Does God exist?

When we wake up early in the morning, the first thing we do is thank god for granting us another day of our life. We remember different gods — Lord Shiva, Krishna, Jesus or Allah — as per our religious beliefs. 

Similarly, we see many people praying to god before having their meal. Still, there are devotees who are always in a rush to reach the religious sites. And at night, we look up in the sky and think god in the form of stars and the moon.

But who is god whom people are paying so much attention to? What does the god think about people? And why do people trust god more than themselves? These questions always come in my mind. As such I asked several people, ‘Does god exist?’ While some believed in his existence, others did not believe that god really existed. 

I was really puzzled by those answers. It was already dark and I was standing on the street and looking at the sky. There were few stars and a moon. But my eyes were full of tears and I was not able to see things 

clearly.

Just then I saw a small boy at the street looking at the sky. For a few minutes, my eyes were fixed on him. But again I looked at the sky and tried to search answers of my questions. However, I couldn’t get the answer whether god existed or not. So, I was ready to go when I saw the boy folding his hands. I rubbed my eyes to see him more clearly. His eyes were closed but he was murmuring something. Then he exclaimed with joy, “Wow! God I know you would fulfil it.”

After couple of minutes, I realised what this little soul did — he was praying to the god as he had faith in him. At the same moment I also felt that god does exists and he is within us in our soul. For me he is omnipresent and speaks in the language of my soul.

— Suvha Shree Sharma, Class IX, The Excelsior School

Two-year-old girl gets windpipe made from stem cells

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File photo of Hannah Warren, 2, lying in bed in a post-op room at the Children's Hospital of Illinois in Peoria, after having received a new windpipe in a landmark transplant operation on April 9, 2013.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHICAGO: A two-year-old girl born without a windpipe now has a new one grown from her own stem cells, the youngest patient in the world to benefit from the experimental treatment. Hannah Warren has been unable to breathe, eat, drink or swallow on her own since she was born in South Korea in 2010. Until the operation at a US hospital, she had spent her entire life in a hospital in Seoul. Doctors there told her parents there was no hope and they expected her to die.

The stem cells came from Hannah’s bone marrow, extracted with a special needle inserted into her hip bone. They were seeded in a lab onto a plastic scaffold, where it took less than a week for them to multiply and create a new windpipe.

The windpipe was implanted April 9 in a nine-hour procedure.

Early signs indicate the windpipe is working, Hannah’s doctors announced Tuesday, although she is still on a ventilator. They believe she will eventually be able to live at home and lead a normal life.

“We feel like she’s reborn,” said Hannah’s father, Darryl Warren. “They hope that she can do everything that a normal child can do but it’s going to take time. This is a brand new road that all of us are on,” he said in a telephone interview. “This is her only chance but she’s got a fantastic one and an unbelievable one.”

Warren choked up and his wife, Lee Young-mi, was teary-eyed at a hospital news conference yesterday. Hannah did not attend because she is still recovering from the surgery. She developed an infection after the operation but now is acting like a healthy 2-year-old, her doctors said.

Warren said he hopes the family can bring Hannah home for the first time in a month or so. Hannah turns three in August.

“It’s going to be amazing for us to finally be together as a family of four,” he said. The couple has an older daughter.

Only about one in 50,000 children worldwide are born with the windpipe defect. The stem-cell technique has been used to make other body parts besides windpipes and holds promise for treating other birth defects and childhood diseases, her doctors said.

The operation brought together an Italian surgeon based in Sweden who pioneered the technique, a pediatric surgeon at Children’s Hospital of Illinois who met Hannah’s family while on a business trip to South Korea, and Hannah — born to a Newfoundland man and Korean woman who married after he moved to that country to teach English.

Hannah’s parents had read about Dr Paolo Macchiarini’s success using stem-cell based tracheas but couldn’t afford to pay for the operation at his centre, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. So Dr Mark Holterman helped the family arrange to have the procedure at his hospital, bringing in Macchiarini to lead the operation. Children’s Hospital waived the cost, likely hundreds of thousands of dollars, Holterman said.

Alliances of discomfort

Madhesi politics is undergoing a tectonic shift and the early tremors have already been felt. But many have undermined the scale of its impact. While the media reports have been rife with talks of internal homework between Mahanta Thakur’s Tarai Madhes Loktantrik Party and Upendra Yadav’s Madhesi Janadhikar Forum for a unification, there is larger development silently taking place.

Upendra Yadav’s MJF-Nepal along with Rastriya Madhes Samajwadi Party led by Sarat Singh Bhandari, M. S Thapa led Rastriya Janamukti Party and Janajati leaders like Parasuram Khapung have formed a political alliance with other fringe groups along twin agenda of identity and federalism. “We will hold a press conference tomorrow afternoon and declare the alliance.”, MJF-N’s Yogendra Yadav told Nepali Times over the phone from Jhapa district.

Yadav further said that the alliance would bring together those who have been ‘betrayed and exploited’ by the big parties including the ruling UCPN-M and the Madhesi morcha. However, when asked about unification with TMLP, he clarified, “We respect Mahantaji and want this unification to take place but we will not enter into UDMF which has failed people of Madhes and instead request TMLP to ally with us.” The young leader who is close to Upendra Yadav didn’t mince word while claiming that the idea of the unification was to establish Thakur as party’s father figure while making Yadav its political head.

The parties in alliance are holding last minute talks with Limbuwan leaders in the east as well as other Janajati leaders including UML’s Ashok Rai and Rajendra Shrestha.Whether or not the new alliance has potential to influence the future course of Nepali politics, it will once again bring back Upendra Yadav into political center-stage.

A Madhesi journalist who has been closely following these development believes, the lack of clear class or caste basis makes alliance between Thakur and Yadav unlikely.  “Besides, Upendra Yadav will not forget under what circumstances TMLP was established and how Thakur downsized his influence in Madhesi politics.”, he says.

The alliance itself is an ambitious one where parties and leaders from different orientation will be coming together with a common agenda of identity and federalism, but the biggest challenge for Yadav and his partners will be to explain to the people – how will their alliance be different from the one formed by the ruling coalition under the same tenets?

In any case, these are not electoral alliances but power consortium in which individuals and groups are looking to secure their future bargaining power amid great political uncertainties.

Clash of civilisations on Everest

The fist-fight near Camp 3 on Mt Everest on Saturday between Sherpas and three foreign climbers has been jokingly called the highest brawl in world history, but mountaineering experts say it underlines a growing problem of the commercialization of climbing in the Himalaya.

Jonathan Griffith from Britain, Ueli Steck from Switzerland and Simone Moro from Italy are noted mountaineers, who were injured when high altitude Sherpas who were fixing ropes up the Lhotse face roughed them up and damaged their tents. Steck is said to be injured and being airlifted to Kathmandu Monday.

Jonathan Griffith (r), Ueli Steck (l) on a Facebook picture on the way to Kathmandu.

Mountaineering experts, however, say that the incident highlights the growing clash between commercial expedition-style climbing, and free alpine style climbing on the world’s highest mountains. This year, there are more than 250 mountaineers on Mt Everest including a joint India-Nepal military expedition.

Alpine-style climbers do not use Sherpas and climb in small groups of two or three without oxygen. Griffith, Steck and Moro are the world’s most noted climbers who climb alpine-style and have done first ascents of many of the world’s most difficult faces.

Moro climbed Shisha Pangma South (8008 m) without oxygen in 27 hours in 1996, using skis in the descent from 7100 m. It was during his winter ascent of Annapurna South Face that his climbing companions Anatoli Boukreev and Dimitri Sobolev were killed in an avalanche.

Simone Moro’s Facebook profile picture.

Steck climbed the difficult north face of Eiger when he was 18. He has been called one of the three best alpinists in Europe by Climb magazine for his “Khumbu-express” during which he solo-climbed the north wall of Cholatse (6440 m) and the east wall of Taboche (6505 m). He was part of the daring but unsuccessful rescue bid of Spanish climber Iñaki Ochoa de Olza in 2008, who had collapsed at nearly 8000 m below the summit of Annapurna.

When climbers start punching each other on Mt Everest it is more than just “mountaineering rage”, Sunday’s incident seems to point to a clash of civilizations and two types of climbing styles, as well as between commercial expeditions and purists, that was bound to happen sooner or later.

Nepal: Kingdom in the clouds

Modern Nepal was established in the mid-18th century, when Prithvi Narayan Shah, the leader of one of the smaller principalities, conquered Kathmandu and unified many of the surrounding states. Further attempts at Nepalese expansion were halted in conflicts with Tibet, China and British India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. 

The Shahs ruled in Nepal for much of the first half of the 19th century. That ended in 1846 in a bloody coup. Jung Bahadur, an army commander, ordered his troops to kill hundreds of Nepal's most powerful men, who had been assembled in the palace armoury. Bahadur gave himself the title "Rana" and declared himself prime minister for life. He later declared that the title would be passed down his own family line. 

The isolationist Rana regime remained in place for over a century. During that time, the royal family was reduced to figurehead status. When the British left India in 1947, the Ranas lost much of their support, leaving the door opening for an anti-Rana revolution. King Tribhuvan, a descendant of the original Shahs, left Nepal for India and, with diplomatic support from New Delhi, put the monarchy back into power. 

New government by cabinet 

In 1951, the first of Nepal's post-Rana constitutions was proclaimed. It established a multiparty system and a government of Ranas and members of the new Nepali Congress party. It also established an elected constituent assembly, but those elections were never held. The next constitution came in 1959. It established the House of Representatives and the National Assembly, but much of the governing power remained with the king. 

Three years later, another constitution established the "no party" system of government, called the panchayat, in which the prime minister, cabinet and much of the assembly were named by the king. Political parties and organizations were outlawed under the new system. In 1980, the citizens of Nepal voted against returning to a multiparty system. An amendment to the constitution shortly after the referendum allowed for direct elections to the panchayat. 

By the end of the '80s, however, a people's movement had grown strong enough to topple the panchayat system. Hundreds of people died in the ensuing conflict and King Birendra dissolved Nepal's cabinet. The Nepali Congress formed an interim government and proclaimed a new constitution, one that allowed for a multiparty, democratic system of government. 

However, even these reforms included concessions to traditional ways. The 1990 constitution did not, for example, establish a secular state as recommended by the country's left wing and non-Hindus. As well, some of the constitution's fundamental rights, such as equality of all Nepalese citizens, have not been fully implemented. 

A Maoist insurgency began in 1996 with the goal of overthrowing the constitutional monarchy and establishing a communist state in its place. At least 20,000 people have been killed in civil violence since then. 

Throne room massacre

In June 2001, Crown Prince Dipendra shot and killed 10 members of the royal family, including King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya, and then turned the gun on himself. At first, Nepalese officials called the shootings an accident and declared Dipendra king, while he was still on life support from his self-inflicted wounds. When Dipendra died, the country's State Council crowned Prince Gyandendra, the slain king's brother, the new king of Nepal. 

In June 2002, Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba dissolved parliament after a split in the ruling Nepali Congress party and called for early elections. Elections were set for November 2002, but were disrupted by the Maoist rebels. In October 2002, King Gyandendra dismissed Deuba and his cabinet for incompetence and later appointed a cabinet of his own.

Peace talks between the government and the rebels broke down in 2003 and the violence has only escalated since then.

In early 2005, King Gyanendra declared a state of emergency and dissolved Nepal's parliament. It was the second time in three years the king had taken control of the country. He accused the politicians of failing to stop the violence between the government on Maoist rebels. Gyanendra said he would form a new cabinet and restore peace and democracy within three years. 

In April 2006, a shoot-on-sight curfew was imposed in Kathmandu to stop a mass rally called by the opposition parties sidelined when King Gyanendra took over the country's administration. 

At least a dozen people were injured when Nepalese police fired on demonstrators. 

Security forces also fired on demonstrators in Pokhara killing one person and injuring at least two others. Protesters were throwing stones when the soldiers shot at them, witnesses said. 

Political parties said about 1,500 people have been detained. 

The U.S. and other Western nations urged the king to begin dialogue with Nepal's political parties, saying it is the best way to deal with both the political unrest and the Maoist rebellion. 

On May 18, 2006, Nepal's parliament voted unanimously to strip King Gyanendra of his powers and transform the kingdom into a secular constitutional monarchy.