In Empowered and Imperiled, Sanjay Upadhya retraces the last decade and a half of Nepal's tempestuous quest to reinvent itself and chronicles key personalities and events with caustic insouciance. Upadhya contends that a landscape fertile for well-meaning initiatives often allows events to careen out of control and construct wildly differing versions of the same story. He insists that conspiracy theories aren't necessarily irrelevant just because they run rampant. With Nepal on the cusp of another change-albeit without a clear roadmap-covering old ground chronologically can be of consequence.