Author: Akshat Rathi

Akshat Rathi is a senior reporter for Bloomberg News. He has previously worked at Quartz, The Economist and The Conversation. His writing has appeared in Nature, The Guardian and The Hindu. He has a PhD in chemistry from Oxford University and a BTech in chemical engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai.

It’s not just about wanting

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The desire to want is not enough to make someone do what is needed to get it. This is to say: desire ≠ motivation (to do).

We tend to want a lot more than we can actually get. I feel the solution lies in deeply caring about what you want. If you care enough, you will do enough and make it happen.

You want to learn something, care about learning it. You want to achieve something, care about achieving it. You want to give something, care about giving it.

There are far too many distractions around us. If you don’t care, you won’t do. 

India’s new anti-malarial drug

Akshat Rathi

Indian pharmaceutical firm Ranbaxy has launched the drug Synriam, which it claims will prove a more efficient and simpler treatment for malaria. With its affordable price, Synriam may well be a step towards achieving the WHO’s goal of eradicating malaria by 2050, but Ranbaxy cannot take all the credit for it.

Ranbaxy launches new anti-malarial Synriam – Chemistry World, 3 May 2012

A list of main references for the article is here.

Fixing the bugs in our brain

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We human beings should be famous for doing irrational things predictably. No, I am not joking.

Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, wrote a book about it. The take home message from his TED talk is that the only way to stop making some those mistakes is to be able to challenge our intuitions. The inherent difficulty in doing so cannot be overstated but that is exactly why we make those mistakes time and again without realising.