The Anatomy of a Hollow Society: An Audit of Nepal’s Missing Moral Core

Returning to Nepal in 2013 after spending most of the preceding twenty-five years abroad, I made a few devastating discoveries about Nepali society. One was how hollow and deeply flawed it was. Struggling to recover from major personal issues, I needed to understand the details of this "hollowness" for my own sanity. Starting in late 2020, I began documenting evidence of this decay on X/Twitter. In this post, I share an analysis of those 130 documented instances to demonstrate exactly how and why Nepali society is currently lost in a state of hollow confusion.

I returned to Nepal in 2013 after nearly 25 years of studying, working, and traveling around the world. I went on a mission to re-learn about the people, the society, and the country I had left as a teenager. I traveled, observed, and listened. I read voraciously, took notes—copious notes—and published blog posts about the things I was seeing, hearing, learning, and observing. I engaged with fellow Nepalis in person and on social media at a level and extent I rarely had in my entire life. During this time, I served as the co-director of a non-profit, volunteered for the United World College Selection Committee, and visited schools across the country to share my life and work.

In time, I discovered a painful truth: the society I had worked so hard to escape as a naive child in the 1980s was even more hollow and flawed than I could have imagined.

Attempting as I was to recover from my personal issues—not least of which was the fallout of the traumatic experience of eleven nights and twelve days in police custody in Doha, Qatar—this realization drove me to declare Nepali society as “hollow” for the first time in a response to a post on December 4, 2020:

As far as I can tell, not long after, I created a meme on the subject and shared it on X:

I also realized that I needed to know and learn as much as I could about specifically how and why Nepali society was so hollow and so deeply flawed. I needed to make as much sense of it all as possible, and for that, I needed details—specific details and examples. I needed to know how exactly Nepali society was “hollow”—how it had lost its moral core and, as a result, exists in a state of constant confusion.

For my own sanity, I began informally documenting examples, instances, and evidence of that on X. Having done that for six years, I was curious to find out what all had made it into that series. So, I asked Grok, X’s AI, to analyze the 130 posts I made between December 2020 and early 2026.

Evidence of a Society Lost and Confused

To understand the “how” and “why” of this hollowness, we must look at specific evidence. The following instances illustrate a society that has lost its moral anchor, touching on systemic inequality, lack of empathy, and a profound disregard for the vulnerable.

1. On Accountability and the “Status” Shield

A society is confused when it cannot distinguish between “status” and “accountability,” allowing the powerful to bypass the rule of law.

This disregard for justice is systemic. Former Attorney General Raman Kumar Shrestha has noted that only 11% of the population has access to justice mechanisms.

Meanwhile, former IGP Bigyan Raj Sharma estimates that 30% of those incarcerated in Nepal are actually innocent. Even when the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court oversteps his bounds, the legal fraternity remains mum.

2. On Education: Accolades over Expertise

A society is flawed when academic qualifications that impart severely limited practical and soft skills are valued more than knowledge and skills, simply because those qualifications are associated with social status.

In Unleashing Nepal, Sujeev Shakya observes: “A fundamental flaw in the traditional Nepali attitude to education was a yearning for degrees rather than education… to have a title rather than expertise.” This hollow pursuit is so entrenched that an investigative journalist discovered in 2014 that students had been buying Master’s and PhD theses from vendors—a practice dating back to the 1980s.

Furthermore, education often serves as a tool for denial. In spite of the caste system being a major source of the cultural, social, economic, and political issues the country suffers from, the system fails to confront it. Far from teaching the gravity of these systemic issues, the Grade 8 Social Studies textbook declares “religion and caste” to be “small issues.”

3. The Moral Vacuum in Leadership

Hollowness thrives when those in power—such as Pushpa Kamal Dahal “Prachanda,” one of the most powerful political figures of the last two decades—struggle to recognize and acknowledge something wrong as “wrong.”

Not surprisingly, Dahal and the other two most senior and powerful leaders of the last decade, Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli and Sher Bahadur Deuba, have been associated with many of the corruption scandals to rock the country.

4. The War on the Vulnerable: Women, Children, and Dalits

Perhaps the most harrowing evidence of a hollow society is how it treats its most vulnerable: women, children, and the Dalits.

The statistics on sexual violence are a national shame. A majority of reported rape victims are minors (roughly 45% are under 16), and a disproportionately high percentage of both adult and minor female rape victims are Dalits.

What’s more, the legal system of the country recognized the sexual abuse of children only recently; it was officially reported for the first time only about seven years ago.

The human cost of this confusion is fatal. Dr. Pasupati Mahat notes that Nepal ranks third in the world for adolescent suicide. Between 2018 and 2023, official figures show that girls killed themselves at almost twice the rate of boys.

Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) have revealed that Nepali society raises an incredibly high percentage of females to believe in the acceptability of wife-beating and abusive behavior from mothers-in-law. The treatment of females and the devaluation of their lives are routine. Consequently, they are driven to take their own lives at such high rates that suicide has become the leading cause of death for females of reproductive age in Nepal.

Final Thoughts

Seeing these years of observations laid out so clinically by an AI offers a sobering mirror. This archive of 130 posts is not just a list of complaints; it is a roadmap of systemic failure. Until we find the courage to acknowledge that we are hiding from our own truths, we will continue to exist in this state of hollow confusion—a society with a missing moral core.

What do you think?


PS. Apart from getting help from Grok with the analysis, I got help from Google’s AI Gemini composing this blog post.

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