Ashu wrote: >If the king really was a monstrous character, he could have killed more > -- and be killed or fled the country like so many African dictators. The >biggest question is: Why didn't he do that? Wouldn't it have been rational >for him to collect money, pack up his bags, and spend the rest of his life >skiing on the Swiss Alps? Swiss Alps ? That's a quite ignorant assumption. The Hague. That would be an informed assumption. Even for those 21 killings, I am pretty sure he is not going to remain scot-free at least if he decided not to co-operate with a smooth transition of Nepal to republic. In case he decided to co-operate, people might want to let him go peacefully. Otherwise there are lots of people determined to put him behind the bar. *** *** *** As for failure of KG, this guy never had anything to offer to people. "Peace" was a bluff and the "order" was a fantasy. There ain't "peace" without silencing Maoist's gun. KG did not have anything except khursani-yagya, musa-yagya and pancha-bali to do that. Recently the Maoists reveled that the palace had offered them 20 years of sanyukta satta if they helped to finish off the political parties. Look at the level of the ignorance of KG. He is even oblivion of the fact that the Maoist's is an ideology-driven movement. There were few people who bought KG's bluff. Most people of Kathmandu, that Ashu presumes otherwise, were like myself- pissed off with political parties' neglect to Maoist issue and Singh-Durbar aimed agitations, and waiting for the time that would sunshine their "ghainto". The movement was done NOT BY the people who had bought king's bluff but BY people like me who saw real prospect of peace and democracy in "12 points agreement" and the slogan of "Loktantrik Ganatntra". People who bought king's bluff were few, to begin with. ******************************************* ******************************************* Sunnydev, I thought "decastification of surnames" would be self-guiding if not self-explaining. Anyway, "decastification" was the purpose and "freedom to choose surnames" was the method, in my proposal. The idea was to let anybody to choose/change any surname any day of their life so that, as more people do that, a particular surname remains no longer limited to a particular caste. The idea is to confuse the caste. Of course a person who is proud of his/her caste and does not want any outsider to use that caste will not be happy with it. But who cares the caste chauvinism ? It should be obvious, this method is primarily intended to free people from the stigmatized identity. The reason I chose "freedom" (as a matter of fact, I would like to make it "encouragement") "to choose any surnames/caste" was to avoid Mahatma Gandhi's error. Gandhi thought he liberated Dalits by just giving a respected class name of "Harijan". It did not liberate Harijans from their stigmatized identity. I hope I made it clearer. Nepe