Experience is a good teacher. And personal experiences are easier to use to make judgements about life around oneself than cling on to abstract ideals. Life, as they say, happens. 10 years ago, I spent one year working in Dang district with some very good Nepalis. It was one of the happiest time of my life -- I learnt a lot, by asking questions, meeting people, working with people, travelling on foot across those parts of Nepal. For a Kathmandu-bred and then-studying-in-the-US boy, working in Dang, making friends with complete strangers, and travelling deep into the villages and the forests of Bardiya, Banke, Kailali, Kanchanpur (and later,Baitadi, Rolpa and Rukum) was an eye-opening experience in ways more than one. I made a number of friends then: and, for several years, kept in touch with many of them. Some, I later learnt, became Maoists, and have probably died by now. Others -- whom I later met in Kathmandu -- had been threatened/displaced/wounded and maimed by the Maoists or the security forces. They told tales of unspeakable horrors; and wept about family members and relatives and friends and villagers who had been killed, primarily by the Maoists. Those tales affected me -- very deeply. When friends are hurt -- not once, not twice but again and again -- you believe them. And this experience remains too personal to brush aside to repeatdly chant slogans against relatively abstract ideals. It's fine if others want to shout slogans against the king. But my intense loyalty to my friends (as indeed, my intense loyalty to all my friends) is that the system that brought death, destruction and mayhem among them and completely turned their world upside down negatively through bloody violence is not a system worth giving a single benefit of doubt. Hence, my opposition to Maoist violence under any context. That comes first -- regardless of whether the king is there or not. To use my earlier methaphor, with or without the fox out there, we will have to take care of the crazy elephant. And taking care of that is going to be the hardest challenge in Nepal. oohi "ideology is fine; but it's intense personal experiences that shape political priorities" ashu