LigLigKot Cube Marathon

A country owns respect when it demonstrates excellence in at least few common things like policy, governance and service delivery. Excellence in delivery-mechanism is in the limelight of a prosperous country. Lesson learnt on 14^th May, 2017 election, with voters stunned and bizarred both during voting and counting, is shocking. If a nation gets a situation where people can’t read and count comfortably, by the size and entries of a ballot paper, its time to go back to the basics.

New South Wales upper house election in 1999 witnessed a ballot paper stretching to one meter length and 700 mm deep to accommodate total 264 contestants. What if a larger number of people decide to contest and ballot paper reaches to its size limit, and accommodation compels reading possible only through magnifying glasses?

Right to contest is unquestionable, so without elimination rounds, ballot paper based electoral system does not seem to have better efficiency. Electronic voting will prove yet another trap, election hacking and interferences in recent US presidential poll are definitely not a good sign. The world community now admits that focused cyber operations against elections are the newest threats experienced by both developed and developing countries – almost as a global phenomenon.

High numbers of contestant is recent trend all over the world, especially in the parts where people are unhappy. Subtle level analysis points out that the mechanism set out to bottleneck the choices for people’s representation, is in fact the root cause of many political parties and independent claims.

Individual strength was the basis for leadership selection in early time. Gradually speed, stamina, skill and sharpness were added to it. Later, leadership gradually shifted from individual level to group level. Now, the group that exercises the power like muscles, money, machinery, media and intelligence has completely crippled down the election beauty.

Copy paste is not bad, but with one’s own ground reality it must be adjusted to yield the excellence. The term democracy with its root deep grounded in the human slavery, has “demos for common people” and “kratos for strength” from its ancient Greek origin. It first appeared in ancient Greek political and philosophical thought and later got established in city Athens in 508–507 BC. Since then, series of changes through active/passive right to vote (suffrage), women suffrage, universal suffrage, adult franchise and so on got introduced to refine it further and further. However, democracy still has not attained its highest possible goal, and lacks in fairness and excellence issues.

A country can learn many nice lessons from its own history and culture. Selection of a King by Ligligkot marathon and elephant garlanding of King Nawaraj in Swasthani Katha may not be relevant now, but see the beauty in such practices. Not yet realized, the best political system is the one where election is made like a festival and genuine citizens entitled and encouraged to contest, and yet only best two or three are staged for final voting. This will not be possible without elimination rounds – “a must criteria” for filtering.

Good governance does not require knowledge of rocket science, but it needs people with common sense and basic level of intelligence. Nepal has enough political experiences and no need of further experiments. The CVs of past and current political leaders are full of inspiration, but lacks delivery. So where is the problem?

Over 99% people belong to service sector, from labor to business industries and now political parties, but the genuinely needed people in policy and governance are among the rare 1% class. Dust and plastics are available everywhere, but gems are hidden treasure. The filtering system is needed to bring out and identify these rare gems. Otherwise, TOEFL and GRE will hunt them and countries like Nepal will be left out with just residuals.

The best political system ensures a larger participation of citizens as contestant. For this a political system must accommodate two most-simplest expressions 1==1 and 2++2=4 to ensure that. A beggar and a king will never be comparable unless few specific grounds are designed. Honesty can be such ground where these two can be equal. Similarly, you can’t add two things to progress if they are opposite in nature. Understanding these two expressions in its entirety, Nepal could have constituted world’s shortest Constitution, only after Great Britain.

See the natural systems around us where everything gets filtered from food to fabrics, ensuring quality. Contestants whether from political parties or independents are just like “market products” at the launching pad before quality control. Failure of democratic practices in several parts of the world got bottlenecked here, lack of proper filtering mechanism to sort out the gems of a country.

With simple kid games these lacking issues of democracy can be fixed. A mandatory win of a certain level of “randomly selected computer based chess game” can be one of such option. Similarly, time based “LigLigKot Cube Marathon” (see the picture) can be another interesting option for such gem hunt. It’s now time to decide why choices only among black and white pieces of king, queen, rook, bishop and knight, why not from the biggest colorful pool of them?

Some time big problems have very simple solutions. Nepal currently needs intelligent people to work out its policy and governance issues. The so called intellectuals so far proved nothing more than the paper giants. Filtering intelligent people is simple. Forget degree and decorations, just start with chess and Rubic cube. If one does not believe it, why not test yourself and find out whether you belong to average class or the rare class?

More interestingly, just select 10 best brains of the country each from sectors like politics, bureaucracy, judiciary, security & intelligence, media, business, social sector, education, medicine, engineering and so on. And see how many of them are competent enough against these simple games, with a gross period of one complete learning month.This will prove us why we failed to put right people in right place.