Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"People love to say, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” What they don’t say is, “And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.” That’s the part of the analogy that’s missing."

"People always lecture the poor: “Take responsibility for yourself! Make something of yourself!” But with what raw materials are the poor to make something of themselves?"

"The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money."

"Which is how I’d been dating a girl for over a month— the girl I very much believed was my first girlfriend— without ever having had a single conversation with her."

"I was mortified. I’d spent four years of high school carefully avoiding any kind of romantic humiliation whatsoever, and now, on the night of the matric dance, the night of all nights, my humiliation had turned into a circus bigger than the event itself: Trevor the undatable clown thought he was going to have the most beautiful girl at the dance, but he’s crashing and burning so let’s all go outside and watch."

"I told Bongani how much I had to spend, and he said we’d make it work. The trick to looking rich, he told me, is to have one expensive item, and for the rest of the things you get basic, good- looking quality stuff. The nice item will draw everyone’s eye, and it’ll look like you’ve spent more than you have."

"I got up onstage and Tom did some terrible beat- boxing—“ Bff ba- dff, bff bff ba- dff”— while I stumbled through some Busta Rhymes lyrics that I made up as I went along. The audience erupted with cheers and applause. An American rapper had come to Hammanskraal, and it was the most epic thing they had ever seen."

"These people had been so fucked by their own construct of race that they could not see that the white person they were looking for was sitting right in front of them."

"if she's that bored with civilization why doesn't she just move to a Siberian salt mine."

"Why is it that people who wouldn't dream of stealing anything else think it's perfectly all right to steal books?"

"I personally can't think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book."

"Such beautiful, mellow rough-cut pages they are, I do feel for poor William T. Gordon who wrote his name in it in 1841, what a crummy lot of descendants he must have-to sell it to you casually for nothing."

"I never can get interested in things that didn't happen to people who never lived."

""I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to."

"It's certainly good to know that someone so many miles away can be so kind and generous to people they haven't even seen,"

I'm currently in a sweet spot. It's been more than a few years since I could read voraciously or keep up the pace persistently. But this has been one of those rare good weeks. I can't stop reading any of the three books I've picked up. Each one is warming my heart in its own way and I'm happily juggling their pages. My heart is so full right now.

"From where I sit, London's a lot closer than 17th Street."

"I still like my anthropomorphic explanation the best. They left because I left. And now I am back and so are they."

"What's wrong with hope?"

"When I sing a lousy version of their song, chur-rhee chh-chh, they soon answer back and will then come to me and stare or even feed from my hand."

"Apparently, the Scrub Jays also dropped a number of intact shelled sunflower seeds. Or maybe they deliberately buried them, as they are wont to do with acorns. Sunflowers sprouted, grew tall, and before I could harvest the seeds, the Scrub Jays ate them fresh off the flower head. Farmer Jays! Another lovable behavior."

"I've discovered that when birds have been successful in finding food in a certain location, they don't immediately give up looking for it."

"We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to. "What if...""If only...""I wonder what would have..." You will never, never know, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days."

"I don't regret anything I've ever done in life, any choice that I've made. But I'm consumed with regret for the things I didn't do, the choices I didn't make, the things I didn't say."

"I learned that even though I didn't belong to one group, I could be a part of any group that was laughing. I'd drop in, pass out the snacks, tell a few jokes. I'd perform for them. I'd catch a bit of their conversation, learn more about their group, and then leave. I never overstayed my welcome. I wasn't popular, but I wasn't an outcast. I was everywhere with everybody, and at the same time I was all by myself."

"Always an outsider. As the outsider, you can retreat into a shell, be anonymous, be invisible. Or you can go the other way. You protect yourself by opening up. You don't ask to be accepted for everything you are, just the one part of yourself that you're willing to share. For me it was humor."

"I'd found my niche. Since I belonged to no group I learned to move seamlessly between groups. I floated. I was a chameleon, still, a cultural chameleon. I learned how to blend. I could play sports with the jocks. I could talk computers with the nerds. I could jump in the circle and dance with the township kids. I popped around to everyone, working, chatting, telling jokes, making deliveries."

"That's when I learned: time is money. I realized people would pay me to buy their food because I was willing to run for it."

"There was one time I stood up and then the prefect named the five people and I wasn't one of them. Everyone burst out laughing. Somebody yelled out, "Where's Trevor?!" The prefect looked at the paper and shook his head. "Nope." The entire hall erupted with cheers and applause. "Yay!!!!""

"The names of the kids with detention were announced at every assembly, and I was always one of them. Always. Every single day. It was a running joke. The prefect would say, "Detentions for today..." and I would stand up automatically. It was like the Oscars and I was Meryl Streep."