BONY Podcast

Season 3 - Episode 15: From my own experiences, when I've had grief moments, the Bangladeshi perspective is “oh, be strong, and just pray” but we don't really talk about our emotions or feelings. That's something that I really struggle with because, yeah, I can go and pray, but I need to have an open conversation about what's happening.

I worked in the corporate world for like over a decade. Then things changed. I started training in the therapy field, and I started doing bereavement training. I essentially changed my career, and I now work in bereavement in my daytime job for a charity and I run the podcast on the side in my spare time or my days off. 

It's great that you see a lot of desi kids that pursue their passion. Their parents are hesitant initially, but then once they start doing well, because you know, people always say that if you follow your passions, you end up being successful. A lot of people just follow them. So after a while you end up doing well and making money, then your parents just come around.

Listen to the entire conversation with Host of The Bereavement Room Podcast, Callsuma Ali,  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

#Bereavement

#PodcastHosts

#BengalisofUK

Season 3 - Episode 14: I wanted to look stronger, feel stronger. I wanted to feel more confident. I wanted to feel like I could do what guys can do because I've been told as a kid; “no, you can't do this because you're not a guy” in both American society and Bangladeshi society. “Women are fragile. Women are supposed to need men.” So then when I got into weightlifting, I started feeling like there's nothing really that I can't do just because I'm a female.

So I told myself that I could build a character, if I just put myself out there and took responsibilities, and not rely on my parents and not overwork my parents, even more than what they have been doing their whole life, you know, they came all the way from the village with no electricity to here. And they've had to work a lot, 60 70 hours a week. So I decided that I'm going to learn how to manage my time to be good at my academics. So since high school, I took responsibility to say I'm going to get straight A's, I'm going into a really good college, I'm going to handle my own bills, I started working really young, so that time management came from experience because I put myself out there, I said I'm not gonna learn unless I do it.

I just want to continue to help my clients and even maybe expand my horizon with the type of clients that I have. So I want to get some people into the competitive air every now like I'm trying to see if I could get another Bangladeshi in bodybuilding.

Listen to the entire conversation with Body Builder, Fahmida Sheuly, 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 #fitness #gym

#bonypodcast

#anchorpodcasts

#bangladesh #podcast

#humansofnewyork

#BodyBuilding

Season 3 - Episode 13: I grew up in Bangladesh and moved to Perth, Australia in my late teens. When I moved to Australia, I was sure that Bangladesh was my home. My friends, my family - everything's there. But somewhere over the last 10 years I have slowly felt like I don't know where home is anymore. I believe a lot of people in the whole diaspora struggle with this question of identity. Moving away from Dhaka to a different country has really raised a lot of questions about my existence, from a cultural level. I think about it often, I still don't know the answer. If someone were to ask me, “Where is home?” I'll probably say it's in Australia, but a part of me is conflicted.

The people, the culture, and the voices all play a role as to what you call home.  A lot of my friends in Dhaka have moved away as well. Those earlier memories and attachments - whether it’s the tree in the front yard or the ice cream cellar, when those things start fading away, your concept of home also fades away with it.

I’m at the part of my career where I'm learning to say no, I've got shiny ball syndrome. Anything creatively exciting that comes my way I start to lose focus, and that's really bad for your long term vision. If I do see a shiny ball, I'd be tempted to play with it, but I'll ask myself - does it align with my goals for this year? Does it align with my financial goals? My career goals? My creative goals?

Listen to the entire conversation with documentary filmmaker, Tawsif Akkas, 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”

Season 3 - Episode 12: My instagram page is called @financeforyouandi - it's personal. I want to share my gains, but I'll share my losses to show that it's not always a win. With stocks you are going to have days, weeks, maybe even months where you're down. You're going to have to learn how to manage your emotions. If you do the research, you'll learn pretty quickly. I understand stocks enough to know which ones are good for me and which ones aren't long term. I firmly believe anyone can understand stocks.

On my page, I’m putting my personal finance journey out there, the things that I found helpful for me, hopefully it helps you get ahead of where you were yesterday. I have people reach out to me that it has helped them learn something new about finance. I'm just shouting and anybody who's going to listen, well - listen, take it and run. I always tell people to take the information I give them but also research on your own and then make your own decisions. The term investing really is a foreign language, and it shouldn't be - it should be fun.

I'm the youngest of four brothers and we're blessed to have a dad who just hustled - all he knew was work. My father used to provide everything for us, so we didn't have to do much. That's also the reason why I am so passionate about investing. My father did not bust his butt off to come to America and make those sacrifices for us to do the same thing. He retired in his 60s, he didn’t do what he did for me just so that I can work until I'm 60.

Listen to the entire conversation with finance enthusiast, Tanzil Uddin, 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”

Season 3 - Episode 11: When I finished college in chemical engineering, I had too much free time. And I was like, that's not good because free time is a space for negative things to seep in. I always enjoyed comedy, it was something that I always found to be humbling but also talking to power, and just looking at the absurdity of life.

Through comedy, I've met the most diverse group of people. It could be a sex worker who turned into a comedian, or it could be a CEO who quit his job to be a comedian. You meet all sorts of people and that's kind of what makes it so beautiful in the sense that everyone is equal. Anyone can get started, but over time you put in the work and you obviously differentiate yourself from other people.

There are people who obviously care about their career a lot and are always going to be serious, but there needs to be some kind of balancing out where you can also see the reality of things and just enjoy the course because just the idea of being on stage and getting someone's attention for however long, the five minutes, maybe, maybe 30 minutes is a privilege; especially in this era where social media is so rife and rampant, and everyone is vying for attention.

Listen to the entire conversation with a hilarious comedian, Shafi Hossain, 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”

#D&I

#Comedy

#BoNY

#Bengalisoftheworld

#BoNYPodcasts

#BengaliComedians

#Meetup

#Standup

Season 3 - Episode 10: Diversity, equity, and inclusion is actually a field that thinks about how to create workplaces that respect, and honor the backgrounds of all people. We live in a society that disproportionately harms people of color in the workplace, women in the workplace, people different religions in the workplace than what the privileged identity markers are, which typically are straight, white, rich, Christian men. And so the field of diversity and inclusion tries to address diversity by bringing more people of color, more women, more people from different backgrounds into the workplace. And inclusion tries to make the space the workplace a place that they want to stay and feel like they can stay.

There's so much anti blackness in the Bengali community. Asians, particularly, with the model minority myth have been used as a wedge to show like, we're not racist because we like the Asians; they're the model minority. All of that is made up to pit us against each other. And so particularly in our community, what I'm really hoping for is a lot more understanding that, at the end of the day, many of us might believe that we worked hard to to get what we have, but we are all deserving of a life that we want to live. It doesn't matter what you look like or where you come from, we live in a world that's created to hold people of color back. We have to join together in support of mutual liberation. All the things that I hear that are really anti-black or racist in the Bengali community, saying those things does not put us higher. So we need to get to a place where we can all honor every single person and care about them, because they're a human being and they're a part of our community.

Listen to the entire conversation with diversity, equity, and inclusion expert and a Director at OneTILT, Uzma Chowdhury, on the BoNY Podcast.

Season 3 - Episode 9: I was teaching at a school and I just wanted to know more about what was happening in the area. So I figured Meetup is accessible and it's usually open to the public I figured, why not. And from there, I just started attending more. Some of them have been really, really valuable. Instead of paying a $700 registration fee for a conference, you can still get some type of value from going to a meetup that's walking distance, or just hopping on the train. After participating for a year, I took the leap and began co-organizing the New York EdTech meetup with two other people. It’s been such a fun journey, and just seeing the community grow has been amazing. When I started, there was about 6,000 members, and now this month are reaching to a point where it's over about to be 9,000.

Season 3 - Episode 8: Listen to the entire conversation with Sakib Jamal, the co-founder of The Capsule (a South Asian focused Newsletter)

Season 3 - Episode 7: BoNY speaks to the founders of BacharLorai, a non-profit organization that has been behind some of the most successful campaigns to help people in Bangladesh with initiatives like distributing g of oxygen cylinders to healthcare facilities to disseminating health messaging through food packages.

Season 3 - Episode 6: Why do some people in the US not vote? What are some obstacles keeping them from voting? How to have civilized conversations with your family members who have a different political view? Just some of the topics covered in this episode with the Co-Founder of South Asians Vote.