0:00:02.4 Rachael Wong: Okay. Today is November 3rd of 2021. My name is Rachael Wong in the Class of 2024, conducting an interview as part of the Documenting Student Life alumni oral history project. Could you begin by introducing yourself with your name and your class year.

0:00:21.2 Indran Amirthanayagam: Right. I am Indran Amirthanayagam. I graduated in the Class of 1982. I started attending Haverford in the fall of '78 and then graduated in May of '82.

0:00:38.0 Rachael Wong: Where did you grow up and how did you find your way to Haverford? 

0:00:42.7 Indran Amirthanayagam: Well, I was born on an island in a country that no longer exists that used to be known as Ceylon, now, it's Sri Lanka. I was born in the capital, Colombo, in 1960. And then, I grew up in Colombo but my roots are in the north of the island, in Jaffna and Achchuveli and Alaveddy, villages close to Jaffna. And the first eight years of my life, I lived on the island. And then at eight and a half, I moved with my parents and my siblings to London. And so I got to London, and then I started going to school, a primary school in London. I mean I continued in school in London and then grammar school. And I lived for six years in London. And then we moved again, this time to the United States, through Los Angeles to Honolulu. So I ended up on another island in Honolulu, Hawaii where I went to Punahou School. And I was admitted there. And then I finished my high school in Hawaii. And I studied at the same time as Barack Obama, at that time when he was Barry Obama. And then from Honolulu, I applied to various colleges. And I had a number of choices to make, and I chose finally Haverford to study university.

0:02:21.3 Rachael Wong: And what do you do for work? 

0:02:23.7 Indran Amirthanayagam: Well, I'm a diplomat, belong to the U.S. Foreign Service. And I'm a poet and a translator. And I run the Poetry Channel on YouTube. And I also edit the Beltway Poetry Quarterly with another poet. I'm very active in poetry and translation. So it's hard to, you know... To say one thing that I do. I guess I would say I'm a poet, an editor, a YouTube host, a translator. And I'm still a diplomat, though I'm seeing the last stages of that career I think.

0:03:13.0 Rachael Wong: And what was your major at Haverford? And do you feel like that prepared you well for the career choices you have now? 

0:03:20.7 Indran Amirthanayagam: Yeah. I ended up majoring in English. I think I considered political science initially. And I was always torn because the options of studying at Bryn Mawr and at Swarthmore and at Penn. Practically speaking, Bryn Mawr was the closest and the easiest to study at. And I spent quite a bit of time in courses at Bryn Mawr, especially in English. But I also, of course, my major ended up being at Haverford in English. And I think I must have made that decision somewhere in my sophomore year or even early junior year, where I just chose English. And what did English mean? I mean it was a very specific thing. I mean, I studied playwriting. I did independent study in English with a particular professor who took an interest in my work and my writing, Robert Butman. And I did 18th-century English literature courses at Bryn Mawr. So it was an eclectic study of English literature. I mean if there was any one area of the study I focused on, it was the 18th-century writing. But I also did the sort of creative writing within the English literature as an independent study where I did a whole semester where I'd read all of V.S. Naipaul's work that he had written until that time. And then I wrote an essay on his work. I also did a course on playwriting where I wrote plays in a small class with the playwright, the theater director at Haverford and Bryn Mawr at the time and the professor of English, Bob Butman. But English was my major, yes.

0:05:20.4 Rachael Wong: And what made you decide to choose Haverford? 

0:05:23.9 Indran Amirthanayagam: Well, you know, I was very keen on cricket at the time. I was playing cricket. You know, it's the national sport in Ceylon or Sri Lanka. And I continued playing cricket at school in London. And in Hawaii, I used to play on the Diamond Head, the volcano, the extinct volcano in Kapiolani Park. I don't know if you know Hawaii, but Kapiolani Park is a major park in the Waikiki area of Honolulu. And there was a cricket club there, Honolulu Cricket Club. And I joined it as a teenager and used to play cricket there both with visiting teams and internal games between the players. And so I was quite keen on cricket.

0:06:09.8 Indran Amirthanayagam: I also... Then I learned that Haverford had a cricket team and was actually designed by an English gardener who, when the College was designed or laid out, he left a cricket field as part of the landscape, Cope Field. And so I was attracted by that idea of being able to play cricket as an undergraduate in the United States. And then I'd heard about Quaker philosophy and Quakerism, and I was intrigued by it, peace-making, non-violence. I was very passionate about Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. And I thought Haverford... I would learn something about non-violent conflict resolution at Haverford. I had alternatives. I had the Georgetown School of Foreign Service I was accepted to, University of Chicago. And I think there was another school that accepted me, Syracuse, I can't remember now. And I was waitlisted at Stanford. Now, I was at Punahou school, and Stanford is kind of the West Coast Harvard or something. At least if you were looking at elite private schools for their education and also for their stature, you might look at Stanford. But my older brother had studied at Stanford. But I was just waitlisted, so I didn't... And somehow going east was important to me. I mean, it's a long distance from Hawaii in a pre-internet, pre-cellphone world, 1978. But that was important to me to learn about the East Coast United States. So I came east from Hawaii.

0:08:04.4 Indran Amirthanayagam: And Haverford, small college, I wasn't sure what that meant. I had no idea what... I never went to see any colleges. Nowadays, people visit colleges before they make a decision on which one to visit, or to study in, but not at my time. Well, that wasn't really practically an option then. We didn't have the money for me to go on a college-visiting tour. I was a scholarship kid, I could say, in Hawaii. I mean my father was at the East-West Center and a scholar, a poet. But being one of five children, I have a brother who's autistic, we had a lot of family... We're a close family, but I sometimes wonder how my parents managed to not only feed all of us but give us this idea that we could achieve whatever we wanted to achieve. And I'm grateful for that because we managed somehow in that very expensive school. But we got, as I said, fellowships, scholarships for some of the costs at Punahou, and so we managed to go there. And at Haverford, too, I got a pretty decent financial aid offer. It was not perfect, and I had equally good offers from other schools, but it certainly helped that there was that incentive, that I didn't have to bear the full cost of the coeducation, in my decision.

0:09:40.1 Rachael Wong: And what were your initial impressions of Haverford when you arrived on campus? 

0:09:46.7 Indran Amirthanayagam: You know, I remember it was such a long trip from Honolulu. I had to fly probably to Los Angeles and then go on from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. I remember being met off my flight and being driven to Haverford quite some distance. I can't remember now if I actually flew into New York, and then we were met and taken to Haverford from New York, or whether I flew into Philadelphia. But I don't remember if the chaperone was the customs student who was in charge of this particular freshman. I can't remember the term. Whether that person or whether the school, the College had somehow arranged transport. But I didn't have to take a taxi to go to the College from the airport. Somebody met me, which I'm grateful for 'cause I was quite green, even though I had lived in England. And I was 17, and I had never been on the East Coast of the United States.

0:11:04.0 Indran Amirthanayagam: And I got to the College. And I guess it was a small college, and I noticed that. And such a small group of students. We were about 250 in our class maybe. I think what the number now must be 300 or 350 maybe. I'm not sure how many currently study every year. And we were all young men, right? It was still an all-male school. While I was there, coeducation began. There were women students who were masters students at Haverford while I was there early, but they were the only Haverfordian women at the time. When I was a junior, co-education began formally. Though of course, Bryn Mawr was all female, so we had a natural conversation between the two student bodies and all that happens when a young man meets a young woman, and the longing and the silences and so on, and the discoveries.

0:12:12.9 Indran Amirthanayagam: I guess I was struck by how... That it was a small college. I was also remembering that not everybody knew about Haverford. I mean, it was not a secret but it was... It didn't have the media presence of some of the bigger universities, whichever ones you name. But it had a very strong reputation for academic excellence. And I think I must have taken the SATs and the PSATs and the GRE... Not GREs, SATs. Achievement tests, they were. I don't know if still achievement tests are part of the high school program. And I think I had looked at statistics, I think, when I was considering colleges, and what Haverford tended to accept and so on. So I fell into that group. And so anyway, I felt... I mean, I was looking for a school that would challenge me, that I would be intellectually, be challenged, and I would be politically challenged as well. I think I was looking for some school that was not just academics and intellectual development but also political development, social development. So I was looking for something broader, and I thought Haverford would give me that opportunity to grow in a broader way.

0:13:44.5 Rachael Wong: Do you think that Haverford met those expectations? 

0:13:49.2 Indran Amirthanayagam: Well, I was confronted with this thing called the honor code, my first day or something. And I thought it was quite quaint or odd initially, but then I... And then when I went to a Quaker meeting, and everybody was quiet for the whole meeting, and suddenly, someone burst out speaking. And I thought that was very interesting meditation in the West. And here I am coming from the East, so to speak, or the Orient or South Asia, and learning about American meditation. And I was... I don't know when I discovered the relationship between Haverford and Civil Rights struggles and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States in the 19... In the '60s and before, in the '50s. And as I learned about America, I learned about the connections between religious philosophy and the struggles for racial justice and equality. And the philosophy of Quakerism, I thought was very, very... I don't know. It's very sophisticated. And the kind of, like, teaching that I think is just very good. I think everyone should be exposed to it who can, in terms of making peace in the world and moving on. So I was impressed by what I found at Haverford.

0:15:31.2 Indran Amirthanayagam: But I was a token. I mean I was the only Sri Lankan in my college community, as far as I could tell, not only at Haverford but also at Bryn Mawr. I was also one of the few from South Asia. I think Bryn Mawr must have had a couple or two or three. But I'm pretty sure I would have been the only one in my class at Haverford. There might have been a Pakistani student as well, at that time. And then I was a natural minority. I mean I stood out, but I also identified with other minorities that I found there. There were a couple of African students who were from Ghana in my class. And I befriended them, and they befriended me. And so there was a natural alliance between being outsiders or visitors or migrants and coming together around at the lunch table or the dining table in my first year. But those natural alliances or group formations became... Revolved around other, not just race or ethnic background, but there were other... I mean, as I spent time at Haverford, the key was music. I was very close with my roommate from my first year. And we decided to share an apartment at HPA the second year. And then one afternoon... He was a guitarist. He was playing guitar, and I started writing a lyric for the music that he was composing, playing, and the tune he was playing.

0:17:23.0 Indran Amirthanayagam: And that's how our first song, called Snowman, was born. And then that led to other songs. And then we decided to establish a band, which I called... When I had this idea of calling it The End. I was very... A bit of an angry young man. I was 19 or something. I was politically engaged. I didn't like Henry Kissinger. And I didn't like Margaret Thatcher, who was the Prime Minister of England at the time. And why did I not like these people? And I started thinking about it. I didn't like big corporations. And I didn't like injustices writ large and human rights violations. So I started to write songs about these subjects, but I also just bizarre things like it rained... I mean it snowed on, I think on that year on Thanksgiving, and it snowed again on April Fools Day. And that led to a song called Snowman, which people have interpreted as a song about cocaine. But it wasn't about cocaine, it was about snow literally falling. And so I wrote songs. And that formed another group, a natural group, sub-group in the dining center, where we would sit around together, and then we had friends who joined us. I mean, you could call them groupies, or you could call them friends, whatever. But there was a larger subset that grew around that band. And the band played... Started to play concerts at Haverford and at Bryn Mawr. And so it felt... That was another meeting place and another source of...I don't know.

0:19:13.3 Indran Amirthanayagam: I felt I belonged to that group. But it was a group playing punk music in 1979-1980. And we had gone to Philadelphia, and we saw The Members, The Clash, The Jam. These were the groups coming out of England at the time. I still had a pretty British English accent. I mean, I'd left England when I was 14 or something. And I was now 19, but I still kept, that accent was still there. And listening to British music was still a great passion for me. I used to love The Kinks among other groups. But The Kinks, we went to see concerts in Pennsylvania in different places when they played...

0:20:00.0 Indran Amirthanayagam: But... I'm sorry, I've lost... Your original question was did Haverford meet my expectations. I guess I didn't quite know what my expectations were, and so they were formed as I was studying at Haverford. I mean, I did have an expectation about cricket and playing cricket. And I joined the cricket team right away, and started playing on the team from my first year. I did have a hope, rather, about partnerships and romance, but it didn't quite happen right away when I got there. So I'm not sure it was an expectation. It was more like an aspiration. But eventually something happened. Anyway, it was a... Look, I remember the duck pond. I remember a very... I felt it was a beautiful campus. I felt it was agreeable to the eye. And a kind of place for meditation, I considered it. And it's really a privilege. I mean, you don't have to worry about money. You don't really... You have your... I mean whatever arrangements are made so that your basic needs are addressed. All you have to do is study and be friends, to learn, and get up... Yes, you have to get up, and you have to make your bed. But it's a certainly somewhat protected place, and I had the sense of being in a protected village at Haverford.

0:21:34.0 Indran Amirthanayagam: The troubles of the outside world were in the outside world. They were not there as much as... Though sometimes they came in. And I remember when John Lennon was killed in New York. That would have been... I think it was 1980, my fall... Sorry, I can't remember if it was '79 or '80 that he was... I think it was '80. I would have been in my sophomore year, sort of half way through my sophomore year. And that was a shock that was heard around the world and was certainly heard at Haverford. And the other big, major event that took place my first year, '78-'79, was the meltdown at Three Mile Island in Harrisburg, of the nuclear plant. And there was a sense of nuclear annihilation and tragedy. I mean it was not that far away. It was in the same state, in Harrisburg. And there was a lot of fear about that meltdown and that accident and what would result from it. And I remember writing a poem about that. I mean, I'd been a poet since I was a teenager. And I've now published about 20 books of poetry, including poems I've published and written in Spanish and French, so I have a career in different languages. But at that time, I was a fledgling poet writing once in a while a poem. But the poems, and the songs, tended to be about social political subjects. Occasionally, I guess, from solitude, about a personal love poem or the desire for love, but mostly, they were these other social political subjects.

0:23:32.2 Indran Amirthanayagam: So I think I had a social conscience and a political conscience that was developing, and Haverford helped it to grow. Prior to arriving at Haverford, I was already a migrant, and I had already lived... I'd already been a minority in Sri Lanka, which had suffered... Where the minority was oppressed by the majority in that island. Left for England, and I lived... I suffered... I mean, I loved England, but at the same time, I had difficult experiences there with racism. And I was a kid. I was 8 years, or 9-10, and racial abuse was flung at me by... There was one incident that happened that was difficult for me at the time as a kid to deal with. I couldn't understand why this woman on a bicycle, dressed all in black with a black hat, was screaming these filthy words at me. And I was terrified. But those experiences jar you and mark you growing up.

0:24:34.2 Indran Amirthanayagam: But yeah, so Haverford I think helped me to understand some of these things, and the courses I took I think... I mean, it's a College that at the time had a strong reputation in philosophy, and I imagine it still does, as one of its strengths. And I remember taking philosophy, Introduction to Philosophy class early on. And then I studied with a professor named Ramón Garcia-Castro who taught a course in Latin-American literature in my first year, in translation. So I read all the classic books in tran... And it was a very good course. And then I remember, as a sophomore, taking a course called Interpretation of Life in Western Literature, which was essentially a Great Books course where we read Homer and King John.

0:25:33.9 Indran Amirthanayagam: The Bible, that part of the Bible and it was just Western literature, but there was some Eastern literature as well. The, Lao Tzu, The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu, was part of the text. And so these were transformative experiences for me, in terms of deepening my understanding of the world of literature, of history, of meeting of cultures. I came from Hawaii, where my father had been at the East West Center where he had established something called the Culture Learning Institute. So I had in my head, the meeting of cultures as being an important subject to study and to know and to learn about. And so I think at Haverford, I continued that interest or that passion to learn about what happens when cultures meet in an imaginary or imagined fiction or in a poem. So I mean, that's why when you have mentioned your parents are from Guyana, I mean, the migrant story for me, is almost a human condition. I mean, so many people have addressed by, been migrants or lived with the consequences of migration.

0:27:00.4 Indran Amirthanayagam: And I've been a migrant literally from birth. I was born a migrant, in a sense. I was born in Colombo to parents who came from Jaffna, the north of the island. Then I migrated to London, to England, and then I migrated to Hawaii and so on. And I think at Haverford, though I was one of the very few visible migrants, so to speak, in terms of being able to tell, "Oh, are you from such and such a place?" I mean, it's an awkward question, "Where are you from?" sometimes, but we tend to ask it anyway. And, or you try to ascertain somebody's origin by their name or their way of dressing or their whatever. But the identity is something that, maybe it's a human need to know where you are from and where some person you were talking with is from.

0:28:02.8 Indran Amirthanayagam: And at Haverford, I guess I wasn't exotic. I was rather... I mean, I was not part of the majority. So perhaps, that gave me some privileges. Maybe I benefited from that. It's ironic to talk about being a minority and saying, that's an advantage, but if you turn this around, you're the special kid in the group, or you're the special person at the party, the exotic, the different one. So I think some of that was... But I can say, it's hard to separate growing up from being at Haverford or being at any other college, or you know what I mean? You grow up whether you go to Haverford or not. I mean, it's how you grow up where Haverford plays a role, I think. That particular opportunity to be protected from certain of the challenges of life, whether it's the economic or... And to have this space to dedicate yourself to books and study and conversation and seminars. I remember the seminar being so special about Haverford, the seminar format and classes, the emphasis on thinking and free thinking and creative thinking, not rote study of information from books or rote memorizations.

0:29:44.0 Indran Amirthanayagam: And I don't know how innovative that was in 1978 when I started at Haverford. I mean, I remember in high school at Punahou, in Hawaii, also having seminar classes and that being a sort of a standard. But still, it's very different from other parts of the world and how you study, for example, I don't know, in India or in China or in different parts of the... There are different ways of absorbing and learning. The lecture that someone gives and everyone takes notes and then presents the notes in their own words, in the final exam. Haverford was not like that, it was a seminar system of exchange between the students and the professor and a kind of I suppose, Greek idea of dialogue and conversation and the truth. And that's where the honor code came in. What is justice? How do you respect? What is respect? That conversation about the honor code was helpful in getting us to think new to the campus about ourselves as members of a community with responsibilities to that community, not just individual actors pursuing our careers. Yeah. I'll stop there.

0:31:13.5 Rachael Wong: How would you describe how people of color were received by the majority of the student body? You talked a bit about feeling like an outsider. Could you maybe elaborate on that? 

0:31:24.9 Indran Amirthanayagam: Yeah, I mean, I did feel, at times as an outsider. I'm not quite sure, I mean, I think I was relatively at ease at Haverford and dare I say, happy, at times, but I was also frustrated and sad. And that could have been because of my own solitude or my own... I mean, like anybody, a human being who would like company. And I had friends, but then there's that ache for the other, for the union with a partner or a girlfriend, whatever it is, so...

0:32:05.8 Indran Amirthanayagam: But I think that... And I don't really remember feeling the victim of some kind of prejudice at Haverford or at Bryn Mawr except in one case and that had to do with a very personal thing where I was going out with somebody romantically, and I felt that there was some distance because of who I was, what I represented, where I came from, and that... Because of that, the relationship could not prosper, could not move anywhere, so it just stopped. And I was very disappointed and sad about that because I thought it was not me or her, but it was rather what the baggage we brought, and then how that informed the way we were supposed to be with each other. That almost taking an old style, the queen or a court does not meet with ordinary... Frequent ordinary members of the society, they have their own rules of their own partnerships. Then there was a bit of that, I think in this case. I did remember at some point making a decision to smoke cigarettes, which I had never done until then.

0:33:32.3 Indran Amirthanayagam: And that happened at Haverford where there was a smoking room in the library at the time where you could... It was a lovely room with arm chairs and part of the library where that's where smokers would smoke, and that's where I began to smoke. I know nowadays, smoking is some kind of mortal sin or something, but at the time, it was not. And the reason I went to cigarettes, I remember was solitude and also feeling inadequate somehow, why did this relationship not work? And it was a trigger to do something else. And I was also in the band, and I was the lead singer of the band, and so I had a lot of attention as the lead singer, and I think I misunderstood my role in the band or people were jealous, or there were some jealousy and the band broke up in an unpleasant way.

0:34:37.9 Indran Amirthanayagam: I came... I went away for the summer, we all did, but I actually managed to make a trip to Europe, so I went to Europe to France and England, and I took a train across some of Europe as a student, and I came back to find that the band was breaking up, I had this full illusion in about my junior year. People often spend a junior year abroad or somewhere, and I didn't do that, I just did the summer or part of the summer, because I thought this band was going to go places... We were going to make music, we're gonna make a record, we were going to get a contract with the recording label, and then I realized that some of the people in the band wanted something else, they wanted to record music, but I honestly... I think the motive... There was some... There was some problem with the sense of, you know, who was getting... Who was in the limelight and who was not and I didn't know it, it ended up... It ended being very hurtful, the end of that.

0:35:43.8 Indran Amirthanayagam: And I think that also contributed to my rather hurtful and silly decisions to smoke cigarettes and I... But I retreated into myself, and I became a poet in a peculiar way at that point, poetry is a very solitary art. You write by yourself, but you share the work afterwards and there is a community aspect to it. But the writing... The competition is a solitary thing. And I did that. What was nice about the band was that you... That solitude disappeared even in the writing as you are writing for somebody else, you're writing for the composer to compose music for your words in my case and I remember one winter writing whole rock operas, two of them or something for my close friend who composed the music for the words I wrote then.

0:36:44.8 Indran Amirthanayagam: So it was very sad, the ending of the band. But we did come back together to play one more time, it was almost a sort of legendary concert that we gave at the bottom of Leeds in 1981 spring, but what remains of that band is, of course our memories, and about five or six songs of the recorded ones in the refrigerator room of the dining hall, which had been on MP4s and threes. There is... And listening to those songs now, they're pretty good. I could have shared them with people, musicians in different fields. So it was an important learning experience, I suppose, breaking up the band. It was an experience in being thrust into solitude and learning how to cope with that, and my initial coping was not very successful, and I did things that were destructive in a sense, and cigarettes being an example. I didn't drink much, but there might have been one day that I... One evening where I went off, but I remember being carried back to HPA on one occasion but that... That... Yeah, so Haverford, even if you did have some excesses, it was a loving community. I think people took care of you and they wanted you to... To recover and move on, but it was tough dealing with the breakup with that band.

0:38:17.7 Indran Amirthanayagam: I don't know why it was so tough. I was very attached to that group. The way we... I thought we made music together and it's music, there's a idea that music and dance and the word at one time, they were all together and that's... That's perfection when music got separated or the dance got separated or the word got separated, you're living in a sort of broken up world? And so yeah, where... Did racial prejudice enter into that? I don't think so. Into that breaking of the band, no. But convention, small conventional ideas did. There was a sense that what you, we were doing was too radical, too innovative, too left off the chart and what they wanted to do in The End, just play cover songs, which you can you imagine if you're writing songs, you're making something new and then to go back and just do covers of other songs.

0:39:29.0 Indran Amirthanayagam: It's great to do cover songs, but not as all you do. So that was tough, but there were some very creative people in the group. And then a couple of them remained... I mean, there were three of them, we were five, three of them remained, of course they remain friends, but only one really he himself as over the years as, we've been able to see each other and recover. And yeah, but... I think there were times when I was feeling the minority and I remember living at Black House, it was called at the time. I don't know if that's still the name, sort of a house along the path towards HPA. And I was in touch with the African students and the Black American students and I... And I identified with the need to make Haverford more diverse and more multicultural. And I protested on these issues in the campus. And I mean, apartheid was still going on in South Africa. And I remember that being a motivation for some of our protests. I don't know at the time if Haverford invested in companies doing business in South Africa or not. I know later on when I went to journalism school at Columbia. I participated in in protest there on this issue divestment, divesting investments from racist regimes like the apartheid regime. I can't remember if Haverford also was... Will you just hold on one second? 

0:41:54.6 Rachael Wong: Yeah.

[pause]

0:41:56.6 Indran Amirthanayagam: Can you hear me now? 

0:41:57.4 Rachael Wong: Yeah.

0:41:58.8 Indran Amirthanayagam: Yes. Okay, great. Yeah. Okay. So I can, where were we, I mean, it's a very interesting question about whether one felt left out or prejudice or isolated or something. And I think at the time I did have those emotions, they seem to have been... They seem to have gone away over time. I don't, I mean, as I'm talking to you, I'm remembering... I'm remembering yes that I did feel that way of looking, but the significant events of my social, emotional events of that period had to do with the setting up of the band and then the breaking up of the band, and also that first sort of romance that didn't, that went sour because I thought of a racial ethnic issues as being a factor that limited how we could develop that friendship. So I think those two are key for me in terms of things that I still go back to and remember and recall. But every difficult experience is also an opportunity to grow and to develop and learn new again about... So I think in that sense, there's never been an unfortunate, a useless experience and every experience is somehow food... I think growing up is becoming wiser [laughter] just infinitely.

0:43:37.7 Indran Amirthanayagam: So but at the time, I don't think I had the emotional and I didn't have the emotional resources to cope as let's say I... Perhaps I'm not saying that I have them now, but I think I'm better equipped now in my life to deal with disappointment and sadness. And I remember my grandfather dying, my mother's father when I was at Haverford and I got this news, he was very close to me. I was very close to him. And I remember sitting, I don't know if I went home at that point or I was driving by when I got this news. And I don't remember how I got the news, but it was a phone call somehow. And I went and sat there and I wrote a poem. I wrote two or three poems actually about him and it ended up late– years later, being part of my first book, the Elephants of Reckoning, which many years later after that, I went back and I actually read from at Haverford, I was invited by the English department to read from that book. That was... I hope it's in the library. It's called the "Elephants of Reckoning." It won a prize in the United States, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and three of those poems...

0:44:56.1 Indran Amirthanayagam: The ones about my grandfather, and I think a couple of others were written at Haverford by the Duck Pond in around 1980 or 1981, the book was published in 1993. I was 32 at the time that, I had written those poems when I was 20 at Haverford, so they're very tender but they're well done. They're beautiful poems. I shouldn't say that about my own poems, but anyway, they... And so you do have a kind of... You might be sad, but then the poem heals and transforms and you feel much better and... So Haverford was... And then I went to Bryn Mawr and I would... There were social events at Bryn Mawr, and then there were classes I took at Bryn Mawr. I was... I liked the fact that you had both these. The different... There were certain strengths that Bryn Mawr had that I couldn't... Academically that Haverford had different strengths so it was a nice compliment. Complementary relationship. I really didn't explore though I went to Swarthmore events since, but I really didn't explore Pennsylvania or Swarthmore though one had that option during my time, yeah.

0:46:27.1 Rachael Wong: How were women received after Haverford became co-ed? 

0:46:34.2 Indran Amirthanayagam: How were women received? I don't think there were so many women who came in that first year. They must... I think they were received... They were given a sort of special status or something, they were kind of stars in a way, but I think some Haverfordians were opposed to the idea of co-education. Some Haverfordians were certainly... Were thrilled because they had a larger selection of young women to spend time with, [chuckle] and they were blessed, really. But the women who came into Haverford when I was a junior... I had been with women at Haverford who were Master's students, a few, but I must say I'm shamed to say this, but the basic...

0:47:40.9 Indran Amirthanayagam: The first thing perhaps that I thought about was not the intellectual or the political capacity or whatever, but it was just the attraction, it was the basic biological attraction, and here, the campus was somehow transformed by this beauty that was not there before. Literally a beauty that... And then there was... And then came the interactions, and I think everyone must have, had gone through a sort of adjustment process because from faculty to the dorms, there were... I imagine floors that were for women and floors that were for men, and various adjustments, so it was an interesting process to have been there at the time. I remember having friendships among some of the Haverfordian women who came in as when I was a junior, but they would have come in as a freshman, I think of...

0:48:46.1 Indran Amirthanayagam: So they would have been younger to me, I don't... I'm sorry to say, I don't have... They have not lasted to this day, I didn't touch with them, but then we are looking at a 40th reunion coming up next spring, and also there was simply... The work was tough, the studies were tough it took a lot of energy and time to do well, and someone can't forget that, it's not all play, it's also just working hard in your nature. But I suddenly didn't know the women well who came in, at least initially.

0:49:37.7 Indran Amirthanayagam: Of course, I knew women, they tended to be from Bryn Mawr who... And they tended to be related to the band or friends of the band, or friends from classes that I took there, and that's where... And they were friends and to this day, are friends, a couple of them. Well, I've lost touch with one, but another is a friend, so yeah. But overall, they were... It was a positive time, I don't think... There were periods when I protested and I was angry with policies of the school, of the College or for what I consider to be kind of... Not arrogance but a sort of smug satisfaction about morality, and I didn't like this smugness. I... But then... It's very hard to have a very general statement because morality is such an individual thing, but I... In memory I... The memories are positive and the experience was mostly positive, except again, for these two sort of signature things that happened to me. The break up of the band and the break up of that first... Not the first but the sort of initial first year venture into a romance.

0:51:16.3 Rachael Wong: What did activism look like at Haverford campus? 

0:51:20.9 Indran Amirthanayagam: Well it was non-violent protest, marches and sittings and sitting on the Founders lawn and... I don't think we ever interfered with the activities of classes or such, or blocked people from getting a meal or going to... But there were a protests loud enough to be noted and to be addressed somehow by the administration or the president of the time. I have a mixed feeling about protest now, I've participated in protests in different moments in my life, and I believe in the right to protest, and I believe in the need to exercise that right into... But I guess I'm a little bit more cynical now about protest, but I... Look, when I was there, the war, the Uncivil war.

0:52:28.9 Indran Amirthanayagam: I wrote a book called Uncivil War, it's a book of poems about this uncivil war in Sri Lanka. When I was there that uncivil war was just starting to happen. The early 1980s, I left Haverford in '82. In '83, Black July took place in Sri Lanka, it was a week when pogroms against Tamils. And in 1981 though, when I was there, the Jaffna Public Library was burned to the ground, which is a huge... Like the burning of the... The loss of the Library at Alexandria, all of the elite manuscripts, all of the history of the Tamils of the north over many hundreds of years, burnt by soldiers setting fire to the building. So these are horrible, horrible acts against memory, against... Trying to wipe out a people from its culture and I was very angry about those things.

0:53:38.0 Indran Amirthanayagam: And it fueled my writing. You know what I wrote about in my first book, The Elephants of Reckoning, some of those poems are war poems in a sense of the subject of the result of that conflict. And other books like the Uncivil War in particular or... So, although I espouse and espoused non-violent methods, it's a complicated matter. It affects social change and political change, and creates a bit more justice in the world or a bit more human rights in the world. And I can imagine a situation where the right thing to do is to take up a gun and to fight. But I did not do that, I took up a pen and I wrote, and that's an easy thing in a sense to do, it's a safe thing to do. But I wrote about that violence, and I hope I wrote about it in a way that's useful for any reader to learn what happened and also sympathize and empathize to people... If there's a broken people there that's trying to recover and it's recovering, the trauma does go away in time, but one has to respect the right to remember, and that right to remember is what the current Government of Sri Lanka is trying to deny by various policies and practices. And whether it's the Government of Sri Lanka or any other government, I have always been and I'll devote the rest of my life to fighting for that right to remember.

0:55:27.4 Indran Amirthanayagam: And I'm sure that Haverford has a positive influence in shaping that ideology for me, even as an American diplomat, internally, I try to fight for that right, I'm very angry about certain... Upset about certain things that I've seen. But most recently, this policy about turning Haitians back and sending them on flights back to the Haiti from the border in Texas, people who've not lived in Haiti for many years, some of them in Chile and other countries, who are there with children who don't even speak Creole, they've grown up in Brazil or in Chile, or in... And suddenly, they have been... And we know they are desperate economic migrants, but they're also political migrants because Haiti is unfortunately ruled by gangs, 80% of the capital city is controlled by different gangs, and there are now 16 American missionaries conducting the negotiations and FBI trying to get these people released, including an eight-month-old baby.

0:56:45.4 Indran Amirthanayagam: So there are very real things going on and dangerous, and so we have to... And I write about Haiti, I write now, once a week, a poem, a column in a Haitian newspaper and one in a Dominican newspaper, and one in French, the Haitian paper, and in Spanish in the Dominican paper. So that kind of political engagement through poetry I'm doing now, and it's natural for me to do it. And it's rather unusual, you don't usually have a poem as a columnist, but that kind of energy, political energy, I think goes back to time at Haverford, and these are circumstances when I was growing up, my life, but Haverford certainly did not try to stop me, it helped me grow that energy. And in that sense, I'm grateful that it was a conducive place for... There's some amazing... The world is vast. It's seven billion people or something, and there are so many species disappearing and so much stuff to do and so little time and yet... And the education one gets at Haverford, I think can only help save the trees or help save the elephants, it's an idealistic thing to say, but I think it is a positive education with a moral conscience and a political conscience shaping it. And I think that's an important part of the Haverford education, and what makes it not unique, but a special place.

0:58:45.0 Rachael Wong: And what was your experience like with faculty during your time in Haverford? Do you feel supported by your professors? And do you have any mentors? Do you have any faculty or people of color that stood out to you? 

0:58:58.6 Indran Amirthanayagam: I was supported by one particular professor who's passed away. His name is Bob Butman who was a professor... He was the director of plays, theater at Haverford and Bryn Mawr. He was also a professor in the English department. I think he was attached to both Haverford and Bryn Marr. He used to live on the, right around the cricket field and in one of those houses. And he was brilliant, and he was kind, and he loved my poetry and my writing, and he encouraged me to develop it, he was very kind. He was a mentor to me, and he really... I'm indebted to him. But he was not a professor of color in a sense, he was an American from... I mean I think he grew up in Indianapolis. He had a house in Indianapolis, eventually, he used to teach at St. Johns before he started teaching at Haverford. One of the things about Bob Butman was that he had seen the atomic bomb testing in the Bikini Atolls before the bomb was dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

1:00:25.2 Indran Amirthanayagam: He was in the army and he had seen... And that changed his life when he saw those and the effects of that, and he devoted his life to teaching and to non-violent, and to trying to... So he asked you to, challenge you, and how are we going to avoid nuclear annihilation was a passionate question for him, and it is for me too. How are we going to avoid annihilation? Annihilating ourselves and our fellow species. So it's a very burning real question. And I learned that question from Bob Butman. But there weren't any minority faculty as such who were models to me. There are very few minority faculty. There was one named Ashok Gangadean who taught philosophy but I never studied with him. There was Ramon Garcia-Castro who taught me Spanish Literature in Translation course, and he was a very good professor and I enjoyed working with him in my freshman year.

1:01:32.2 Indran Amirthanayagam: There was... I'm trying to recall. There was a wonderful teacher of poetry and lyric, Sandra Berwind at Bryn Mawr and Peter Briggs who taught 18th century Literature, was very good. And I learned a lot from Marcel Gutwirth. So there were good professors. And there were also weaker professors, people who I learnt later, not to, to despise is a strong word, but to dislike as I thought they were... They simply... They were not... I keep on thinking hard words like hacks. They were not brilliant. I won't name their names, they're all passed on, I think, but I was upset that I'd spent time with them because it was time wasted. I hope I don't hurt anybody by saying that but there were those moments. And I had to learn that, you go by the teacher, not by the subject. Pick a course, you're still a sophomore. Go by the reputation of the teacher, try to be... Doesn't matter what the subject is, you learn a lot from that teacher. Have you decided a major by the way? 

1:02:48.7 Rachael Wong: Yeah. I haven't decided formally yet, but I think I'm gonna be a philosophy major.

1:02:53.4 Indran Amirthanayagam: Philosophy, okay. It's Kathleen Wright still teaching there? 

1:02:57.3 Rachael Wong: I don't believe so, but Ashok Gangadean still teaches there that you mentioned before...

1:03:03.8 Indran Amirthanayagam: Right, okay. And yeah. Okay. And I think more recently, there's somebody I've met named Susanna Wing who teaches at Haverford, she's in the political science department. But I met her more recently as an American diplomat. She came to, I think it was Haiti where we had a program with her... But going back, so there were professors that shape me, especially Bob Butman. But some of the other names I mentioned, like Berwind and Peter Briggs from Bryn Mawr, Marcel Gutwirth are more important to me as well. And there were professors who are less, shall we say, less inspiring, and I can... I had their names in my head, but what's the point of naming them really? They're no longer there anyway as far as I can tell.

1:04:03.1 Rachael Wong: Were there any systems of support that Haverford created to aid students of color during that time at Haverford? 

1:04:11.3 Indran Amirthanayagam: I don't remember any at that time. There wasn't any sort of formal therapy group or something. I think, and really therapy even we knew of existed as a concept, I might have been just by ignorance, but I didn't know groups to help... America is a very different place now. And I think now, and certainly in certain liberal places, there is a kind of positive, very positive celebration of the minority. And I'm a poet, and as I mentioned, I had 20 books and I've judged prizes and in all of various things. But if you look at the people who win the Pulitzer prize, or people who, or the chancellors of the American Academy of Poets now. It's a much different group than was there 20 years ago, or even 40 and 40 years ago, and it's a group... It's a colored group, it's a group of color and of women and of minorities, and so it reflects the diverse American, but...

1:05:29.1 Indran Amirthanayagam: We haven't worked out the race question in America, really. I mean, we have... We try... You know, Barack Obama, who was my classmate at Punahou who becomes president. And then we're followed by Donald Trump, you know, a chief racist, I mean, a scourge on the good name of the country, as president for four years. And then, and so, you know, we have... Sonya Sanchez once said, you know, you take two steps forward and one step back in America, you know, and the Sonya, civil rights movement, I mean, civil rights, one of its leaders, Martin Luther King was killed. And so was Malcom X. And so was, and Robert Kennedy who was a supporter was killed. I mean, you know, there are consequences, terrible... Terrible energies in the society that want to demolish advances, you know, I guess it's a problem every, anywhere where there is a push and pull.

1:06:38.9 Indran Amirthanayagam: I mean, there's a... There are people trying to improve the lives of all, and there are people trying to destroy those people unfortunately. As it's going on in the United States, today. We just went through the insurrection on January 6th, not that long ago. A very direct attempt to overturn American democracy and its consequences are huge. And I think we don't... We have short memories as a people. We are limited by the latest Facebook post or whatever Instagram post. We need to try to remember. I've advocated for the right to remember in Sri Lanka and the war. I think we all need the right to remember in the United States as well, the right to remember 9/11, the right to remember January 6th, the right to remember that we may be a great nation, but we are also a bloody fratricidal, you know, murderous nation.

1:07:42.6 Indran Amirthanayagam: We murder our own children. We allow our children to be shot by guns that should not be available. You know what I mean? We do many things we... Abroad and here that will not help us when St. Peter looks at our dance card as we approach paradise, will he allow us in based on what the national sins that we've committed as a nation? I don't know, I'm talking very religious language here, sins. And... But I think you have... You understand that I am very concerned not only about Sri Lanka, where I was born, but about this America where I've become, you know, I mean, I'm a citizen of the United States. I'm a migrant, American migrant. I'm an American diplomat. I love this country. And I'm very, very sad when its values are being, are trammeled or pushed down or ignored.

1:08:50.1 Indran Amirthanayagam: And I hate arrogance, whether it's American arrogance or French arrogance or British arrogance, whatever it is, it's the sense of snobbishness, you know, the sense that we know the truth and you don't, and I think there's a danger in the... On a core system where that, oh, we have... I found a way to know the right way, you know, and the others don't, I have to guard against that, be modest, do right, take care of you, be kind to strangers, be generous. These are values that I think are helpful for all people. And I think they inform the best of what can happen Haverford, to happen in Haverford. But Haverford was also limited by being a Western institution, a cultural product of the United States of America, and which at the time, did not understand, did not accept that there was an Asian America, or there was a African America in the same way as there was a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America.

1:10:00.6 Indran Amirthanayagam: So the... What influenced the literature, the scholarship at the university at the college have come from a political group, a social group, a power center, you know, though the power center has shifted, I think, at least in certain fields, like in poetry in America, and that's good, and we need to keep shifting the center power, diffusing it, you know, otherwise we can, we will lose these small gains we've made as a society. And there are many who want us to step right back into the dark ages. People like Trump, people like the henchmen he brought on. And yes, it's a democracy. So you have to accept it that the other side may win the election, but you have to allow the election to happen in a fair way. Now, many states in the United States have very restrictive rules about elections. So Haverford and other colleges have a role to play in educating the people and energizing people to go out and fight to... I mean, I don't mean literally fight with guns.

1:11:24.3 Indran Amirthanayagam: But fight with protests and with letters to the editor and with... To influence that these anti-democratic laws get rewritten, that limit voting. To vote. I have a book coming out next year called Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant. And it's a book of political poems. It's a book literally about voting and about the hope that was born in this country in 2020, in the lead-up to those elections and this amazing victory over the tyrant, the orange-haired tyrant, whatever. The person who oversaw this kind of dismantling of democracy, or the attempt to dismantle democracy. Now that optimism drives in the book, but there's obviously some pessimism now with what's going on. But anyway, it's coming out. I hope it will be a book of interest to people. At least, that's where... I mean that kind of political energy is definitely linked to my experience at Haverford. It's not an apolitical school, I would say that. Or an apolitical student body, or a conservative student body. I would not say that either.

1:12:54.7 Rachael Wong: Yeah. What was your experience like as a young alumni after you graduated Haverford? 

1:13:00.5 Indran Amirthanayagam: As an alumnus of Haverford? With what? With Haverford, or with other places? 

1:13:06.5 Rachael Wong: With other places. Like right after you graduated Harvard, what did you do? 

1:13:10.9 Indran Amirthanayagam: Well, I went to teach at George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania, which is a Quaker high school and middle school and primary. It's a boarding school. And I was struck how Quaker philosophy there was quite different from the Quaker philosophy at Haverford. It was much more conservative, many more restrictions on the students. And I railed against that. I liked the fact that Haverford was so liberal and open to the difference. But at George School, I found that they were not open. Yes, they were younger students. They were teenagers that I was in charge of, not college students. They had not turned 18 as such. But I enjoyed teaching there. But it didn't work out. I spent a year and I left. I left under somewhat complicated circumstances, but I enjoyed that experience. And I came back to the Haverford area after I taught at George School. And then I left for New York, which was really an important decision because I've always been... I had begun to think that I... Poet in New York. I mean, it was my... And I landed in New York. And I didn't have a very good time the first time. I spent several months there, living in the East Village. And I had a girlfriend at the time who was from Haverford... Was from Bryn Mawr. And she was also in New York at the time with me. But that relationship didn't work out. And then I left New York to go back to Hawaii to my parents.

1:14:51.4 Indran Amirthanayagam: And I was depressed because of the relationship, so there was a pattern for me of... Anyway, I went back. And I wrote, and I finished my first manuscript of poems in Hawaii that year. And then I came back to New York, but to study at Columbia's journalism school. And in that time in Hawaii, I taught English to Japanese students. And I had a really wonderful year in Hawaii that year. And then I came back. But right after Haverford, I had the experience of teaching at George School, finishing that job, coming back to Haverford. I'd been having some sort of dilemmas about the difference between that Quakerism of George School and the Quakerism of Haverford and the much more restrictive Quakerism of George School, which I didn't like. And then I left George School and I went to New York. And I would sometimes come back to Haverford very occasionally, not often. And I stopped playing cricket somewhere around that time. I'd been the captain of the cricket team at Haverford in my last year. I played cricket all four years. So that was an important part of my experience at Haverford, too, which I haven't talked about. Kamran Khan was the coach then, and he still is the coach there. And now he's in his 70s or something. And I have a nephew who plays cricket. And he went to play a game at Haverford recently. And he was with Kamran, and Kamran remembered me and so on. It was quite so nice to hear about Kamran now.

1:16:34.4 Indran Amirthanayagam: Anyway, talking about being a minority. I don't know if this is important. But for some reason Haverford used to do a nice little thing on a piece of wood. They would write the names of the team for each year that played for Haverford. And the captain was there and so on. And they'd been doing this since the 1890s or something, okay. So there we are, 1981, they do that. And for some reason, the year that I captained, my last year, they stopped doing that, the school. So there's no record anymore of who played for Haverford starting in 1980-81. And so if somebody visits the pavilion at Haverford and sees all this history, but then the history suddenly stops in 1981. And I think whoever made that decision not to pay for this... I don't know. I mean, I wish I had known because that should not have happened. I mean, if you have a tradition like that that is part of a history, you should just keep it going. It couldn't have cost much to the college to have written the names and had it crafted. But they stopped that for some reason. I don't know if it was because I was captain. I don't think so, but who knows? You wonder why things happen sometimes. And if you're a minority, you start to think, "Well, is it because I'm a minority that this is happening?" Or is it because I'm paranoid? I don't know. But that should not have made it. It was a poor decision on the part of the athletic department at the time. And it should have been corrected, and it never was.

1:18:24.0 Indran Amirthanayagam: But that's a small thing but it meant a lot to me and to all the team that suddenly, we were not on the wall. All our previous predecessors have been on the wall since the beginning of cricket at Haverford, but there we were... Anyway, Haverford cricket was important to experience for me too, and I enjoyed being the captain and directing the team. We went on tour to Canada, and we played with Haverford-west, which is a Welsh town that came... And their cricket team came to Haverford play. So Haverford being a Welsh name and Bryn Mawr also. Yeah. So I think I'm talking myself out. Do you have any other questions or? 

1:19:19.5 Rachael Wong: I have one more. I was just gonna ask what interested you in partaking this interview? 

1:19:28.7 Indran Amirthanayagam: Well, I'm interested in history, and recovering history and the right to remember. As I mentioned early about the war in Sri Lanka. And about the war anywhere. The insurrection. But this is also part of the right to remember, or the need to remember or the wish to remember. To wish to record, I think, oral histories are wonderful insights into a lost world perhaps of time and how things were. And everyone has their particular memories and their perspectives, but somebody writing about this period might watch this interview and find some material in it useful for their reflection. I was interested in meeting you. Meaning whoever was going to interview me learning about life at Haverford.

1:20:27.9 Indran Amirthanayagam: I'd like to come back to Haverford, I'd like to read from my poetry at Haverford. I have this new book. I mean, I write... I mean, this is in Spanish, and my new book is called Blue Window. And you see, if you see the picture, the cover, it's a book of love poems. And it was written originally in Spanish, Ventana Azul, and it was published just recently by Dialogos book. What I'm trying to say is, this is what I do. This is what gives sustenance to my life, it's my passion and reading from the poems, that can somehow build bridges and break down barriers of prejudice or sadness and eliminate sadness for a while. I think it's what I should be doing and what I want to do. So that's why I'm mentioning it. I mean, there's a chance of you, for example, you're studying philosophy.

1:21:21.6 Indran Amirthanayagam: But if you think about suggesting to the English department that they bring or they invite Indran to come and read his poems, I'd be on the first train to Philadelphia or whatever [chuckle] or drive. And living at the moment in Rockville, Maryland just outside of Washington. Anyway, so yeah, I mean, I like to be engaged with Haverford. I must make sure that I'm free to be able to come for that reunion. And I mean, it's an important... I mean, I think it's a good college, it's a necessary college, and I'm very glad that it became co-ed when I was there that this is part of, but... And I think Bryn Mawr too should be co-ed. I think we should just grow... But there's a reason why it was all male and there was a reason why Bryn Mawr, all female. It's also a historical reason. That's part of the reason, the need to remember, to learn why there can be occasions when we need to protect the right to grow and to flourish in a safe environment. Anyway, it's... Yeah, so that's... It's hard to know why. I mean, I guess, is an essential solitude in the human being and sharing one's life or experience with another is part of building community and eliminating that solitude. So. That's helpful, I think that's why. How about you? Why do you do this interview yourself? 

1:23:15.6 Rachael Wong: I also have a similar relationship to liking to remember things. I think that it's really important for information to be accessible and for us to understand what happened before. Yeah.

1:23:27.9 Indran Amirthanayagam: Very good. Very good. Well, as you write your... Do you write poetry by any chance or fiction? I'm just curious what you...

1:23:36.4 Rachael Wong: Yeah, sometimes, I do poetry sometimes, but not super regularly. It's just sort of a thing I do when I have time or when I have a lot of thoughts.

1:23:45.7 Indran Amirthanayagam: Well, if you ever feel like sharing an event or I mean, I do this thing called The Poetry Channel on YouTube, which if you Google, enter in Poetry Channel, you'll find it. It's free, I mean, feel free to subscribe, and that's a very interesting material there you might enjoy. But also if you ever feel like sharing a poem or sending a poem for the magazine Beltway Poetry Quarterly, I know public and private are two different things and sharing in a private setting and then sharing in a public setting. I mean, there's another editor as well, and we'd review it. But I'd be delighted to consider for publication. But with an understanding that we would both review, the other editors and I would review the work and make a decision. But I would invite you to do it because if you're writing, why not share it? I'm curious about your story, Guyana, New York, it's fascinating. There's so much we can talk about.

1:24:50.0 Indran Amirthanayagam: I must ask you questions the next time 'cause I do have a lot of questions I'm curious about, but enjoying this time. But I realize it's probably... We've already talked, I don't know, for a while. And you've... Your questions... Are you happy with the interview? Is it okay? 

1:25:07.5 Rachael Wong: Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me.

1:25:11.0 Indran Amirthanayagam: No, no, no. And if there's any other... If you need to follow up with any questions or... But I would just say, I hope that we can continue the conversation, including about your poetry writing. And I invite you to look at the channel if you have time, my Poetry Channel. And good luck with your... You've already declared the major, or you'll do that this... Sometime this year? 

1:25:37.5 Rachael Wong: I do that next semester. So I haven't done that yet.

1:25:39.7 Indran Amirthanayagam: Okay.

1:25:41.1 Rachael Wong: Alright.

1:25:42.2 Indran Amirthanayagam: Alright then... And you're studying, is it Western philosophy then, Greek and Roman and European? 

1:25:49.4 Rachael Wong: I'm actually doing a mix of both. Yeah. I'm currently taking a class on Black social and political theory. And so that's mostly about American history and American philosophy.

1:26:00.6 Indran Amirthanayagam: Oh, okay. Okay. So it's a broader... It's not just the Western philosophers. It's philosophy in social, historical context. Interesting. Yeah. I'd be curious to know what you're reading. If you have time, you can send me the syllabus or something just to understand...

1:26:18.3 Rachael Wong: Definitely.

1:26:19.6 Indran Amirthanayagam: What one's studying these days. Well, you have my email, right? Obviously, so yeah. Okay. Well, thank you very much.

1:26:26.1 Rachael Wong: Thank you. Take care.