Dinajpur
Reading, mathematics and cricket were early habits.
Four places. One recurring habit.
Learn the room.
Then translate.
I have been the newest person in the room since I was twelve. Each time, the job was the same: work out how the room actually talks, then make myself useful in it.
Four places that changed the questions.
Equirectangular map, with sampled great-circle paths. Distances measure geography, not the flights taken. The line crosses the date line between China and Iowa.
Chapter dates follow Nafi’s biography. Tampa Bay is the regional map reference; home is Land O’ Lakes.
01Dinajpur, Bangladesh
Childhood
Childhood
A house where reading
was the answer to boredom.
I grew up in Dinajpur. At home, a book was the natural answer to an empty afternoon. Mathematics gave me problems with clean answers. Cricket gave me problems that changed with every ball.
At twelve I left for Rangpur Cadet College, 66 km from home. It was the first time I had to learn an unfamiliar room on my own. A military school makes you notice routines, expectations, and the difference between knowing a rule and knowing how people use it.
The curiosity stayed. The rooms kept changing.
02Changshu, China
A country, and a language,
I didn’t know.
At sixteen I moved to UWC Changshu on a full scholarship. I did not speak the language. My classmates came from more than 100 countries, which made even ordinary conversations a lesson in how differently people see the same thing.
Studying for the IB Diploma was part of the education. Learning to listen before explaining was the other part. A good answer needed to make sense to someone whose assumptions were different from mine.
03Decorah, Iowa
Eight thousand people
and a long winter.
I studied data science at Luther College in Decorah, a town of about 8,000 people. Iowa gave me the time and tools to turn curiosity into quantitative work.
At Mayo Clinic, I learned that messy data is the job. At SkyBridge, screens across hedge fund profiles had to become exposure dashboards and investment memos. At BlackRock, where I joined the Data & AI team after college, risk reports and capital-flow dashboards connected the numbers to decisions.
The scale changed. The underlying work did not: find out what a number means, understand who needs it, and make the answer useful.
04Land O’ Lakes, Florida
The pattern gets
a job title.
Today I am a Solutions Engineer at Dasseti, working remotely from Florida. I sit between investment teams and the software they use for due diligence, translating in both directions.
Outside work, I write long-form research, make small tools with AI coding assistants, and play weekend league cricket around Tampa Bay. Field Notes is where numbers become stories. The workbench is where problems become tools. Match reports are where close finishes become memory.
I still follow Formula 1, read mostly nonfiction, and study alternative investments through CAIA. They are different ways of asking the same question: what is happening here, and what would help me understand it better?
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