When the United States invaded Grenada way back when on some pretext or another, the media hype surrounding the arrival of the macho marines on that tiny speck of an island in the Caribbean reached a crescendo. Soon after, some bright researcher surveyed high school students across America and handed out sheets of paper with an outline of the continental United States, and asked students to draw Grenada. Most traced an island the size of Australia off Florida.

Some of the Indian media coverage of Nepal as a security threat to the Indian state has started doing the same in the subcontinent. If Indian school children were asked to draw Nepal, they may actually show a country the size of Mongolia in the Himalaya. The latest story in the media is of a foiled bid this week on the life of the editor of tehelka.com (which exposed corruption in the Indian defence establishment) by a bunch of supposed Pakistani agents who had supposedly been armed by a nameless Nepali "don" to supposedly embarrass the Indian government who would be blamed for the slaying. We've heard conspiracy theories, but this one takes the chappati. The only thing we can say for certain is that Indian intelligence has started believing its own rumours, and the police in Delhi are spoofing Bollywood.