Parliament at the Bhatti: A Nation’s Most Expensive Happy Hour

For readers unfamiliar with Nepal, a bhatti is a neighborhood tavern. In this place, people gather to drink, argue, complain about politics, solve the nation’s problems by midnight, and forget the solutions by morning. It is part social club, part therapy session, part community court, and part amateur parliament.

Actually, that last part may be redundant.

Because lately, watching Nepal’s Parliament feels less like observing a legislative institution and more like peeking through the window of a particularly crowded bhatti.

The resemblance is striking.

In a bhatti, someone eventually stands up and declares himself the smartest man in the room. In Parliament, several people do it simultaneously.

In a bhatti, disagreements escalate into shouting. In Parliament, they call it debate.

In a bhatti, nobody listens. In Parliament, microphones make the process official.

In a bhatti, someone inevitably blames everyone else for every problem since the beginning of time. In Parliament, entire parties are dedicated to the craft.

The difference, of course, is that customers at the bhatti pay their own bills.

The parliamentarians send theirs to the taxpayers.

That distinction matters.

We are often told that democracy is the triumph of reason, yet citizens elect representatives who often fail to deliberate carefully, highlighting the disconnect between the ideal and reality.

Then reality arrives carrying a bottle.

One of the great myths of modern society is that education automatically produces wisdom. We worship credentials the way medieval societies worshipped relics. Add enough letters after a person’s name, and people assume maturity has arrived.

Yet every parliamentary session reminds us that a diploma can teach economics, law, engineering, medicine, or political science while leaving untouched the human talents of ego, vanity, stubbornness, tribalism, insecurity, and theatrical nonsense, exposing the gap between knowledge and wisdom.

Education is knowledge.

Wisdom is judgment.

The two occasionally meet, but they maintain separate residences.

A degree proves that someone survived examinations.

It does not prove that a person can manage power.

It certainly does not prove that a person can manage themselves.

The tragedy of politics is that voters often confuse expertise with character and credentials with competence.

And nowhere is that confusion more visible than inside Parliament.

The French philosopher Guy Debord argued that modern society increasingly substitutes performance for reality. Public life becomes theater. Images become more important than substance. Appearance overwhelms achievement.

He called it the “society of the spectacle.”

Watching modern politics, one suspects the spectacle has expanded into a full-scale industry.

What citizens frequently witness is not governance but performance art. Politicians no longer merely solve problems. They perform problem-solving. They do not necessarily seek solutions. They seek clips, headlines, camera angles, and moments that can be replayed endlessly on television and social media.

The audience is no longer sitting in the gallery.

The audience is the nation.

And every politician is auditioning.

Observe the incentives.

If a representative quietly studies policy, negotiates compromise, and helps pass sensible legislation, almost nobody notices.

If the same representative pounds a desk, stages a walkout, shouts slogans, points fingers, disrupts proceedings, and generates viral footage, everybody notices.

Guess which behavior gets rewarded.

Democracy did not eliminate human nature.

It merely televised it.

The result is a strange contradiction. We claim to value reasoned discourse while rewarding theatrical disruption. We praise statesmanship while promoting showmanship. We celebrate institutions while cheering behavior that undermines them.

In other words, we want Parliament to function like a university seminar while consuming it like professional wrestling.

And then we wonder why things become confusing.

The bhatti, at least, is honest.

Nobody enters a tavern expecting a policy white paper.

Nobody walks into a bhatti believing the loudest person has conducted rigorous research.

Nobody mistakes confidence for competence.

Parliament, however, often encourages precisely those misunderstandings.

There, volume masquerades as conviction.

Conviction masquerades as intelligence.

Intelligence masquerades as wisdom.

And wisdom frequently never receives an invitation.

Every bhatti has that one customer.

You know the type.

They arrive already angry.

Nobody knows why.

Perhaps they lost an argument twenty years ago and never recovered.

Perhaps outrage has become their personality.

Whatever the reason, they do not come to enjoy the evening.

They come to ensure nobody else enjoys it either.

If someone suggests a card game, they object.

If someone proposes a song, they object.

If someone offers a solution, they object.

If the problem disappears, they object to the disappearance.

Their purpose is not participation.

Their purpose is interruption.

Watching Nepal’s Parliament, one occasionally suspects that entire political careers have been built around this business model.

A democratic opposition is essential. It asks difficult questions, exposes corruption, challenges executive power, and protects the public from governmental excess.

Without opposition, democracy becomes complacent.

Without scrutiny, power becomes dangerous.

But there is a profound difference between scrutiny and sabotage.

An opposition is supposed to oppose bad decisions.

It is not supposed to oppose decisions themselves.

An opposition is supposed to challenge policy.

It is not supposed to challenge the very existence of policymaking.

The public is left wondering whether these representatives entered Parliament to solve problems or merely to halt progress, as sessions are disrupted before debate begins, with microphones used as weapons and slogans replacing arguments, revealing a distortion of parliamentary purpose.

The public is left wondering whether these representatives entered Parliament to solve problems or merely to prevent anyone else from solving them.

There is something strangely childish about the whole performance.

A child denied a toy sometimes decides nobody should play.

A child losing a game sometimes flips the board.

A child losing an argument sometimes begins shouting.

Adults are expected to grow out of these habits.

Parliamentarians are expected to have already done so.

Unfortunately, a parliamentary seat does not automatically confer maturity. Elections can distribute authority. They cannot distribute wisdom.

And so, the nation watches highly educated men and women behaving in ways that would earn a time-out in primary school.

The Speaker becomes less a guardian of democratic procedure and more a bartender attempting to separate customers before furniture starts flying.

Committee meetings produce reports.

Subcommittees produce recommendations.

Task forces produce observations.

Experts produce studies.

Citizens produce tax revenue.

And somewhere along the process, actual results vanish like loose change on a bhatti counter.

Meanwhile, roads remain unfinished.

Projects remain announced.

Reports remain unread.

Promises remain renewable.

Young people continue departing for foreign employment.

Villages lose their workforce.

Cities gain more speeches.

Every year, politicians promise transformation.

Every year, citizens receive another explanation for why transformation must wait until next year.

Nepal may be one of the few countries where a project can be inaugurated so many times that the ribbon deserves retirement benefits.

The irony is that ordinary citizens often display greater practical judgment than many of their representatives.

Visit a village tea shop.

Visit a roadside café.

Visit a bhatti.

You will find farmers discussing weather patterns, laborers calculating household budgets, shopkeepers analyzing market conditions, and migrant workers comparing international economies.

They may lack prestigious titles.

They may lack impressive credentials.

But many possess something increasingly rare in political circles: consequences.

When ordinary people make foolish decisions, they suffer personally.

When politicians make foolish decisions, they schedule another committee meeting.

The citizen lives in reality.

The politician often lives in a narrative.

One must pay rent.

The other must manage optics.

And optics can be more intoxicating than anything served in a bhatti.

Yet perhaps the most uncomfortable truth is not about politicians.

It is about us.

The politicians did not descend from the Himalayas carrying sacred instructions from the gods.

They came from our communities.

Our parties.

Our neighborhoods.

Our voting booths.

Parliament is not merely a reflection of political culture.

It is a reflection of national culture.

When we reward tribal loyalty over competence, we receive tribal politics.

When we celebrate confrontation over achievement, we end up with confrontational leaders.

When we demand entertainment, we should not be surprised when politics becomes theater.

The tragedy is that everyone knows the performance is absurd.

The actors know.

The audience knows.

The journalists know.

The critics know.

The voters know.

Yet every election cycle, the same play returns to the stage with a slightly different cast and the same script.

The government blames the opposition.

The opposition blames the government.

The parties blame one another.

The public blames everyone.

And the country’s future waits patiently in the lobby for the adults to begin the meeting.

It is still waiting.

A bhatti has no obligation to govern.

Parliament does.

A bhatti may indulge in ego.

Parliament must restrain it.

A bhatti can waste an evening.

Parliament can waste a generation.

The man sitting in the bhatti eventually pays his bill and goes home.

Parliament stays.

The tab stays.

The taxpayers stay.

And every election season, the bartender looks around the room and asks:

“Another round?”

The country says no.

Then orders the same thing again.

Author Subedi is a Professor of  Medical Sociology at Miami University, USA