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Fakery Without Imagination

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Fakery Without Imagination The notion of being fake and creating information that appears plausible is nothing new. Because mythology, folklore, and everyday life have long operated where deception is not only permitted but often admired - provided it is done well. The Trojan Horse was not the work of someone with a weekend app, a digital photograph altering tool, and an inflated sense of their own cleverness. It required imagination, patience, timing, and most importantly an understanding of how people think. Good deception has always had a certain elegance. It respected the intelligence of the audience. It required the deceiver to be, inconveniently enough, intelligent. Fast forward to the present, where we have achieved what can only be described as the great democratization of fakery. The tools are now everywhere. Everyone has access. Anyone can edit an image, construct a narrative, alter a reality, and present it to the world with the quiet confidence of someone who assumes acce...
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The Safe Word: Mentor

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The Safe Word: Mentor (Audio Deep Dive  English ; Audio Deep Dive  Bangla ) In academia a curious word reappears with remarkable regularity: “mentor.” Universities, to their credit, actually use the word correctly. In the academic narrative the mentor occupies a specific role. The student is the protagonist; the mentor stands nearby, offering guidance, asking inconvenient questions, occasionally pointing toward a door the student may not have noticed. It suggests intellectual companionship without ownership of the story. It assumes a respectful distance between guide and protagonist. But words, like species introduced into foreign ecosystems, tend to mutate when they migrate. Outside the university environment the word “mentor” has developed an entirely new career - less about guidance and more about narrative sanitation. For instance, in a situation in which someone once played a rather active role in another person’s life, the messy, logistical, occasionally exhausting ...
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Redacted Naratives

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Unless one has been living under a rock one has heard the word redaction . It sounds official, procedural, almost responsible. Documents are released, transparency is declared, and then entire paragraphs look like they lost a fight with a black marker. Nobody says the document is false; they simply insist that some parts are “not relevant at this time,” which is a polite way of saying the truth has been rearranged into something emotionally convenient. What is fascinating is how perfectly this practice migrates into relationships, where people do not technically speak falsehoods, they just distribute edited versions of reality, and everyone pretends the missing sections never existed. Now imagine if every communication between two people suddenly appeared in its original form, no cropping, no selective memory, no curated narrative for public consumption, and this is possible with people like me who are archivists by the nature of their work – nothing is ever deleted – everything is sav...
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Newcomers Don’t Just Dislike Authors — They Delete Them

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I have had the good fortune to be able to write and even better fortune to be read and appreciated. Writing is my art now and my profession was built on writing; several books, one more coming out soon, and nearly two hundred blog posts each of which has garnered responses that are gratifying although may not always be in agreement in what I had to say. I have enjoyed being an author and hope to continue to be one as long as I can because the author occupies a permanently inconvenient position inside human systems because authors notice sequences, authors remember life such as who used to call every night and who slowly stopped, authors remember when conversations were long and unstructured and when they became scheduled and polite, authors notice when affection turns into formality, when curiosity turns into updates, when someone who once asked questions now merely broadcasts decisions, and authors do not experience these shifts as mysterious accidents but as patterns, which immediate...
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Toxic Investment

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(Audio Deep Dive  English ; Audio Deep Dive  Bangla ) In the world of finance there is a phrase that sounds clinical, almost polite: toxic investment. It marks the moment an investor accepts a truth so final it leaves no room for debate. The investment is no longer underperforming. It is no longer salvageable. It is a net drain. Money has gone in, nothing will ever come out, and every additional dollar only deepens the loss. The rule is brutally simple: write it off, stop funding it, and cut all ties. No sentiment. No memory. Just arithmetic. In a car ride recently a dear friend was talking about his business and how often these toxic investments need to be jettisoned. I am not a finance person. I am not a chartered accountant. But once you understand this logic, you begin to recognize it in places where balance sheets don’t exist—especially in human relationships. I realized that Human relationships have toxic investments too and many of us are in the middle of one. Year...
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Time Recycle

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(Audio Deep Dive  English ; Audio Deep Dive  Bangla ) We are now 15 days away from the "new year" and thankfully the initial salvo of mass-mailed good wishes - fired off through digital networks with military precision and emotional emptiness - has finally died down and we are back to the routine "Morning" and other such meaningless statements on WhatsApp and other platforms. It is time to confront a truth so unromantic that it barely qualifies as content: none of our life narratives are about to change in any significant way. Unless something catastrophic intervenes. You dying. An immediate family member dying. A global war. Another pandemic. Short of these minor inconveniences, the story will trudge on obediently. We will continue to make the same memories, carefully preserving the ones that flatter us and quietly deleting the ones that require accountability. We will ignore the same people - not loudly, not dramatically, but with the sophisticated silence of unre...
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Change Agents

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(Audio Deep Dive  English ; Audio Deep Dive  Bangla ) I am involved in teaching a course in management and as we look at the readings, and I draw on my lived experience as a teacher and a researcher, I confront an element that exists in most systems – from personal relationships to instititutions – the change agent. Every system eventually produces a change agent the way damp walls produce mold - quietly at first, then suddenly everywhere, and by the time you notice you’re already breathing it in. They don’t arrive because the system asked for transformation. They arrive because they can smell fatigue and dissatisfaction, because tired people are the easiest to recruit into dramatic rewrites of reality, and because nothing energizes certain personalities like the chance to insert themselves into the center of someone else’s narrative and call it salvation. At first it’s charm, it’s sincerity, it’s the soft voice with the hard message: “This doesn’t have to be this way.”...
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