Musings of a White Haired Teenager

Five years. One hundred and ninety-seven posts. It began in the furnace of lived experience - the second wave of COVID in Kolkata, the spring of 2021, a time when oxygen cylinders became currency, fear became routine, and narratives became survival tools. Layered on top of that was the theatre of state elections, because history, in its usual lack of subtlety, prefers to pile crisis upon crisis and then sit back to see who notices the pattern. Five years later, as another round of elections circles back, I have the opportunity to acknowledge five years of writing.  These numerous posts also elicited two hundred and thirty-seven comments that chose to show up in public on the blog site, and an uncounted archive of messages that arrived privately - some thoughtful, some generous, some irritated, and a few that mistook irritation for insight. This was never meant to be a quiet archive; it has always been a space where reaction - of any kind - signals that something landed, something u...

Anonymous Courage Those who are regular readers of my blog would have noted that in a mildly entertaining turn of events, a supposedly anonymous interlocutor has been responding to my recent posts with admirable enthusiasm, apparently operating under the assumption that anonymity has rendered him unrecognizable . It is a charming belief. One almost hesitates to disturb it. Because, in truth, the identity is not particularly difficult to discern. The patterns are familiar, the voice is consistent, and the performance - how shall one put this -lacks the subtlety required for a convincing disguise. And just to make the exercise even more efficient, I have already been generous enough to identify the author as male, thereby eliminating roughly half the possible candidates in one polite stroke. One imagines the remaining pool is now feeling slightly uncomfortable. Out of courtesy, I have chosen not to identify him. There is a certain generosity in allowing someone the comfort of their cho...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

(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...

(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...

(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.”...

(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...

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...

Loyalty is usually sold as noble. A virtue. A steady hand on the rudder of life. But in relationships, that noble loyalty takes a darker turn when the newcomer enters. Suddenly, loyalty isn’t a gift freely given — it’s a demand, an ultimatum. Prove your devotion not by being present, but by erasing everything that came before. The past isn’t just behind you; it becomes the enemy. This is not loyalty as trust or love. This is loyalty as ransom. “You want me? Burn everything else.” The friends who stood by you for decades. A threat. The family who shaped you? A liability. The institutions that made you whole? Dangerous. Your history, once your anchor, is reclassified as evidence of betrayal. To stay “loyal,” you must file for divorce from your own past. The script is ruthless. Meet an old friend, and you’re accused of disloyalty. Recall a fond memory, and suspicion grows. Show affection for anyone from “before,” and suddenly your loyalty is in question. The newcomer doesn’t just want to ...

One of my loyal readers, in a comment stated, “Genuine loyalty is moral clarity wrapped in care,” in response to a recent blog . And opened a Pandora’s Box – loyalty - that quaint little word we like to dress up in Sunday clothes, pretending it’s still shiny, noble, and worth something in a world addicted to the next big thing or the next magnificent person. I used to think loyalty was invisible, hidden quietly in gestures and choices. But no—actions out you every time. Actions don’t lie. Wear the tie with the university crest, and suddenly you’re branded: “company man.” I heard that more than once when I was chairing my department. And yes, guilty as charged. Because loyalty to an institution, to a person, to a relationship, actually meant something to me. Imagine that—choosing predictability over chaos, constancy over the sugar rush of novelty. What an old-fashioned fool. The truth is: loyalty has a price. It demands sacrifice. It demands compromise. It demands giving up some dreams,...

I will put the associated song here in case you want to listen to it. Promises Without a Bottle A kind and thoughtful reader commented on the most recent blog and said that what eventually matters is walking toward the future with quiet clarity. Got me thinking. Sounds beautiful, almost poetic. But let’s not kid ourselves. Clarity in relationships is reaching perfection, and perfection is no small trick. Because clarity happens when promises and actions converge. When they don’t, the whole thing falls apart. Promises without action? That’s fluff, nothing more than sweet talk floating in the air. Action without promise? That’s just confusing—why the heck did you bother if there’s no suggestion of a future, no hint you’ll ever repeat it again? Sure, the promises— I care for you, I think about you —sound noble, but words without action are nothing but stage props. The real test of a narrative is not how pretty the dialogue sounds, but whether it can stand up, walk into the room, and pou...

A reader kindly commented on the last blog and made a very important point. In narrative theory there is always an intended audience, and those who think they control the narrative have that audience in mind. It is not always about cleverness, or manipulation, or even power. Sometimes it is simply about survival. The one who crafts the story, trying to write out a character from the plot to make space for the newcomer, is often desperate, doing whatever it takes to keep the new guy happy, like buying a round you can’t afford just so you’re not the one left at the table with empty hands. You tell the newcomer what they want to hear because you’ve got nothing else, because maybe stroking their ego buys you another story, another sliver of a life that already feels like it’s slipping through your fingers. The story becomes less of a weapon and more of a life raft. But as the reader asked— “in my own story, am I the narrator, the newcomer, or the one written out?” —that’s where the whole t...