Hundreds, maybe more than a thousand, people, including children, women, students, old and those with heavy loads of packages, were stranded in the cold chilly night of November 23rd at Sahidgate, all wanting to go home in Sahidgate-Dakshinkali route. No one was sure why the bus wouldn’t come and the traffic police was not very helpful. Someone said there was a traffic jam somewhere in the middle of the route created by some ‘angry men’. It was hours of wait and a bus suddenly appeared already filled up with people. Many managed to get in and on the bus roof, now tightly packed, that one man in the seat said, “I don’t think it’s any worse than this in hell.”
It took more than one and a half hour to slowly crawl to Balkhu. The bus already old could break down at any time, anywhere. On the way we could barely see what was going on outside. Some men got down on the way, which made it possible for me to crouch on the spare tire before the back seat of the bus and see the outside. Our bus could pass slowly through the jam but there were many, some carrying school children, jammed for hours, which had to go the opposite way to ours. The whole system seemed to have been broken down. There was jam almost everywhere. And this is not the first time it is happening. I have experienced this several times before.
It seems the ‘homeostasis’ level is going down, which is not very satisfying after the end of decade old war. Loktantra is slowly suffocating people unknowingly, those people in land cruisers and long limousine would never know. They have never actually known the problems of the nation have thus become a problem themselves. Common people want to get rid of the greatest problem of the nation: all of the politicians, who have been time and again assuring people of peace, without actually knowing what it means.
The water level has risen, rivers are swollen, floods have taken up their position in terai, but there has been no sign of discontinuity of the weekly load shedding schedule. Nepalis still live in the dark!
