Category: Partha Chakraborty

October 1, China’s National Day, is marked with trepidation 100 miles across the Taiwan Strait; this year was no different. Like clockwork, 25 Chinese fighters, bombers and other military aircraft appeared in menacing formations over the strait.

As a newly married couple in 2004, we were planning an Italian trip, each was respectably employed on H1 visa then. We were not drinking Kool-Aid, so we prepped all the papers before we reached the Italian consulate in NYC for our Schengen visa.

“Of all those unaccounted for, who would you miss the most?” The question was thrown at me over dinner in Charlotte on Sep 18, 2001. It had been a long day, and the question gave me a pause. I could only think of her though I did not even know her name.

Sometime around May of 2005, my wife entered the room with her eyes fixed on a thermometer-like object in her hand. It says Positive, she said. Cool, I replied. We hugged, blurted out in unison that we have to find an obstetrician now, and turned to the Web to research specialists together.

Last week I dropped my son at a college in Southern California. At the parking lot, I overheard a small group of students discuss schedules. A few opted for the online-only option, severely limiting their choices.

Partha Chakraborty- Partha Chakraborty is an Indian-born immigrant; a naturalized US Citizen since 2018. Educated in India and at Cornell University, Partha is currently an entrepreneur in water technologies, Blockchain, and wealth management in the US and in India. The views expressed are his own. Rabindranath Tagore’s Kabuliwala (“The Man from Kabul”) was my first […]

As we start to celebrate the 75th year of Independent India, it is a good time to remind ourselves the idea of India. Bollywood, the biggest – and arguably the best – cultural export of India has, rightfully and very admirably, been at the forefront of experimentation with templates that stuck over time. One early example was set up by the first talkie, “Alam Ara”, released in March 1931.

Most throwers make “an attempt to throw the javelin as quickly as possible, don’t draw their throwing arm as far as they could. The longer they delay releasing their arm, the more distance they can get… Arm delay is something, you keep trying to drill into an athlete’s head. Today, perhaps just the best five throwers have that quality…Neeraj already has that ability.” – Gary Calvert, Coach for India’s Javelin team in 2016.

Academic life in social sciences is supposed to be a lonely pursuit of interpretations. Not often does an academic theory emerge that energizes, also repulses, so many of the people outside of the Ivory Towers. And rarely, if ever, one emerged that managed to do exactly that in such a short span as Critical Race Theory has done. School districts, universities and Fortune 500 corporations are rolling out orientation programs that are “informed by” the theory while many schools retooled their curricula to incorporate the theory in classrooms as young as kindergarteners. On the flip side, some states are passing laws that prohibit the teaching of the same.