Welcome to daktre.com! A compilation of writing, reflections, actions and curations of mine since 2005. One way to navigate daktre is to randomly browse through the categories of articles organised here. In case you wandered here, that is better.
daktre is the full meal drawing from different kitchens. Most of the cooking is happening in Crossroads/ಅಡ್ಡರಸ್ತೆ or at Kaanu, both being Obsidian-driven digital gardens/kitchens where several incomplete notes are being inter-woven into meaningful bites. Meanwhile, I am building an archive of interesting documents I find on South Indian Adivasi studies at Doddasampige, which attempts to become an open online annotated bibliography on Adivasi studies. That apart, my notes on public health, birds, wildlife & natural-history and poetry are here, as are occasional campaigns I take up. Reviews of books, events or other stuff and notes that do not fit anywhere else are here too. Tech-talk is an archive from an era where new tech-stuff were fascinating enough even if they were not othwerwise integrated into my life. Of late, tech-notes and reflections are integrated into notes and writings elsewhere or enable the other kinds of writings – like on Obsidian, which enables a very non-linear way of thinking, writing and visualisation – like Crossroads/ಅಡ್ಡರಸ್ತೆ or Kaanu.I am otherwise a medical doctor & work at the Institute of Public Health Bengaluru. I am also a licensed ham radio operator with a call-sign VU2JWD. That apart, I run (typically 10K & half-marathons), bake (breads and such), brew (largely wine), compost (mainly with soldier flies), and sing. I have been an advocate of open-knowledge and have hence been on Wikimedia Commons and have been a Wikipedia editor since 2005.
For many years, I have been a resident of BR Hills, India. Most of my schooling was in Bengaluru, and I went to Mysore Medical College to study medicine. For my masters in public health, I went to ITM, Antwerp where I am today a member of the General Council. For my PhD in public health from Université Catholique de Louvain (Brussels, Belgium) I studied how organisational change could occur within public services such as health in Tumkur district. After that I’m back at BR Hills where some of us run a public health research field station. We work on various aspects of health equity, Social determinants of health and Adivasi health, but also collaborate with social movements and academia for action on other axes of health inequities. I am on the editorial board of Health Policy & Planning, International Journal of Equity in Health & on PLoS Global Public Health.
I have a great interest in life, human or otherwise, particularly birds (all my bird records go on eBird) and wildlife (1500+ records on iNat). Apart from various public health issues mostly to do with health policy and systems research and teaching (at Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp (Belgium), at Sangath (Goa) and a few other places.
On the English wikipedia, I contribute mainly to articles on birds and plants. I also dabble a bit with medical articles especially public health, historical biographies of little known naturalists, especially British and on biographies of notable contemporary Indian scientists and academia. My photographs generally go on Wikimedia commons and are on these same subjects. I have earlier done some mechanical yet important tasks such as fighting vandalism, vote on tools, ask for page protection and watch BLPs. I am also on a few other Wikiprojects such and have been on the editorial board of WikiJournal of Medicine. What I cannot write on Wikipedia, I write here. I consider myself as a passionate advocate of FOSS, but lot of that happens on a Mac…so oops!