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Introduction: Diabetic mellitus (DM) is a group of metabolic disorders where glucose is underused, producing hyperglycemia, which is associated with renal dysfunction. Abnormal renal function is indicated by an abnormality in various biochemical parameters, among them serum urea, creatinine, and urinary microalbumin. In diabetic mellitus, these mentioned markers are usually correlated with the severity of kidney damage. Objective: The objectives of the studies were to compare the level and direction of urea, microalbumin, and other study parameters such as creatinine and serum glucose among diabetic and non-diabetic individuals in Butwal, Nepal. Materials and Method: This was a cross-sectional comparative study of type-2 diabetic and non-diabetic individuals who came to the National Path Lab (A-grade reference lab) in Butwal sub-metropolitan area, Rupandehi, for routine blood tests. A total of 100 samples were collected using the simple random sampling method, and study parameters were determined using standard laboratory protocols. Results: Among the studied samples, 40 were diabetic and 60 were not. The mean SD of serum urea, creatinine, and urine microalbumin for diabetic patients was 53.50 7.68, 1.71 0.23, and 33.0 8.25, respectively, and 20.60 5.12, 0.73 0.19, and 11.73 4.517, respectively, for non-diabetic individuals. There were correlations between serum urea, creatinine, and urinary microalbumin among the diabetic patients. The r-values of urea, creatinine, and microalbumin were 0.703, 0.572, and 0.674, respectively. It is also statistically significant in diabetic and non-diabetic individuals (p-value 0.001) with serum urea, creatinine, and urinary microalbumin. Conclusion: This study suggested that there were correlations between serum urea, creatinine, and urinary microalbumin in diabetic patients and a statistically insignificant relationship between urinary microalbumin and serum creatinine in diabetic and non-diabetic individuals among various age groups in the study population. Key words: Creatinine, Diabetes mellitus, Diabetic Nephropathy, Microalbumin, Urea

As rupture in the prevailing practices, modernity adopts writing off as one of its diverse ways of bringing the ethos of contemporary time to match up with the aspirations of people. The inner core of the society develops erroneous aspects in its structural foundations over a course of time, whereby promoting social inequalities. Often, the proponents of such system fail to see through the possible implications of such fault line during the inceptions. The fissures in system set onto trouble the people, thereby obstructing the smooth functioning of the society. In such context, the society calls for the intervention of the larger agency, capable of enforcing and sustaining change. The present study examines and analyse slavery as the system that has undergone such change in the history of Nepal. I have taken Chandra Shumsher’s 1924 speech on abolition of slavery and Madan Mani Dixit’s Madhavi (1983) as the primary source of data to explore examine and analyse slavery from the intersection of history and literature in that both Shumsher and Dixit reflection the nature and course of slavery as such. Using the critical perspective of new historicism, the study concludes that modernity employs ‘writing off’ as one of the chief strategies to upgrade the polity with the ethos of contemporaneity.

In his play Masan (1946), the modern Nepali playwright Gopal Prasad Rimal (1918–1973) captures the national aspiration for political change in the 1940s. He weaves a narrative in and around the protagonist Krishna as the typical member of the ruling elite. The play explores his inability to understand the dynamics of conjugal and family life at the personal level, representing the failure of the rulers to grasp the changing spirit of the society. The play sets Krishna in a politically analogous situation of the nation in which the repressive order dominates the people. Consequently, the nation searches for a new form of governance to get rid of the repression of the Rana rule. At the same time, Rimal grasps the spirit of the awakening of the South Asian countries in the process of democratization during the 1940s. He uses a very personal narrative of Krishna to discuss the impacts of larger political ideology of patriarchy in the formation of self like Helen, Bagmati, or the Bride. Presenting Krishna’s world as a microcosm for the whole nation, the playwright depicts the national political ethos in the play. The victimization of the innocent characters and the tension resulting from therein parallel the suffering of the nation. The denial of creative potential appears as the central device through which he approaches the national quest for change. Giving a new historicist reading to the play, this paper argues that Rimal’s play prepares a ground to justify the call for radical change in the existing order of the Rana regime in the 1940s in Nepal.

Madan Mani Dixit’s novel Madhavi (1983) subtly argues for change in the existing rigid political order of his time by projecting self larger than the polity. Borrowing a narrative from the Mahabharata, the novelist develops it into a full length novel to point out the cracks in the political system of his time: as a political order, the Panchayat had lost the sense of justice within the first two decades after its promulgation in 1962. Dixit employs Galav and Madhavi as dissenting voice of the age, upholding the spirit of resistance and seeking for transformation in consciousness. The tale from the post-Vedic society serves as an instance to imply the parallel situation of the country that attempts to transcend beyond the contemporary context. In this study, I have approached the novel from the new historicist vantage point to dissect the text in the changing political context of its writing. The paper claims that as a Nepali novel, Dixit’s Madhavi rewrites the episode of political struggle between the person and polity in an oppressive political order in the 1970s in Nepal when the political self and polity were in tension as the outcome of their struggle for a new order in society. Moving beyond the existing situation, the maestro novelist picks the narrative of Madhavi and Galav from the Mahabharata and sets them in quest of new order in the form of agrarian society from the crumbling order of slavery. Dixit’s work critiques the limitations of both self and polity in leaving the impact of one on the other, thereby exposing the brutal treatment and fall of an oppressive political order. This paper reads historical reality of the 1970s in Dixit’s Madhavi in which the author writes the political history of Nepal.

Design of smart irrigation systems is a transdisciplinary work involving selecting optimal field-specific sensing devices, data capturing from these devices, their pre-processing, feature analysis, classification, IoT (Internet of Things) based actuation, and feedback operations. A wide variety of smart irrigation models, including IBM ThingSpeak, Tracxn, Farm Connect, Hydrawise, etc. have been proposed by researchers, and each of them have its own operational & deployment-specific characteristics. These models are either highly complex or have slower response time & low efficiency when applied to real-time irrigation scenarios. Moreover, these models have a higher cost, which limits their scalability levels. To overcome these issues, this text discusses design of a novel efficient IoT based irrigation platform via fuzzy bioinspired multisensory analysis of on-field parameter sets. The proposed platform uses low-cost components for sensing moisture levels, temperature levels, rain probability, NPK (Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium) levels, and soil types. These sensed values are processed via a Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) to identify optimum sensor types, and then a fuzzy decision layer is used for irrigation. This layer assists in the identification of efficient water flow for different crop types. The resulting growth of plants is fed-back into the model, and a Genetic Algorithm (GA) is applied to tune the fuzzy rules for better water-flow under multiple types of crops. Due to the integration of GWO with Fuzzy Logic controller, the proposed model improved yield efficiency by 8.5%, reduced computational delay by 4.9%, and reduced deployment cost compared to standard smart irrigation models. Due to these advantages, the proposed model is capable of deployment for a wide variety of real-time smart irrigation use cases.

Background: Abortion is legal up to 12 weeks’ gestation period in Nepal. Due to a lack of proper abortion services and socio cultural stigma, every year many women died due to abortion. The aim of this study was to asses the knowledge, attitude and practice of abortion in the residents of slum area of Kathmandu district. Methods: The cross-sectional study was conducted in slum area of Kathmandu district from 20th December, 2020 to 15th January, 2021. The sample size was 255 and convenient sampling technique was used to select the participant aged above 15years. The collected data were enter in MS excel and analysis was performed using SPSS version 22. Results: The prevalence of abortion was 25.27%.The level of knowledge was found significant with education status. Age, marital status, ethnicity were found significant with attitude of the respondents. Ten percentages of the female respondents had done unsafe abortion. The complications after abortion were the bleeding (54.3%), trauma (15.20%), loss of consciousness (13.0%) and abdominal pain (2.20%). Conclusions: The level of knowledge of participants of the present study found to be satisfactory but attitude was less satisfactory with compared to the knowledge about the abortion.

The spiritual and the political at times merge together in the formation of powerful voice of protest in quest of social harmony. This is also seen in Newari cultural landscape. Newari hymns present that the collective imagination poetically transcends beyond the earthly domain of control of authority and social structures, revolting against the prevalent social order. The paper studies two historical Newari hymns “Shitala Maju” and “Bijaya Laxmi” from the perspective of the cultural resistance. When the hymns that are still sung as integral cultural performance in social life of the Newari settlements are analysed to examine the nature of their spiritual quest, the hymns, in the form of devotional poetry, emerge as a sharp critique of the then power structure. This paper argues that the Newari hymns raise the voice of people against the atrocities of both the state and/or the King in the form of spiritual resistance in its inner core though such poems externally display devotion as their primary ethos.

Prema Shah’s “A Husband” and Rokeya S. Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” present two complementary versions of women’s world: the real in Shah and the imagined in Hossain aspire to make the other complete. The worldview that each author projects in their texts reasserts the latent spirit of the other one. The embedded interconnectedness between the authors under discussion reveals their unique association and bond of women’s creative unity towards paving a road for the upliftment of women in general. The paper seeks to find out the historical forces leading to the formation of a certain type of bond between these two authors from different historical and socio-cultural realities. Shah locates a typical Nepali woman in the protagonist in the patriarchal order while Hossain pictures the contemporary Bengali Islamic society and reverses the role of men and women. Hossain’s ideal world and Shah’s real world form two complementary versions of each other: despite opposite in nature, each world completes the other. Sultana moves to the world of dream to seek a new order because Nirmala’s world exercises every form of tortures upon the women’s self. Shah exposes the social reality dictating upon the women’s self while Hossain’s protagonist escapes into the world of dream where women control the social reality effectively and successfully. Overall, Shah and Hossain complement each other’s world by presenting two alternative versions of the same reality, creating the feminist utopia.

Background Craniovertebral junction (CVJ) hydatid disease, although rare, forms an important differential diagnosis of CVJ bony pathologies, especially in endemic areas due to the sheer volume of cases presented there. The authors report a rare case of CVJ hydatid disease mimicking a bony expansile tumor on imaging. Case Description A 21-year-old woman presented with a left-sided neck tilt and pain for 3 months, intermittent low-grade fever, and features of high cervical myelopathy (Nurick grade II). Magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography imaging showed a solid enhancing mass with numerous small cystic areas with bony erosion of the basiocciput, C1 and C2 vertebrae, suggestive of an expansile bony lesion (osteoblastoma/giant cell tumor/aneurysmal bone cyst). She underwent a posterior approach for decompression and spinal fixation, and multiple clear grape-like cysts were encountered that were confirmed to be hydatid cysts on histopathology. All visible cysts were excised and instrumented fusion of the CVJ performed. Albendazole was continued for 6 weeks and at 3 months' follow-up, the patient remains asymptomatic with no recurrence on imaging. Conclusions The authors conclude that in tropical regions, hydatid disease of the cervical spine should be considered in the differential diagnosis of patients presenting with high cervical compressive myelopathy, especially when associated with fever. Spinal hydatosis may mimic a bony lesion on imaging and should be kept in mind, as in addition to routine decompression, use of scolicidal agents and intact removal of cysts have a significant effect on reducing the recurrence rate and improving the outcome.

Beekeeping practice started a long time ago in Nepal, and nowadays it is gaining momentum as a highly valued and income-generating activity for the local people of the Himalayan region. Five specie...