Category: Opinion
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Who’s the Default Cook in your Home?
There’s plenty written by women about how unfair division of household chores is the classic symptom of patriarchy. They’ve written about how it is not just about cooking, but also about the mental burden of thinking about the house — about grocery shopping, about making a list for grocery shopping, about keeping a mental checklist…
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Read Everything
In hindsight, this was the most important advice I got as a child. Read everything. Newspaper. Books. Textbook. Children’s magazines. Even the paper which the shopkeeper uses to wrap vegetables in. I followed it religiously for most of my life. I used to wake up and read the whole newspaper from first page to last.…
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No, You Don’t Understand Intersectionality
Most people who use the word intersectionality understand it as “sum of various identities”. Ask them to explain what intersectionality means and they’ll go “Oh, so think about a Dalit woman, she’s doubly oppressed — through caste and through gender” This is a crude and problematic understanding of intersectionality. Firstly, it leads to what’s called…
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The Logic of Social Justice
Today in a discussion at IPH, Meena said “we should all fight against discrimination”. And Prashanth asked “Isn’t that your personal politics? What if people don’t agree with it?” What Prashanth was really asking was “Is there any logic to the demand for social justice?” “Isn’t it just politics?” This is the same discussion I…
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How the World Should Be and How the World Is
There are two modes of thinking in society and social work. “How The World Should Be” mode, and “How The World Is” mode. There is a constant friction between these two. This friction explains hundreds of debates I’ve been in and many of my own moral dilemmas. Understanding this friction and being able to categorize…
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Imaginary Heroes and Why A Radical Commitment to Truth is the Only Solution to Inequity
In my post about truth and Gandhi, I wrote about how a radical commitment to truth is the missing ingredient in the world today. In this post I will elaborate on that. To do this, I’ll first recap what it means, then talk about the “inverted iceberg” model of savarna mediocrity, and finally illustrate what…
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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…