There is an idiosyncratic Nepali trait: if we don't look at something we think it's not there. A pedestrian will run across the highway not looking at a bus he knows is coming straight at him. Or we think that if we ignore a problem it won't bother us. Shopkeepers litter the sidewalks right outside their pasals, even though it is putting off customers. Families chuck trash into the street below because out of sight is out of mind.

So we will endure rotting refuse right on our doorstep, tolerate injustice and accept wrong even if it is not in our own longterm interests. The fatalism of Nepal's dominant caste has been a subject of sociological and anthropological studies ever since Dor Bahadur Bista's seminal work, Fatalism and Development. But today the fatalism is combined dangerously with a millenarian belief in a saviour, the knight in shining armour who will come and rescue us and deliver us into a new dawn.

Well, things don't work that way in the real world. A political resolution will not just happen, peace will not land on our laps. The people have to vent their outrage and demand from the self-appointed rulers of both extremist politics that they end their power struggle. They have to put moral pressure on the political parties to first unite among themselves, then unite with the king and finally negotiate with the rebels for an acceptable exit strategy.

Traditionally tolerant and historically apathetic, we have allowed others to determine our destiny, accepting the outcome as our karma in this life. But the brief period after 1990 when we were allowed to freely chose local and national leaders has whetted our appetite for freedom.

If the government spokesman's purported remarks about a return to authoritarianism was a trial baloon, it was quickly pricked. We now know that the future is not written in the stars, it is shaped by the decisions and informed choices we make today.

We are no longer a forbidden hermit kingdom. The world is watching us and the world is worried: about the conflict spreading and setting fire to neighbourhood, about extra-judicial killings and disappearances, and about the unprecedented hardships and misery faced by Nepalis. They want to help, but international law requires us to ask them first.

Nepal's donors are relying less and less on diplomatic niceties these days. They want to revisit the commitments made at the Nepal Development Forum to see if resources aren't being fungified. They are egging the government to make public the auditor general's report which has been stuck three years in a row. Even Nepal's staunchest allies are aghast at the human rights situation here.

We need national indignation to pressure our rulers to muster the political will for peace. So far, all we see is a willingness to drag on the war.