My hands twitched towards the book, a piece of my identity on the shelf. I tucked my long hair behind my ears, a deep longing surfacing, incorrigible and hard to explain. Immigrant on a shelf. All my life, I had tried to beat into submission, my otherness, my inexplicable difference and finally, with open arms, I ran towards it. Fifth generation, Punjabi, Indian, Malaysian, immigrant, citizen, girl, woman, identities in a vortex spinning around me, threatening to absorb me whole....

Languidly, the playwright composes her scene, her hands tugging at invisible strings that control her delightfully quirky characters, rearranging the flow of the story, the setting. The dialogue aches to be read and acted out. The playwright is me, and I long for college to come, that time where I can pull my screenplays and novellas out of the closet and discuss and read and write and write and write. And Boston University seems the best home for such a...

Without a doubt, powerlessness. There is nothing more dangerous and threatening to someone's morals than the feeling of inevitable injustice and helplessness. Why? Because we humans hate the feeling of vulnerability, so much so that we would do anything, absolutely anything, to avoid it. I witnessed the corruption of the feeling of simply having no options, on the fellow youth of my country, Malaysia. Growing up in a neighbourhood haunted by the spectre of mobsters, delinquents, poverty scrawled on crumbling...