This semester, Amiya Bhatia a doctoral student in the SBS department, shared morning prayers on how engaging with data is engaging with people, on studying mortality, and on the power of never looking away – both from what is visible and from what is invisible.
A daily service of Morning Prayers has been kept at Harvard since its founding in 1636. Held Monday through Saturday during Term in Appleton Chapel, the service consists of music, prayer, and a brief address given by a member or friend of the University.
Listen on sound cloud: https://soundcloud.com/harvard/amiya-bhatia-march-28-2016-morning-prayers?in=harvard/sets/morning-prayers-memorial-church (Remarks begin ~9 mins, 30 seconds)
Good morning,
I would like to begin by sharing a passage from Arundhati Roy’s book, the Cost of Living.
- Reading
“The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
2. Comments
Today I hope to share how these very ideas– of never getting used to the disparity of experience around us, of trying to always understand, and of never looking away – sustain me as I study how poverty and injustice affect our health, and as I exist in a world where I write and learn about data.
In public health, we talk a lot about mortality. Infant, child, and maternal mortality. We talk about how – and how many – people get sick and suffer, live and die. The data are endless, neatly arranged in rows, and columns, sent far away from the neighborhoods, and, computer screens through which they were collected so they can be analyzed. I often find myself reminding myself that to understand data, is to begin by understanding all data are people.
I learned this when I collected data in India on programs for children living with HIV. Before the rows and columns were created, I met health workers and families with stories and histories, who ate breakfast the day they were interviewed, who argued with their siblings, and saved to buy sweets to celebrate birthdays. People who lived with, and battled HIV stigma, and whose loved ones coped and endured. I think often of those I worked with – remembering that some will meet them as a row in a data set, others as a small contribution to an HIV statistic. And, I carry this lesson with me when I meet people through datasets and statistics, without an opportunity to meet them in person.
I remember that endless rows and columns are now a series of narratives, surrounded by so much more than the statistic. An obesity rate of 35%, and 70 dead in Lahore take on a different meaning. To consume, and use data should be to exercise empathy and to never look away. But this, I have found, is not easy.
I am learning to never get used to the fact that I study mortality and sickness, to never breeze past a mortality rate, or an estimate of how many children are hungry, but choose to live with the necessary discomfort. To remember, that child mortality, is an aggregate of individual funerals, to see the people within the statistics I consume.
Last year my hometown in Nepal endured a devastating earthquake. I watched the mortality figures rise, desperately hoping they didn’t include those that I loved, and heartbroken by the fact that they included anyone at all. I witnessed friends and colleagues who had never been to Nepal, whose only access to the devastation was through the headlines, care deeply, support events that we organized, and listen as we processed what was happening. I have learned to see an enormous beauty in how we cope, live, and endure, and in the empathy of those around me.
I am also struck by so many efforts to use data to speak truth to power, to chart income inequality, to remember and count each black man killed by the police, to expand voter registration, and to remind us how the conflict in Syria is reducing life expectancy.
Amidst this is the realization that the absence of data is also data – that the invisibility of ethnic minorities, racial groups, women, and the elderly in many research studies, tells us a lot about who matters, who is seen, and who is left out when statistics are created. It tells us that there is much work to be done.
Today I submit to you, that to care about the people in data, is tantamount to caring about people around you. It is to ‘never look away’ from friends and strangers. And, to ‘never look away’ from yourself – to understand, and grapple with your own assumptions, conclusions and biases. It is to look at a percentage or a statistic and wonder who was not included when it was calculated, as it is to look around a room and understand who is present, and also who is missing. Today, I am sustained by a commitment to empathy and to looking – at both what is visible and invisible – and this is at the core of how I hope to be a friend, a sibling, a student, and a researcher.
Thank you for listening. I wish you courage and joy for the week ahead.
Amiya Bhatia: amb803@mail.harvard.edu
