Character:Dinarah

Dinarah (a main Character in Peritia)

née Dinarah Munni, born on 2002 (27 years old), pronouns she/her, journalism, macroeconomy, of Bengali background.
A Problem: she's resigned
A Want: successful career

A Need: hope, leadership, communion

Dinarah

Personality

• Insecure: lacks work security; lacks financial security; inexperienced
• Dualist: there is right, and there is wrong
• Ashamed: of her humble origins; of her family and Muslim upbringing
• Anxious: wants to prove herself; wants to establish herself financially and career-wise; wants to fix the world’s problems
• Omnivore: has never thought about the impact she has in the lives of other creatures, and the environment
• Emotionally unsophisticated: unaware of her values, feelings, and emotions; lacks psychological depth
• Plain: normal/average; trusts the authority that comes from old money and established hierarchies; believes strongly that Democracy and Capitalism are the way to resolve the problems she sees need solutions

Struggles

• overwhelmed (powerless)
• aimless: she has a plan, but doesn’t really have transcendental goals
• anxious and insecure
• overworked
• stuck in her personality: not growing spiritually or emotionally or psychologically
• no partner, a few friends but none is a great friend
• loves her family but she’s also ashamed of them

Source of pain

• she wants to bring about (racial/ethnic) equality, because she was bullied in school, called “paki”, which she hated
• she feels unfairness very strongly (she was often punished for her siblings’ misdemeanours)
• she’s ashamed of her muslim background (she doesn’t like how her parents had to leave Bangladesh because of their mixed marriage)
• she was an excellent student with excellent grades, but a very average education overall (consumerist, work ethic, cisgender heterosexual, study to achieve, work to retire, be pretty to marry)

Needs

• ACCEPTANCE: of self, of circumstances, of reality
• FAITH: in oneself, in others, in the world, in God
• TRUST: in oneself, in others, in the unknown
• SELFLESSNESS: including sacrifice, altruism, heroism, and overcoming greed
• RESPONSIBILITY: including duty, standing up for a cause, accepting one’s destiny
• REDEMPTION: including atonement, accepting blame, remorse, and salvation

Wants

Successful career.

• wants to solidify her position at The Guardian; dreams of being deployed as a correspondent at a war-zone
• wants to achieve financial independence
• wants recognition and praise
• wants to make her parents proud
• wants to disassociate with her background and her past

In pursuit of her goal (successful career), she's been actively:

• studied hard and achieved honours majoring in journalism and minoring in macroeconomics
• managed to get a position at The Guardian Group of companies
• she's living in London in a tiny flat but on her own

Roadblocks to achieving her goal:

• she’s insecure, and indecisive, doesn’t dare taking risks, is afraid of making mistakes
• she’s nice and fair, and believes in reporting “the truth”, and this plays against politics within the company (writing what sales, what people want to buy)
• she’s young and naïve, she’s only worked in the company for the last two years

Desires

Intimacy, love, hope in Humanity, a brighter future.

Background

• journalist, doing an internship in Financial Times
• 27 years old (born in 2002)
• lived above her parents’ store from birth and until she went to university in 2020 (age 18), where she lived for four years in the University of Trent Nottingham campus
• she represents the monetary market as a whole, historically, in every culture, from her ancient background to her current allegiance to the British Empire
• major in journalism, minor in macroeconomics
• she hasn’t come out as atheist (apostate), but she’s generally agnostic, and expresses herself with cultural traits of both her mother’s and father’s families (often wearing a bindi)
• studies: BA (Hons) Journalism (2020-2022); MA Media and Globalisation (2023); Msc Economics Banking and Finance (2024)
• has been recently approached by The Guardian Group to write an article for The Observer

Family

• from Bengali descent
• youngest of three sisters
• muslim mother, hindu father (converted to muslim to marry)
• her mother (Tahmima Hassan, homemaker, daughter of a homemaker and a bus driver, sister to an older brother) was low-income middle class, born in 1980 (age 49); was a bit of a rebel and not a strong believer; married to Dinarah’s father at 18, as an arranged marriage
• her father (Partha Munni, merchant, son of merchants, brother to two younger sisters) was middle class, born in 1976 (age 53); his family feared for their safety in Bangladesh and all converted to Islam in 1997 (age 21), and married him into a muslim family
• her parents got married when she was 18 and he was 22, had two children in Bangladesh, and he worked at their parents’ store, called Munni Spices
• her father’s parents they helped them migrate to the UK before she was born (when her father was 25), with her mom and her two older sisters, helping them set an Asian food store in in Tower Hamlets, also called Munni Spices

Appearance

Research

Surnames

• Bangladesh surnames
• Basar
• Rouf
• Salim
• Pal
• Monir
• Munni (homophone of money): this surname is great, but is typically Hindu in origin. A possibility is that her father converted to Islam to marry her mother (so that their marriage was not considered an "irregular marriage"), and the reason why Dinarah is only marginally religious (her mother is religious, her father is not)
• Yousuf

Bangladesh people

• Bangladeshis in the UK
• Journalists
  • Kia Abdullah: family life (gone-girl, me and my addict brother); parents; relationships
  • Hanna Yusuf