Author: akshay
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Money Matters
Warning: This post discusses money. Like, it’s going to talk about my account balance. Now, for some of the people reading this, their account balance might be much lower than mine. And for others, vice versa. So, if you don’t want to compare lives, you’re better off not reading this. *** Like I said when…
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By Doing “Government’s Work”, Are We Making It Easier for The Government and Worse for the People?
At the end of the CHLP session today Akshay (not me) asked something like: “When we do work that the government should be doing, are we making it easier for the government in some ways, and also making it more difficult to hold the government accountable?” This is a question that only someone who is…
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What Can An MBBS Doctor Do?
In the protest surrounding suspension of Dr Saibal Jana and Dr Dipankar Sengupta, a debate has emerged around what an MBBS doctor can and cannot do, especially in rural settings. This is a very complex question that requires a complex legal answer. There are several relevant case laws and even acts like Clinical Establishments Act…
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Essential Digital Literacy for Community Health Folks: Part 1
Whether one likes it or not, everything is getting digitized. And it is often a good idea for human beings to keep abreast of changes. This is a series of posts designed with community health folks in mind to help them develop mental models around the technologies that make up the digital world. In this…
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Analysis of v-safe response data
Amar Jesani shared in mfc group link to an article about v-safe data release. The actual data could be downloaded from this website called icandecide. The 5GB file can be extracted with p7zip to a 25GB CSV file. $ md5sum consolidated_health_checkin.zip 53ff7a8153f44eaab4166f722b726fe1 consolidated_health_checkin.zip$ md5sum consolidated_health_checkin.csv345cf6ca148832141260aab8638bf0dc consolidated_health_checkin.csv $ wc -l consolidated_health_checkin.csv 144856044 consolidated_health_checkin.csv (That’s 144 million…
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Intersectionality, Queering Science, Lived Experience, and Rationality
Plenty gets written about intersectionality. I have a feeling that my repeated use of the word might be giving some of my readers nausea by now. Yet I feel like there’s plenty that’s not written about intersectionality. Questions like the following: What’s the relationship between intersectionality and science? How does intersectionality validate lived experience? And…
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Love is Enough
“You need power only when you want to do something harmful. Otherwise love is enough to get everything done.” ~Charlie Chaplin Judah (JP) sent me that quote in response to a question that I had posed JP. The question was something like this: “You need power to do things and attain change. But power is…
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The First Feminist in My Life
As usual on mothers’ day, my WhatsApp is filled with images that romanticize the systemic oppression of people who become mothers. Photos of mothers who are at work with children, of “caring”, “loving”, and “sacrificing” mothers, of mothers carrying children on their back (including photos from animal kingdom), and so on. While I find it…
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Decommissioning Technology Centered Theories of Change
If you look closely, many theories of change in public health where technology is involved has, at its heart, the following idea: Adopting Technology -> leads to -> Better Health This is a meaningless assumption guided by the hype around what technology can accomplish and the wishful thinking on solving large problems. Firstly, technology is…
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Finding Direction When Being Pragmatic
You remember how I embraced pragmatism and started chasing power? There was one problem. When you start chasing power with the idea of wielding it for social justice, when and where do you stop chasing power and start wielding it? Take Praveen’s comment for example One possible answer can be that you start wielding…