CK Lal in 'Diplomacy for dummies' (#302) compares the Nepal Council of World Affairs (NCWA) and the Institute of Foreign Affairs (IFA) and says that both are irrelevant and uninspiring. He himself was a member of the executive committee of the NCWA so if that organisation has become senile, Lal himself has to share the blame. As a student of political science in TU, I have been regularly visiting the IFA library at Tripureswor. It has over 1,000 books on various aspects of foreign policy and is one of the best in the country. The IFA also published half a dozen books last year. If the organisation was formed as Mr Lal says, to 'groom the son of the former foreign minister', I don't think it was a bad decision at all. Very few think-nks in the country organise so many brainstorming sessions or publish so much. Instead, it was a horrible decision on the part of new Foreign Minister K P Oli to remove an energetic youth as executive director of the IFA and not appoint anybody for more than a month. It seems that very soon IFA too will become senile like the NCWA.

Shristi Shreshta,
Politcal Science Student, TU

. C.K Lal's 'Diplomacy for dummies' highlights something that generally stays hidden: diplomacy needs preparation and practice to master. A country wedged in between two giants and stuck in a time warp until the 1950s will naturally find it hard to understand the world. India, and to a much lesser extent China, were the only countries until then that Nepal had any relationship with. Now the shell is broken and the light too blinding and confusing. Unlike the United States, which can always go back to being insular if it chooses to, countries like Nepal can afford no such luxury. Nepalis are now permanently linked to
countries like South Korea, Kuwait, Malaysia, Australia and the US. But we know little about these countries where hundreds of thousands of our compatriots work.
Edward Said lamented how little the Arab World understood the US even as the latter's influence on the former was increasing. The same goes for Nepal. Ten years ago, people in Kathmandu heard about Maoism taking root in the midwestern hills. We should have realised that the ideology came from a neighbouring country, which should have prompted us to take a closer look at this phenomenon. I blame centuries of isolation during the Rana Shah period. Mr Lal is right: we need to see things differently now. The business of interacting with other countries should be as important as anything else. Nepal now depends on foreign countries for its survival. Archaic methods will simply not do anymore. Nepal's links to Malaysia, South Korea and other countries are its links to modernity. The isolationism of the past, encouraged by the old order, must be done away with.

Manish Gyawali,
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