Musings of a White Haired Teenager

(Audio Deep Dive  English ; Audio Deep Dive  Bangla ) With a little breathing room between semesters, I found myself wandering through old war films, which is how one accidentally relearns uncomfortable truths about human behavior, because wars—ethically questionable but pedagogically efficient—have always understood one thing very clearly: if you want to reduce a threat, you blow up the bridges. Not because bridges are evil, but because bridges connect things, and connections are inconvenient. Cinema has reinforced this lovingly for decades— A Bridge Too Far , The Bridge on the River Kwai —entire traditions built around the idea that you don’t negotiate with the bridge, you remove it, preferably in a dramatic collapse with smoke, water, and unmistakable finality, because the real advantage isn’t just that the bridge is gone, it’s that you were there to watch it fall. Once the bridge crumbles, the threat is reduced, the geography is rewritten, the map changes, the story c...

  Two Boats and a Sinking Feeling   (Audio Deep Dive English ; Audio Deep Dive  Bangla ) There are people who try to live with one foot on each of two boats, and don’t we all know one, or perhaps—brace yourself—you are one. The boats can be anything: two incompatible companions, two divergent cities, two competing careers, two distinct identities, two fantasies pretending to be life choices. From a distance it looks impressive—balanced, worldly, evolved—but life has absolutely no patience for emotional acrobatics, and sooner or later the elegant pose becomes an involuntary split. You can keep the illusion alive for a while, convince yourself both boats are somehow gliding in synchrony, and say noble lines like “I belong to both places equally” or “Both companions matter in their own ways,” which is adorable until you realize the universe is snickering because every boat has its own current and eventually they drift apart, leaving you wobbling between them wit...

Pivot, Please (If you just want to listen try the Audio Deep Dive  in English) On a recent trip, I had to make a quick decision — a “pivot,” as we now call it. You remember “pivot,” right? The sacred buzzword of the Covid era. Back then, it was corporate-speak for “we have no idea what’s happening, so let’s pretend this is the best thing after sliced bread.” Everyone was pivoting — restaurants, universities, your yoga instructor, even your dog groomer, not to mention your lover who would spend countless data on secretive video calls. The word became a badge of virtue. So, there I was, on an international trip, forced to pivot. Pivoting was essentially managing risks, because we all take risks and when we have choices between the most risky to somewhat risky decisions we pivot to the least risky. Risk-taking always brings along its anxious sibling: risk management. You can’t take a risk without simultaneously crafting the story of why it was “the right move,” and pivoting was select...

The Message in the Mask ( Audio Deep Div e English; Audio Deep Dive Bangla) Covid did many terrible things, but perhaps its greatest magic trick was convincing us that distance could feel like closeness. We told ourselves it was noble—this “human contact reduction.” Stay home, save lives, text furiously. The digital message became the new handshake, the video call the new hug. For a while, we even believed it. We said things like, “See? Connection doesn’t have to be physical,” while sitting in our pajamas, lit by the unholy glow of a laptop camera, nodding into the void of a Zoom rectangle. Then the world reopened. People went back to coffee shops, airports, classrooms, and whatever passed for normal. The masks came off, but the habits stayed. Somewhere between “Can you hear me?” and “You’re on mute,” we learned that the digital proxy actually worked—sort of. Messaging systems exploded, and suddenly a thumbs-up emoji or a five-word text—“thinking of you, stay safe”—became the social e...

The book is done. Finally. After months of listening, transcribing, analyzing, and occasionally arguing with myself like a deranged panel of one, it’s finished. You’d think that would feel definitive, but even as I close the last chapter, a familiar thought sneaks back in — like that uninvited guest who shows up just as you’re doing the dishes. Managing change — or crisis, or anything that threatens to ruin the illusion of control - isn’t really about managing facts. It’s about managing stories.  Not the grand epics of the powerful, not the government’s carefully pressed statements with their shiny slogans, but the small, handcrafted tales we spin just to stay upright. The stories we use to make chaos feel organized, to justify our choices, and to convince ourselves that we still have agency while the roof is caving in. The focus groups I spent time with drove this home. Everyone had a story — their survival kit. The logic didn’t always hold, but the narrative did. They needed a ve...

I’m finishing the last section of my book on Covid narratives, and I keep circling back to the same conclusion: people make decisions on the basis of stories. Not evidence. Not logic. Stories. And not just their own stories—other people happily jump in to reinforce them, especially when there’s something in it for them. During the pandemic, science was catching up as it went along, so we leaned on stories to guide our actions. Remember the “15-minute rule”? Stay near a Covid-positive person for fewer than 15 minutes and you were supposedly safe, like the virus had a stopwatch. At 14:59 you’re fine, at 15:01 you’re doomed. I used that little gem myself when I delivered food to the sick family of a dear friend (bondhu). Did I actually believe it? Not really. But I wanted to believe it, and the narrative gave me cover. And that’s the thing: we don’t just invent these stories alone. We get help. People around us validate, repeat, and polish the narrative until it feels like the truth. And...