Aparna Sachdev > Recent Status Updates

What else does one do but read this whilst waiting for a delayed flight to finally take off?

Lots of food for thought in the case studies and that rare gift of treating other people's narratives with dignity and care makes for a gratifying read. I'm a bit disappointed by the ocularcentrism, sigh. What in heaven's name is "musical imagery"? If music is a predominantly auditory phenomenon, can't we at least admit there is such a thing as the "mind's ear"? The "mind's eye" has been a thing for centuries.

"...maybe we need a better narrative to describe humanity's "triumph." Our story doesn't begin with a weapon...a man. The symbols of our ultimate technological achievements shouldn't be the atom bomb...the Hoover Dam. Instead, they should be the Pill, the speculum, the diaphragm."
survive before you thrive, makes sense. I wonder about the veracity of the first sign of civilization idea attributed to Margaret Mead.

Decent explanations that make sense to somebody who knows essentially zilch about coding + zero visual representations = good learning experience. I also like the practice website - keeps stuff from slipping out of my head as I read.

I only wish I could listen to these stories read out in the original sindhi. So much of this was supposed to be oral tradition, passed on from parent to child. Assimilation was a double-edged sword- it robbed the Sindhi people of our roots, even as it successfully grafted us into our new lives. Perhaps it is not too late - books like this anthology help us pick up the threads where they were so infelicitously dropped

My reactions to the book so far include periodically thinking "wha-a-at?", and "what the actual soup!". I'm stunned. Centuries worth of the medical equivalent of algorithmic bias that women rarely get to know, all in one place. Reminds me a little of Naomi Woolf's The Beauty Myth in tone and also content, to some extent.

My God! What towering, ableist privilege, to lay claim to imagination, and internal worlds, to acknowledge these as inviolate for herself, and to then turn around and claim that people with intellectual disabilities, autistic people - in short, people who don't think exactly like her - can have no part of it. "...and ever since, I've hated vulnerable people". For shame. Is that the child that books built?