Where I come from
Some stories begin in quiet places. Mine begins in Arghakhanchi — a hilly district in western Nepal, where the mountains are patient and the horizons feel both close and impossibly far. Growing up there, I could not have imagined that one day I would be writing about peace processes from Helsinki, editing news from Finland, or spending years in archives trying to understand how powerful nations shape the fates of their smaller neighbours.
But that is exactly what happened. And the journey between those two points — between a hillside in Nepal and a doctoral desk in Finland — is, I think, the most honest introduction I can give you.
Who I am
I have never been able to choose between thinking and telling. Between the library and the newsroom. So I decided I did not have to.
I am a researcher, a journalist, and a media entrepreneur — and I have always believed those identities belong together. Knowledge that does not reach people is just noise in an echo chamber. And journalism without intellectual grounding is just noise of a different kind.
I came to Finland in 2007, a young man from Nepal drawn northward by curiosity and a scholarship. What I found here was more than an education. I found a way of thinking — rigorous, evidence-based, uncomfortable with easy answers — that has shaped everything I have done since. Finland gave me the tools. Nepal gave me the questions.
The work
In October 2025, I defended my doctoral dissertation at the University of Helsinki. The title is a mouthful: Mediation, Meddling, and Micromanagement: India in Nepal’s Peace Process and Political Transition. But the question at its heart is simple — what does it actually mean to be a small nation living in the shadow of a giant? How do you negotiate your own future when your most powerful neighbour keeps rewriting the terms?
These are not abstract questions for me. They are personal. I lived through Nepal’s political upheavals from afar, reading the news from Helsinki with the particular ache of a diaspora member who feels every crisis twice — once as a citizen, once as an outsider who cannot intervene. The research was my way of intervening, at least intellectually.
Alongside the academic work, I spent fourteen years as Editor-in-Chief of Global South Development Magazine — commissioning stories from journalists and researchers across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, mentoring reporters, and insisting, always, that development is not a technocratic problem. It is a deeply human one.
In 2025, I founded Takura Communications & Publishing Oy, under which I run two media platforms — Nepalilainen.fi, Finland’s first Nepali-language media platform, and The New Finland, an English-language outlet documenting the lives of immigrants and multicultural communities across this country. Both are acts of belief: that stories from the margins matter, and that media can be a tool of dignity, not just information.
What drives me
I believe in the power of proximity — of actually going to the places you write about, sitting with the people you study, and letting their reality complicate your theories. I have done fieldwork in Nepal, Bangladesh, and across South Asia. I have worked in homeless shelters in Helsinki. I have mentored more than fifty students and journalists who were finding their own voices for the first time.
Justice doesn’t announce itself. Someone has to.
That is why I write. That is why I research. That is why, even after twenty years in this field, I still find it hard to sit still when there is a story that needs telling or a question that needs asking.
I speak five languages — Nepali, English, Finnish, Hindi, and Urdu — which means I get to be wrong in five different ways, and occasionally understand something the monolingual world misses entirely.
Beyond the desk
When I am not writing or researching, I am usually behind a camera, looking for the image that says what words cannot. Photography, for me, is not a hobby so much as a different kind of journalism — slower, quieter, more honest about the limits of language. I also travel whenever I can, because I have found that the best way to test your assumptions is to change your geography.
I am a father. I am an immigrant. I am a Finnish citizen who dreams in Nepali. I am someone who has watched his country from a distance for most of his adult life, and chosen, again and again, to turn that distance into understanding rather than estrangement.