Nepal, June 2 -- The idea of this column germinated when Kishor Dahal, op-ed editor at the Kantipur Daily observed during an informal conversation: "Once readers used to look for writers. Such are the times that scribes now must search for readers." The force of his statement is somewhat lost in translation, but the unsettling point remains valid.

The idealistic youths of the 1970s and 1980s were naively ambitious. We debated whether the pen was mightier than the sword and often argued that a better world was possible. Some of us believed that leadership was more important than organisation and activism without ideology was a prescription for disaster. The so-called Millennials and the Zoomers that came of age after the 1990s are more pr...