Musings of a White Haired Teenager

(Audio Deep Dive  English ; Audio Deep Dive  Bangla ) There’s a fairy tale we like to tell children, preferably early and often, that life isn’t about competition. That everyone is special, equally good, equally deserving. It’s a charming story—like Santa Claus or meritocracy—but wildly irresponsible as preparation for adulthood. In the world we actually inhabit, competition isn’t optional. It’s the air we breathe. We live inside hyper-capitalism—of money, of attention, of desire, of emotion—and in every market there is a winner, because someone has to be chosen. The rest are not “also considered.” They are discarded. Politely, of course. With a smile. Possibly with feedback, which is just salt administered with a clipboard. Why someone wins is never about fairness. It’s about judgment. And judgment belongs entirely to the chooser. The chooser decides what counts, what matters, what is suddenly “essential.” Everyone else can have contributed, sacrificed, invested emotiona...

(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...