A piece of humor

by oohi ashu

My friend Anup Raj is a smooth operator, the kind who can sell saris even to the Marwaris. In college, all he ever talked about was how to make tons of money, go out with a dame named Sunny and be funny in front of those dainty damsels attending the nearest all-women's school.

But we lost touch after his case-study-laden MBA days on the banks of the Charles River in Boston, Massachusetts -- the same place also famous as the bastion of American capitalism where the collective first-year salary of the graduates is higher than Somalia's GDP.


Anyway, imagine my surprise when I spotted Anup Raj the other day in Indrachowk- all suited-booted like a Zee TV talk-show host, nonchalantly puffing out Surya churot in small concentric circles.


"Hi Anup Raj! Fancy meeting you here. I thought by now you were some big-time investment banker on Wall Street, pulling all-nighters at Lazard or something."

In response, Anup Raj merely flashed his you-stupid-devil smile, and waved his cigarette, signaling me to follow him.


Puzzled by his uncharacteristic silence, I looked around, and seeing nothing unusual, decided to take his lead. I figured he was up to something.


A couple minutes' quiet walk through the haphazard row of parked Maruti cars and Hero Honda mobikes, and we ended up in front of a house with a cement coat and strategically hidden behind the huge parking lot of that made-in-Hong Kong, sold-in-Kathmandu bought-by-Indians Bishal Bazar.

Following Anup Raj, I climbed up a flight of paan-stained stairs, only to come upon an open corridor. With the Surya-stub firmly between his lips, Anup Raj reached into his back pocket, and pulled out a Jawalakhel Distillery locket that jingled with yellow keys. He clicked open the black Chinese lock that hung on the wooden slab of a door of the last room. Pushing the door open, he looked at me, and with a flourish of an A-class Sri Teen Maharaj, he swept me in.

The room was sparsely furnished. A bare floor, a desk with some papers and a phone, a couple of chairs, a computer in one corner, lots of space and that was all. From one window, I could see two pigeons cavorting romantically on the head of the Juddha Shumsher statue on Juddha Sadak, as though they were Karishma Manandhar and Rajesh Hamal of the pigeon-world.

Settling down on a chair, I surveyed the pictures on the walls: Gaudy, brightly painted life-size portraits each of Madhav Nepal, Girija Prasad Koirala, Man Mohan Adhikari, Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, Surya Bahadur Thapa, Hridyesh Tripathy and Ram Raja Prasad Singh were all doing 'namaste' to me. All grinning like Panauti cats. Looking at them, I thought that all the Who's Who of Nepal's most famous geriatric club - also known as politics - were right up on the walls of Anup Raj's strange office-cum-hideout.

But in all my 15 odd years of knowing him, I had never thought of Anup Raj as a political animal. As far as I knew, he liked politics with all the passion of a fish in love with a bicycle. So what explained this sudden change of heart?

"I am in the julus business," Anup Raj offered quietly, as though reading my mind.


"Political tension in Nepal is great for my business," he explained. "Thanks to democracy. Nepal now has a plethora of political parties. You know them. All shout for God-knows-what causes. But, hey, what's a political party without a supportive julus behind, right? My job is to supply julus to the political parties. On demand. They pay me well. I give them good service. The transaction's done. Once in a while, I do lose a few lives. But those are small losses compared to all wonders I am doing to strengthen Nepal's democracy."

I didn't know whether to congratulate him or disagree with him. So I kept quiet., letting him to talk deep philsophy.

"You know, after B-school in Boston, I did go to Wall Street for a couple of years. But the work itself was boring. Spending all my time staring at Excel charts 14 hours a day was not my idea of using education for the greater good of humanity. Besides, what I did merely consisted of making rich Americans richer. So, naturally, I just couldn't reconcile my Clintonite liberalism with Reaganite conservatism...

"Soon, I kissed my French-Chinese bohemian artist live-in girlfriend good-bye, gave up the over-the-Hudson apartment, cleared up my American Express bills, and hurried back to Nepal last year. You know, to restore my sanity. Today I'm in this julus business, and I'm very happy. I make lots of money, but also have lots of free time."

As I listened to Anup Raj's autobiography, I wondered how he had launched himself into the julus business. But suddenly he was silent, as if lost in the lullaby of his own tale.


"This julus business is very good," he said after a while. "I employ mostly unemployable youths who have come to Kathmandu from 14 zones and 75 zillas. They are the zealots to whom an ideology does not mean anything. As long as there's a julus, and Pepsi and samosa after-ward, they go to do whatever is required of them. Why, just the other day, Madhav Nepal phoned me for about thousand baliya-baanga. He wanted them to shout slogans against Girija. The following day, Krishna Prasad wanted another thousand guys at the Academy. Whew! I did manage to meet the needs of both clients. Some of my workers do double and even triple shifts. And they get paid more. With elections coming, my only fear is that I would not be able to keep up with the demands for julus. My agents are already out in the drought-ridden eastern Tarai, looking for hungry-looking recruits...

"Getting new recruits is no easy task, you see," went on Anup Raj. "I have to train them to chant slogans, clap hard, pull apart railings, throw stones at public buses, burn telephone exchanges, laathi-charge the police and even face the bullets. All this is hard work, you know."


Then the phone rang. From what I could make out, Ganesh Man was on the line. He wanted 500 youths at the Khula Manch in Tundikhel to be in the audience while he awarded Mangala Bhauju with a "mother of democracy" prize.


At last, I left Anup Raj's office, with a sneaking admiration for the way the guy had made his business acumen work for a just political causes.

As Rod Stewart once sang in that raspy voice: some guys have all the luck.

(Originally published in The Spotlight magazine).