Amiya Halder

Amiya Halder works as In-Charge for Daily Star's weekly career supplement Next Step. She has the daunting task of turning dull, sleep inducing articles into interesting content. She often steps in to create info-graphs which happens to be one of her specialties. Amiya has a recurring worry that her arms are too short for taking selfies, rather like the Tyrannosaurs Rex. This IBA student refuses to let her poor selfie taking skills hamper her team building activities. Most of that involves accepting LAN games of NFS and beating the guys most of the times at races. It's called team building exercise and she practices what she edits.

Nobody the Girl

It was the hour of waking on Winter Solstice and yet a radiant sun was rising on the already bustling borough of Colony. From the first glimmer of sunlight on the shortest day of the year, the citizens of Colony would take the Choice, till the World were momentarily plunged under the cover of darkness. Once the sun rose on the new season, a new Commandant would be named.

Invoking the “Mantoiyat”

“This is a particularly timely film and in many ways, and perhaps self-contradicting ways, a comforting film.

ALTERED CARBON

Although it's been out for over two months, the visually-thrilling, ultra-pulp tech-noir Altered Carbon has enjoyed relatively little fanfare. Created by Shutter Island screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis, Altered Carbon is set in a depraved new world 400 years in the future. Human consciousness now exists on “stacks”, and if you're rich enough, it can be downloaded and

Priyabhashini's orchestrations of carbon

That Ferdousi Priyabhashini's driftwood creations are more sentient than inanimate becomes apparent the second you enter Shilpangan, a contemporary art gallery tucked away in a cosy corner of Dhanmondi 13. Her current exhibition, Megher Shongi, is a tribute to the monsoon, her most loved of the six seasons, and the inspiration for her woodwork orchestrations. With boats and boatsmen, long-legged water-birds, and stranded figurines, her characters and forms look like they've emerged straight out of a tempest.

Tickle your intellect this Lit Fest

It's that time of the year again—to soak in the muted, winter sun on the dewy early-morning lawn, sipping shatkora and lotkon sherbets as you give up body and soul to rapturous lines of poetry, all eyes and ears for the literary luminaries and cultural icons who grace the grounds of Bangla Academy this weekend-and-a-half as Dhaka Lit Fest (DLF) returns for its third year.

Rules of engagement

A nine-to-five workday spent dangerously close with the opposite sex in a sequestered office cubicle makes it painstakingly difficult for things not to get steamy once in a while.

Tall, handsome and deathly—the enduring allure of vampires

Growing up, vampires were never quite the James Deans of the undead that they are today. Vampires that I would encounter were middle-aged, had an unwholesome pallor, the same coiffure as Alfalfa from The Little Rascals, and god-awful vaguely-European accents.

Phoenix of Longadu

“After the landslide, it became all too clear where the aid was headed. Of course there would be an inclination to send relief to the Bengalis,” says Mrittika Kamal, Director of Terracotta Creatives and one of the curators of Phoenix of Longadu, a charity exhibition, held between October 16 and 19 at Drik Gallery, dedicated to raising funds for the affected families.

What to do when entry-level positions require “two years of experience”

It's your dream job in your ideal industry. This is what four years of undergrad built you up for. You are ready to take on all those challenging albeit thrilling responsibilities. Even better—you are genuinely digging the company's mission, you can already envision yourself sticking up Steve Jobs posters in that spiffy green cubicle with the plywood walls. So what's stopping you?

3 signs your work place is killing you

Wondering if your workplace is getting to you? Here are the top three questions you should be asking yourself.

Is spitting it out the best way to break bad news?

People pick up on when they're being buttered up for bad news—it only amps up their anxiety. Why make a person go paranoid waiting for you to get the point just because you can't find the right words?

Epic fails: Jack Dorsey

The founder of Twitter and biggest US mobile payment chip service, Square, faced a heavy blow when he was kicked out as CEO of the microblogging site for his poor management style.

Leaving no one behind: “Hijra Lives in Bangladesh”

"When I was a volunteer for UNYSAB, a bunch of us were distributing sandals to rickshaw pullers who didn't have any. A group of hijras came along and took the sandals away, but a little while later, they returned and apologised for having done so. Assuming we were NGO workers, they said: 'Rickshaw pullers have parents, children, siblings, a family. We have nobody. Can't you do something for us too?'”

Television for the bibliophile

It is often said that the book is better than the movie, and it is certainly not every day that a movie improves on the novel that inspired it, or that a masterpiece like Rashōmon springs out of the mind of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and into the hands of Akira Kurosawa to mould into the vivid piece of storytelling and cinematic brilliance that it is. With filmmakers determined to take a shot at breathing new life into literary greats, here are six exciting on-screen adaptations you don't want to miss this fall.

Job hunting? Get a personal website

With your résumé and your cover letter, you have to tell hiring managers all about your skills. But why tell them, when you can show them?

What happened where [INFOGRAPHIC]

We map the shortest possible distances Rohingya families needed to take to reach Kutupalong Refugee Camp, as well as the destruction at Maungdaw and Rathedaung.

Secrets to success for the fresh grad from C-suite hotshots

Top managers in Bangladesh on what they really look for in new recruits.

The 'other' side of the Wall

Envisaged as vast, impregnable structures in their inception, walls have been proclaimed to defend realms and their inhabitants from invaders for time immemorial. The same can be said to apply to the Wall in George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, televised on-screen as Game of Thrones.

A thousand gardens

Where have the fish in the Buriganga gone? Bubbling with rich, garish tones that can belie the grim reality, the waters of the Buriganga, once the lifeblood of the capital, tell our very own tale of woe.

Pitch perfect

Have a brilliant idea, but don't know what to say to your boss?

3 more ways to motivate yourself [INFOGRAPHIC]

Why are we so good at thinking of what to do but terrible at doing them?

What's the right photo editing app for you?

With thousands of photo editing apps out there, and the app store not making it any easier for you with its endless scroll of

What to do when you're bored with your dinner table

Peaceful Cuisine Platform: Youtube Subscribers: 1 million+

Reverse engineer your way out of work misery

If you can't seem to set goals even if your life depended on it, and you think it's getting in the way of a fulfilling work experience, do not despair. Turns out you are in the same boat as Warren Buffett and his business partner Charlie Munger.

The dolled-up, leopard-spotted women of 'Concealed'

Habiba Nowrose's first solo exhibition

Priyabhashini's orchestrations of carbon

'Megher Shongi', sculptor Ferdousi Priyabhashini's 13th Solo Exhibition

6 jobs that didn't exist 10 years ago [INFOGRAPHIC]

Jobs exist now that we’d never heard of a decade ago.

How to be as productive as a Google employee

Sleep pods, breakfast bars, massage therapists, and even haircuts—with in-office perks like these keeping employees rested, relaxed, energised, and satisfied, no wonder Google is the high-functioning, super-innovative company that it is.

5 science-backed reasons to drink more coffee

You probably already knew that when adenosine binds with its receptor, you feel drowsy, but when caffeine comes in, it binds with the receptor instead, stopping you from feeling drowsy, right?

What is really killing the children of Tripura Para?

Forgotten by healthcare workers for seven years, 10 children in Sitakunda died from a disease that takes a single shot to prevent.

What kind of communicator are you?

By figuring out how you and those around you communicate, you can say just the right things and have more fruitful discussions.

'The Handmaid's Tale' is a dystopia all too familiar

The television adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel, The Handmaid's Tale, is perhaps more hyperrealist than dystopian.

The data-driven future is here

Next Step speaks to Cramstack, a data company with its very own business intelligence and analytics platform, about the data revolution in Bangladesh.

Want to pick up data science? Brush up on your math first

If you’re considering picking up data science online, but are feeling a little shaky with your stat skills, here are a couple of introductory courses to get you started.

A demographic time bomb?

According to the latest figures released by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), around two million youths of working age are unemployed. Young university graduates are struggling the most to secure employment.

9 ways to have more effective meetings [INFOGRAPHIC]

If you've ever caught your team looking for an eject button on their conference room chairs, take heart! There are simple ways to make meetings highly productive.

Destruction of shops at Rath Mela and the ever-shrinking space for minorities

Last Saturday night, the 400-year-old Rath Mela in Dhamrai, a fair integral to the Hindu Rath Jatra Utsab and the biggest Rath Jatra festival of the country, was shut down by the police over what it called “security concerns”, the fair stalls forcibly dismantled, visibly destroyed, and their owners beaten up.

Unusual team building exercises of famous companies [INFOGRAPHIC]

Some of today's most famous bosses use whacky and out-there team building methods to make their companies more cohesive. And considering the success, it must be working!

The single biggest driver of success is challenge

Stephen Filotas, Group Head of Route-to-Market and Customer Management, has spent what he calls “15 very short years” at British American Tobacco (BAT). He shares the biggest lessons he's learned over the years with Next Step during his visit to Bangladesh.