Many people will have been more or less shocked by the violent deaths in Nepal of the country's King Birendra, Queen Aishwarya and at least seven close relatives, including their two children. "More or less" might sound brutally casual, but for Westerners, it's the reality. Our obsession with Europe and the US blinds us and makes us careless as to what goes on in most faraway places. We take some interest in China and Russia because of their size, and the Middle East because of its dangerous tensions, but that's about it.
Nepal is sufficiently far away for us to care very little about what happens there. What do we know about it? It has the Himalayas, some 130 peaks of awe-inspiring magnificence. Prime among these is Mount Everest, first climbed in 1953 by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa (though it is still argued that George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were first to the top). Nepal has Kathmandu, the capital, a fabled destination for the 1960s hippie generation in search of cheap dope, free love and inner meaning (most of us found all three there, but can't remember that we did). It has the Gurkha soldiers, famous for their bravery and tenacity when fighting for the British during two world wars. It has some beautiful temples, a gentle people, serious pollution and a great deal of poverty.
In terms of our general knowledge about Nepal, that's probably about it. Oh - it also has Guinness, which I seem to recall arrived in Kathmandu just in time for St Patrick's Day, two or three years ago.
In truth, Guinness is probably the only thing that Nepal has in common with Ireland. Quite properly then, Irish news coverage of recent events in Nepal has been just that - straightforward news coverage. But British interest has been intriguingly different, because Britain has a certain relationship with Nepal. If I am not horribly wrong, Britain, while busily colonising India, reached some kind of accommodation with neighbouring Nepal which allowed it to retain its constitutional monarchy. And the huge and well-appreciated contribution by Gurkha soldiers to Britain over nearly 200 years has already been mentioned (indeed Prince Charles is colonel-in-chief of the Royal Gurkha Rifles).
More to the point - or so one would imagine from some British media coverage - Crown Prince Dipendra, who died of a bullet wound two days after succeeding his father as king, was educated at Eton College. And while he was being educated in England, the London Independent pointed out, he "sees at first hand the break-up of one of the most influential and most emotionally dysfunctional arranged marriages in modern royal history".
So: let me get this straight. Having taken careful note of Princess Diana's predicament (though just a schoolboy at the time), Crown Prince Dipendra finally returns to the family palace in Kathmandu, and some 10 years later tells the ma and da at a family conference that he is not happy about their choice of a bride for him, announces he wants instead to marry the (ravishingly beautiful) Devyani Rana, causes a huge row and shoots the whole family dead before fatally wounding himself.
Yep, that's it: "He was a post-modern prince who found himself in a position unallied to any of the norms he had come to expect his extraordinary life to conform to. Like young people the world over, to a greater or lesser degree, he cracked under the contradictory pressures of his existence."
The Crown Prince was actually 29. This patronising tosh was presented in an article bearing the fatuous headline "Things are not so different in Nepal" and all it proves is that they are. We still don't even know what actually happened on that fateful Friday night.
Meanwhile, the Guardian also managed to patronise "the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Nepal" and was properly pulled up by a reader who pointed out that Nepal has a larger surface area than England, with a population more than twice that of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined. Another reader dryly remarked that if any good can come of the tragedy of the Nepalese royal family, "perhaps it will induce the Duke of Edinburgh to think twice before laying so roughly into his son". A bit late for that, unfortunately.
bglacken@irish-times.ie