On April 3rd, Google’s daily doodle showed Fazlur Rahman Khan, the designer of the Willis Tower (formerly known as the Sears Tower), as a celebration of his 88th birthday.
I’ve never been more excited about a Google Doodle in my entire life.
The reason why this Doodle means so much to me is because Khan is a Bangladeshi, and as a fellow Bangladeshi, I always get excited whenever someone of the same nationality is celebrated.
Bangladesh, for those of you who don’t know, is a small country situated right next to India. While I was growing up, I always found myself having to explain where Bangladesh was and how I was different from the Indian girls at school. Even today, I still come across people who assume I’m from India, and when I tell them otherwise, they are confused. It often frustrates me that people don’t know or even seem to care about a place that is so vital to my identity.
That’s why the Google Doodle of Khan was so important to me.
The son of a school teacher, Khan was born in what is now Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Like many Bangladeshi immigrants, he moved to America to complete his graduate studies. While working at a design firm in Chicago, Khan developed a “tubular truss” method of design, which entails a series of vertical tubes used as the frame of a building in order to protect buildings against high speed wind and earthquakes.
This same method was used when Khan designed the Willis Tower, which stood as the highest structure in the U.S. until One World Trade Center in 2014.
I only found out about Khan and his groundbreaking (excuse the pun) work a few years ago, but when I saw the doodle, I knew exactly who it was about. Seeing the doodle reaffirmed my pride in my country, and it reminded me that even though people may not always know about Bangladesh, there are still aspects of the U.S. that have been enhanced by Bangladeshis.
In Bengali, we have a saying: “Bangali buddhi,” which translates to “Bengali intelligence.” The connotation of the phrase is that Bengalis have a very specific type of intelligence, one that you won’t find in other people or in other parts of the world. This is not to say that the rest of the world is not intelligent but rather that the intelligence found in Bangladesh is unique to the country and culture.
This Doodle was a celebration of Khan’s “Bangali buddhi,” but more so a celebration of the growth this country can achieve through the involvement and work of different individuals from different backgrounds.
So yes, it was just a drawing. But to me, it reminded me that people of different colors and cultures should not be recognized simply in terms of their country. They should be celebrated for their individual “buddhis.”