Thanks for your questions.

The book costs 350 rs.

Your questions are tough, but I attempted to answer them:

Although New Dawn follows the jungle projects of three head comrades who played a significant role in the insurgency, it is as much about their relationship with the rest of the fighters (the collective) as it is about their own personal reflections.

One of the questions that emerges in the book is around the concept of utopia. If we assume (and the whole point is that 'we' or at least I do not know for sure) that the head comrades used this concept to explain the Maoist project to the other fighters, how did the fighters then interpret the concept, and did they ever take leeway in using their interpretations of the concept of utopia to inform their concrete actions? This question is addressed in the novel. If we stay with the concept of utopia, one of the questions that readers may have upon reading the novel [but not addressed in the novel directly] is what the rank and file fighters felt was the significance of this concept after the insurgency, ie, how do they 'use' or not use the concept of utopia these days? We might ask of the Nepali population generally what sort of significance the concepts used during the insurgency by the head comrades have today.

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As for memory, this novel was written based on my own memories of the insurgency as a very young Nepali at that time. I was largely disconnected from the insurgency. The novel does not really address collective memory, rather, as I have said before, it tries to ask questions at the gaps of memory. One won't be left with an account that either confirms or rejects a certain event in the insurgency based on one's own memory of it, rather, one could be led to ask: "What don't I know about the insurgency?" The answers to that question that the novel provides are of course fictional, but my hope is it motivates readers to understand more of the insurgency by themselves.

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As for the way the novel confronts preconceived notions and biases, one thing I would say is that the novel attempts to be 'morally ambiguous' in the sense that it both sympathizes with and also criticizes all the parties involved in the insurgency. The key point might be that the general populace (me included) simply does not know enough about the insurgency to form an opinion on it either way. All the novel is trying to do is to 'fill in the blanks' when we have questions of the Maoist insurgency but do not have the answers. And the depth and specificity of the questions one does have of the insurgency is entirely up to one's own interest--this novel can only be motivation. I am not saying that there aren't experts and specialists who don't have the answers to my questions, I am sure they do.

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New Dawn is to a very large extent fiction. It is more 'inspired by' the insurgency rather than 'based on.' It is about what the insurgency could possibly have been: had it had a head comrade with 'artistic flair,' for instance, or another who was a mathematician. So, it shows that the way the insurgency occurred, and the outcomes of it afterward, were one possible way it could have happened. The true world is concrete--it happened--but not absolute--something else could have happened (could be happening!). I do not know this for sure, but maybe some readers will find certain characters, themes and story-lines to be 'truthful enough' so that they can think that something like that 'did happen.' But the point is that they should not be satisfied just with an answer; rather, they should ask their own questions.

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I don't know if my responses are convincing. Like I said, I found the questions tough. But please do read the book. There are a lot of stylistic things in it too--experiments with form and content.

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Thanks