If Mahakal is dancing, it's CK Lal who's keeping the beat. How disappointing to see Lal's moving tribute to Major Khatri ("The purity of pure despair", #117) degenerate into lugubrious pontifications on the death of this and that. He mourns the death of hope in the country, but all I've heard since 4 October is that now there is some. And there seems little sense getting misty-eyed about the passing of "the sovereignty of the people" when the pretend-democracy at play in Nepal for the last 12 years clearly gave birth to no such thing. Their indifference to political thought and action and their quite invincible complacency, moreover, hardly qualified the Nepali people for an adventure into people power in the first place. They have tolerated rot in their air, water, and streets: what reason on earth was there to suppose that they would not also tolerate it in their government? The hard truth is that the Nepali people, whom I love dearly, have deserved every fool and crook they've kept in power in Singha Durbar. In the king they have neither, consequently, the hope.

Lal is contemptuous of the "sanctimonious judgments" of donors (the writer in his familiar xenophobic mode), but that begs the question why it is not the business of donors to see their largesse safely to its destinations, or pass judgement on the success or failure of its arrival. Doesn't his resentment spell the larger problem of Nepal's failed democracy: its aversion to accountability? The contradiction in Lal's thought mirrors the paradox of Nepal's commitment to democracy. Both support democracy and lament its failure even as they reject adherence to the transparency and rule of law central to its functioning. Indeed, some homegrown sanctimony, as well as the rectitude which underpins it, might have helped the struggling experiment to its feet. And more cynicism, not less, dear editor, might have helped too. Real democracies are run by laws, not by men.

Thomas Duddy
Thamel