Kathmandu, May 7 -- 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 ...