On the journey

Have you guy’s seen Sicko by Michael Moore? It shows the hardship of American’s in getting affordable healthcare. I find it very amusing because they can spend trillions in Iraq war but not provide proper healthcare to its citizens. Insurance companies here are like Mafia, they dictate which hospitals, which doctors, and which procedures. Politicians indebted to these special interest groups sway from making any opposition. In Sicko, Moore tries to compare US health care with that of Cuba, UK, Canada, and France. And all of these countries seem (in that movie) to have very good and inexpensive system. Moore advocates on socialism of healthcare in USA (similar to what they already have done to postal and school system). I’m not promoting his idea but I was really curious about its possibilities. Although health care is cheap in Cuba, Canada, France, and UK, do the people pay more taxes? Do they have much longer wait to get medication? His movie says no, but I find that hard to believe, may be its true too. But one thing is for real, despite having health insurance, for some issues it will cost me much less to go to Nepal for the procedure than sort it out here. I guess that might be the reason why Medical Tourism is booming in India, recently one of my colleagues went there for his procedure. I’m not expert to verdict if socialism in healthcare is beneficial to USA, but it does work wonders in my aquarium.

I grew up in city, Putalisadak: downtown Kathmandu and I had very less opportunity to be exposed to nature. And the crammed living style led to not having any pets either. Pragya on the other hand had more opportunities, she loves pets: just about anything. She would love to have a puppy to start with, but I was against it. Not only that I care less for dogs, it’s expensive to maintain too. So, on her birthday I gave her a pair of gold fish. I guess that’s the first step: she will have some form of pet, I will get used to an idea of having pet, and it’s less stressful on the budget too.

I wanted to name those fishes, and I was looking for Nepalese unisex names. I tinkered hard but couldn’t think of any until my friend Ashish coined in: Sujan & Kiran. I loved those names, so did Pragya. Sujan was very active but it was fearful too, may be it was still adjusting to new tank. Kiran on the other hand was less mobile but wasn’t scared of us when we approached the tank. So Kiran got bulk of food while Sujan was in its hideout. We were worried about Kiran getting swim-bladder disease due to excessive eating; it had already started showing signs of it. So we had to split the aquarium into two halves using a splitter during feeding time. After a month Sujan started showing more guts so we stopped splitting the aquarium while feeding. But being a natural athlete that it was, Sujan always took bulk of food away from Kiran. Sujan relatively grew bigger while Kiran starved.

Though it was a “natural selection” and “survival of fittest” phenomenon, we couldn’t let Kiran starve and fade away. Adding more food will lead to clouding of the tank as well as risking Sujan of having swim-bladder disease (these goldfish don’t know when they are full). So we had to intervene again with a splitter.

It’s been two months now, and they are doing very well. If someone asks me “how are you”? I nowadays reply by saying “I, Pragya, Sujan, and Kiran are all doing fine”.