If any foreign embassy in Nepal treats Nepali people rudely ('Letter to His Excellency Bloomfield', #268), it has no right to be situated on Nepali soil.

Anu Pradhan,
email

. I would like to console Khagendra Sangraula and people like him for their ordeals at the British Embassy. I just came across a passage in the famous book, Fire of Bengal, written by Rozsa Hajnoczy, wife of the Islamic scholar of eminence, Dr Gyula Germanus. The Hungarian professor was invited by Rabindranath Tagore to teach Viswa-Bharati at Shantiniketan-the educational centre that blended the best of the west and east in rural Bengal. His wife writes in her book: 'The quiet flow of life was suddenly disturbed by an unexpected event. Some disagreeable news of the poet Rabindranath Tagore had reached us. When he tried to enter the USA from Canada, the American immigration authorities on the border treated him with great disrespect. They kept him waiting and pestered him with the usual questions directed at coloured immigrants. One of the immigration officers handed him a form to fill containing questions which were offensive to the Nobel Prize-winning poet, who was traveling to America to lecture at the invitation of several American universities. He was asked, "Can you read and write?" Tagore's feelings were deeply hurt and he called off the tour and did not go to America.'

This was written in the 1920s so Sangraula's predicament is nothing new. In fact, it reminds me that Australian aborigines protested the 200th anniversary of the landing of Captain Cook because for them it was the 40,000th anniversary of living in Australia.

Gauri N Rimal,
Putali Sadak