{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Saikat Chakrabarti, Part 1 (S8E6)","description":"The story of Saikat Chakrabarti begins in a time when his parents\u2019 and ancestors\u2019 country was being torn apart, almost literally. In this episode, meet and get to know Saikat. These days, he\u2019s busy knocking on doors and otherwise hitting the ground in a bid to represent San Francisco in the US Congress. As I write this, just last week, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi announced that she would not run for a 20th term. Timing! Let\u2019s go back to mid-Nineteenth Century India. Because his dad\u2019s family is Hindu, they were forced to relocate after Indian\/Pakistani partition, fleeing their home country of Bangladesh for Kolkata (Calcutta) in India. Folks had warned Saikat\u2019s grandfather, a school teacher, to leave, and they did. Once in Kolkata, his grandfather opened a school largely for the kids of other refugees living in the area. Owing to the school\u2019s success, he was able to secure a one-bedroom apartment for his family of 12\u2014he, his wife (Saikat\u2019s grandmother), and 10 kids, including Saikat\u2019s father. Saikat has been back to that apartment. He says that, walking around that neighborhood all these years later, folks still recognize his dad, Samir, thanks to what his grandfather did for them and their family. His mom, Sima, had it better than his dad. But still, she went to a school with dirt floors. Saikat looks to his ancestors\u2019 struggles\u2014the communities they were part of, and how those communities came together to address issues the government neglected\u2014for inspiration today. When his dad was young, a friend took him to an office where he was pitched to come to the United States. There was a whole set-up. The sell was simply the so-called American Dream. Saikat\u2019s parents met in India through an arrangement. Their respective parents knew someone who set it all up. They met and got married about a week later in a field. The visa his dad had applied for at that office came through after he\u2019d been married, making it a bigger decision than it would\u2019ve been if he were still single. He was also the primary earner in his own family, and they didn\u2019t want him to leave. He decided to take that leap regardless. His dad showed up in the US with $8 in his pocket and no job yet secured. He slept on a friends\u2019 couch in Manhattan and hit the pavement, r\u00e9sum\u00e9 in hand. And it worked. He got a job. Saikat\u2019s dad had studied civil engineering in college. His first job in his new country was with a company that built skyscrapers \u2026 NYC skyscrapers. It was 1979. Saikat\u2019s mom came to join her husband soon after, and they had their first kid, Saikat\u2019s older sister, Urmi, while living in Queens. His dad and his mom also experienced their first cold-weather winter that year. After a stint in New York, Samir moved his family to Pittsburgh. He had visited there in the summer, liked it, got a job offer, but relocated in the winter. Once again, the weather got the better of the young family. Seeking a warmer climate, they moved to Texas, first to Houston, and then to Fort Worth. At this point in the podcast, I decided to do something I\u2019ve never done in the eight years since Storied: San Francisco began. And that\u2019s because I\u2019ve never had any guests on the show who are from where I\u2019m from. I chose to dork out with Saikat about my hometown. Thank you for indulging us (me, really). The first question I had for Saikat is: What hospital were you born in? Harris Methodist. Holy shit, same! He asked me my age (52), what schools I went to (Bruce Shulkey Elementary, Wedgwood Middle School [Saikat went there for one year], and Southwest High School). What a fun turn on this podcast, me rattling off the schools I went to like born-and-raised San Franciscans do. Heh. I digress into a sidebar about the race riot that happened at my high school during my junior year. You\u2019ll have to listen, or you can read a little more about it here. Then we get to hear about Saikat\u2019s experience growing up in the same city. His family lived in a suburb (apparently not far from where my parents still live), and he describes his early life as fairly standard\u2014hanging out with friends, going to the mall (the same mall I was a regular at a decade or so before). But, being an Indian-American, Saikat experienced racism I was privileged enough to avoid. Saikat makes a distinction, though, between intentional, malicious racism and what I\u2019d call accidental or unintentional racism. It\u2019s an important distinction, and he says most of what he experienced in Fort Worth was the less-harmful variety. He summarizes his childhood thusly\u2014family, school, the Bengali-American community in Fort Worth. One member of that community, Saikat\u2019s best friend from childhood, lives downstairs from him in San Francisco today. His whole world in high school was, as Saikat puts it: hip-hop, basketball, and math. He got into Harvard, which he says he didn\u2019t expect. Many of his friends went to UT Austin (my alma mater), and he figured he\u2019d go there, too. But he wasn\u2019t about to pass up the opportunity to attend one of the most highly regarded universities in the country. But Harvard was a culture shock for Saikat. The Fort Worth community he\u2019d known all his life was working- and middle-class. The student body at Harvard was largely kids who came from money and had wildly different interests than he did. Saikat went into his shell his freshman year. As he emerged from that shell, he found his people at Harvard. In 2007, Saikat graduated from Harvard with a degree in computer science. He\u2019d spent a summer in San Francisco between his junior and senior years, and loved it. All his life, The City had been presented as this place where \u201ccool shit happened.\u201d Movies, music, TV shows, skateboarding, the LGBTQIA and civil rights movements \u2026 and of course, the fledgling internet. Tech and social justice\u2014both existed in a cutting-edge environment here. He lived in New York City for one year immediately after he graduated. We riff on life in NYC vs. life here, agreeing on most aspects. When it was time for Saikat to find a new place to live, San Francisco was the obvious choice. The woman he was dating (his wife and mother of his child today) went to school at Cornell in Ithaca, New York, where he visited often. But even her friends told Saikat that he was much more a NorCal-type. Unable to find housing anywhere else in SF, Saikat first landed in Park Merced. He was happy to have a San Francisco address, but didn\u2019t feel like he was living in The City. A trip to The Mission changed that quickly. Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Saikat. We recorded this podcast at Duboce Park Cafe in October 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt ","author_name":"Storied: San Francisco","author_url":"http:\/\/www.storiedsf.com\/","html":"