Priten H. Shah

I am currently on a leave from Harvard College as I pursue some outside-the-walls learning!

I currently run Suddha.Marketing LLC, a small business marketing and web development firm, using the skills I acquired from running my nonprofits. I dabbled in the education industry for a while through Pain, Passion, and Pursuit Inc., a start-up consulting company that ran projects in college admissions.

My pet project is United 4 Social Change Inc. (U4SC), a platform for a global community that works to spur Social Change by training young activists.  During my gap year before college, I started and ran a non-profit organization, the Teach to Learn Foundation, which aimed to increase educational opportunities for the underprivileged, at the end focusing mainly on debate, before I closed it to focus on U4SC.

I am working on some other projects as well, and love to chat about Start-Ups, Nonprofit Organizations, Indian Subcontinent, and Technology with others

Favorite Articles

Dear White America

In 2015, I conducted a series of 19 interviews with philosophers and public intellectuals on the issue of race. My aim was to engage, in this very public space, with the often unnamed elephant in the room. These discussions helped me, and I hope many of our readers, to better understand how race continues to function in painful ways within our country.

You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you (classroom-friendly version) – The Oatmeal

This is a classroom-friendly (no cuss words) comic about the backfire effect.

Mental Illness and the Journey of the Soul

It is my belief that we are all, throughout our lives, on a journey of the soul. God is leading each of us through life and is with us as our souls grow and change.

Opinion | What ‘Snowflakes’ Get Right About Free Speech

At one of the premieres of his landmark Holocaust documentary, “Shoah” (1985), the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann was challenged by a member of the audience, a woman who identified herself as a Holocaust survivor. Lanzmann listened politely as the woman recounted her harrowing personal account of the Holocaust to make the point that the film failed to fully represent the recollections of survivors.

Opinion | The Pope on Panhandling: Give Without Worry

New Yorkers, if not city dwellers everywhere, might acknowledge a debt to Pope Francis this week. He has offered a concrete, permanently useful prescription for dealing with panhandlers. It’s this: Give them the money, and don’t worry about it. The pope’s advice, from an interview with a Milan magazine published just before the beginning of Lent, is startlingly simple.

An Open Letter To Those Not Graduating On Time

To the person that isn’t graduating on time, It sucks, and I won’t lie to you and tell you it doesn’t. The day you walk out of Advising, head hanging down because you aren’t going to finish in four years, makes you feel ashamed of yourself.

Maybe Now Isn’t the Time, Guys

If you’re tempted to point out that you’re one of the good ones right now … please don’t. If you are upset that people of color are upset that their lives and beliefs are under assault by a resurgent, resilient, citronella-candle-filled white supremacist movement, empowered by a White House that can’t call a racist a racist because #NotAllWhitePeople …