Classes start at UChicago in like, a 3 weeks, and these past few days, I’ve been trying to kind of prep by looking a bit ahead at the syllabus for my summer session and, there’s an essay that they had us read and it's Clifford Geertz's piece on thick description-and it messed me up about everything I’ve been doing on this blog for the past seven months.

The whole point of this essay-from what I can tell after reading it once-is that talking about what happened, isn't the same as describing the meaning behind it, and that the meaning is layered, it is contextual, and unless you are able to pay enough attention to exactly which people were involved, exactly when, it will all remain illegible-that is the way he described it. He uses the example of a wink-it is not just the eye twitching-it is a wink. You’ve got to know a ton of contextual shit to understand what it means for something to be a wink, obviously, it's kind of blindingly obvious after someone tells you that but it's the type of obvious that will kind of reorganize your whole world in the process.

Anyway, once I finished that essay, it just occurred to me, that I have been writing a bunch of posts here that are, you know, just describing what happened. Thin descriptions. I don’t think I’ve been doing the second, meaning-making layer of it at all, nearly as much as I thought. Writing 'we ate fuchka at a party' does not mean exactly this-it means something far more rich and complex and layered abouttranslation and belonging that took me about a paragraph to even approximate even then, and I’m not sure I even managed.

Anyway, every time I open this blog to write on it now, I have this tiny, Geertz-ian voice that’s like, are you doing a thick description or a thin description? And it has basically made me turn this diary into something that basically has a rubric applied to it that I didn’t really want coming from a diary nobody is reading and that seemed like it was supposed to have lower stakes than that or at least I wanted it to have lower stakes than that. I wanted it to be “today wasweird” and I could leave it at that.

Obviously I’m going to keep writing on this blog, clearly-I am writing this right now. But I’m finding myself already editing myself, cutting out the thin parts, making sure I earn the thick parts, and I don’t really know if it’s going to make the blog better or worse or just more work to deal with. Ask me again in like a month, probably after I’m actually at UChicago and probably have even less time to obsess over my own paragraphs.

Random one but, on my mind anyway. Why does fuchka have three names?

Fuchka is fuchka. My family call them puchka sometimes and some people have called me out saying you know that’s also called golgappa and panipuri when I mention fuchka and I have had this ‘wait what that is not panipuri’ conversation enough times to have it ready to go. A hollow crispy ball with spiced tamarind water and a potato and chickpea filling, it should be eaten in one go to make sure it doesn’t get soggy! The water is made from scratch by my mum, and I have seen her adjust it, seemingly based on her mood, so there is no fixed recipe I could give.

The thing is, am I using this ‘bridging’ as a skill, or have I adopted the habit because it looks like a skill externally? Skills implies I can switch it off if I want to; habits just happen. Honestly, probably both, depending on what mood I’m in, I like it on some days where I get to bring the two worlds together, but on some others I resent it, that there IS even a space that I am in, where I seem to have to be doing a constant process of translation. And again, literal translation is often required, so not in fact the gap in understanding I seem to be referring to.

I’m not going to solve that confusion writing it all out, but felt like it had to get said somewhere, as it’s one of those bits that is incredibly clear to me, and almost invisible to others.

Writing this brief, because finals just wrapped up, and my brain has officially melted, but I wanted to get this down while the summer hasn't had time to steamroll this current nervousness, away.

So, I got into a summer session course at UChicago: a couple weeks at college, reading what is essentially the theory of how societies stick together, and come apart, with tons of old anthropology and sociology thought-leaders. I applied half because of all the things I've read this year on here: Boas, Mead, Levi-Strauss... The gang, and half because I genuinely wanted to see if I had it within me to handle real college assignments, instead of just reading books like I normally do in my free time.

After reading through the syllabus and email list that they sent out, I immediately felt nauseous. Familiar names appeared along with masses and masses of other names I'd never seen but still look like a terrifying number of pages. One of my friends, Rafi-taking a program some other time/place this summer-told me it would all be fine, everybody feels like that on the first day.

I hope he's right.

I'm still not convinced.

One reason I'm nervous is that this is literally the first time I've decided to do something scholastic purely based on my own curiosity, not because a homework assignment or college-application deadline nudged me into it. All of this year's supplemental reading, Boas, Mead, Levi-Strauss, Geertz… has essentially been me following my curiosity with no consequence. This class has homework, grades, a professor-who has no obligation to care if I found out about this because I went down a three-houryoutube rabbit hole a few months ago followed by digging through my great aunt’s genealogy research on a long-defunct blog. This is me finally being tested to see whether I actually understood any of it, or just really loved the feel of the low-stakes, easy version.

I'm leaving in a little less than two weeks, and I'm going to try to blog about what it's like actually in the class as it happens (rather than waiting until a month after it's over to figure out what happened), though at this point I'll consider it a victory if I have the energy to read.

Quick hit while midterms continue to chew up every waking moment, just wanted to jot this down before my brain goes to total sludge.

So a lot of you may know I'm doing my Mead paper (yes), and during the research phase his name came up about three different times so I decided to, for lack of a better word, read some Levi-Strauss for fun. Turns out one of the more influential dudes ever has a lot to say about myths of cultures totally divorced from one another that seems to be based on the idea that under all the surface weirdness of cultural phenomena of wildly divergent peoples there's some core human way of organizing experience. Primarily we deal with dualistic opposites (e.g.

Raw/cooked, nature/culture etc.) all over the place because "that's how minds work".

He calls it structuralism.

It’s a weird contrast with Mead (duh, already knew that) who (as you remember) went on out into the field and experienced it directly. Levi-Strauss's approach seems a lot more desk based and comparative: he looks at myths all over the globe and thinks “oh, here's the pattern repeating beneath the specific details". It’s a vastly different paradigm for an anthropologist, and to be perfectly honest I don’t have a preference yet. Mead feels much more grounded; like, more real. It feels…real person based, like someone is saying ‘this is what actually happened’. Levi-Strauss is a beautiful brain puzzle, which is satisfying, but his method definitely verges on me thinking ‘is there a way patterns show up just because Levi-Strauss is so intently searching for patterns?’
What’s interesting to me about both them is sort of how their perspectives would differ if I were to sort of analyze my own family:

Mead would take up residence at our dinner table for about a month and take down minute by minute observations of what we actually do. Levi-Strauss would most likely jump straight over our mundane life experience to my family's collection of myths, the partition story and the 1971 story in search of some underlying dualistic structural property shared by them. It's unclear who if anyone would better capture the true essence of my family. Possibly both: which isn't the clean-cut, easily definable conclusion one hopes for in the last few days before an in-class presentation on just that kind of thing

I was writing back in March about how nobody at school seemed aware of 1971. Now, I have an actual narrative for that, coming from the research process of my spring AP Lang paper. It is something that I’ve wanted to write down for months.

After telling my teacher, who, for the most part, I love and admire as an educator, that I would like to use the 1971 genocide for my research paper, which was an unexpected departure from the provided list of subjects, she asked if I could quickly outline the topic for her; since she apparently hadn’t heard of it before. This also completely shocked me – she teaches this class every year and discusses a substantial number of other 20th century atrocities in far too much detail, it seemed like. But eventually I wound up relaying her essentially the same information as I’d relayed to my friends in March, the contents of which, once again, she thank me for, stating that no student had ever approached her with that particular topic before in all her years of teaching.

My actual research for the paper introduced me to and consumed a dimension of it which was far deeper than I had predicted: the role of American diplomat, Archer Blood (the US's top official stationed in Dhaka in 1971), and his entire contingent of staff sending a confidential cable to Washington, in which they essentially accuse their own government of a moral failure for siding with the Pakistani military in its war against its own citizens. It states: "In Washington at least, support for Pakistan despite official assurances against any assistance being furnished with that aid contributing to or having as its primary purpose internal repression or political violence toward civilians". Nixon and Kissinger read this document and their continued support for Pakistan continued unabated simply because Pakistan was necessary to the normalization efforts that the US was working to establish with China at that time; Blood and his staff were largely ignored.

A detailed account of these events, among a plethora of others, can be found in the book titled "The Blood Telegram," by Gary Bass.

It’s the first entire book that I’ve read about the war that wasn’t compiled family stories, told sporadically.

This, though, didn't even shock me to as great a degree as discovering that there was an entire verified paper trail indicating that, to the people in positions of power, exactly what was occurring during that war was being accounted for in real time by others-and they deliberately chose to overlook it all for reasons of "political advantage". The topic isn't simply "a section of history that's been forgotten". Instead it's essentially a section of history that, according to the people in charge, was deemed an unworthy casualty of our political interests to be remembered by more than the few.

I submitted the paper, and received an A. I know that, given the subject, this is sort of a ridiculous things to mention, but I feel as though it’s the most hard work I’ve produced on an assignment all year in high school. Afterwards, my teacher pulled me aside.

She has apparently decided to make that aspect a point she teaches in her units during the class next year, which, while it doesn't make a world-shattering difference, can never-the-less provide an extra classroom full of people who would otherwise have just left my school exactly as my friends had done: oblivious.

I'm willing to accept that much more than zero, at the least.

I've had this conversation like 30 times now in my life and had it again this week so I figured it was time to just write about the pattern rather than the silently exhausted feeling I've experienced each time. Someone on my group project was asking me where my family was from and after I told him Bangladesh the natural next question - or near-enough what I always get - was "oh, so like India?" I get why people get it confused - geographically they're, well, adjacent and if Americans know anything at all about South Asia in school it's probably a single unit where the topic might mention the subcontinent as a whole and perhaps a very broad history of India, but Bangladesh often doesn't even register.

It gets pretty old explaining that there's an entirely distinct country there, with a separate language, flag, war for independence, everything and none of it is just a sub-plot to India's story.

The version of history I've mastered explaining: Bangladesh is former East Pakistan, which was previously part of British India before 1947, and then split off from it to declare independence from the now-formed country of Pakistan in 1971, the same country which is itself separate from India. So it's less "Bangladesh is part of India," and more "Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan all used to be one country under the British before splitting up, twice, for two different reasons, in two different years." Usually that description is too long for someone's casual interest, which again, I'm not mad about, but really means the real details of how I got here are basically non-existent. But honestly, it's less about a person and more about the repeated need to act as unpaid geographical and historical tour guide any time my identity comes up which for me, given my appearance, happens all the time.

I don't have a good solution - I mostly try to use my explanation at the speed of light these days, and without quite as much tolerance as I once had, which I guess is another thing I don't love about me but honestly I also don't think I'm responsible for fixing other people's historical misunderstandings at my own expense, repeatedly.

This is going to be a quick and kinda funny one. My mom went out for a few hours to run errands on Saturday and in her absence I decided to surprise her by attempting to cook bhuna khichuri, which is this lentil and rice dish that’s kind of only cooked when it rains, you know, comfort food. I’ve seen her cook it like, a hundred times so I figured I’d got it.

I was wrong.

Attempting vs knowing how to is a tricky business. Firstly, I managed to burn the onions on the first go and had to start all over. Then I used way more lentils to rice than I should have for what I intended and it turned into a big mushy baby. On top of that, the ghee that I added at the end pooled up on top of the khichuri instead of combining, which my mom told me later is because of adding it to too early.

She got home, saw the khichuri, laughed about it for maybe thirty seconds straight and then managed to polish off two bowls of it telling me that I had “potential”.

It’s the people that love us for the mistakes we make. I don’t think the lesson is as much about not burning stuff as much as it is about the fact that a lot of cooking has to be learned from muscle memory, a certain timing that simply cannot be explained through words or measurements alone. When I asked my mom about the precise measurements beforehand, she told me, “You’ll know when you see it,” and “just kind of adjust it as you go.”

At the time, I thought that was kind of bull and it wasn’t until I was standing over the burning rice that I realized she was totally right there was no really real shortcut to learn how to make the stuff properly aside from probably doing it poorly several times. Attempting it all over again this weekend. Hoping for much lower expectations this time, which may just be a healthy outlook in general.

So, my elective requires an anthropologist research project, and I chose Margaret Mead probably because her name popped into my mind once when I went down the Franz Boas internet hole a few weeks ago, and it turns out she was a student of his, which I found out myself for a little while before anyone told me, how cute is that?!

Her first big ethnography was about Samoan teenagers in the 1920s, she was looking to see if adolescence was stressful/crazy everywhere or just because Americans raise their children in specific ways and apparently she thought it was the latter and that she actually interviewed a group of samoan girls who did not go through any sort of stressful, difficult phase compared to Americans and that most of the traits we associated with "being a teenager" were actually just "being an American teenager."

It was kinda weird to hear as a actual teenager; part of me felt affirmed that I wasn't broken, that maybe this age was actually supposed to be hellish. And then I found during the course of the research that two decades later, other anthropologist (main one is named Derek Freeman) who went back to Samoa had evidence that Mead might have been mistaken about many things and perhaps it was some of the people she was interviewing misleading her, or maybe it was just her expectations again. That whole controversy apparently isn't resolved to everyone yet.

That part surprised me a lot because I just figured that when you write an anthropology paper in class you read one person who already got their points accepted.

But really you need to understand the controversy surrounding that work and have something interesting to add.

I don’t know if Mead is correct or if Freeman is, neither is the most important part in my eyes. It's all based on that question underneath: how many of the traits and "human nature" aspects in people are just part of that particular culture you were born in, without you even realizing they are culturally bound. I keep finding myself applying this concept to my own life and my own behavior; it is like a constant check-is this "me"? Or is this simply things I’ve just gotten used to as a Bengali home-dweller, or as an American high schooler.

Presentation due in 2 weeks, pretty sure I will be going over the time limit because I have WAY too many thoughts on all of this.

I wanted to write this one really carefully because... Well it means more to me than most of the stuff I put up here and I don't want to mess it up.

My family is Bengali and it is never just a distant history to us, it is the date that Bangladesh was born and it was born in a war that basically no one my age in the US has heard of. I mentioned it casually to friends here at school this year and basically got the blankest looks. Someone actually asked me if I meant the India Pakistan war which is close, but not really what I meant-and actually just that disconnect made me feel really lonely.

The super quick version of the story (as much as a war and genocide can have a super quick version): 1971, what is now Bangladesh was East Pakistan, and it was controlled by West Pakistan from over a thousand miles away with all kinds of political and economic discrimination against Bengalis. Then a Bengali party was elected overwhelmingly in a national vote and the West Pakistani government refused to accept it, initiating a crack down known as Operation Searchlight. The military began a nine-month operation where they killed Bengali students, intellectuals, Hindus, Bengali women broadly...

Basically it was and is treated as an outright attempt at ethnic cleansing or more broadly Genocide depending on your phrasing of the statistics and political motivations to write/not write it.

My grandfather went through this war and I am writing that part of my grandfather’s story in another entry soon (it feels like it deserves its own post and I’m not completely comfortable with how to tell it yet).

What has been hard to convey has been talking honestly about the numbers of deaths. The number my government teaches us has been the figure of three million-others estimate the deaths much lower based on more scientific modeling, but are around in the hundreds of thousands with an emphasis on ethnic/nationalist differences between accounts, so... That’s a pretty wide range.

Obviously neither of those two figures should tell us that three million vs hundreds of thousands matters too much when all estimates agree it was hundreds of thousands who died...

But even then every single number given has been higher or lower than what it was, and that makes it difficult to put the atrocity where it needs to be in terms of global human rights issues while also dealing with conflicting narratives. Regardless the general consensus seems to agree that the killings constitute a genocide because of specific targeting (especially targeting specific groups like students, religious groups, women, and educated individuals).

But here is what is most frustrating, for me. It’s not that we don’t disagree with other countries about it, we do, that happens with lots of atrocities around the world. It is that we don't even mention it really, at school, we don't mention the 1971 massacre of Bengalis anywhere and they were so important to the history of Asia and the world. When we learn about the Holocaust and the genocide of Rwanda they are given sufficient lesson time while Bangladesh’s civil war barely receives a sentence and despite there being documented evidence like UN reports, journalist accounts, even evidence of American involvement in the massacre (through withheld information and knowledge of genocide); and I want this to be documented for any of you who don't know and I wanted it written down someplace other than just in my family and in my head.

In english, it was mentioned in passing by the teacher, this guy Franz Boas essentially invented that cultures should be studied in their own right and not rated on a "civilized vs primitive" scale (whichapparentlywas the thing before, totally crazy to me). She said his name for eight seconds and then immediately carried on about a completely unrelated topic, but I jotted down his name in the margin of my notes and looked him up later that night.

Turns out this guy trained lots of the people that keeps coming up in all this other anthropology material that I have been reading, biggest being Margaret Mead. I had no idea that this discipline basically reinvented itself as essentially one German guy moving to the states and just being outraged that the scientific study of its time was basically casual racist bullshit with regards to rating cultures, not a sentence I figured I’d care about at all on a Tuesday.

The part that really got me though, this wasn't even like the point of the lesson; my teacher was actually lecturing on a completely unrelated different unit changeover kind of topic and just threw in this guy’s name. I've kind of noticed that so far lately there are so many times where literally a passing comment the teacher makes on some lecture is the only thing I will remember come time that I am at my apartment and get ready to do nothing that evening; it seems that all the stuff that is supposed to be informative hardly stuck at all, and the 8 second comment I will look up late at night instead of reading guide, which says something I don’t have time to figure out now on what my actual learning style is.

I'm going to actually read some things by him instead of just the wiki article once debate calms down and stick it on my very long reading list.

Like I said in my last post I was going to try write about this at some point if I ever worked out how to say it without completely collapsing. I still don't think that's working, but going to write this out now before I totally lose my courage.

I was having a video call with my Dadu last week and ended up asking him directly, for the first time ever, about 1971. He's 78 now and clearly doesn't love discussing it (my dad had told me as much in advance), but he answered me anyway, in a hushed way that I'd never heard him speak in before.

He was a very young boy living in Dhaka at the time when the crackdown began. He explained that he was stuck in a relative's house out in the suburbs for a few weeks with not much real information beyond whispers and then... Sounds at night, that he didn't want to describe.

He lost a cousin that year, someone who he remembered simply as, ' a good boy, quite, wanted to be a teacher,' and then paused on the call.

I held my breath and stayed silent, feeling it was the wrong time for me to try and fill empty space.

The most interesting thing for me though was at the end when he said, in Bengali, that he doesn't talk about it a lot 'because nobody here wants to hear it anymore and it changes nothing.' I've been thinking about that particular sentence all week. It's not really accusatory, more like there's an acceptance to it, a resigned peace in letting this one defining, most traumatic year of his life become an almost completely untold story.

I did ask him afterward if he minded me putting a bit of this down on here (even if poorly) and he seemed really receptive, saying he was in fact glad that someone in the family was taking the initiative to ask questions rather than allow it all to be left unsaid and unspoken. That wasn't exactly the reaction I expected; I'd thought I was perhaps trespassing on very private ground, and in reality the silence wasn't serving an protective purpose; it was just the path of least resistance.

I don't have a clever concluding message for this. Just wishing I had asked him these questions ten years ago, when he might have been able to recall things with a little more clarity, although as I know I might not have understood his answers. Going to continue asking, slowly, whatever he's prepared to tell.

It’s rare for frustrations to build on the highway at a standstill and have anything to do with the mechanics of the problem. When a driver passes single-file traffic to zip down an otherwise unused lane leading up to a merge, deep emotional reactions kick in-all thanks to the etiquette classes we learned in grade school. From the child who was meticulously taught that taking turns is the highest form of civic duty comes the motorist whose rage at “cutting” appears less like an annoyance and more like a sign of blatant societal collapse. It is at this point, miles from the actual lane drop, that well-intentioned drivers voluntarily narrow their lane, inadvertently preparing for massive gridlock.

The mathematics have long been settled for traffic engineers. Properly utilizing both available lanes to the absolute last bit of pavement available to them (known as a “zipper merge” by a variety of state DOTs around the world) gets the maximum number of vehicles through. Cars effectively alternate going into a merging point the same way that teeth interlock.

This strategy uses available space instead of creating waste, shortening traffic backups by as much as 40% and allowing congestion to drain before overflowing into road intersections, highway ramps and emergency routes.

Furthermore, smooth, controlled movement toward a single destination reduces traffic cascading over the roads and eliminates the dreaded “stop and go” phenomenon.

Those who claim that driving all the way up an open lane is “cutting” are operating on the outdated assumption that what works at a grocery store or ticket counter will work at 70 miles per hour on a highway. In such static settings, one’s move ahead of the pack is directly at the expense of others but adds nothing to the overall efficiency of the situation. By not utilizing an empty lane of a highway, “polite” drivers are doing more than just being patient; they are wasting the infrastructure that others have paid for with taxes while causing traffic to build. Late merging is not theft of line position; it is intelligent filling of available space that would otherwise contribute to a lengthy traffic jam.

Simply informing road users what math tells us to do cannot fully overcome deeply ingrained instinctual bias-and this must change. State Departments of Transportation around the world have begun using highway messages that instruct drivers to “USE BOTH LANES TO THE MERGE POINT.” Dynamic message signs, in particular, serve to legitimize the late merge and help drivers understand that rather than being a rude “cutter,” they are doing what traffic engineers say they should. Once the police and highway agency encourage the “zipper merge,” social anxiety melts away and a more cooperative road culture emerges where it becomes to our collective best interest to maximize capacity instead of getting angry.