A peripatetic poet’s pleasing musings
The title of this book suggests that it is based in Bengal but it really meanders deftly across time and space, more often than not in “mazy motion”.
3w ago
Be a tree
Be a tree Get wet in sorrow’s shower and you’ll recover. From envy’s scorching sun gather strength
1m ago
Rehman Sobhan’s recollections of the road he took towards December 16, 1971
The title of the first of Professor Rehman Sobhan’s two-part memoir suggests that it is about his “years of fulfilment”; the subject matter of its sequel therefore would be about the “untranquil” years that followed.
2m ago
18th century British women writers and their Indian others
The postcolonial and feminist lenses Chatterjee deploys in his discussion of the works of the selected women writers seem to suit his analysis of the works of these "enlightenment" period British women writers, for their biases, fixations, and anxieties often come into view then.
3m ago
Remembering Melville in his bicentenary year
Melville's critics, inevitably, panned him for what he had characterised self-deprecatingly and in his frustration as his fictional "botches," although his works were rarely that.
8m ago
Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Gora’: From notions of purity to an all-embracing Bharatborsho
Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora, written between 1907 and 1909, reveals the ways in which Tagore addresses the all-important issues of his time—national identity formation, the coming together of people over time, and obstacles or barriers put in the way of the progress of a nation. The novel captures Tagore’s fascination with envisioning a future based on human amity or moitri, one where the powerless and the dispossessed transcend the barriers of division and distrust.
8m ago
October 13, 2022
Ahaduzzaman Mohammad Ali's 'Nakhshatra Nivey Jai': Poems well worth waiting for
A series of poems also reflect his ecological sensitivity to the machine in the garden and snakes and hyenas imperiling forests and rivers and Dhaka—the city he has lived in for most of his life.
September 17, 2022
Home in the World: The Autobiography of a Well-Known Bengali
The dust jacket cover of Amartya Sen’s absorbing and remarkable memoir shows him as a young boy, with his sister and a cousin at home, looking out at the world. An apt cover image of a fittingly titled book about someone who would be always taking in the world as he went all over
August 15, 2022
Bangabandhu’s 1952 trip to New China
“The truth is—here is a new country, new people and new modes of behaviour. It appears that there is newness in the air, everywhere” (New China, 143)
July 7, 2022
A history of this subcontinent, woven in jute
The book reveals how in mid-19th century colonial East Bengal jute first emerged “as a global commodity”
March 26, 2022
Bangabandhu and Bangladesh’s Landscapes
Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was rooted in the land and loved Bangladesh’s natural features. He wanted them to be as they were—green, open spaces full of water bodies and flora and fauna.
February 26, 2022
Jibanananda Das’ “Ananto jibon jodi pai ami”
If I get to live forever— then forever, I’ll be all alone— If I return to the paths of the world, I’ll see green grass Sprouting—will see yellow grass scattering— the sky Whitening in the morning—like a tattered munia bird, Breast blood-stained in the evening—again and again I’ll see stars And view a strange woman untying braided hair and leaving Alas, her face devoid of traces of the setting sun’s soft glow
November 20, 2021
Pandemic Musings Anthropocene: climate change, contagion, consolation
Sudeep Sen’s Anthropocene is the third work on the subject by an Indian writer that I have come across in recent years, but it is truly sui generis.
November 6, 2021
Scenes from a Radio-Active Age
As my siblings and I grew up in the first half of the 1960s, the radio set was the most sought-after device in our house. Till Baba bought a television set for us towards the end of the decade, it was our main source of entertainment, news and small talk.
October 2, 2021
Paradisal Libraries
Younger people might find this too dated, but I will stick by what Jorge Luis Borges once said: “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of a Library!”
August 14, 2021
Empathy and Bangabandhu
Empathy, the Wikipedia entry on the word tells us, includes “caring for other people and having a desire to help them; experiencing emotions that match another person’s emotions; discerning what another person is thinking or feeling; and making less distinct the differences between the self and the other.
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