This article appeared in Dhanvantari, medical column in Nepali Times Issue #561 authored by Dr. Buddha Basnyat, MD and is published here with his special permission. I found the article inspirational and this is the second piece that appears in my blog which is not authored by me. Subodh ---------------------- When the friendly 22-year-old American Nick Simons arrived in Kathmandu in 2002 he worked for an NGO in the hydropower sector. In March 2003 he returned home to New York and told his parents, Jim and Marilyn Simons, how he had grown to love Nepal sharing with them his dream to study medicine. Before starting his mandatory premedical course in the autumn of 2003, he decided to travel to Bali where he tragically drowned while swimming. Nick Simons In 2006, Jim and Marilyn set up the Nick Simons Institute in Kathmandu in memory of their son to provide quality health care to people in rural Nepal. In its first five years, NSI has had a remarkable impact...

D uring my first visit to Helsinki, Finland I was intrigued to find the huge statue of Tzar Alexander II adorning the center of Senate Square in the heart of the city. Didn't the Finns actually fight the Russians for independence? Then I remembered that, of course, Finland gained its independence during the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 A.D. when Russia was convulsed by its civil war. Finland escaped the clutches of the Bolsheviks. A reformist Russian emperor is appreciated incongruously in a foreign country and not in his own! What is it about revolutions that the past has to be so negated? Does one have to end history to move forward, even while this motion is at the same time making history? Or is it the certitude of history repeating itself and toppling the present protagonists from their high pedestals that these revolutionaries are so afraid of? The French Revolution devoured its own children and gave birth to the French empire under Napoleon Bonaparte. Czar Nicholas II of...