Blowing stuff up real good...

I had many menial errands to run on Thursday; a bicycle to buy, a barbershop to find, self-medication to perform. None of it happened, because a Nepal has an odd tradition called the banda, which I’m told it shares with much of the Indian subcontinent. A banda is a particularly obnoxious variety of street protest wherein the aggrieved consider that they have the moral right to demand a complete shutdown of the entire bloody city. In this particularly obnoxious form of dissent, a mob of several hundred or more snarling citizens roams the street and, among other behaviours I don’t yet fully comprehend, ransacks any business or working vehicle that has the audacity to disrespect the banda by disregarding the general strike.

My employers at CECI send out a mass text message on Thursday morning saying that a banda had been called for the entire Kathmandu valley, and that those of us with long commutes should stay put and avoid the madness. I wasn’t working that day, but was a bit under the weather, and so I didn’t leave the hotel until 11 or so, camera in hand. The fun had largely petered out by then, but I still passed a public bus thoroughly wrecked by the angry mob, and the streets were littered with fragments of masonry. Kathmandu’s ample supply of tottering brickwork provides ready ammunition that presumably rained down upon riot police for much of the morning. Traffic was unsettlingly sparse, as only a handful of motorcycles and no cars plied the streets. Late in the day, hundreds of armored cops manned major intersections. A few wore a curious scarab armor that brought to mind feudal Samurai, but they rebuffed my requests for snapshots. I later snuck a few surreptitious shots of their less exotically attired colleagues, which will be e-displayed as soon as I have functional bandwidth.

My taste for urban chaos is well-known, and I briefly cursed my inertia for depriving me of a first-hand taste of Thursday’s banda. However, I’m new here, and it’s likely better that I avoid such lunacy until I’ve the local knowledge to safely navigate it. Bandas of one variety or another are reportedly a regular event, though this was (I’m told) one of rare intensity. There’ll be another for me to enjoy sometime tolerably soon.