In his latest column (The Rana resonance, #30) CK Lal makes this astonishing observation: "In order to learn anything from history, you need to read it with a point of view." Now, can history-or for that matter, any text-be read without a point of view, without the intervention of one's subjectivity? It might be salutary to note that the late French thinker Michael Foucault argued that even scientific methods and discourses were implicated in the ideologies of their times. How much more so a loaded intellectual practice as the writing and reading of history.

Talking about history, CK Lal is very fond of trashing Nepal's various myths of nationhood such as our "brave history". Granted that they are mostly nothing more than vacuities constructed by our pro-establishment scholars and academics, as often pointed out by CK Lal. But is there a nation on earth that has not knowingly grafted what Nietzsche called "monumental" (heroic and triumphalist) history?

Kanden Thebe
Taplejung