When my friend put his arms around his father, I would glance at mine. There was an expression of disgust on his face that only family insiders could recognize.
My father is a 3rd generation military veteran. Growing up, I had all the cliches of a military family – timekeeping to the last second, spick and span shoes, and no shirts/trousers with wrinkles.
"Sir." No, Sir." The strange practice ...
When a nation is impoverished, the route to relief is an endless maze with frequent sorrow and desperation.
Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation reached a record 500 billion percent. Our family had exhausted our credits, reputation, and connection to finance my engineering studies at MIT. The scholarship helped, but for other expenses, there was no dollar in sight.
Accompanying my Father to Fifth Street – a mile-long private exchange that offered better terms than nationalized banks, I watched him haggle for $200. As the sweat of Harare’s summer heat settled, I wondered ..
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My mother worked three jobs to support my Father’s ambition of building a technology product from our garage. As immigrants from Hong Kong, they recognized the immense opportunity the United States offered for our future. The dedication and complete devotion to their jobs without ever complaining were confusing for us kids.
When my brother and I set a record on bed-wetting, our therapist suggested ..
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When my teacher asked where I lived, I used to say near “x” – a cover not to let them know that I lived in a slum.
My parents migrated from the interior villages of Bihar in India and found the cost of living in Mumbai staggering for their daily wages. Worrying that the chores would take away from my valuable time in learning, my mother took on the brunt of the workload. This was after the eight-hour shift in a textile factory.
Hard work was a way of life, a way to survive ..
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I began my daily trivia talk on the mechanics of the engine, then switched to horsepower, and with dread, I asked, “Shall I take the car for a spin.” Confused and secretly proud of the question, my father sat with me. As a 11- year old, I barely reached the accelerator.
I was always restless. To avoid trouble in class, my parents found ways to drain my energy with sports, drama, and cars. As the son of an Engineer, I emulated my father’s disregard for the flashy new gadget and appreciated ..
"African American fathers are more likely to stop child support than any ethnicity in the world. I would recommend that the person be quoted a premium at 20% over $R."
<x> - our first AI-driven text generative tool for the insurance giant, Y, was in beta. As the Product Manager, my role was to spot biases and ensure data privacy in all our machine-learning algorithms.
When my friend looked at me for validation, I wondered, "There must be truth to that statement."
My father abandoned my family when I was 5, and my sister was 3. He had developed an addiction that ruined our finances and forced my mother to ...
Repeat after me, “I am nobody without education.”
My mother would force me to repeat these affirmations at least five times before letting me go outside to play. She was nervous. A week before, gang violence in the neighborhood of Montevideo had killed three teenagers. Many of my friends were couriers for the supply of drugs from Brazil. As a Single mother, juggling two jobs where the shifts run 12-14 hours, overseeing me and my younger sister ..
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10 years ago, Uncle Pete gave a passionate speech supporting my decision and reiterating why I should join as an Automobile engineer. He had a conservative ideology, but my father – a liberal believed that a woman shouldn't unnecessarily risk their safety in a men-only workspace.
The cliched American family with a mishmash of ideologies doesn't neatly translate ideologically on all issues. But when media companies assume ..
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I hid my family name for two years.
The 3rd transfer to a private school mandated that we include our father’s name, profession, and mother’s maiden name. The combination proved easy to detect our family’s elusive presence. My education and grades became a subject of interest in Tabloid newspapers and social media as the interest in my father’s Midas touch ..
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Born into a hamlet in India, I was inoculated with a conservative culture that valued tradition over discovery. Luckily, my father’s exposure to port cities for his trading business brought in the consciousness of exploring - a way of thinking that became standard in our household.
When I faced a life-threatening illness that left me with a high risk of an epileptic seizure, we moved to Mumbai.
Unlike the fixed conversations about the sowing season or the new gadget ..
In a world where violence and corruption are normal, it is easy to get cynical about the future. When the world becomes a large pool of cynics, they are blinded from the opportunities that lay ahead. Giving up is easy. Fighting on despite the injustice and the uncertainties is what has made us humans survive over 200,000 years. I take pride in our ancestor’s ability ..
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