Playing chess began as an antidote to idleness. After the thrill of battle had expired, the red sandstone palaces had been built, and the emperors and kings lounged on their velvet divans, gazing out at their vast courtyards with nothing left to do but surrender to boredom, the vizier reminded them of that millennia-old game, and sent them spiraling into their next addiction. 

In those moments between catharsis and dreaming  

in the soft amber glow of the lights 

when my fingers wander on piano keys searching for vagabond melodies

traveling from nocturnes to blues

and return to familiar lands, notes stitched into muscle memory—

Communism, the caste system, and the oppression of women. A rare species of moth, lemon-flavored soda, and a pair of red-tinted sunglasses. At the heart of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is the idea that the “big things” and the “small things” are inextricably and inexorably related.

Watching the 2015 film The Big Short in AP Macroeconomics class, I was especially struck by the unsettling reality underlying its resolution. As Mark Baum, one of the shorters, ruminates about the immorality of a taxpayer bailout and Wall Street’s full awareness and indifference to the consequences of its actions, there is a brief interlude when a voiceover states that Baum was wrong.

A hip-hop musical about Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton seems like a paradoxical proposition in and of itself, yet that is exactly what Lin Manuel Miranda, multiple time Tony and Grammy Award winner and recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant, set out to do in creating the now ubiquitous Broadway musical “Hamilton” (2015-present).

As the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide rises to 89.3 million, with 27.1 million classified as refugees, it is apparent that the global humanitarian refugee crisis is becoming larger and increasingly multifaceted. The need for action is more urgent than ever. From Ukraine to Afghanistan and Syria to Sudan, the causes of these wars and conflicts may be disparate—ranging from religious divisions, political instability to civil unrest—but their human impacts are remarkably similar. 

The farmer wakes up before the first streaks of scarlet have tinged the sky

loads his rickshaw with gourds, melons, okras and eggplants

While the village lights still dim and 

the reflection of the pearlescent moon still rippling in the Ganges River. 

If we sifted through the faded dust of our ancient past

in the long-lost fact and fiction blurred into folklore,

we might see how we built castles made of sand,

waiting to be washed away by the sea of time,

daring to defy our destiny, choosing to overlook our fate of oblivion

relentless, resilient, resolute

But they linger, echoing,

woven through the shimmering silk kurtas,

tucked in the loose Darjeeling tea leaves,

embodied by the dancing melody of the raga

on my dad’s favorite sitar track…