Fritz Berger deserves thanks for keeping visual as well as textual representation of selected village folks from Nepal (Then and now, #118). The juxtaposition of pictures taken then and now is touching but I wanted to know more about Mr Berger as well, along with his Nepali subjects. For example, his own family life, his children or lack of them and their occupation. Or, at least, the number of books he has written or things he has done. A comparison would have made a bigger point about modernity. In the absence of his own life story, what we have been given smacks of old anthropology with its divide between the subject and object of knowledge, between the knower and the known.

Pramod K Mishra,
Illinois, USA