Rashed Chowdhury was a man of the world before coming to Grinnell. “I was really surprised when I first got here because the image that I had of the U.S. before getting here was from movies and the news and most of that shows either California or New York,” he said. “My first impression was actually how green it was, because after living in Kuwait, which is mostly desert, for six years, I thought the trees lining both sides of the highway were really beautiful.”
Kuwait was only one of Chowdhury’s homes before Grinnell. He was born in Belarus, and still retains Belarusian citizenship, but his family moved to Bangladesh when was two. “I’ve gone back to Belarus many summers,” he said, the last being in 2000. “Belarus doesn’t offer dual citizenship, so I only have a Belarusian passport, and so I need to maintain my bond with Belarus, by going there and traveling around the country.”
After leaving Bangladesh, Chowdhury’s family then settled in Kuwait when he was 12, and have since relocated to Toronto, Ontario after Chowdhury enrolled in Grinnell.
Fittingly, Chowdhury is an International Relations major. “I had a hard time choosing between French, Economics, and History, so I decided to build a major that would combine all three, and not make me choose,” he said.
Chowdhury believes in the power of international studies to reduce violence. “The more various parts of the world know about each other, the less misunderstandings there will be. The less misunderstandings, the less hatred. And that’s in everyone’s interests,” he said. “For the world to be able to live harmoniously together, the basic thing is to know each other.”
To help provide Grinnell with an international perspective, Chowdhury wrote a column for the S&B, “Looking Beyond the Final Frontier” during Spring 2001 that focused on world affairs. “It’s so important to share that perspective with people,” he said. “Also, because I needed to write about these issues, I had to first educate myself, so it was a really good learning experience for me.” This past semester, Chowdhury co-hosted a weekly news show on KDIC with Doja Khandkar ’05 that focused on international news.
Chowdhury will continue his study of international relations in the future. He recently was awarded a junior fellowship by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He will be assisting senior associate Anatol Lieven and visiting fellow Edward Chow, and will be studying Central Asian politics and energy affairs for the next year.
Chowdhury feels that he has been learning and growing since he first came to Grinnell. His first writing assignment in his tutorial, Prairie Encounters with John Andelson, Anthropology, was to write about whether he preferred the forest or the prairie — “whether we like closer and more secure spaces or something more open but more vulnerable.” Until visiting the prairie during that course, Chowdhury said he “was sure that I was a forest person but having been to the prairie, I wasn’t sure any more,” he said. “This is just one of the thousands of ways in which Grinnell has change me as a person. That’s the best thing about Grinnell—how it has let me build myself."
—Brad Iverson-Long