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Originally Posted by mufi_02
Yeah agree. But NY is home to more than 50k (my assupmtion is 70k) Bengalis. From colleges like BMCC, La Guardia, and other CUNYs, to Jackson Heigths to Jamaica, Astoria, Parkchester, Ozone Park, Brooklyn, everywhere there is a huge presence of us. Heck, I even think Jackson Heights is home to every single 'shomiti' from every single district and subset too e.g. Dokkhin Comilla, Uttor Komilla etc..
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I was in NYC for much of this past summer. You soak in a lot more when you actually live there than when you're just visiting for a few days.
My (rough) estimate would be that there are at least 100,000 Bangladeshis just in the five boroughs alone. Wikipedia gives data that is I think at least 2 years old and estimates 70k and that is most probably an under-estimation.
Bangladeshis are everywhere in NYC.
In Midtown, I sometimes got my lunch from a Subway on 7th ave between 56th and 55th. One day I walked in wearing my old 2005 BD cricket kit. Thats throwing up a flag. Two or three brown guys and an Arab with long hair were behind the counter. One of the brown uncles asks me "Kee Khaben?" We converse, I tell them I'm from Sylhet.
Immediately the long-haired Arab perks up and then says to me "Sylheter koon district?" OK, so they're all bengali here, including the "Arab".
The Kaplan center where I was taking my review course had 2 Bangladeshis working there, one of whom resides in Woodhaven and actually recognized my name from this forum, LOL.
The there was the Duncan Donuts I used to go to on Amsterdam and 94th...all the workers were Bangladeshi. And there would often be 3-4 Bangladeshi members of the NYPD sitting there adda-ing about "playing cricket on the streets" back in the home country.
So one day I asked one of these officers how many Bangladeshis are on the force. The last batch out of the Academy he said had 9 bangladeshis, two of them were women! I told him the wiki census of 70,000 bangladeshis in the city and he said that was certainly an under-estimate. I asked if he thought there are closer to "ek lakh" bangladeshis in the city and he nodded and said "hobe" while giving the impression that that was the lower end of the estimate.
But after checking out Jackson Heights, Woodside, and Elmhurst (whose hospital on Broadway has signs written in English, Spanish, Mandarin and
Bangla) and then seeing an even larger distribution of Bangla businesses on Hillside Ave in Jamaica, without venturing into the enclaves of Ditmas Park and Kensington in Brooklyn, I think I believe there are at least 100k Bangladeshis in the city proper.
I have at least two uncles who live in Nassau country (New Hyde Park), but I'm not sure what the Bangladeshi population of Long Island is like. NHP certainly doesn't have too many.