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Originally Posted by Ashfaq
I think Bangla has one word for dorks: আঁতেল Aside from that, I don't think Bangla really has equivalent words.
Fitting really. In Bangladesh, every parent want their child to be a nerd and geek/ nerds are seen is a positive light. So, no degrading type casting for them.
But there's planty of names for unruly boys is Bangla.
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I don't know what it's like now in Dhaka (and I would like to know), but back when we grew up, one major difference between adolescents in Bangladesh and the West was the different way peer pressure played out in schools. Back home, doing well in schoolwork, being a geek, etc., was a positive trait, one that most students aspired to; but in high schools in the US, then and now, this was looked down upon.
Now that I look back upon it, almost all my classmates were geeks, albeit fierce, driven and determined ones, forcing our principal to add courses to the curriculum that previously hadn't been there simply because they wanted to study that particular subject, getting rid of teachers who weren't competent, running small businesses and publishing firms, applying successfully en masse to get into undergraduate programs in the States and UK with scholarships (yes, I know that's fairly common now, but at the time most people who went abroad for their studies did it for graduate work; it was largely our generation, from many different schools, who started the ball rolling on undergraduate admissions), etc. I certainly see a smilar zeal and drive in younger students whenever I visit Bangladesh, but I am curious as to what forms peer pressure currently takes (as some of you might recall from
an old thread of mine, while we generally excelled in academic endeavours, we weren't quite that adept in er, other fields).
Coming back to the point that Ashfaq made, yes, the expectations of our parents and guardians have much to do with our geekiness, both in Bangladesh and in the West -- there's a reason why South Asians and East Asians tend to excel in academia there, despite the negative peer pressure. That said, these parental expectations can also be oppressive and confining, as Zeeshan and others have pointed out in
the SMBL thread.
Regardless, given now that the conventional wisdom is that geeks shall inherit the earth (not exactly the most palatable of inheritances, mind you, given global warming, rising populations, potential pandemics, etc., but who better to handle such challenges?), who else can I vote for other than the next generation of upcoming young geeks like Zeeshan and Shardul?