Author: akshay
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Scraping the Bottom of the Pyramid in Indian Healthcare
At least 300 million people in India live below poverty line. And that line is drawn somewhere around an income of ₹1000-1500 per month. If we draw the line double that, the number of poor also doubles. That’s the bottom of the bottomless pyramid. Half a billion people who earn less than ₹3000 a month.…
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Why I am Back on WhatsApp
Long time readers of this blog knows that I have a very strained relationship with WhatsApp. When I deleted my WhatsApp account a couple of years ago, I was at a place where personal productivity was the most important to me. For example, I wrote this: Thirdly, and most importantly, people are unable to work…
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Asking For Help
Many days ago, in a discussion with some of my colleagues, I realized two things. I trust less on others (compared to how much I trust on me – even in things I have no clue about) and I rarely ask for help. It probably is also true that the latter is because of the…
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Objective Assessment of Primary Healthcare Leadership
In our primary healthcare leadership fellowship that’s been running for 2 years now, we’ve only used self-assessment by fellows as a measure of impact till now. While self-assessment is the easiest to perform and also gives a good sense of subjective measures like confidence and readiness, bringing objectivity to the measurement of impact is important…
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Be Irreplaceable Workers And Replaceable Leaders
A good worker is someone who produces so much value that they become irreplaceable. As Cal Newport writes in the book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” knowledge workers who have the most satisfying careers don’t just “follow their passion”. Instead, they build rare and valuable skills that they leverage to negotiate better career…
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Why I Shaved Beard
Well kempt, clean shaven man dressed in a coat, pant, shoes, and a tie. That’s the typical figure of leadership. Anarchists hate that. Feminists hate that. Why should leadership look a certain way and act a certain way? Who is excluded from the ideal image of a leader? In medical school, for example, it was…
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How To Live With Opposition
There are enough number of people in the world who will tell you that the world is becoming “increasingly polarized”, that respectful political debate is “a thing of the past”, that people talk past each other “all the time”. You will also be forced to pick a side. “You’re either with us or against us.”…
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On Leadership
One can be a leader only when one desires something to happen in the world. This something can be called “change”. Leaders want to change the world (or a part of it) in some way. The change that a leader wants to see in the world – the impact they want to make – that…
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Power is Useful
In my post about giving up ideological purism, I talked about how it felt like activism was weak resistance, and not something powerful. I still hadn’t discovered an answer as to how to engage with and change the system powerfully. I have an answer now. Power. To make powerful change, one has to have power.…
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With Great Power Comes Great Accountability
Where should the line between ‘doctors should be held accountable for medical malpractice’ and ‘doctors are humans and they can make mistakes’ be? [Source] There is a world where this dichotomy/binary is not entirely false – medical negligence/malpractice jurisdiction. And the courts in such cases have a very nuanced approach to this question. For example,…