On a related note, I have been thinking: Late Dinesh Chandra Pyakurel, the bureaucrat who lived in Gairidhara in Kathmandu, committed suicide last week. It's quite possible that his suicide was just that: a suicide, and there was nothing more to it. But tellingly, according to reports, he was also about to be under investigation for his involvement in the Melamchi Project. Maybe he was guilty of corruption when he was in that project. Maybe he wasn't. We'll never know for sure. BUT ASSUMING that he was guilty, the question is: why did he commit suicide? After all, if DCP had looked around, he would have seen that pretty much ALL the certifiably corrupt people in Nepal have gone on to have pretty good careers in their post-corruption-charged life. For example, I know for sure that of the so-called corrupt people that CIAA caught during its infamous midnight raids in August 2002 ( raids that were publicly lauded at the time), ALL were eventually freed, and many of them went on to win promotions at their sarkari jobs. In other words, the message coming from that and other examples, has been: NO matter how corrupt you are in Nepal, CIAA kicks you around for a while, before setting you free so that you can vanish in the relative anonymity of our corruption-land with your loot intact. But DCP was an exception. He took his own life. Why could he NOT see that being "formally" accused of corruption in Nepal was not the same as being actually punished for it? Why? Could it be that -- and this is my theory -- unlike most CIAA-certified corrupt officials -- DCP happens to be from Kathmandu itself (after all, you don't come from a place like Gairidhara, if your roots in KTM are not pretty deep), and that the costs of losing his reputation in his own hometown were too great than the benefits that he could have derived from his corrupt act? In other words, the shame factor was at play. That is to say, if DCP were, say, from Dang or Salyan, he probably would have ridden the storm out WITHOUT committing suicide. I don't know. Just thinking aloud. oohi ashu