemen can attend zoom meetings in shirt, tie and undies.</li> 	<li>Wear masks at all times since you don’t have to smile and put on a brave face.</li> 	<li>When flights resume, Kathmandu Airport will replace frisking arriving passengers with antibody searches so as to stop the virus before it enters Nepali air space.</li></ol>Read also: <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/opinion/zoomed-out/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Zoomed out</a>, Ass<a style="font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: 0.01em;" href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/opinion/why-wear-a-mask/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Why wear a mask?</a>, Ass

lovkdown

Lockdown downtime

Lockdown downtime