Reflections

I was back in my favouritest country in the world a couple of weeks ago. I visited Kathmandu on a business trip, where I spoke to a couple of audiences and met some of the leading clinicians there, hoping to kick start stem cell therapy in Nepal. This was the first time that I have been back to the heart of Nepal since I left Pokhara on the last day of 2003.I remember that the mountains had given me a grand farewell; the entire Dhaulagiri, Annapurna, Macchapuchare range was visible in grand splendour throughout the entire month of December that year. This time I was coming to a rain soaked Kathmandu. The rains have been particularly heavy this year I was told. The clouds barely lifted, and even when they did, we could just see the mountains ringing the Kathmandu Valley, the snow ranges remained hidden. The Airport is just the same as ever, there has not been much renovation or modernization over the past 6 years. It would have been difficult, considering what the nation has been thr...

Plagiarism is a way of life in science and medical publishing. We are all familiar with the papers that are read in our medical conferences. The data is often fudged, more often plagiarized. I remember once attending the annual Indian Association of Cardiovascular Surgeons’ conference. There was a spate of papers from Calcutta reporting large numbers of valve replacements over the past year. One of the trade representatives told me that if you added the numbers of valve replacements reported during the conference, they would be more than three times the number of valves sold in Calcutta the previous year! I am told that the Indian Society of Anesthesiologists has taken note of the inconsistencies in the papers produced by a leading post graduate institution of Calcutta and later investigations showed that the data was manufactured in the canteen over a couple of days. The same holds true for many of the presentations in Indian conferences. So much for fudged data. Now on to world o...

One of the central tenets of the greens, though not often actually enunciated, is that humans are the only species that are greedy and exploitative and often overuse natural resources to such levels that they lead natural stocks to extinction. According to this sentimental view, animals live in harmony with each other and with Nature and never overexploit any resource, sharing the goodies with other members of the ecosystem that they share. While this may fit in with the image of the ugly human, it does not square with facts. Less sentimental environmentalists have suspected this all along and now there is definite evidence to show that a bird species has overfished in the Baltic Sea to the extent that the survival of several fish species has become endangered. This story started in the 1950s when the greater cormorant (which can often be seen near Indian water bodies, drying out its wings, was protected by the Governments adjacent to the Baltic Sea in order to prevent their extincti...

“People do read travel literature in a cheerful frame of mind, imagining themselves at leisure and the world at its best. It’s an intrinsically optimistic thing, travel” The above is a quotation from a novel that I was reading the other day. Nothing great about the novel itself, but the quotation stuck to my mind. It really struck a chord. As I reflected on this I realized that the writer was absolutely right (alliteration unintended). Travel is something that you do with a very positive frame of mind. When you travel, you expect new experiences, new friends, new sights and new sounds. And you never travel unless you expect to enjoy the experience. It is a different matter that the expectations may not match the experience. This, is also very common. Tiresome, irritating and sometimes even downright scary experiences do occur during travel. However a seasoned traveler takes it in his stride and can always extract some enjoyment out of any experience. In fact this is the hall mark...