Loote - Good to hear your viewpoint again. A couple of further thoughts: "what was interesting though was the rhetoric that Churchill presented about the repercussion of indpendence for a country like india which is religiously, lingually, culturally and socially variant. he knew that it would be difficult for india to bind all of them together. as known, pakistan separated within a couple of years of indpendence" India and Pakistan separated right at independence under the very noses of the British. To imply that Churchill's alternative of continued colonialism would have prevented them from splitting is not based on objective reasoning in my opinion. On the contrary you could argue that it was the "divide and rule" policy of the British that precipitated the pre-existing Hindu-Muslim divide. For example, the partition of Bengal happened under the British long before Indians ran their own affairs. While the human cost of the partition was horrendous and truly tragic, India is a much more prosperous country today and along with China is emerging as a global power center so I don't see the partition as a failure at all. The Indian sub-continent was a loose collection of states to begin with that the British cobbled together into a colony and I doubt even Churchill would have been able to keep all of them together for ever. Last point on Churchill, he definitely had a good side to him that people must give him credit for. But in order to develop a holistic picture of the man and what he meant to the world, one needs to look at his other side as well and there is plenty of hypocrisy and double standards there. Churchill, a darling of white conservatives in the the English-speaking world has been over-hyped in my opinion. When you let the facts speak for themselves you find that Churchill was right on plenty of things but wrong on a whole lot of others. As for Nepal, I am quite optimistic that we can survive and prosper without monarchy. Nepal is still at the early stages of a period of enlightenment that all societies go through in their history. The 1950 revolution and the two jana andolans have proved that Nepal has a matured polity and is far from a failed state. For the first time in the country's 250 year history people in villages are demanding equality and dignity. People whose voices were silenced for years are speaking up. People are questioning their leaders. All these to me look like signs of a strong and enlightened society developing over the course of time.