Kanak Dixit's lament in his conversation with Michael Thompson (#138) that Kathmandu's middle class do not go hiking around Kathmandu seems a tad misplaced, if there are people like Sagun Karmacharya and Yogi Kayastha around (www.karmacharya.com/hike/hike1.htm). With more young "upwardly mobile" professionals like them we can only hope that a critical mass of outdoorsy Nepalis will be venturing out more often to discover the grand scenery of our beautiful nation.

Bhupendra Rawat,
email

. The photograph accompanying "Another Vietnam?" (#138) reminded me of the tragic war the Vietnamese faced. I still remember seeing the picture in Newsweek with the girl fleeing the napalm attack and posing with the photographer who took that picture during the Vietnam War. The naked girl in the picture is Phan Thi Kim. She met her photographer in Havana in 1989, seventeen years after the first picture was taken. She was nine in the first picture, and it so moved me that it was the inspiration for my short story, "Bamko jhirka" and was translated into English in www.paradesh.com volume 12.

You are right to call Iraq as "Another Vietnam". Let the people of the Third World along with the Iraqi people be united and take part in the resistance war against US imperialism.

Hari Har Khanal,
Chitwan

. I would suggest that you devote more space to SARS than the Iraq war in your international pages. The government should have a health worker placed at the airport to keep a check on flights coming in from Singapore, Thailand and Hong Kong.

Harish Agrawal,
Kathmandu