This gallery’s theme: “A Logic For Your Attention.”

I hope you enjoy taking a look at some of the graphic designs I’ve made recently for my Summer 2026 collection.

“Question on Set Theory”

Digital Canvas, 2400 x 1600 pixels

“Less True Once Spoken”

Digital Canvas, 2400 x 1600 pixels

“Laundry Room Photo Booth”

Digital Canvas, 2400 x 1600 pixels. Photo shot with iPhone 14 camera.

But all good things must come to an end.

Share Persuasion Tactics

Share the memories one last time…because it’s time to make room for something new! As May comes to a close, I’m excited to share the first edition of Persuasion Tactics as a magazine!

Volume 1 presents the highlights of the posts I’ve made here and emailed to you all over the past couple months. I’m calling it my personal literary magazine: a place to compile my prose, essays, and artwork for a given season. Everything concentrated into one place.

And while it’s time for me to wrap up what I’ve done for the spring, I’m excited to get started on Volume 2 for the summer. Posts, emails, successes, failures, I plan to continue it all.

It’s part of giving myself permission to experiment in public.

When I sent out an article in an email blast or even let my posts sit on my website without notifying anyone, it was a chance for me to observe, listen to, and appreciate the reactions I got. And now, I hope you enjoy reading the Spring 2026 volume, linked here for you.

If you’d like a personal copy in your inbox, just let me know and I’m happy to send one over! Otherwise, you can read it online from the link above. Thank you for your readership, and I hope you enjoy getting to take a closer look at my work.

And by the way, you can always find the web versions of my past posts here.

~Yusuf R.

I’ve had a ton of fun designing graphic art recently alongside my writing work. Here is a gallery of some of my recent pieces.

I hope you enjoy looking through my work.

“Macbook from Ebay” / “Internet Stream of Conscious”

4000 px x 3000 px canvases

Designed using Affinity

From my prose fragment of the same title.

“Wedding Ring Melancholy”

1200 px x 800 px canvas

Designed using Canva

From my prose fragment, PAWN SHOP BLUES.

“Ad-Induced Accusations”

1200 px x 800 px canvas

Designed using Canva

Original piece.

“Blue light in complementary forms”

1200 px x 800 px canvas

Designed using Canva

Original piece

“Thousand Dollar Mindset”

1200 px x 800 px canvas

Designed using Canva

From edition 2 of my Weekly Sales column.

“Words on the globe”

1200 px x 800 px canvas

Designed using Canva

Alternate version of graphic from my prose fragment, A Pakistani Coincidence.

“Projections from different web colors”

4000 px x 3000 px canvas

Designed using Affinity

Original piece

I didn’t need a MacBook sophomore year of high school.

But the old family laptop had crashed for good upon starting up.

I’ve always been one for status.

My mom got it for me, after some arguments and some cash collected after paying rent.

$500 from Ebay, two years old and bought used, with a smaller screen to save cost.

I think I’ll love that junk device forever, long-since replaced.

Like I love taking the case off my phone and feeling its smooth glass back.

Once unimaginable, now in my hands.

Last week’s fragment.

Step 1: Scavenge the pantry. How does the almond mom joke go? Somehow, women’s eating habits are always the punchline of a joke.

Step 2: Start pouring out granola.

Step 3: Remember to preheat the oven. Preheat the oven.

Step 4: Chop some almonds, chop some walnuts.

Step 5: Realize the knives are dull. Fortunately, you bought a knife sharpener out of impulse a few weeks ago. Sharpen the knives and try again.

Step 6: Pour in the chopped walnut-almond mixture, but spill some of it because you’re holding your phone.

Step 7: Time for the wet ingredients. Pour out some milk but run out halfway through.

Step 8: Adjust the recipe measurements. Decide which mouth won’t get fed today, like they did during the war.

Step 9: Add eggs, honey, vanilla extract, a pinch of cinnamon, a pinch of salt, and a heap of love.

Tip: Eggs demand brutality. Tap them firmly on the counter and crack them open cleanly.

Step 10: Get confused about one of the yolks spreading. Choose to ignore it and keep going.

Step 11: You got ahead of yourself, and it turns out you don’t have vanilla.

Step 12: Contemplate adding random shit instead.

Step 13: Go ahead and do without vanilla.

Step 14: The microwave beeps for the 10th time. Your milk, which you warmed, has probably gone cold. Warm it up again while you whisk in the ingredients you do have.

Step 15: Take a timer selfie from inside the microwave. Do not turn on the microwave. Please.

Step 16: Things come together! You have your mixture, your dries, and it’s time for a pan.

Step 17: No round pan. You find a rectangle. Will it work? Only one way to find out.

Step 18: Pour it. Don’t mess it up.

Step 19: Wonder if it’s too shallow but go ahead and scatter the granola stuff over it anyway.

Step 20: It doesn’t really have a custard vibe…well it might be yum in its own right. Maybe I’ll just sprinkle brown sugar over it.

Step 21: Finally, time for the oven. Good call on letting it preheat extra-long. Never trust an oven’s temperature. Or the time it tells you.

Step 22: Bake for 30+ minutes. Relax.

Step 23: Just kidding. Start cleaning up. Wash dishes, get to work. The domestic sphere is no place for laziness. It’s hard work, keeping up a house.

Step 24: Realize that you forgot to put on a timer. Okay, just guesstimate.

Step 25: Make an omelet while you wait. Let’s hope I won’t cause egg prices to surge again.

Step 26: Marvel at the astonishing beauty of what I baked. While she’s asleep, vacuum the house. It’ll wake her up, conveniently, and knock off another to-do list item. The chores are not the Mother’s Day special; they’re simply the Sunday routine, the labor that must always be done, holiday or not. Enjoy the crunchy pumpkin seeds, though it’s not to your taste, and enjoy the small moment of love you’ve built that transcends the language barrier you guys have, or the generational gap, or whatever division the world seeks to build between home and what lays beyond it.

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Did we even ask for it? The flight attendant at the counter had the kind of smile on her face that stretched to the corners of her eyes. My mom told it to me as we walked down the tunnel, and my dad explained it again when I didn’t understand. We were flying business class that trip.

You already know I reclined my seat over and over again on that plane, the full 15 hours it took to reach our layover flight. Tapped through the seat TV ferociously, peaked over the divider at the guy on his laptop. There happened to be exactly 5 tickets available on that flight in business class. Oh, we were proper American, polite, well-dressed in JCPenney’s clothing. Such an astonishing upgrade, offered at no cost whatsoever.

2012 was the last time I went to Pakistan. These days, my relatives tell me it’s a place that’s best left behind. Corruption, crime. I don’t know, looking through my fishbowl. We’re in the same water now, and if Pakistan really was just some country on a different tectonic plate, I wouldn’t care. I’d say thank you to that flight attendant a thousand times, and if I could keep Pakistan as a keychain on my suitcase, well, you know I would.

Last week’s fragment, linked here.

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Education is in great shape these days. Anyone who tells you there’s a crisis with our youth, with our college kids are wrong. Not only do 1 in 5 people struggling financially definitively experience no difficulty whatsoever in paying their student loans, but every spring, students flock to social media to post their college decisions. I did it once, but I’m too embarrassed to unearth it.

But most of all, spring holds the joy of graduation. After a grueling, or maybe not so grueling, several years of education, you are officially passed along to greater society. In this economy, jobs may not be too hot, and grad school might be your sudden passion. But a degree is worth something, so long as you say it is.

This season, give the gift of education by giving respect to its definition. Education is not the degree that is formally printed, or even the experience you gained without the opportunity to attend school. It’s simply your readiness for the workday regimen you will execute at full maturity.

Go where your heart desires. Not where the price tag lures you.

Here’s my own student loan balance. I take sympathy in cash, and I take empathy via debit.

Actually, it could be a lot worse, especially for an English degree. I went to a school that meets “100% of demonstrated financial need” and I couldn’t be more grateful. But my education has also given me something no dollar amount can ever approximate: the ability to sniff out bulls**t like a dog.

Try it this way. Go to LinkedIn and count how many posts celebrating the newest AI coding tool you can find. Even better, count the number of “ironic” posts making fun of the LinkedIn format while also collecting hundreds of likes and proudly displaying their corporate achievements in their work experience.

I’m guilty of it, too! You play a game; you play it to win. Invest in a bachelor’s from a private university because it can give you a leg up in the game. That is, if you care to do so. I’m not bitter, actually, I’m quite grateful for the immense opportunity I’ve had to study my passions, change majors several times, and meet dozens and dozens of ambitious peers.

One thing you might learn in a humanities degree is that the most persuasive criticism is often self-implicating. And frankly, in a world that is desperate to automize labor wherever possible, your “soft-skills” degree might indeed prove quite lucrative. Recent technology hasn’t introduced the perceived lack of critical thinking in society. It simply exploited a deteriorating framework around schooling to concentrate wealth within a select few, a framework that arose from the demand for stringent labor schedules during an era of industrialization.

Read voraciously this summer.

Still, schooling has its innocence. Education is meaningful. You might consider it a luxury purchase, but rich reading experiences can transform ones educational, professional, and personal trajectory towards security.

I don’t know if they still publish these animal profiles anymore. I couldn’t bring myself to Google it and find out. My parents withstood this sacrifice for me, for the hundreds of pages I was sent in the mail. When the binder grew full, I overheard the whispers in my parent’s bedroom. The credit cards had been getting too hard to pay recently.

More is not always better. Indeed, while the shipments no longer continued the next month, I had something physical to hold. Knowledge held in my hands, quite heavy, causing misalignment of the binder rings. But damn, if that subscription wasn’t the investment of a lifetime. For a long time, it gave me something to look forward to, jumping to sort through the mail before my father could. In slick, flimsy plastic packaging. Like trading cards, I could inhale their paper scent, trace the creases with my fingertips, insert and reinsert the latest entry into my binder until it felt just right.

No, I won’t look up the price now. Nor will I confirm its continued publication. I have it, it’s mine, I possess it. And maybe, I’ll pass it down someday to someone else who seeks to possess it too. No one will take it from me, what I have inside my skull. It belongs to me, much like my work belongs to you.

Last week’s deals, linked here.

He parks the car against the curb. On that South Bay afternoon, he takes off his sunglasses, loose at the hinges as they clatter on the console.

“I’ll be right back.”

His knuckles cracking, he churns the window roller. The ocean-touched breeze flows in by the inch. With a smile, he steps outside and straightens his back, marching towards the gated doors.

Through the specks on the windshield, I watch him press the buzzer at the gate. The traffic rushes past the car, and when the metal bars swing open, he disappears inside.

The parking meter blinks red. It’s okay, he had said. Can’t ticket an occupied car. The light flickers weakly, its metal casing covered in scratches. Forgot to leave the keys in to keep the radio on.

Katy Perry, Bruno Mars, whoever’s voice in my mind. When the gate swings open again, I hardly notice. It’s only when the driver’s door opens that I realize my door handle has gone warm from my grip.

He clears his throat, cranking the engine until it sputters to life. The brakes are getting weak, he mutters as we drive away from the curb, into the traffic flow. That might’ve been the first time I noticed that his hand was blank, save for the aging spots on his skin. Is an object made symbolic through its loss or through the awareness of it? I’ve watched these transactions for a long time. I’ve watched bit by bit, if not to learn the weight of a wallet in its pocket.

Moving is a big task for anyone, but for a former child refugee, it’s a compulsion. The beauty of a big move is what we unearth of our old lives. Treasured belongings, momentos from distant relatives, toys our kids played with as babies. To leave a place is to set your eyes on a new horizon: whether that’s down the street or across continents, for someone who has only known being unmoored, the unknown is a chance to build something new.

With your own hands, with your own blood, sweat, and tears. If they’ve only ever torn you away from home, you can find empowerment by defining home on your terms. What’s different about moving now, however, is that you can give yourself some time to breathe. Call it your spring cleaning, reinvent yourself with some of the offers in this week’s newsletter.

It’s okay to need someone.

It’s like the recycling problem we’ve been having. We have so many materials we send to recycling, that it’s become a landfill itself.

The best solution to needing junk removed was to not have any in the first place. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and if you need a quote, go for it. Junk, maybe like this column, is a fact of life that we can only manage after it happens.

Get your quote, but keep your expectations tempered. It’s a hard job, and although this company didn’t get back to my request, estimates can be upwards of $500 depending on the removal size.

The heart must be here, too.

Home is here because you’re here. I feel like I’ve said that before. To a romantic interest, begging them to stay? It would check out. Do not fear the rental market, especially if you’re the kind of guy who just got dumped (maybe for a good reason) and have to move out soon. Home is in the market, and home is in your next apartment.

For every breakup, be it from your home country, be it from your husband, is a chance to make a new place your own. At just $800 a month, you might find the price is worth it.

Get rich quick: it really is possible!

The market is utterly saturated with free money. I call it free because, at worst, they just ding your credit. But you can always pay a loan with another loan, probably.

In any case, who gets to decide what counts towards building good credit? If it’s not along moral lines, then it’s at least upon financial ones.

We think labor in the home, for example, is not economically productive or otherwise measurable with economic tools. Housekeeping, laundry, cooking, and other duties are rarely paid. And they are documented even more rarely. But that work still directly invests in other people’s economic outcomes. Children specifically, who go onto take work outside of the home in salaried jobs, are more likely to succeed if their home environment was conducive to their development.

Perhaps that’s not the same as paying a debt or showing trustworthiness to lenders. But if a payday loan is the only way to keep a home afloat, say for its rent, then maybe that labor should count for something, somehow.

I’m no financial analyst. I’m just thinking out loud. But if you need to move, these offers have got you covered. Either that, or the plethora of other Google searches that can help you find what you need. Just take a look above.

Credit, finances, and loans are all emotional subjects. But we’re here to help.

Leave it all behind. No judgment.

“Arizona is the pulse of America.”

The Manufactured Housing Industry, based in the state, is opening doors for nontraditional homeowners to build wealth in America.

It is lucrative for a refugee mother. For a refugee mother, a property in your name wipes away the residue of dust torn up at home. It clears the shrapnel you saw littering your gardens, stuck in papaya trees. It erases the memory of corpses on trains arriving to take you to your next destination. The stench of a rotting body dissipates when you walk into your freshly manufactured home. The Pine Sol puts freshness into everybreath, the walls blank and pleasant in your nostrils.

I wouldn’t blame you for taking up such an opportunity. Just don’t forget the fine print. “Unlike a traditional mortgage, which is secured by both the home and the land it sits on, a Chattel loan is secured only by the movable property, such as the manufactured home itself.” You don’t own the land in these agreements, leasehold contracts. You get the building, which becomes more like a vehicle than real estate. Like the mobile homes of a bygone era, manufactured is the new chic.

If you’ve ever slept in a car before, or in a warehouse, it can’t be much different. It’s all legalese, and when the wooden rungs of the ladder seem to rot more by the day, you’ve got to take your chances.

Survival is hard-earned. Survival is movement. Just consider who wants to sell it to you first.

Image credits: Manufactured Housing Industry of Arizona

Freshman year math class was in a giant classroom divided with thin curtains. You could hear precalculus behind you, geometry here in the room we sat in. Blinds broken, Mr. Man read the textbook aloud, and we read the book silently. Mostly, it was a quiet class, save for the days with substitutes, the days where even Mr. Man couldn’t drone on anymore.

I answered his questions, I did. But I wanted to goof around, too. To finally speak on something besides the textbook, and so, with the A/C rumbling above, I let myself in on the joke I overheard.

The kid, his glasses round beneath his crew cut, scrunched his face until his white skin went pink.

“You speak English?”

I turned back to stare through the cracks in the blinds, my cheeks burning. My fingers, tugging on the rips in my jeans. He laughed with his buds, surprised I wasn’t a foreign exchange student. If only I was that exotic, don’t you think?

But how can you tell me now that I always pull the race card? It’s them, first. You know it. It’s always been them, first.

Caregivers are not defined by their formal status. Not their employer, not their relationship to a person, and certainly nor their age, gender, personality.

Caregiving is an act of love. It is labor for someone’s health, a frontline for someone’s wellbeing. And at one point or another in our lives, we must step into a caring role. Whether it’s for a week or as a career, you deserve love as much as you give it.

Here are some hot deals for you, things you can buy to show that love. For them, for you. Signed by my personal experience as a caregiver for my grandmother, mother, and father intermittently, sometimes love really is best purchased.

Hydrate or Diedrate!

In the desert, we need all the water we can get. That goes double for the aging population. Hydro Flasks have been receiving markdowns these days, and their Spring collection is filled with vibrant colors! Get one while you can!

Unfortunately, the logo came across as idolatry to both her and her daughter (my mom). Something about looking like an eye.

No worries! I landed a sweet deal at Target, where I had a gift card balance. In fact, the greatest gift is not always the most expensive one. It’s often what’s least problematic.

★★★★★

“My last bottle was just so beat up. Ugly thing. God bless you!”

My grandmother.

We all have to keep things somewhere.

Caretaker reality: your “caregivee” has way too much stuff in their apartment. How many more times are you going to do their laundry, only to move a box of photos and a broken fan out of the way first?

Storage is a subscription worth the cost. Their wedding dress can be safe in there, as well as the broken desk they insist on keeping in the living room. Out of sight, out of mind. It sounds cold, but the truth is that our memory starts to hold more than what’s strictly necessary as we age. Indeed, what we hold as beloved may be clutter pushing aside the things that matter more. Is it a pill schedule? A promise to a grandchild? She’s cooked for you all her life; give her the shiniest kitchen gadgets she could put her hands on!

A feminist interpretation of my grandma involves a vocabulary she was largely denied. But maybe it’s her vocabulary that the interpretation has yet to hear. Buy her a product in a language she can’t quite read, and she might just worry about the cost instead. Less is more, less is more.

First a mom, then a grandma. Mother’s Day is just a month away!

The older we get, the more we miss home. For someone born just on the precipice of South Asia’s decolonization, home is nonetheless a fraught place. But it’s worth celebrating the home she’s built in spite of it. She’s defined—or rather, others have defined—her life role in terms of children.

And her children’s children. If you’re feeling lazy and obligated, default to that definition. Caregiving is exhausting enough already. She’d love to feed her grandbaby baby good food, no doubt. From colonial times to now, it’s been the case for centuries.

If not for Mother’s Day, then at least give her the joy of knowing that her grandchildren will be well-fed. Grandma shies away from saying it out loud, but food was scarce in her time. Maybe it still is. Motherhood is still the greatest gift of life: celebrate it right.

Health is wealth.

Your blood sugar’s on the rise and you already know it? Too many strips, not enough money for everything else?

Sell it. Sometimes, you want to eat refined wheat without the guilt. (Grandma!)

Best part is that you can make some money too, and better yet, help someone in need. Yes, that’s the expectation. Get priced out of basic medical goods by pharmaceutical companies so that it is patients who must now care for patients. All with enormous legal and medical risks.

If you don’t do it for the one you take care of, then do it for you. The golden rule of caregiving is to put your oxygen mask on first. If by dubious means, then so be it.

Last August marked my dad’s 30^th anniversary of immigrating to America. The 90s were a different time, as he never fails to remind me. He slept on the couch of his friend’s one bedroom apartment, clicked around at a desktop the size of his laundry basket. It was just different, really, every time he’d drive by the mall, waiting for the day his wife and kid’s visa would get approved.

In this case, work was the golden ticket that brought him across the ocean. His profile as an engineer was growing luminous, and in his travels to the UK, Hong Kong, maybe even Switzerland, too, he was an unexpected catch for the Los Angeles tech scene. They didn’t quite need to know that he spent his teen years on the family farm, or that he was about eight years old when his father was taken as political prisoner. What they saw, and what I still see as his youngest child, was a man who can conjure up a circuit design out of nothing.

If those traumas crossed the border with him, I would’ve had a hard time pointing out how. For all that history brought over, he could condense it into one box on the census. Asian, a formality more than an accepted identity. In those thirty years that passed since his arrival, I found myself checking that box, too. On college apps, on job websites.

Lately, the forms with an Asian box now seem to allow a more specific subcategory, and Pakistani is usually there. But that itself is a fickle idea. Where the homeland has enormous diversity, it gets flattened into a subset of boxes to then serve another pool of American diversity. Our Muslim practices are essentially like other American Muslims, save for some inflections of traditional South Asian practices. And of course, South Asian is a watery term too. No one called it that until the British, my dad told me over coffee once, perhaps angrily. So why on Earth would I be calling myself that?

I could swap it out for Punjabi, but that would’ve ignored the unclear history of my maternal side. In rotating through the first half of my identity, the hyphen always stuck around. What remained attached was “American,” be it Pakistani, South Asian, Asian, Muslim, brown, second generation.

The way my dad joined the workforce in the U.S. was ideal, for all intents and purposes of being hyphenate. With hard work, he proved his labor to be lucrative. And with some of that hard work, he lifted himself out of economic instability. Never mind future job loss or unfortunate business decisions, it was all on his account, in true American spirit.

It came as a shock when I learned that his first company’s biggest contracts were signed with the military. It elicits a chuckle out of my dad when I ask him about it. Things just aren’t black and white, he says.

Only, it didn’t seem to bring the long-term benefit of a successful family, either. For what it’s worth, I do believe that we had much better structural footing than much of the people he knew in Pakistan. He, for example, benefited from the immigration policy emerging in the 1960s that gave preference to educated, high potential immigrants. Regardless, whether it was poorly planned financial strategy or simply a matter of supporting well over two dozen people back home on one salary, the fuel was bound to run out repeatedly.

Working for a company that develops weapon technology was not immoral, at least, not outright. It was the result of narrow choices available in a situation where staying put was hardly an option. But at what point is surviving in a new country a strong enough reason to take those jobs? They seem to arise from a sincere belief in the power of technology to make people’s lives better, much like my dad’s fascination with engineering since childhood. If not a solution to economic precarity at home, then it’s at least as a genuine interest in a highly technical industry.

Yet for many of those who were granted visas during the major immigration waves of the 1970s and beyond, their work in the west was granted on proven achievement. True, a degree from a place like the Indian Institute of Technology might not have automatically granted someone financial security. But when the rungs of the American corporate ladder continued to shine for these immigrants, it seemed less and less likely that those positions were needed for escape from poverty.

My dad didn’t play that ladder, but plenty of others in his class did. Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, is a prime example of the wealth that has been amassed by Indian immigrants. With a net worth of $1.4 billion, he has made history as the first person of South Asian descent to lead Google and its parent company, Alphabet.

“India is a part of me, and I carry it with me wherever I go,” he told the press in a 2022 awards ceremony.

On some level, this kind of ascent is intoxicating in the status it can bring. A model minority is built on the promise that a country will provide ample opportunity for social mobility as long as one earns it. To arrive in a foreign country and exceed all expectations is a real badge of honor. Naturally, an executive position at a tech company is even more enticing when presented as something rightfully earned.

By that point, survival is more than sustained. You might even take on such a role believing in the company’s ethos of expanding human possibility. In exchange, the same technology later powers the drone strikes launched on Muslim countries. Or, if “Muslim” requires substitution, then that same technology is resold to places like India where it was trained with dirt-cheap, often traumatic labor. Some of the women in rural India, who were abruptly given the task of moderating pornographic content as expected parts of their work with AI companies, have described their employment as "graphic and relentless."

Sundar Pichai said it best. “I am grateful for the opportunity to bring the benefits of technology to more people.” Indeed, the people he chooses. It would follow that a diaspora that benefited from hierarchies allowing them to pursue education and immigration continues to build new ones in new countries. Caste is a famous example, but even a country like Pakistan, which my father swears has no concept of caste, creates a culture around rigid marriage arrangements within appropriate classes and family origins.

Asking for solidarity with the homeland is a fool’s question. South Asia has never existed as a uniform identity, and in fact has long defined itself in terms of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity. Why should we expect immigrants from the region to automatically view those back home as part of their community? The community we join is an American one, where we are crammed into a box labeled “Asian” on government forms, where a return on the investment of immigration must be realized.

Unsurprisingly then, leveraging ethically compromised ladders for personal security should not be seen as a new tradition. It can at least date back to a colonial residue that was left by the recruitment brown people to subjugate other brown people. In one 1916 report on the colonial administration of the territory now known as Odisha, officials noted that it was “custom” for Sardars (tea plantation laborers who recruited workers from their own communities) to send relatives into areas of interest in order to do the recruitment for them, much to the aggravation of English plantation owners. Many of these sardars came from economically precarious situations, and it would be patronizing to suggest that they didn’t understand the nature of their work. Really, they seemed positioned as both intermediaries trying to circumvent authority while also trapped in a system that exploited their community status to recruit even more vulnerable people to excruciating work.

The same practice bolstered the military effort for World War I, where recruiters were sourced from local communities, often poor and lacking literacy, to enlist the support of upwards of 1.5 million native colonial subjects at its peak. As opposed to conscription, which would seem more outright offensive morally, recruitment put a layer of distance between the crown and the colonial subjects.

It appears that the differences today are geographical, if not even more submerged. The exact work my dad does is classified information; is he making bombs, missiles, or the casing of a missile? Might he be making engines that are meant for vehicles other than war tanks, like vehicles which can save lives on rescue missions?

My dad is well aware of my criticisms, but he’s also well aware that I don’t have many serious alternatives. When even a company like Google has engaged in its own form of violence abroad and even supplies its technologies to the Department of Defense, it’s quite inadequate to tell my father that he should simply take his talents elsewhere.

What I would emphasize, however, is that the horror we express at horrifying events abroad often overlooks our role in producing it. In Iran, drone warfare has increasingly characterized the American front of aggression. And as gas prices skyrocket, so too do the missiles in Iran: missiles which were ideated in plain buildings in Los Angeles, technology that was designed in offices just a walk away from a Persian restaurant.

The solution for the South Asian identity crisis, at least for the one I have embraced, is not going to emerge in the form of diversity initiatives or vague notions of solidarity. Especially when “diversity” has become a phrase co-opted by these very technology giants, the starting point to freedom comes from recognizing where we sign warfare into existence. Checking the Asian box on the census, for example, is a symbol for this violence. Whether it becomes ten boxes or stays rigid, the point remains: a checkmark becomes an allegiance to a cause we did not otherwise have the choice to endorse.