Musings of a White Haired Teenager

(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...