A word on television

When I was four years old, television was my best friend. As sad as that sounds now, my younger self found an esoteric solace from the small, flickering screen tucked away in the living room of our two-bedroom apartment.

Throughout the early years of my childhood, my parents exhausted themselves trying to build their careers to a point where financial stability would not be an issue so that they could forge some form of the American Dream for our family. Don't get me wrong, my parents were very proactive and present in my life. They always squeezed in a bedtime story or teaching me the art of calculating and optimizing discounts at the grocery store, even though I was too preoccupied winning the Indy 500 in my trusty shopping cart.

However, being an only child, I found myself passing a lot of my time in front of a television screen—much to my parents' chagrin. 

But I couldn't help myself. The stories—only six inches away from my face—captured my imagination in a way that toys and books simply couldn't maintain for more than a few minutes. I remember sitting in my kid-sized, blue plastic chair piecing together all of Blue's Clues before Steve even laid a cheek in his Thinking Chair. I remember accidently rolling over the remote control and being mesmerized by a soap opera where an older, bougie woman gets wine thrown on her blouse and slapped in the face by the ex-boyfriend of her daughter with whom the older woman was having an affair. I remember building forts with the couch cushions as the iconic tick of the "60 Minutes" opening heralded a night of compelling human interest stories whose significance I could barely grasp—all I knew is I liked that one time they talked about Harry Potter.

Television gave me my very first glimpse of American culture. It was this mediator for me between the bubble of my Sri Lankan-groomed household and the foreign world just inches beyond the front door. No, I wasn't a reclusive toddler, but even stepping out into the grocery store or interacting with kids at my pre-school, my parents and teachers sheltered me from nuances of popular culture and instead fostered a more disciplinary background.

Watching my favorite television shows as a kid gave me a freedom that was not very accessible to me, and I think that's why I find such a fascination with examining popular culture of today.

Sitcoms compelled me to empathize with strange people and zany cartoons from the most far off and alluring of places like London, a spaceship in outer fabrics of the universe, New York City. The evening news with Dan Rather first showed me that there is evil in the world with the sole image of the two burning towers the night of 9/11 that petrified my mother as she attempted to prepare dinner. Staying up with my father on Saturday nights to watch "Saturday Night Live" taught me the palliative power of comedy—the edgier and the more satirical, the better.

It might be a bit of a stretch to say that TV shaped me into the person I am today, but it certainly influenced me in ways I never realized until coming to Duke. Like most pre-med kids who drop pre-med, I chose Duke because of its reputation as a research university with my mother's hope that it would equip me with unique opportunities to put me on right path for medical school—just like a good little brown boy should do. Coming here, however, I realized that one of my truer passions was to critique and engage with the realm of media that had been so influential to me growing up—hence, here I am at Recess.