His Excellency Saluted by Red Army

Groucho Marx once resigned from a club with the explanation that “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member”.

This famous quip partly explains why I myself do not care to join any club. This bothers and annoys some of my Sydneysider Nepalese friends, who conclude that, since I do not show up in the movable feast of their club barbeques and song-and-dance fests, I must lie low all the time in my dimly-lit ‘cave’ like a mythical slumbering monster. I call this non sequitur “social solipsism”.

To be sure, I do not remember turning down an invitation for private functions. I recently had the pleasure of attending one such function at a friend’s place. I joined a throng of people in the drawing room, and sat down on the floor to watch Australian Open Tennis on Channel 7.

An elderly visitor from Nepal whom I did not know was holding court, surrounded by some well-known stalwarts of the local Nepalese community scene, some of them sitting on the floor just like myself but with their backs to the TV in deference to the elderly visitor.

Even though I was focusing on tennis, I could not help listening to snatches of their conversation, which was, in reality, more like a monologue delivered by the elderly visitor as he regaled his audience by recounting how he had been saluted by Red Army guards and addressed as "Your Excellency" by Foreign Ministry mandarins during a visit to China.

“A Nepalese tour operator with a talent for self-promotion. Elementary, my dear Watson,” I ratiocinated subconsciously.

Inevitably, their conversation turned to the social and economic problems in Nepal and the demands for self-determination by various ethnic groups. Here, the visitor and his listeners politely agreed to disagree, which was not surprising given that the visitor, unlike his audience, belonged to the ruling caste in Nepal.

Finally, the discussion converged on a root cause analysis of the problems besetting the beautiful Himalayan republic. At last, all parties could reach some sort of consensus. Yes, all agreed, it was not the domination of the ruling caste or the ‘machinations’ of New Delhi, Beijing or Washington that was holding back Nepal’s destiny but a lack of developed institutions.

One local community stalwart clinched the argument by holding up the example of North Korea, pointing out the obvious that the peaceful transfer of power in that glorious nation in the aftermath of Dear Leader Kim Jong-il’s sudden death demonstrated its institutional maturity.

Soon thereafter, the elderly visitor left amidst a flourish of parting ‘Namastes’, and his erstwhile interlocutors started to swap notes and conduct a postmortem of their robust intellectual joust with the visitor. They remonstrated among themselves that the elderly visitor, who seemed to command a lot of respect even in abstentia, had not offered any ‘guidance’ on the question of the ethnic issues.

Curiosity got the better of me and I inquired about the departed visitor. It transpired that he was the Attorney General in a former Nepali Congress government.

Such an August Personage publicly boasting about being saluted by Red Army guards as if it was the highpoint of his public career … and his ethnic audience expecting to be given a prescription for a political panacea by a distinguished buffoon from their masterly class … supposing such a panacea exists …

Perhaps, I should, after all, join a community group to enliven my mirthless existence.