Flipping through the back issues of this paper from the past three years, we can't but help notice that the exhortations, admonitions and unsolicited advice that we dished out are just as relevant today as when written. Koirala and Deuba are barely speaking to each other, Oli and Nepal are still washing linen in public and this headline from our very first issue in 2000, 'The people don't want war', could just as well have been the banner in this week's paper.

The questions about transparency, accountability, politicisation of the bureaucracy and governance are still the same. We are still trying to reconcile the budget with rising security costs. A lot of things are worse, most things are the same, some things are better. For example, our democracy may be in deep freeze, parliament may hold only virtual sessions, the people may have no representation, but curiously, the press is freer than it has ever been.

Three years ago, the death toll was mounting alarmingly as Maoists slaughtered police in the midwest, today we have a ceasefire that has lasted half-a-year. The people are so desperate, they are clutching at this straw. Even though the cessation of hostilities has not meant a cessation of extortion, threats, abductions, or a halt to militarisation, they still feel things are marginally better because at least they are not being butchered.

It is a fragile, frantic hope that the truce will last. But the anxiety level is up again because of reports that the Maoist leadership is back in its safe houses across the border. If it is indeed government policy to keep delaying the third round to magnify cadre pressure on the Maoist leadership, then we must point out that this is an extremely risky gamble.

As messengers, we have been carrying the wish of the Nepali people to the Maoists and the army: no one wants this war that is being fought in the peoples' name. They want you to take the talks seriously and stop playing games. And to the political parties, they have this to say: instead of being a part of the problem, for once try to be a part of the solution.

Slightly smug and probably naive, we wrote in our first editorial three years ago: "Newspapers do more than hold a mirror to society. They become the mirror itself...to point the direction as well as record the speed of change. Journalism is called history in a hurry. It is also culture, sociology, anthropology, philology and philosophy in a hurry. A newspaper needs a sense of values to sustain itself. In a society cursed with extreme inequality, some of those values are fairly obvious: to speak for the last, the lost and the least."

However futile it may seem here sometimes, we rededicate ourselves today to those principles.