ABOUT US
You May Say I’m A Dreamer, But I’m Not The Only One…
We’re just two ‘Common Folks’ straight out of R.K. Laxman’s cartoons—navigating life’s ups and downs with a blend of curiosity, grit, a dash of humor, and a whole lot of hope.
Dreamers? Absolutely. Because we’re the hopeful ones. HOPE keeps us grounded as we roll up our sleeves and dive headfirst into the wonderfully unpredictable intersection of public and planetary health.
Our journeys into medicine may be separated by a decade—one of us has spent over 30 years practicing public health in every role imaginable, while the other has spent over a decade capturing the intricate dance between humanity, health, and the environment through the lens of a storyteller. Together, our stories intertwine with a shared purpose.
We’ve sweated through blistering heatwaves and shivered in the biting cold, all in the name of fieldwork. It wasn’t just the two of us either; we watched health workers and entire communities face the same elements, battling through the very weather patterns that seem to have a personal vendetta against human comfort. Yet through it all, we’ve witnessed resilience, humor, and the undeniable connection between climate and health unfold before our eyes.
So here we are—two ordinary people, wandering through the extraordinary paths of human evolution, with stories to tell and lessons still being learned. If there’s one thing we’ve discovered, it’s that while the climate might be unpredictable, so are we. Resilience, adaptation and mitigation are the keywords.
Stick around—you might just see what we mean.
– Raj Shankar and Kaushik
Hope is not optimism. Optimism assumes the best and assumes its inevitability, which leads to passivity, as do the pessimism and cynicism that assumes the worst. Hope, like love, […] means recognizing the uncertainty of the future and making a commitment to try to participate in shaping it. It means facing difficulties and accepting uncertainty. […] To hope is to accept despair as an emotion but not as analysis. To recognize that what is unlikely is possible, just as what is likely is not inevitable. To understand that difficult is not the same as impossible.
Not Too Late
(Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua)
The Dreamers
Dr. Raj Shankar Ghosh
Senior consultant and Advisor, public health and climate health
Dr. Kaushik Ghosh
Visual Documentarian & Information Designer, Global public Health and planetary health