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).

The pain and struggles of refugees and displaced people are universal, driven by the only realization that can force people to uproot themselves from their homes and country, leaving everything they have known behind: it is their only chance for survival.

The farmer is one of millions- both a drop in the ocean and the entire ocean in a drop

Still treading this unforgiving maze of gullies and alleys

In the hopes that one day his children will not have to do the same,

With passion and hard work, all his dreams will be theirs to claim

as I wandered along the edges of my consciousness,

and traced my fingers across the long-past memories,

I was humbled by the thought of how the

crashing waves, gentle ripples and dancing waters of time had

smoothed edges, made impressions, and carved canyons within me.

it was then that I realized that all along I had feared change

when I should have feared stagnation.

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

I walk through my roots,

the earthen path uneven beneath my feet,

and the steamy air caressing my cheek.

The streets of Kolkata pulse

with energy, ebbing and flowing

with the syncopated rhythm of a city

that runs on its own schedule.