A group of primary school children are huddled around Aakrit Shrestha, a Book Bus instructor, who holds a cylindrical contraption built of chart paper and has a few illustrations on the inside frame.

The Nepal government has currently designated different regions across 13 northern districts as ‘restricted areas’, for which trekking groups (one cannot travel individually) have to pay a varying range of fees to the Immigration Department.

The collection of US state department cables published by Wikileaks allows us to chart one such period between 1974-1976, when events in Sikkim that led to the former Himalayan kingdom being integrated into India as a state resulted in tensions between Nepal and India.

The defence of unequal citizenship rights is a defence of the Khas-Arya man’s status, and not a question of state sovereignty.

The only response to the recent India-Pakistan conflict might be Kurt Vonnegut’s pithy refrain: so it goes

The US intelligence service’s assessments about Nepal have mostly been proven true