New York is very much “The City of Dreams.” It’s where dreams come true. And there’s no doubt about it. When we say America is the “Land of Opportunity” and what have you, what we really mean is New York! As one American foreign service officer of African descent once told me, everything outside of New York is “West Bubblefuck.”
Which is correct, because once my parents left New York when I was a kid, I was limited to just two career or work options: one, follow in my dad’s footsteps and take over his medical practice. Or two, take over the real estate development and investment business my mother set up. The first was intolerable for me, and the second became an impossibility because I got butted out of it by my mother. So what was I left with? A stipend every two weeks which enabled me to voraciously read and write after I finished school. The reading and writing should have translated into a PhD, but neocons failed to interpret my family background and history properly.
But coincidentally, the moment my schooling ended in 2014 was exactly the moment when the colonial or modern age ended and the digital and information age took off. But what did that imply? What it implied was that the dollar was no longer the most important currency in our world. Content was now the most important currency in our world! And luckily for me, I used the stipends to build for myself what is perhaps the best personal library in all of America, which then enabled me to foster or cultivate the kind of creativity and imagination needed to generate the kind of content that doesn’t get me into trouble.
Adam A. Azim 