From Shawmut to Boston, with love

The train rumbles underneath. It doesn’t shake my coffee cup, but it takes a moment for me to understand why the ground seems to stir beneath a café. I have just sat down for coffee in a shop with the quintessentially Boston tagline “Love, Always” after a walk along the Memorial Drive – a road built in the early 1900s along the Charles River. The river flows eastward, neatly dividing Boston and Cambridge, and emptying itself into the Boston Harbor. The city names are comparatively modern – if one ignores the American way of treating historic timelines – coined in the mid-1600s when English settlers started dotting the Atlantic coast of North America with colonies. Apparently, names such as Boston and Cambridge, borrowed from England, reflected the settlers’ “desire to recreate a moral and intellectual community modeled on their English roots,” perhaps because Shawmut, as the indigenous peoples called these marshy lands, wasn’t cutting it.

The city today seems to be living a maelstrom of cultural viewpoints. The apologies of its past ghosts have morphed into an over-compensating present, with a city intent on showing awareness of rights and justice in every corner of its streets. Its murals, ceremonies, and conversations seem to chase a morality that history never allowed, and the city almost performs conscience as a civic sport. Amidst this moral performance, its organic cafes, boutique shops, and ‘sustainable and community-driven’ ethos hint at a dreamy socialist utopia, set against the polished pavements and tree-lined promenades built from the spoils of colonial ambition and industrial might. At the same time, it is a city that provided finesse to capitalism – the engine of the modern world – through a culture steeped in innovation, research, and entrepreneurship, embodied by the venerable Harvard and MIT. And it is this version of the culture that enamors me, blending the city’s diverse historical and cultural viewpoints into one giant crucible of excellence.

My Memorial Drive walk takes me below the Longfellow Bridge, offering a view of the Boston ‘postcard skyline’ on the other side of the river. It’s a stretch of pavement that Richard Feynman and Noam Chomsky have shared as part of their daily routines, and I wonder if I belong here. There is bewilderment, as the mind juxtaposes the years of toiling-past with this momentous-present, as if they were from different lifetimes. Other emotions rear their head too, the ever-present imposter syndrome, a bit of anxiety about future, an immense feeling of missing a certain beloved, and some pride. After a meeting yesterday, Ashley and Michael showed me around the MIT Media Lab: here is the cancer research, here is the agentic web research, that’s where we sit. Here is the old building, designed with caverns underneath floors when they anticipated volumes of computer cables would run through them, and with small windows because they imagined engineers poring over screens in relative darkness to be the primary function of the building. Here is the new building, built as an extension to the old one, but with a different ethos – a well sunlit lobby, bright and modern interiors, for the age of wireless computing that arrived in less than a few decades. And here is a nugget: the old building was designed by I.M. Pei, the same architect who designed the Louvre Pyramid. Ashley decided to omit Pei’s alma mater Harvard in her kind discourse, but sportingly took my joke about Louvre’s recent heist. I thanked her for this first ever mini-tour inside an MIT building, a campus where I had driven a few times as a tourist. A mélange of emotions run their course through my head again, almost questioning – what am I doing here?

Longfellow Bridge (Image courtesy: Another Believer, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The view from the Longfellow Bridge is iconic, and languid in these morning hours. Last weekend, the river hosted 60 years of Head of the Charles Regatta, the largest rowing race in the world. Today, a few teams rowing upstream feel like strays from the previous weekend. I turn right to walk alongside the Broad Canal, a small waterway dug up in the 1800s for barges to reach inland into Cambridge that was then an industrial zone with factories, mills, foundries, and warehouses. Today’s Kendall Square, “the most innovative square mile on earth” ecosystem of labs and startups, was a bustling manufacturing hub until the early 20th century.

From the coffee shop at the end of my walk, the city seems to be slowly waking up from its Saturday morning slumber. There is the periodic rumble of electric locomotives beneath the ground, keeping the city’s pulse alive. Brightly lit electric billboards along the road broadcast train schedules down to the minute, and public squares are punctuated with objects that feel almost scientific: a globe in a tiny plaza, a steel ‘molecule’ fashioned to hold bicycles. Faces pass by from the window: students carrying hopes for the future in their backpacks, academics who have seen generations of hope arrive and depart, workers and cleaners who keep the city’s lifeblood running. I myself have journeyed from streetside tea to oatmilk cortados, and contemplate whether I am a participant or merely a witness to this strange time and space.