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Nepal Ascendant the 2300s: Imagining a Future as a Global Power

 I've been reading and learning about world history. The lessons I can take from it are many. What amazes me is that there are so few key events that shape history; much more is shaped by various wild probabilities and chances that determine who we are today. As a student of Literature, I am interested in learning about the truth just as much as about fiction. After all, fictional worlds often imitate the real one, and sometimes it's the opposite as well.

Yesterday, while talking with a friend of mine, I had an insight: in the Nepali literary scene, there are hardly any fictional works that try to imagine a future for Nepal, purely in fictional terms. The idea is to write about Nepal as an underdeveloped nation reaching the heights of a superpower, with the span of this dramatic rise taking place over decades or centuries. Imagining a few aspects of this story excited me, but working on it and actually thinking of the conditions that might result in that kind of importance on the world stage is another beast entirely. As a thought experiment, I would like to practice this and ask anyone who reads this article to suggest their own ideas on the matter.

The time scale for many nations to rise and fall from superpower status is definitely measured in decades and centuries. The French Empire, the British Empire, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, the American Empire, and more recently, China, have all had their development engines geared to superpower levels at one time or another. It would be a mistake not to consider the impact of the exploitation these powers have enacted across the globe to reach their zenith, and maybe it isn't possible to achieve it entirely alone—some form of exploitation seems to be, or has always been, part of the bargain. What, then, can the small state of Nepal exploit to take on a meteoric rise as a superpower? In terms of reality, the question is ridiculous (experience suggests we'll never get there), but purely in fictional terms, we might just have a go at it. I will invest part of my time here to try and find a reasonable answer to that question.



"The Apotheosis of Napoleon" by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1806)

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