Did Narrating The Nepali Budget Give A Power Trip?

Narrating the Nepali budget entailed reading about the ways in which the Nepali government would influence many different parts of Nepal with large sums of money. The coverage of the whole of Nepal, such a huge territory to be governed, and the play of large sums of money to help this territory undoubtedly gave a power-trip to the individuals who narrated the budget.

However, the experience of having a power-trip is different from the experience of feeling actual power. And importantly, the experience of feeling power, or even more crucially, of becoming powerful, is highly suppressed in Nepali politics and state-based activities. Nobody involved in Nepali politics and state-based activities is allowed to feel actual power, but there are plenty of figures within the halls where decisions are made that experience power-trips. In the case of the narrating the budget, the power-trip will be sustained, celebrated and historically established as a major political event, yet feeling actual power would have been a far greater experience, and it would entail sidestepping etiquette and order in an otherwise formal political event, eventually sidestepping the whole of field of politics itself. Actual power is not constrained by the performance of the role of a powerful figure, but it moves beyond the field of the political, and makes visible the pleasure derived from engagement with the political. Had there been a feeling of actual power in the narrating of the Nepali budget, we would have seen more excitement and more informality in addressing the audience. 

It is clear that actual power did not feature into the performance of the narration of the Nepali budget. The most crucial role and strategy in the suppression of actual power was played by the other figures in the national-political positions, especially the politicians and statesmen in the audience as the budget was being narrated. One could see that these people were inattentive, talking among themselves, and perhaps even asleep as the Nepali budget was being narrated. It is in a scenario where the audience to a political performance is for all purposes passive that there is no actual power for the narrator, rather only a power-trip supported by fantasies of an attentive audience is generated. Yet if one wanted to really appreciate actual power in this narrating of the Nepali budget, one would have to go to the previous night, when perhaps the narrator stood before the mirror in his room, with the budget document in hand, and narrated the budget before his image in the mirror. This narration to the mirror-image is not simply the rehearsal to an actual political performance, it is in fact the political act itself. For we know, following Lacan's writings on the mirror stage, that we are jealous of our mirror-image, and we actually compete with this mirror-image, so that before a mirror-image there is an actual power game, with the possibility of gaining actual power if the image is somehow defeated in this power game. If the narrator felt he was better than his own mirror-image, then he gained actual power, and his relationship with his mirror-image will have a bigger impact on Nepal politics and state-based activities than the narration before a passive audience would.