Thatched House

It has been a very, very busy year. I wanted December to be the month of PEACE AND QUIET. But it is turning out to be just the opposite. I woke up at 6:20 AM this morning and straight to work; after having slept at 2:00 AM. This post is a stolen moment. Looking back, at the work front I think I have been able to do much this year and I'm satisfied. I changed job midyear and dived into the new one right on, getting all busy at once. I was a columnist for Eastern Mirror for some months. Though I don't have much savings, financially I'm able to help family during crucial moments - Siblings college/university admissions, besides their monthly expenses. I've travelled to all the districts of Nagaland, except Tuensang. Supervision and monitoring plan for all medical directorate officers that I designed I hope will bear fruit. Now, all officers go to the districts every two months and bring back report. Through analysis of reports, I'll be able to understand the h...

Delhi is in the grip of Dengue outbreak again. To date, over 800 cases and 2 deaths have been reported this year. People panic. The blame games do the rounds. Monsoon passes. Winter sets in to dry up the mosquito breeding sites. Cases come down. And it is forgotten. Come next year and the story repeats itself.  Aren’t all seasonal diseases supposed to be that way? The worrying part is that Dengue and vector borne diseases like Malaria, Japanese Encephalitis, and Chikungunya (the sister diseases caused by the bite of mosquitoes) are preventable. Other seasonal diseases like Typhoid, Acute Diarrheal Diseases, and Influenza are also easily preventable diseases. Yet season after season, year after year, we are caught off guard. To a large extent, we ‘let nature take its course’ and we do too little to stop the cycle.  Diagnostic facilities have become more refined, medicines have become better, and hospitals have become more equipped to handle complicated cases. But t...

If I want to increase the rating of this newspaper column , the easiest thing to do is to say something controversial or outrageous. The more bizarre, the better. That’s the way to become popular today. I don’t have to work hard; to be notorious is enough. I might ‘sex it up’ a little. A reference to sex can shoot up sales of magazine, soap, car, color paint, mobile phone, jewelry, movie, book, anything. Or I might say something outrageous against someone. Notoriety can turn a person without talent into a celebrity overnight. In this generation, no one wants to be ordinary. Everyone wants to rise above the crowd and be celebrated. We don’t want to be normal. We want to be special. The world doesn’t bother what means we use to become famous. It doesn’t matter if we have to sell our dignity, our self-respect, our very soul for it. To become popular has become the ultimate goal. Online social media like facebook provides platform for every ordinary person a kind of podium or a wo...

Reader’s Digest says that good writing is simple ABC: Accuracy, Brevity, and Clarity. I took that to heart. Another advice is to keep the language as simple as possible. So, I try to write in a language where readers will not need the dictionary. I break down complex words and shorten sentences. I follow certain rules that I learned from other writers, for example: never fall in love with your first draft, break the rules but after having learned the rules, to be a writer there’s no other way but to write, and so on. That’s how I write. I remember how I started writing my thoughts. My dad who was also my headmaster made us write essays. In one class, he decided to read out one essay. He said that one of us wrote it but he won’t tell who. As he started to read the essay titled ‘My Neighbor’, my ears started to warm up. It was mine. Dad might have noticed my discomfort and he made sure that no one knows it’s me and he remarked in the end, ‘It is a good essay’. When other student...

For Eastern  Mirror column In my presentations, I point to the health statistics and say that these are not just numbers in a table, shades of colors in a chart, or dots in a map; but they are measures of human suffering. Behind such mathematical and statistical figures of our health and disease data are real people who either suffered or died. Chances are that in the process data entry, compilation, and reporting; health statistics can lose sight of this and reduce human suffering to nothing but statistical data to measure performance of various policies and programs. I say this, to also stress on the need for reliable data, because those who manipulate or give false reports are not simply playing with numbers, but with human lives. It is also a motivating force for me that even though I don’t work in a hospital anymore to treat patients; through the use of health data, I try to study the dynamics of human health and think of ways to lessen human suffering and death. Everybody...