Nothin' but Nihil

One eating environment that I grew up relatively familiar with was Burger King, the infamous "home of the Whopper." Before I continue with the rest of this piece, one thing I would like to praise Burger King for is its relative honesty. The moment you step into the front doorway, you get exactly what you are paying for. There's no sense of false pretentiousness about it. Take one look around, and you can immediately tell that you have stepped right into a microcosm of corporate America. You're greeted by the sight of workers and cashiers, many of whom are being forced to survive on the minimum wage. Take a peek into the kitchen and you can see, firsthand, the standardization of the food that will be served to you. Pop a patty on the grill and pull it out to serve the people. This process is repeated innumerable times every single day. In fact, it's repeated everywhere as well. Every Whopper made here, in Troy, Michigan, is the same as a Whopper made in Kenya or A

In class last week, we looked at two different interpretations on what it felt like to be an outsider society. We read Firoozeh Dumas's piece on what it meant to have a foreign name in America, and David Sedaris talked about how it felt to not understand French in a French class (with a scary teacher as well). I also feel that in some ways, I can relate to these two authors. I grew up speaking Tamil, just as the rest of the members of my family had done. I never went to daycare like other children did, so my only exposure to English for the first four years of my life was the television. With this in mind, you can probably tell I never really had an American accent growing up. In fact, when watching old videos of myself, the first thing that stands out is the heavy Indian accent I had. I never really saw it as a bad thing. One thing you should know about me as a child is that I loved talking. I didn't care who I was talking to or what I was talking about, all I knew was that I

It was club picture day last Tuesday, and here I was, waiting next to the main staircase with the rest of my Science Olympiad team. Right behind us, there was the wall with all the sticky notes written by our students in support of Oxford. With nothing else better to do, my friends and I decided to take a look through each of them. Obviously, most of them were beautifully written. The thought and effort put into these were palpable. There were nice, cute doodles on some of them, words of unison and love on others; some even wrote entire poems! However, there was one sticky note that kind of rubbed me off in the wrong way. There was one sticky note, smack dab in the center, that said, "what doesn't kill you, can only make you stronger." Now as soon as I first saw that, I began to think about how that saying seemed a little tone deaf in this context. Personally, I don't think I would use that phrase to reassure the survivors of one of America's most horrific tragedi