About Me

My identity and educator role

I am an Indian American public health researcher, who has mostly been a writer, editor, and community health trainer in public health-related nonprofits. During the pandemic I (finally) completed my dissertation on agriculture, health and nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Apart from a brief time as an assistant administrator of a small hospital on the south-west coast of India, I have been working in different areas of public health communication and research. Working on issues at the intersection of vulnerability and health in India have shaped my values of perseverance, sensitivity, and empathy, and have taught me to reject some labels foisted on me and accept what I choose. I no longer take other people’s perception of myself as my ‘self’.

 As an immigrant, cis-gendered brown woman, living in a working class, segregated town in the Bay Area, I negotiate among various identities and move with some ease between these different worlds. I believe that identity is largely socially constructed. I see myself as a human being, while others situate me within their notions of my identity. My substantive interactions with organizations and people from different cultural and social milieux have helped me navigate some of the challenges of living in two or more worlds, navigating the complexities and fluidity of my identities.

I am conscious of my gender identity, which too is socially constructed, because during most of my life I was expected to follow cumbersome rules about behavior, clothing, and cultural expectations. During my field work I heard about the prevalence of gender-based violence meted out to women who transgressed gender and societal boundaries. My experiences of being at the receiving end of misogynism and patriarchy, made me aware of those who experience oppression, those who silenced, and those whose agency has been undermined or taken away.

Though I was raised in a family imbued with a sense of justice and idealism and the Indian state of Kerala where I am from, instituted egalitarian people-oriented policies, it was not until I travelled and worked in other parts of India that I began to understand social justice and oppression in a visceral way. Walking near the banks of the river Ganges, in the Indian state of Bihar, I watched an exhausted new mother, weak with blood loss, on top of anemia (most Indian women are anemic), try to shoo the flies from the face of her infant. I turned to the Medical Mission nun, who I had accompanied, to understand why there was such exhaustion, such life. Then later that same evening in a nearby village¸ while the men debated and decided at a community meeting, women had to stay silent and hidden behind the curtain.

It was also in the villages of Bihar where I encountered Paulo Freire’s contextual model of adult literacy classes, with language lessons based on the learners' cultural and personal experiences, and from themes important to them, drawn from their real experiences.

I am becoming more aware of my positionality. Traversing the different worlds has an advantage, in that I am forced to examine my assumptions and my socio-cultural baggage. Turning an interrogatory eye on myself, I realize that I have benefited through my privileged social position and background (ancestry, heritage, and culture) for access to that I would not have had otherwise. Vestiges of privilege and cultural background are still with me and affect my behavior. My daughter notes that my tone can take on an elitist edge while at other times, I am absolutely tongue tied. This is going to be a journey in understanding more about myself.