Crimson opinion writer
Shanivi Srikonda
Latest Content
Love, Loss, and Remembrance: Bob Quinn and Mission Hill
As the years inch on and we move further away from the start of the AIDS epidemic, we risk remembering only statistics. But numbers cannot communicate the personal nature of loss. What’s missing from the equation is grief and loneliness: love with nowhere to go but to a beneficiary six feet underground or sitting on a mantle.
Sylvia and Me
When I put myself in the shoes of the woman sitting atop the fig tree, I see so many things I want to accomplish. Sylvia Plath would have been 90 years old if she was still alive today. How much more could she have done with all of that time? Here’s to you, Sylvia, and your fig tree.
Rewriting Our Harvard Admissions Essays
In this series of introspections, six Crimson editors revisit the essays that got them into Harvard.
Balancing Act
How do I reconcile these complicated histories with the kind of future I’m aspiring toward?
Instagram Bad
In a semester filled with so much uncertainty, accurate information is all the more important. Pictures might be worth a thousand words, but those words should be accurate, not a facade.
The Women I Will Never Know
I’m thankful to my mDNA for connecting me through time with so many persistent, steel-willed women. I’m especially grateful for the women themselves, striving amidst darkness so that I — and all the women who will come after me — can have only light.
Spaces as Shadows of Memory
Dear readers, in this last column piece, I leave you with a challenge: The next time you’re in a shared space, one filled with joy and hope, appreciate it in its entirety. The mental snapshot you take of that moment in time will decrease in clarity as time passes, but the value you found in that space — and similar shared spaces — need not.
Future Nostalgia for Harvard’s Houses
We are left with memories and feelings of how a place made us feel, how a certain time in our lives made us ache or rejoice. The Houses at Harvard are so instilled within our memories of this place — this old, enduring institution — as they touch us so deeply and for a long time. It is in this way that you find the true Harvard experience: strangers becoming friends, experiences later becoming memories, memories becoming nostalgia.
Harvard's Tug of War in Allston
Harvard’s expansion into Allston with the SEC represents not only a tug of war between the University and the community it is building into, but also between the historic engineering buildings near Oxford Street and the new SEC.