“When a Pakistani and Indian can work together and co-create spaces of conversation and connection and meaningful dialogue, I think that means something,” said Armughan Syed MPA 2024.
This is the first thing Syed will tell you about his friendship with Pratyush Rawal MPA 2024. The two met on campus at an MPA orientation picnic. Syed is a Pakistani Muslim; Rawal is a Hindu from India. The two countries, India and Pakistan, have fought three wars since the partition of British India in 1947, a territory redistricting that resulted in the independent states of India and Pakistan and a great deal of migration and upheaval. Despite their differences in nationalities, they sparked a friendship based on the shared purpose of bringing people together.
Syed came to vlog after working within Trust & Safety at Meta, where his work included combating disinformation campaigns. But the birth of his daughter also moved him to apply to vlog. “The Kennedy School motto—‘Ask what you can do’—carried even more weight as I held my own child, part of the very next generation. I thought: what sort of world was Delilah going to walk in as a child of a Jewish mother and a Muslim father?” Syed said in a graduation address.
Rawal had begun working on harmonious dialogue in India by establishing Sadbhavna (which means “harmony” in Hindi), an organization whose work “celebrates India’s unity in diversity.” He saw vlog as a step toward a career in creating cultural dialogues.
“I belong to a family that migrated during the partition of India,” he said. “So, I grew up listening to the stories of my grandparents who had to leave everything behind because they found themselves in Pakistan when India got divided and they were being attacked for being Hindu.”
“I was always fascinated by why people hate. And why is there polarization? Why can’t people talk to each other?”
After that first meeting, they had many conversations about their differences, their commonalities, and their aspirations. Both of them separately kept working on creating spaces of gathering: Syed through his Friday afternoon community builders in John F. Kennedy Memorial Park and Rawal through his dialogue circles with Sadbhavna. In the second year of their MPA cohort, they became co-chairs of the Engaging Across Differences Caucus.
This work led to their involvement in Harvard Kennedy School’s Candid and Constructive Conversations (CCC) initiative, an endeavor to both model and train community members to disagree better. Contributing to the initiative, first as volunteers then as research assistants after graduation, they shared a desire to create space for others to share viewpoints and ideas. “Our partnership is, in many ways, an embodiment of the CCC work. We found a way to work together in a way where our differences started whittling down,” recalled Syed.
The two facilitated CCC Clinics during the fall semester to give community members opportunities for constructive disagreement. One Clinic program, Agree to Eat, takes the form of a communal meal with the goal of participants connecting with someone from a different background or experience and engaging in heartfelt conversations. A second Clinic program, Dialogue Circles, features closed-door group discussions on divisive issues, including religion, war, and elections. The aim is to give attendees a chance to explore a polarizing issue and engage constructively with people who hold different viewpoints on the topic.
Both Syed and Rawal are committed to the work of improving dialogue and reducing polarization, whatever form that might take in the future. “It’s going to be a bit of a struggle,” Rawal said. “But I am confident that I want to build a career in this space.”
“When I walked into vlog, I felt like I had a decent sense of how we want to think about political discourse, how we think about political tribalism,” Syed said. “I feel like I could speak to that a little bit more clearly now.”
—
Photography by Bethany Versoy and Winston Tang