Word: nepal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...plot that propels the novella, but rather the intimate, unfolding portrait of village life in eastern Nepal that Chettri sketches in masterfully stark but occasionally lyrical prose - like a brisk, cold brook dappled with sun. Chettri vividly conjures the social and natural landscapes in which Dhané's miserable story takes place, from trade councils lorded by ruthless landowners, to placid livestock pastures and swollen rice paddies pleating the hills. The book "might not entertain its readers, because that is not its aim," Chettri has written. "I have simply tried to give a picture of the villages in the hills...
...That encounter, to Sandhya's relief, never came to pass. In 1996, as a 14-year-old student from a town north of the capital Kathmandu, she joined Nepal's Maoist cadres at the moment when their armed insurgency had just begun to take hold of this rugged Himalayan nation, long a magnet for foreign backpackers and adventurers. Her father's military income meant Sandhya did not grow up among the country's many poor, but she chafed under the rigid caste laws and gender norms that blunted her parents' ambitions and stripped her of the same opportunities...
...Today, Sandhya sits batting away mosquitoes in a sparse wood cabin, part of a sprawling Maoist cantonment in the southern district of Chitwan. She believes victory is at hand. A peace process triggered by mass protests in April 2006 against the autocratic rule of Nepal's King Gyanendra brought the Maoists into the political mainstream, paving the way for the extraordinary transformation of a country ruled for two and a half centuries by Hindu kings into a secular republic. Both the Royal Nepalese Army and the Maoist guerrillas - the civil war's bitter foes - returned to their barracks and camps...
...Change can bring uncertainty, however, not just for Nepal but for other countries. Nepal, a country of 28 million, is sandwiched between the world's rising giants, India and China, who both have cast their eye over the Himalayan nation as a buffer against the other. Any unrest in Nepal - hostilities have been suspended, not buried - could spill across into its restive borderlands, particularly Chinese Tibet and the troubled Indian state of Bihar - developments that Beijing and New Delhi would view with alarm. Nepal's Maoists, moreover, are still on the U.S. State Department's list of terror groups. They...
...Indeed, the hatreds that fueled the civil war threaten even now to bubble over. Elections for an assembly that would draft Nepal's new republican constitution are slated for April 10, but only after much bickering and dithering. Nepalis of all stripes are losing faith in the seven parties, including the Maoists, that make up the country's feuding interim government and see corruption and cynical power-politicking stifling the nation's slow reconstruction from the ashes of war. Over a third of the population still lives below the poverty line...