The great Nepali Police Force is challenging an age-old adage: you see, they don’t speak softly and they carry an excuse for a baton – so okay it is a stick but it is in no way, shape, or form, big. How far do you think our cops are going to go?

To be perfectly clear, I’m referring to the the men and women in the blue sweaters done in a horrible mesh – not the camouflage from hell donning ninjas in the form of Armed Police Porce. The police I’m referring to here, ladies and gents, are also equipped with whistles, unlike the APF.

Back in the day when I made some hay, I used to see cops playing with each other’s bellies and giggling every now and then with their batons lying beside the मुडाs they were hunched over. Those batons used to at least have काँडाs on them; like little thorns that would subtly poke outwards a tad. Those thorns were another reason I used to be scared of the cops. Another one? They also had the authority to chop off our long hair if they had the slightest inkling to do so. Profiling pioneers of yore, them.

Now, the thorns are gone, so are the authoritative boots. The boots, seemingly, are supplied to the NA and the APF while our Blue Devils with no glamour have been relegated to being a laughingstock for the bad guys – also because of their pathetic equipment and the attire that quite doesn’t figure except unless only designed to hide their ‘bhitrees’.

For the record – the APF toughies wield real truncheons that could break open the head of an elephant if smacked with corresponding brawns; the police, as we’ve already established, are provided with सण्ठीs that couldn’t injure an ant.

Why do the cops carry a baton at all? I’d clean Bir Hospital’s great pile-o-trash for a day to witness a likely tug-of-war between the baddies and the cops when the cops arduously try to impose – on the baddies – the force bestowed upon them by the merciful and non-thorny baton.

The least the state can do is provide our cops with slingshots. Then, the cops wouldn’t even be needing those sticks, or whistles. Just put a little pebble on the double-s and let it fly.

These cops look the worse with their pitiful little batons when they – in the legion – surround a street vendor who operates a पसल on a decrepit nanglo, only to buy one pan-paraag!! Could the state which can afford more ministers than there are working street lights in Kathmandu also please provide our pitiful protectors with a raise so that they can contribute to the economy by buying one pan-paraag each from our vendor here?

Not to mention, can our cops also get a gun please? If there were to be another cold-blooded murder in broad daylight in Kathmandu, how can these cops be expected to chase the culprits with their little batons? And, riding on what? बुई?

These days there are three different state personnel policing traffic – the conventional cops, the APF, and the traffic police themselves. Can anyone of these state personnel be sent off to help polish that rough track that goes to Bardibas from near Dolalghat? Or to help pave the muddy ‘by-roads’ out in Beni, or Suketar, or after Kataari, or beyond Basantapur, or from Hiley down to Leguwa, and from Leguwa across the mighty Arun to Bhojpur, or build that much-needed bridge over the fierce and freezing Kaligandaki near Jomsom, etc.? Not one of these tracks can be treaded on during the monsoons without risking life.

It’d surely be welcoming if it were the under-performing or freshers in the APF doing infrastructure; why wait until the process of integration for peace ends and that NA Directorate tasked with building infrastructure is finally formulated? In fashionable Nepali time, it would take months for the whole thing to set up and actually get work done after integration process completes.

Icing – while the APF majority who are sent off are at it, they could also hand over their weapons and true truncheons to our cops after training them before they leave to help develop infrastructure; you know, instead of twiddling their thumbs all day in the warm Kathmandu sun.