About me

I’m a Siddi (Afro-Indian), Queer, divergent, non-binary, immigrant born into a Muslim-Hindu household in rural Bangalore, India, with my primary roots in the coastal town of Bengre, Mangalore, Karnataka. Our family emigrated due to the threat of religious communal violence & relocated every few years. I grew up across several countries from Russia to Saudi Arabia, with most time spent in the South West Asia & North Africa region. As a third culture child, “where is home” is a complex & puzzling question. Home is never about nations or borders. Home is where community is & that can be built anywhere.

The earthy scent of the first monsoon. Cream on top of fresh milk. Flickering candlelight while playing the board game “Ludo” during power outages. These are all fond moments of my childhood in rural Bangalore, India.

Only now do I realize that my community’s joy was often a resilient coping mechanism. Fragmented memories include us boiling all our water, waiting in long lines outside public clinics for vaccines & relatives passing away from fevers and colds. Today, peering through the lens of my scientific training and grassroots activism, I see that infectious diseases were a big part of my life: macroscopic inequity manifested through microscopic germs. In the Global South- infectious diseases are still the #1 cause of death. My fervor & curiosity to understand the molecular workings of the universe & love for community motivate my science. My long-term goal is to decolonize academic medicine & biomedical research by pushing for transformation in graduate medical education & increased medicine-wide focus on root causes of negative health outcomes- systemic oppression, inequity & capitalist state-violence.

Praxis- the practical application of political theory in daily life- is my approach to liberation. We practice the beliefs that enable oppressive structures everyday- like hierarchies, power dynamics, transactional relationships, individualism, a culture of punishment / competition/ isolation & loneliness, policing other people, reducing everything into binaries of good/bad or us/ them, hyper self-reliance, arbitrary social norms to be perceived as “successful”, grind & productivity culture, etc. We are socialized since birth to abide by arbitrary social constructs & norms that force us to internalize capitalism as a law of nature & most never question their beliefs or way of life. Capitalism makes all injustice profitable. I work with people to systematically dismantle their social & mental cages & practice everyday abolition, collectivism, anarchism & socialism. We build macro systems of justice by scaling up the “micro”.