Author: akshay
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Being Comfortable With the Non-Binary: A Code of Conduct Case Study
Today morning I woke up to this message in FSCI‘s chat room: What happens here when a member reveals themselves to be a transphobe in another room? 🤔 I immediately said “COC applies”. The FSCI code of conduct, which I have contributed to the making of, is very clear about keeping FSCI an inclusive space.…
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How To Talk With People
It was just yesterday that I read a book on behaviour change through positive reinforcement. Today I put aside all work and read another book: How to Talk with People: A Program for Preventing Troubles that come when People Talk Together by Irving J. Lee. It was recommended by Parth Sharma in response to my…
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Don’t Shoot Your Colleagues
Over the course of my life a realization slowly dawned on me about feedback. Negative feedback rarely worked. And positive feedback worked magically! I started noticing this in myself first. I was learning rapidly and growing in environments where all I received was positive feedback. And wherever people were very cynical, I was just lost…
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Everyone is Everything (To Varying Degrees) – How Binaries Suck
Yesterday in a journal club at SOCHARA, we were faced with many challenging classification questions. The paper we were discussing was titled “Metabolic non-communicable disease health report of India: the ICMR-INDIAB national cross-sectional study (ICMR-INDIAB-17)“. The second classification question was in the title. What is a “metabolic NCD”? Are there non-metabolic NCDs? The paper was…
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Ambedkar and Gandhi — They Couldn’t Have Been Friends
For plenty of reasons, Ambedkar never considered Gandhi as “Mahatma”. And “naturally”, Gandhi rarely understood Ambedkar. In my experience of understanding how my privileges influence how I act, I believe that I’ve been able to appreciate where the difference between Ambedkar and Gandhi arise from. This is perhaps obvious to many scholars. But it was…
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Repeated Names in NSQ Manufacturing
There’s a 2014-2016 survey of drugs. That’s followed up with smaller surveys by CDSCO. We will compare with March 2023 report. Let’s look for repeated offenders. Skymap Pharmaceuticals Uttarakhand. In the old survey they had 14.04% samples NSQ. In March 2023, they’re NSQ again in 2 samples. (We do not know how many samples from…
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Engaging with the System – A Visit to IISc
When Prasanna heard John and I were leaving Hari’s farewell party to join Ravi in the trip to Indian Institute of Science, PS let out a characteristic sigh and said “all the best”. It probably comes from experience of how incorrigible people in elite institutions are when it comes to thinking about broader determinants of…
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A Community for Online Action in Community Health
Today Guru, John, Swamy, Ravi, and I met in the Health for All – Learning Center workspace at SOCHARA. We discussed an action plan for the next 3 years (with a focus on 2023-24) for the Digital Archives Platform unit at SOCHARA. The archives becomes a core activity for a community of community health activist-scholars…
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Non-violence Wasn’t Gandhi’s Only Message
I have read only one book of Gandhi – “My Experiments with Truth“. I read this when I was 13 or 14. I haven’t re-read the book after that. But Gandhi’s thoughts influences me to this day. “I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills.” Today…
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Book Review: Everything is Obvious – Once You Know The Answers
I first saw this book in the Internet Freedom Foundation thread on which books people there were reading. Then I saw it on Scott Young’s blog which I have been following since childhood. I never got around to reading it till yesterday when I got into a 19 hour train ride to reach Sevagram for…