Shayak Sarkar

I probably shouldn’t be writing this article about Shayak Sarkar ’07. Not only is he one of my closest friends, but last week he bestowed upon me a pair of designer jeans for no apparent reason. For the record though, I decided to write about Sarkar before any premium denim changed hands. At any rate, the jeans gifting is illustrative: Shayak Sarkar is the kind of guy who performs stylish acts of kindness—the kind of acts that don’t just make you feel better; they make you feel better about yourself.

What’s ironic is that you really shouldn’t feel good about yourself when you’re around Sarkar. You should feel humbled, awed, and manifestly inferior.

He’s won virtually everything there is to win, and he’s achieved almost every honor available at Harvard. While a junior, he was one of a select group of students inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. As an applied math concentrator, he has been a head course assistant for several classes. His senior thesis, which was about the education of homeless youth, won the Hoopes prize for outstanding scholarship. And recently he was awarded Mather House’s Scholar Citizen prize by his masters and tutors.

Next year Sarkar is taking his interest in quantitative social science across the Atlantic. He will be studying evidence-based social work at Oxford with a Frank Knox fellowship, which provides for a year of study at any British Commonwealth university.

Alright. So he’s smart. And if four years at Harvard have taught you anything it should be that being smart isn’t enough. And it certainly isn’t enough to qualify for The Crimson’s lucky seven. What should really make you feel inferior to Sarkar is the fact that he’s a much, much better person than you are.

There have been countless Friday or Saturday nights out when I’ve inquired about Sarkar’s whereabouts with the hopes that he might join me in drinking. Invariably he’d be unavailable because he had already committed to working an overnight shift at UniLu, Harvard’s student-run homeless shelter in the basement of University Lutheran Church.

Since sophomore year he’s been a director of UniLu, sacrificing his Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks to work shifts that were short-staffed.

For Sarkar, public service is not merely an extracurricular: it’s a fusion of the intellectual and the emotional.

“Intellectualism for intellectualism’s sake is not how I personally want to live my life,” Sarkar told me in a recent conversation. “I think an education is meant to be a catalyst for working toward concrete improvements in society.”

Sounds like pretty standard do-gooder stuff, right? Well, any amount of time with Sarkar will introduce you to a thoughtful person who is unafraid to challenge certain paradigmatic assumptions.

“Social scientists and policymakers sometimes use data as an indestructible science on which to base policy,” Sarkar says in a tone that hints at a fundamental skepticism. “I want to be someone who is well versed enough in statistics to understand how it can help policy but also well versed and realistic enough to understand its shortcomings.”

If you have spent time with a quantatively-oriented social scientist you will understand the unexpected humility of the above statement.

That is the thing about Sarkar: he is completely surprising. But don’t just take it from me. Arie V. Zakaryan ’07, his roommate of four years, says that he has always been impressed with the way Sarkar can converse about both the most superficial and the most serious of subjects.

“He owns a studded belt. He sometimes likes to wear up-dos and mohawks,” Zakaryan said. “But he’s also so thoughtful about how we are living our lives with the resources that we receive as Harvard students.”

“He’s also so intelligent, so thoughtful that he can shift the conversation from style to service.”

—­­Staff writer Sarah E.F. Milov can be reached at milov@fas.harvard.edu.