The more roads you build, the more cars there will be to fill them up. I am no expert, but the numbers don’t lie.
Cyclone Mocha was just the first of the season, and Bangladesh will face more in the days to come. We need to focus on a more holistic approach to disaster management, especially the evacuation process and recovery aspect, and not just rely on warnings and people’s willingness to move to shelters.
Do we all feel this heat similarly? The answer is no. It is no secret that if you are among the well-off in this not-so-well-off nation, you are better equipped to deal with this heatwave. There is a deep running inequality as to how the heat affects people.
Just one bystander can cause enough distraction to move the focus from the real situation on hand—which is to stabilise the emergency situation and save lives. So, who is responsible?
Bangladesh supports nearly 1.7 percent of the world's wildlife. How is that wildlife doing? Why does the chirping of birds no longer wake us? When was the last time a frog just showed up in our bathrooms?
As a traveller or visitor, if you have been to Bangladesh, you are no stranger to the shocking green everywhere, the chaos of Dhaka city, the absolute absence of rules anywhere, and if you have a keen eye then the straightforward, smooth and sometimes borderline funny naming of our businesses will surely intrigue you.
I want to tell you why the loss of a bird somewhere far away from home should bother you.
By the fishing villages of Alipur and Mohipur municipalities in Kuakata, things are afoot. A team of conservationists, field workers, researchers, artists and videographers have put their heads together to drive home a crucial message in favour of Sawfish, lovingly dubbed the king of fishes.
In November 2020, a couple of young researchers at Satchari National Park in Habiganj tried their hands at something that was a novel concept in Bangladeshi wildlife conservation.
French naval officer, explorer and conservationist Jacques-Yves Cousteau was not wrong when he said, “The happiness of the bee and the dolphin is to exist. For man it is to know that and to wonder at it.”
The worldwide scientific community is too often bombarded with bad news -- from first time ever rains at the Greenland ice summit to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) doomsday forecast, there is hardly ever a reason to celebrate.
In the fight against the third wave of Covid-19 infections, youths in Bangladesh’s southern district of Satkhira have taken a united front.
Like writer-journalist Jon Mooallem wrote in “Wild Ones”, I too have been finding nature in the oddest of places.
I was mostly lurking behind the group of marine biologists, young researchers, and local parabiologists scouting the dirt-ridden streets of Chattogram just opposite to the under-construction fisheries ghat.
Through the choppy waters of the Bay of Bengal, our speedboat twisted and turned trying to reach Sonadia Island.
Accessing and reading scientific articles is no easy task. A lot of us are even more acutely aware of the fact now that that many of us are reading scientific papers for the first time in an attempt to make sense of the coronavirus pandemic.
I picked up this book while trying to find a good therapist in this dreary land.
The book explores our inability at the level of literature, history, and politics to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.
When we get there at the break of dawn, Cox’s Bazar is asleep and unexpectedly cold. Pinching at our cheek, making everyone scrunch up their noses. But reassurances drop in from right and left that the coast is rarely ever cold, for a long stretch anyway.
Something strange is happening inside the Bangladesh National Zoo in Dhaka. For the first time in decades, this establishment is devoid of huge throngs of people for an extended period of time as the coronavirus pandemic has resulted in never-before-seen social distancing measures.
With no people in sight, the animals housed at Bangladesh National Zoo in Mirpur-1 seem to be having the time of their lives (however much is possible within the confines of a cage).
By the time she was a young adult, she had started to show the first signs of anxiety, rebellion (cue the dating older men, being too ready, almost too eager to be in bed with them), then not wanting to have sex altogether in adulthood, going from straight As to straight fails—she carried these childhood struggles through adulthood.
Dhaka -- Bangladesh’s densely populated capital -- keeps topping the list of cities with the worst air pollution. Concerns about health hazards due to polluted air have been raised before, but now the warning rings louder as global experts have opined that health
Concerns due to polluted air have been raised before, but now the warning rings louder as global experts say continued exposure to high levels of air pollution in cities can potentially increase the death rate from coronavirus infections.
It is years ago now. The day I took a bus to the southernmost tip of Bangladesh with a group of people wearing khaki-coloured shirts, two-in-one pants, carrying heavy duty binoculars, spotting scopes and talking excitedly about a bird.
“It is named after one of the most prominent wildlife scientists and conservationists in the country, it mimics the sound of crickets and it is tiny,” this is how the team of researchers who determined the presence of a new species of frog describe the amphibian.
‘Raorchestes rezakhani’ was the discovery of two young researchers -- Hasan Al Razi Chayan and Marjan Maria -- from Jagannath University, guided and led closely by Sabir Bin Muzaffar, professor of biology at University of United Arab Emirates.
“Environment, climate crisis, Facebook, Instastories, Snapchat, social media influencers, relationships (lack thereof), and a world obsessed with being connected and updated constantly.”
On a half-wooden, half-iron boat, a team of men and women in heavy winter gear and heavy-duty binoculars set sail on a very, very cold winter morning on January 5. Their destination was the sandbars and shallow water lagoons of the mighty Padma River.
The soft light of the setting sun illuminates the entire section every time I walk in, mostly because I AM ALWAYS LATE. On one side white balloons hang, on another side a dart board.
This is the fifth and final (for now) instalment in a fiction series about a family navigating the woes of immigrant life.
Maybe it was Anita Desai’s book The Village by the Sea or was it that movie My Japanese Wife—I do not remember so clearly now—that had us all riled up during that short four-day long journey down to the last villages of the Sundarbans.
The packing began months ahead of time, even before they had officially decided to move, even before tickets were purchased, even before the children could talk to their school and tell their friends that they were leaving home yet again.
Just a day after teenagers around the world skipped classes and gathered on the streets of Dhaka, Warwick, Hamburg, London, and
In Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, a series of short fables published in 1894, Akela and Raksha were the wolf parents of Mowgli,
I had never gotten around to writing about Sathkhira, at least not as a travel destination. Maybe because travelling to this saline land
I have been recovering from a very long and arduous block in my reading life, a block that could not be broken by the fattest or
The child came just as dawn was about to crack. The earth had almost completed one rotation and was getting ready to light up again and along she came as the darkest hour of the night came to an end.
In a country bursting at its seams with a continuously growing population, it can be hard to get things right especially when it comes to wildlife conservation.
It doesn’t matter how beautiful the cage is. It’s still a prison.—Natasha Ngan, Girls of Paper and Fire
Bourdain, the genius both in and out of the kitchen, once famously said, “Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you.” There
They require no introduction, especially in the river country of Bangladesh, but I will take the liberty to introduce them.
I have thought of the road to Dewanbari ever since I took on the herculean (to me) task of writing about it. I imagined the place when
Nauroze could recall each strange detail about that summer that led to monsoon with the greatest clarity. She was a child invested in
They are famous because they battled petty criminals, overlords, mutated creatures and alien invaders, all the while trying and mostly succeeding to stay hidden. They are famous, for they were cursed and are now manifestations of an evil spirit stuck in a pond for
The urgent scratch of a jackal and the whooshing sound of the brewing storm kept me awake for most parts of every night. I would be
The forest does not intimidate much, in fact, at times it could feel like an extension of Enid Blyton’s mystical and whimsical children’s
Many hours later as he faced the only open window in his room, Shafiq was to remember that distant afternoon when he took his first born to see the undulating sand dunes of the vast desert.
The more roads you build, the more cars there will be to fill them up. I am no expert, but the numbers don’t lie.
Cyclone Mocha was just the first of the season, and Bangladesh will face more in the days to come. We need to focus on a more holistic approach to disaster management, especially the evacuation process and recovery aspect, and not just rely on warnings and people’s willingness to move to shelters.
Do we all feel this heat similarly? The answer is no. It is no secret that if you are among the well-off in this not-so-well-off nation, you are better equipped to deal with this heatwave. There is a deep running inequality as to how the heat affects people.
Just one bystander can cause enough distraction to move the focus from the real situation on hand—which is to stabilise the emergency situation and save lives. So, who is responsible?
Bangladesh supports nearly 1.7 percent of the world's wildlife. How is that wildlife doing? Why does the chirping of birds no longer wake us? When was the last time a frog just showed up in our bathrooms?
As a traveller or visitor, if you have been to Bangladesh, you are no stranger to the shocking green everywhere, the chaos of Dhaka city, the absolute absence of rules anywhere, and if you have a keen eye then the straightforward, smooth and sometimes borderline funny naming of our businesses will surely intrigue you.
I want to tell you why the loss of a bird somewhere far away from home should bother you.
By the fishing villages of Alipur and Mohipur municipalities in Kuakata, things are afoot. A team of conservationists, field workers, researchers, artists and videographers have put their heads together to drive home a crucial message in favour of Sawfish, lovingly dubbed the king of fishes.
In November 2020, a couple of young researchers at Satchari National Park in Habiganj tried their hands at something that was a novel concept in Bangladeshi wildlife conservation.
French naval officer, explorer and conservationist Jacques-Yves Cousteau was not wrong when he said, “The happiness of the bee and the dolphin is to exist. For man it is to know that and to wonder at it.”