Category: Opinion
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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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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…
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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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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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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…