I grew up in Arghakhanchi, a hill district in western Nepal, where the mountains make the horizon feel both close and impossibly far. A scholarship brought me to Finland in 2007, and what I found here was less a degree than an entire way of thinking — rigorous, evidence-based, allergic to easy answers. I never chose between the library and the newsroom; I just decided I wouldn't have to. Today I work as a researcher, journalist, and media entrepreneur, on the theory that unread knowledge is just noise, and journalism without real thinking behind it is static of another kind. 2025 turned out to be a hinge year. In October I defended my doctoral dissertation at the University of Helsinki — Mediation, Meddling, and Micromanagement: India in Nepal's Peace Process and Political Transition — which boils down to a question I've lived with my whole adult life: what does it mean to be a small country in a big neighbour's shadow? That question ran alongside fourteen years as Editor-in-Chief of Global South Development Magazine, commissioning journalism from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The same year, I also founded Takura Communications & Publishing Oy — Nepalilainen.fi, Finland's first Nepali-language media platform, and The New Finland, which follows immigrant and multicultural life here. I believe in getting close to what I write about: fieldwork across Nepal, Bangladesh, and South Asia, and more than fifty students and young journalists mentored along the way. But underneath the titles, I'm a father, an immigrant, and nearly two decades in Finland who still dreams in Nepali — someone who has spent most of his adult life watching his country's crises from a distance, and keeps choosing, again and again, to turn that distance into understanding instead of estrangement.