On Twitter, an interesting, entertaining and extremely useful ritual takes place every week on Friday.
FOLLOW FRIDAY is a chance for you to recommend other people on Twitter that you think merit being followed - for any reason at all.
The result is often a mish-mash of suggestions. Some folks are cryptic, just listing user names [...]

Continue reading " Follow Friday Protocol "

A paper in today’s issue of the medical journal Lancet raises questions about the governance of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Gates Foundation is among the biggest charities in the world that funds, and thereby drives much of biomedical research, globally. I heard about it from this article in our daily newspaper, “The Hindu”.
With [...]

Continue reading " Questioning Gates Foundation "

In 2005, more than 135 million children were born; a little under 10 million children under the age of 5 died.
As a medical professional who has devoted his career to caring for kids, my heart aches at these statistics.

No child should die.
That’s my dream. It’s also a gargantuan challenge to meet.There are battles to [...]

Continue reading " Pick Your Battles "

For years, I have operated on little children born with heart defects.
The surgery is complex, risky, even life threatening at times. Families are stressed to breaking point, but weather that storm with courage and fortitude.
While I understood it intuitively, I’m not sure I really ‘get’ it emotionally.
Because today, I took my 2 nieces for [...]

Continue reading " Perspective! "

I don’t often keep copies of comments I leave on blogs, but
this time something prompted me to save it to my hard drive.
Glad I did, because for some reason, the comment has NOT been
moderated on Kivi’s Non Profit Communication Blog - so I’ll
just share my thoughts here about saying ‘Thank you’ when
someone donates to your [...]

Continue reading " Do You Say ‘Thank You’? "

“Give me one moment in time
When I’m all that I thought I could be
When all of my dreams are a heartbeat away…”
I cried last night.
Bitter tears. Of frustration. Pain. And anger.
All the while, words of my favorite Whitney Houston song kept ringing in my mind. A decade and a half of [...]

Continue reading " Why I Cried Last Night "

In case you didn’t know it already, I’m a heart surgeon using my infopreneur business and fundraising efforts to help sponsor life-saving surgery for children from under-privileged families born with congenital heart defects.
Surgery is expensive. Many families cannot afford it. My goal is to help them.
Some years ago, in an effort to systematize [...]

Continue reading " Red Letter Day for CHD Foundation "

On September 12th, 2008, I ran an event called the Heart Kids Tweet-a-thon on Twitter. It was to raise awareness about congenital heart defects in children and generate funds to sponsor heart surgery for some kids.
For 24 hours straight, I posted tweets every 30 minutes. The event had some great supporters, and raised [...]

Continue reading " Lessons from Tweetathon 2009 "

In the year and a half I’ve been on Twitter, there have been a flood of posts on this blog talking about various experiences, thoughts and opinions I’ve had about the service.
Today, I pored over the archives and picked out these “BEST TWITTER TIPS” to share with you - hope you find them interesting, useful [...]

Continue reading " Best Twitter Tips "

If you know me, you know I love to innovate and experiment.
And on Twitter, I run many different tests, try out multiple approaches and flaunt various ‘rules’ (proclaimed by the Twiterati)… all in the interest of finding what works.
Often, I share them on my blog, or in tweets, or with my email list - for [...]

Continue reading " Lock - UNLOCK! "