BONY Podcast

Season 3 - Episode 25: I started learning piano when I was 4 years old. I then I went through different instruments. Some of them were self-taught, some of them I went and learned from other people. Ultimately, it all culminated when I was in college. I was a part of a competitive dance team and acapella team (both of which were South Asian fusion). This really allowed me to see what creating music was about, the type of genres various music entails, and the ability to create music for people who represent a multitude of identities, not just one identity. I think I am at my best when there's many things happening in my life. So it made sense for me to try and do both music and medical school, but for as long as I can. I'm just really blessed to be able to do it right now while I'm in medical school, and I can continue creating and continue to see how I can make an impact.

Listen to the entire conversation with Shaunak Roy on the BoNY Podcast.

Available on all Podcast platforms and on BengalisofNewyork.com/bony-podcast. Subscribe and share. Link in bio. Also, Amazon Alexa/Echo knows us! Just say, 

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Season 3 - Episode 24: I found I work with a very specific type of health insurance policy, which is a medically underwritten policy, which is typically not what's offered to you guys through employers or on the marketplace. So it is harder to get access to. So I work with a very limited population. But I've learned to marry my clinical background to this type of a plan, and because being a medical doctor, I can offer very quick health evaluations and eligibility for these types of plans for my clients.

Listen to the entire conversation with Dr. Noor, Health Advisor on the BoNY Podcast.

Available on all Podcast platforms and on BengalisofNewyork.com/bony-podcast. Subscribe and share. Link in bio. Also, Amazon Alexa/Echo knows us! Just say, “Alexa, play BoNY Podcast.

Season 3 - Episode 23: "I've been back in Bangladesh full-time since 2014 I've worked in different elements. I worked in social entrepreneurship. I worked in running an accelerator for social entrepreneurs, grassroots entrepreneurs around the country. I think one of the realizations I had is that there's a significant talent in the country. And if we're going to change the economy we have to accelerate the transformation towards being an industrialized, very traditional economy towards a digital one. Then we have to find the entrepreneurs who are doing it. We have to find the ones that are capable of scaling their ideas. And then we have to pair them up with angel investors who can actually give them the skills, the perspectives, and obviously the capital to be able to realize it.

Listen to the entire conversation with Nirjhor Rahman, CEO at Bangladesh Angels, on the BoNY Podcast.

Available on all Podcast platforms and on BengalisofNewyork.com/bony-podcast. Subscribe and share. Link in bio. Also, Amazon Alexa/Echo knows us! Just say, “Alexa, play BoNY Podcast."

Season 3 - Episode 22: "But you didn't get a bachelor's though"-Mom

If you're emotionally invested in something, make sure you have passion for it, make sure that you have a continuous drive to keep going. As long as that passion remains in whatever form you're taking on and the effort is there behind it, I think you'll be successful. I'm not talking about like doing something for one day. I'm putting in eight hours in one day out of a week. I did photography, music, dancing, this and that. Ask yourself as a creative, why are you doing this? Are you doing music to get rich and famous? Are you doing it for fame? I think a lot of soul searching has to start when you go into a specific field like that, but a lot of people do it for checks.

Music was my passion. Like I was like 13, 12 years old, just starting to rap at that time. I would go into high school and the way I asked this one girl out, I performed in front of the whole entire school. As soon as everyone got out, like a hundred people behind me and I'm rapping. And then instead of doing a boring presentation, I would rap the entire presentation. By the time I got done with high school, people already knew that I was in that scene. I'd show up to a few battle, raps, and events. 

On a college degree:

To become a First Vice President, there's so many candidates that have their JDs and MBAs on top of MBAs. Right? They're very qualified and when you see a resume with high school graduate, they won't be able to get past a specific ceiling. On the flip side, I have the experience, right?  A lot of people in my department have a Masters. However, I beat out candidates with Masters for roles, and they get pissed because they have their Masters and, this individual and I, we both applied for this compliance position that I'm in and they just couldn't fathom the idea that someone with a high school degree could hold this position.

Listen to the entire conversation with Compliance Officer, Photographer, and former founding member of the B...

Season 3 - Episode 21: I always make the point that local politics matters even more because the number one thing that city council people do is manage a budget. We’ve forgotten to reinvest in community centers, education or transportation. 

Transportation is not accessible. Housing is expensive and unaffordable, and affordable housing basically doesn't exist. Education is a huge problem, right? I used to spend two hours traveling from this district to Brooklyn Tech, in Brooklyn, just to get to a good school. Think about that.

The fact that I live in a city where schools are near me, but I had to travel two hours just to get to a school that my parents and family felt was good enough. I think that that's crazy; the fact that in these last, 20 years since I've graduated and we don't have schools that are good enough for kids to actually go to, maybe we have one.

BoNY is not a political organization and does not endorse this candidate for office. To find a list of all candidates running for City Council in District 24, please click below:

https://www.nyccfb.info/VSApps/WebForm_Finance_Summary.aspx?as_election_cycle=2020C&utm_source=NYC+Campaign+Finance+Board+List&utm_campaign=521f538cb3-Post_Bd_Meeting_PR_2017_1013_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_35d7325629-521f538cb3-290643053

Listen to the entire conversation with Deepti Sharma, Candidate for City Council, District 24, on the BoNY Podcast.

Available on all Podcast platforms and on BengalisofNewyork.com/bony-podcast. Subscribe and share. Link in bio. Also, Amazon Alexa/Echo knows us! Just say, “Alexa, play BoNY Podcast.”

#podcast #citycouncil #localpolitics #inspiration #alexa #podcastersofinstagram #podcastlife #politics

Season 3 - Episode 20: The name of our app is Shuni Bangla, your book library. So when we started it, the focus was (and still is the main focus), is that we want to build a digital library. It just started because couple of years ago I got injured in a car accident and I got disabled and one of the disabilities is that I cannot read very well. So, I used to read a lot of books. I like books and especially when I was sick and I was home for such a long time, and I could not read it was kind of making me crazy. And then I found out that through our local libraries, American libraries, I can listen to audio books and they were kind of a lifesaver.

So I can say that many of our ideas, our passion, our love for Bangladesh. All of those are kind of bound together in this audio book, library, app idea.

Listen to the entire conversation with Fahmida Ferdousi on the BoNY Podcast.

Available on all Podcast platforms and on BengalisofNewyork.com/bony-podcast. Subscribe and share. Link in bio. Also, Amazon Alexa/Echo knows us! Just say, “Alexa, play BoNY Podcast.”

Season 3 - Episode 19: I remember one of the very first books that my mother bought me. It was a Bengali kid's book written in a diary entry format from the perspective of an incredibly curious six-year-old kid. The little boy would ask his mom and dad a number of questions, and one that stood out to me the most was, “What are planets?” My five-year-old self read this for the first time and became intrigued by simply learning that there are so many different planets and that there was even the possibility of finding little green men on the planet I learned as being Mars. I can recall just how mind-blown I was, and that initial exposure to the fact that there are so many different planets pushed me to want to discover more about this endless, foreign territory we call space. 

Listen to the entire conversation with Tanveer Karim on the BoNY Podcast.

Available on all Podcast platforms and on BengalisofNewyork.com/bony-podcast. Subscribe and share. Link in bio. Also, Amazon Alexa/Echo knows us! Just say, “Alexa, play BoNY Podcast.”

Season 3 - Episode 18: TBD

Season 3 - Episode 17: I take students to Bangladesh to learn about development, and we see all the NGOs, we go to the rural areas, and I'm always itching to do something. I mean, you do read about these things in textbooks, you do a lot of research, but there's something to be said about actually getting your hands dirty and getting things done. And the real world is, may sound like a cliche, but it is different than what the textbook models are saying. It's not that the textbook models don't give us some ideas, they do. They give us some general ideas over decades of what what people have put together. But when you go step out, and you try to implement things, you started realizing some of those real world obstacles are real world realities. I saw I saw a lot of poverty growing up, so I had to do something.

The other inspiration is obviously my students. I take them to Bangladesh and we they go there for about two or three weeks. We go to Bangladesh, we go to the villages we go talk to Professor Yunus, we go talk to people in BRAC then we go talk to the actual clients in the rural areas who are beneficiaries of their projects. And the students, they want to do something, they're young and they want to do something right away, they want to enact change. And I always tell them be a fly on the wall, you're here to learn You have to first learn the customs, the culture, how things are. So whenever we come back, and then we have another follow up course, where we make sense of what we read in the books and what we saw on the ground. But this is once in 100 year thing, this pandemic doesn't happen every day in a country like Bangladesh, no matter how we think about it, they're not ready for this, nobody is us.

This year's flood was one of the worst in decades. And then Bangladesh is a small country, they depend on trade, they really depend on trade. They're part of the supply system in the world as far as far as textile but also depend on stuff coming from outside into the country, we don't have a lot of resources. So when you think of that, it's a triple whammy. They're they're getting really hit from all directions, they're getting hit by flooding, they're getting hit by COVID-19, and they’re getting hit by lack of resources. So this is as good a time as any, to kind of do do some things, I'd say that would be my inspiration in general.

Listen to the entire conversation with Economics Professor and Founder of Nourish Bangladesh, Muhammad Faress Bhuiyan, on the BoNY Podcast.

Available on all Podcast platforms and on BengalisofNewyork.com/bony-podcast. Please subscribe and share. Link in bio. Also, Amazon Alexa/Echo knows us! Just say, “Alexa, play BoNY Podcast”

#Bengali

#Bangladesh

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#NourishBangladesh

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Season 3 - Episode 16: Bangladesh is a growing country and we're going towards a trillion dollar economy. We're a vibrant economy. We're an entrepreneurial society. We need the brains to come back. This is the time if we're going to build for the next 10 years. This is the time if you look at India, and how the NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) went back that made significant impact. Now, they had an advantage that there was outsourcing companies that were already there so they got an advantage in the workforce; we didn't get that. But we now have a chance where a lot of the successful Bangladeshis abroad can come back and work in similar tech companies.

Bongo is a great example. It's one of my first portfolio companies that we invested in. I actually came back to join as the chief operating officer. Over the last few years, our growth has been shining, and we've been raising capital abroad. We've started to attract Bangladeshis aboard who are working in our company. Our CFO was living in the UK and he took the leap of faith and he said, you know what I'm coming home. Then our CTO who's joining us works in Canada. Our VP of engineering works out of DC. We have a director of technology works in Silicon Valley. We have advisors in from the valley who are Bangladeshi, who are working with us. So I'm very proud that we're able to bring in experts that can really help elevate the knowledge, the skills, the workforce, and the professionalism to take us to the next level. We want to go to the next level, and Bangladesh has the potential. It is now, if you're a talent, you're working abroad, and you're listening to this podcast. Now, the money's here, the startups are here.

Listen to the entire conversation with COO of BONGOBD, Fayaz Taher, the largest Video platform and Multichannel network in Bangladesh, on the BoNY Podcast.

Available on all Podcast platforms and on BengalisofNewyork.com/bony-podcast. Please subscribe and share. Link in bio. Also, Amazon Alexa/Echo knows us! Just say, “Alexa, play BoNY Podcast”

#Bengali

#Bangladesh

#Bengalisofnewyork

#Bony

#Bonypodcast

#Anchorpodcasts

#Humansofnewyork

#BangladeshStartup

#VentureCapital

#BongoBD

#MagnitoDigital