Emodus, Unlike you guys who are reduced to forever REACTING to the King (because you hate him so much), I am NOT for reacting to King's moves. Have you ever made King react to anything you say and do? Never. Putting the normative issues aside (and that's because I personally do NOT have the philosophical depth to argue them convincingly to the public at large), I simply accept the King as a self-interested player in this political game who is out to maximize his gains. I do not, as I have said earlier, for a moment believe that what the King is doing is for the greater good of the nation. But I understand that whatever he does, he has to dress it up in a "I am doing this for the country" garb. The same logic also applies to how I view political netas' pleas. This is why, once you accept the king as a crass, self-interested player (and this is contrary to what real royalists believe), there is no need for you to expect much from the King. You just expect him to do things that, he thinks, are going to be help him rule/reign long. Only the time will tell whether the King gets what he wants or whether his decision will prove to be disastrous for himself. At this moment, frankly, I don't know and I don't care . . . about a future that has NOT arrived here yet. This is why, I have no personal interest in getting entangled in what the King OUGHT TO BE and what he OUGHT to do and so on, because I think such discussions are futile and even foolish. Having said that, I am much more interested in seeing where and how the political parties FAILED and what could be done now to do "damage-control" and REVERSE their failure and turn that into success. I mean, if you spend all your energy on the King, where's the time and the energy to turn things around for the parties? Look at the King. He's using Tulsi Giri to take all the heat, while he's having Kirti Nidhi Bista do all the work. Giri's role is that of a circus performer: say outrageous things, entertain the masses, get all the media attention, and deflect the attention from the King and Bista, and, when the time comes, exit from the stage to go back to Sri Lanka. With so much media energy and attention on Giri, who is keeping tabs on Bista, the real kaam-daar of the Panchayat? Earlier, I talked sbout the NEED to craft messages that make people believe, in stark personal terms, that democracy is in THEIRpersonal interest, and that democracy is it not about letting Girija be back in the saddle so that he can loot again. As long as the public views democracy as a means for Girija et al to have another opportunity to loot the nation, no one's going to line up behind the parties. And that's a tragedy. So, yes, I do want to RECAST the terms of the debate to argue what the parties, given the king as the king, can do to move ahead than listen to just another senselessly useless monarch-bashing kura that simply DIVERTS the resources needed to strengthen the parties. But to do that, I first had to strike at the central nerve of the monarch-bashers who are used to getting an easy audience on Sajha to point out that despite the puffery, theirs is a useless and reactive stance. :-) More later oohi ashu