A bold and incisive analysis of Nepal’s society, and its attempts to develop and respond to change, from someone who is both and insider and an outsider to Nepal.The bulk of the author’s argument in this book is that Nepal’s strengths have always been in the indigenous qualities of its various ethnic groups. But it has been under the influence of other cultures which have suppressed its own strengths. Nepal’s future hope lies in its ethnic cultures whose simplicity provides a greater flexibility and thus a greater propensity to development and change, than the cumbersome and ossified structure of the urbane upper class, and caste, society of the Kathmandu Valley.