The precision of the blade is a response to the harshness of Ruit’s own childhood in Olangchung Gola, a remote settlement near the Tibetan border. In his youth, he watched his younger sister succumb to tuberculosis because his family could not afford the long journey to a hospital. This memory stayed with him as he walked for fifteen days to reach his first school in Darjeeling, and later as he studied medicine in India and Australia. He realized that for those living in poverty, blindness was not just a physical affliction but a total loss of agency.
In the 1980s, working alongside Fred Hollows, Ruit developed a manual, stitchless method of cataract surgery. To make the procedure accessible, he founded the Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology to manufacture intraocular lenses locally. These small disks are produced in Kathmandu for the price of a simple meal. Because the incision is designed to seal itself, patients in dusty, high-altitude villages can return to their lives almost immediately, their vision restored by a piece of plastic no larger than a raindrop.
As the early months of 2026 arrive, the Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation has moved through the mountain passes and the southern plains, nearing the conclusion of its five-year goal. Ruit has personally treated more than 130,000 patients, yet he continues to travel to the most isolated outreach camps to operate in person. In these quiet moments, when the bandages are finally removed and a grandfather sees his grandchild for the first time, the long walk the surgeon took as a boy finds its final destination.