Zina Tasreen | The Daily Star

  • Zina Tasreen

  • The cool head steering Unilever Bangladesh through the tempest

    We are sailing through the most extraordinary times in living memory, with every facet of what we knew as normal life upended. So, one would expect the man heading the Bangladesh arm of a multinational behemoth like Unilever to be fidgety.

  • A budget not of its time

    Any finance minister delivering a national budget wants, ideally, to project three qualities: calm, authority and very slight dullness.

  • Budget of self-preservation

    It seems the universe keeps conspiring against Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal. When it is his moment to shine, some misfortune strikes. Last year, it was dengue, and this year, it is the raging coronavirus that has left him at the centre of what could possibly be Bangladesh’s most acute economic -- and human -- crisis yet.

  • A V-shaped economic recovery is still within reach. But the general public must play its part.

    Optimism is a disease, the polemical British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie once said, and talking with Manmohan Parkash, the country director of the Asian Development Bank, one can’t help but catch that disease.

  • Docking bad loans has now become critical

    Age is the price of wisdom, it is often said. And an audience with the immediate past finance minister, AMA Muhith, calls to mind that saying.
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