Difficult to find a cultural explanation for Nepali voyeurism. We love to gloat. Take any minor traffic accident in the capital's chaotic thoroughfares, there is immediate and immense interest on the part of passersby on the outcome of the ensuing altercation. The crowd swells until it covers the whole street, necks craning to look at the hapless taxi driver and the motorcyclist with the broken sidelight. Heads in the crowd turn from one driver to the other, like a tennis match. No one tries to mediate, to bring peace. Everyone is waiting for a live wrestling match-anything to interrupt the boredom of their lives.

Their anger spent, the taxi driver and the motorcyclist realise that the crowd may attract the traffic cop which will mean endless hassles at Baggi Khana, perhaps even confiscation of the license, and the loss of several hundred green rhinos (or maybe even an elephant) to grease appropriate palms. So they hurriedly go their separate ways. The crowd disperses, disappointed at being cheated of a good fight.

The insurgency has become a similar spectator sport. The daily body counts are rattled off like basketball scores, losing all meaning and masking the human cost of the conflict. And when we do attach a human element to the statistics, it is to show gory television footage of dead Maoists being pulled out of the banks of the Rapti River with pickaxes.

Here, you can't really fault voyeuristic viewers. The gatekeepers of our media are singularly insensitive to what is proper to show on television and what is not. Raw footage of corpses, the more grisly the better, are played over and over again on nationwide television. If we can't treat fellow Nepalis with dignity when they are living, let us at least give them some dignity when they are dead.