Click on each pic below to watch video. To see all the whole playlist from the evening....click here.
​
Click on each pic below to watch video. To see all the whole playlist from the evening....click here.
​
Click on each pic below to watch video. To see all the whole playlist from the evening....click here.
​
Click on each pic below to watch video. To see all the whole playlist from the evening....click here.
​
Click on each pic below to watch video. To see all the whole playlist from the evening....click here.
​
Click on each pic below to watch video. To see all the whole playlist from the evening....click here.
​
Shanto presents his immigrant experience in the US as a graduate student and the initial struggle and attempts to fit into a new world, new culture and new pressures. He provides a poignant take on our ability to cope with loneliness and depression in graduate school presenting it from a perspective of a fellow student and the transitive impact it had on his peers.
Shanto Ghosh
Deeapak Deb
Deepak, an IT consultant by profession makes his living in a binary world but has always strived to balance his left and right brain cells in a non-binary way. He will bringing to stage a new story from his early days of his “coming to America” and trying to figure out how all things work in a world thousands of miles away from homeland. Like many immigrant stories which leads to embarrassing and humorous outcomes, he speaks about his experience at his "first apartment".
Urmi is a mother of 2 teenage girls and has been living in the US for over 27 years. She now works for IBM. She came here originally as a wife of a graduate student just like many of you and eventually made this country her home. Her story is about life, about crisis, about helplessness and ultimately about triumph. Urmi speaks about a certain life experience that is almost a coming of age piece - a particular incident that made her who she is today.
Dipanwita has a strong affinity for the atypical. A journalist by training and a development professional by trade, she always looks for elements that don’t perfectly fit into the everyday jigsaw of life. And she has the scratches and bruises to prove it. Laced with funny experiences, her story, The Immigrant Shoemaker, is a cross-eyed take on “immigrant pride”, and the lengths we go to show our children how far we have come and how hard we have worked. Dipanwita hopes to get you smiling, and thinking about what really matters in the end.
Urmi Purakayastha
Dipanwita Bhattacharya
Adhishri is a freshman in Lowell High School and her passion is dance (of every kind). She has had the privilege of traveling to Bangalore India every summer to visit her father’s family. Since Adhishri is also half Gujarati, she has an unique perspective on what it means to be Indian-American. She will be telling us of one memorable summer when she attended dance class in India. Adhishri learnt that just like her own diverse self, dance instruction comes in many flavors…and they are all good!
Adhishri Hande
'Having arrived in the late afternoon of life, Sunanda believes there's little in life to be taken seriously, and that his obituary should simply read: "GOOD RIDDANCE!"'.
Sunanda Sanyal
Maushumi Dey
Mausumi Dey is is a member of Shobdo Recitation Institute and Cultural Media, New York & holds the Triple Crown Award from Toastmasters International. She works as a Senior QA Analyst in IT at The TJX Companies. In this program, she will talk about her experiences with crossing borders. Growing up in a small town in Northeast India, sharing an international border with Bangladesh, she was used to a lot of trust between nations. As an immigrant in USA, there was not much difference at first. Then things changed! Her narrative will explore the changes in the way immigrants are treated at the US border and its humanistic implications.
Amitabha is an orthodontist by profession, and thespian, by passion. In Voices 2018, he will tell us of one specific grad school lecture that opened his eyes. It was the day that he realized that his national cultural pride was a good thing but even better was the connection of being a world citizen. After all, the beloved Bengali poet, Tagore had rightly said “Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of man are mine”.
Amitabh Lala
Malavika Shetty
Malavika started off as a banker in India but the call of language was too hard to resist. She completed a degree in English while working at the bank, and because of an amazingly supportive mentor was able to quit her job and pursue her dream of graduate studies in Linguistics. Her journey thereafter took her to the UK and then the US. In her piece, she talks about her tentative quest to find connections and meaning when she first moved to the US. She describes how even well-meaning fellow immigrant acquaintances cannot always see the emotional struggles of newer immigrants. While the event she speaks of made her feel excluded and lonely, she also knows it motivated her to find newer paths.
Tanni is a professor of Sociology & Justice studies with a passion for creating community. When she is not teaching, she is volunteering to enhance the cultural activities within the Bengali diaspora. Tanni will be sharing a tumultuous time of her life with us - a time when cultural isolation and professional uncertainty lead her to pin her hopes on the wrong person. She turned things around and found closure so it’s all good. But it wasn’t always so.