I am Prashanth Nuggehalli Srinivas, Prashanth for short and NS for shorter and daktre for better. I have been on the english wikipedia since 7th February, 2005. I am a resident of BR Hills, India. Most of my schooling was in Bengaluru, and I went to Mysore to study medicine, after which I came South to the forests of BR Hills where I actually started living (and learning!). For my masters in public health, I went to ITM, Antwerp where I learnt some more. 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 have a great interest in life, human or otherwise, particularly birds (all my bird records go on eBird) and wildlife (1000+ records on iNat). Apart from various public health issues mostly to do with health policy and systems research and teaching, I also do some work on mental health.
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 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 am on the editorial board of WikiJournal of Medicine. What I cannot write on Wikipedia, I write for my website. I consider myself as a passionate advocate of FOSS, but lot of that happens on a Mac...so oops! I have conducted hands-on workshops and trainings on Wikipedia editing in schools and institutions, like this one in Mangalore. Leave me a note if you are interested in doing one.
...that vulnerability to bad science, quackery, slimming products and expensive shiny objects is a side-effect of being human, as opposed to being a chimpanzee. I shun these, but tolerate them.
...that health, education and social welfare are state subjects and markets fail in creating equity in these sectors.
...that the the root of hegemony is knowledge inequity. Wikipedia is an expression of knowledge equity.
...in the future, a welfare state will grant RIGHT TO BANDWIDTH that guarantees a reasonable bandwidth to every citizen of the state.
...solidarity, once upon a time, a defining character of society is now a goal...hmm.
...we are limited by our language. The better your language, more the limitations.
