Honorable Mention Gazi Sakib Hudson High School

The Illuminati of Bangladesh

I still remember that look of disbelief on Nironjor’s, my chemistry tutor’s, face when I accepted the job as a cleaner in his chemistry tutoring center in Dhaka, Bangladesh not for money or grades, but only for the desire to learn and use laboratory equipment. “Just memorize the results!” was all I heard when I tried to enter the school laboratories. “If you cannot afford school, go back to your village! You cannot ever be successful by playing around with chemicals in a laboratory. You will turn out to be like a beggar just like your uncle. Memorize it like the other kids! Stop asking unnecessary questions!” The voices of my school teacher echoed in my head as I hid behind a broken window with a notebook, watching as Nironjor would carry out experiments for his personal satisfaction. Maybe he saw my rebellious nature after he failed the first few times to drive me away with a wooden stick. But I saw the magic of chemistry in the pipettes and burettes I cleaned in Dhaka after he took me in, so I ran through the riots, and the curfews. I ran through the slums and through the dark nights of Dhaka to get to Nironjor.

It was an outlet for me from all the corruption and political hostility around me. “You are wasting your time with these chemicals, just memorize the observations for the test” were the words commonly drilled in my ears through this education system and through this society where corruption and ignorance would suppress curiosity.

So it was one of those days when I was escaping from the riots again, that a few curious souls joined me in the running. Their faces were familiar from before they had joined me; except now there was no fear in them. I had finally convinced them. The spirit of revolution overcame the fear they had on their faces when I first asked them to join me in carrying out experiments at Nironjor's laboratories. We were rather like the Illuminati of Bangladesh. We hid from the main stream education system of memorization of formulas, exams and observations and opened the “Nironjor’s Experimental Tutoring Center”. It was an underground project through which conventions and restrictions were meant to be broken. We were revolutionaries. We talked in code, we traveled through hidden routes and we craved knowledge, not only in the form of high exam scores but in the form of doing. Engineering different experiments through intuition was an art for us and we risked our lives every day to pursue this art through all the riots, curfews and the load shedding.

As the center became more popular it rose from the underground and today it nurtures and frees hundreds of curious souls and free thinkers every day by providing a place where people would learn through doing. From escaping riots in the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh, I made it to America, and now am currently enrolled at a STEM program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. As a high-school senior I am now living my dream of working in some of the finest laboratories in the world with some of the finest engineers and professors. My school teacher might have predicted my future but I definitely created a different one.