Meet Ritwik

My name is Ritwik Banerji and I have worked with the Chicago Cultural Alliance through the Indo-American Center, Indo-American Heritage Museum, and as a board member of the Alliance. Given the number of entities I have just named, I would like to say that my relationship with the Alliance has been as gratifying as it is confusing to explain to other people!

For the past two years, I have been working at the Indo-American Center as their youth program coordinator. Unlike the CCA, the Indo-American Center is an organization primarily focused on social services, rather than arts or culture programming. While most of our programs focus on social service needs of our community, a few programs, including ESL, seniors, and youth, always seem to be a space where culture is very much a part of us providing a quality social service. In this capacity, the youth program became more engaged in the work of the CCA. A highlight of this work was the gardening project of last summer where we brought together the cultural heritage of South Asia (and Latin America) through various gardening and horticultural awareness activities.

From my experience of working with youth development in a social service context, there can often be a tension of how to proceed around the question of developing more cultural activities or more services. What do we pursue next – classical dance classes or a full-time legal clinic? While these two are definitely very divergent paths for an organization to pursue, when working with young people there is a line between “service” and “culture” that often blurs. For example, our recent series of hip-hop production workshops for teens seem to function as both a social service and a cultural activity. When teens are with me making beats, they are not getting high or getting into other kinds of trouble. But my goal is more than just “saving” them from illicit activities. I’m particularly interested in how they understand their experiences as young, Pakistani, Muslim men going to high-school in an outlying neighborhood of Chicago. While none of them are great wizards of qawwali or any other South Asian musical art, the music we make is a reflection of a culture that was born there and is growing up here. As I “serve” them, we also provide a place for them to create.

To me, it is just as important to create culture as it is to preserve it. This is why I have always wanted to keep abreast of activities happening with the Chicago Cultural Alliance. I have continually seen a benefit for my program, and most importantly, the many young people that we have been able to work with.