I woke up with a start at 06:09 am that morning on April 10. It was the sharp ring of the alarm clock going off at this ungodly hour that made me jump up.
Winter came early that year. Mid-October, a steady wind appeared and transformed Dhaka into a dust bowl; by November, a fog descended and obscured the moon.
What would we learn sitting in an air-conditioned and well-furnished classroom if the pedagogical practice remains the same—copy-pasted slides from SlideShare with watermarks still on them, exhibiting incompetence and indolence? Which path of knowledge would we be treading on, with a fancy library reading MP3 BCS guides, while a thick layer of dust covers the library books, longing for human touch? With teachers being transmitters of knowledge and students only passive receivers in a high-tech environment, would we not be annulling curiosity and participation—two fundamental qualities of knowledge as observed by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire?
The distance from Lexington to Astoria is six miles; 1.5 hours by foot. On that crisp fall morning, it took twice that.
Ahmad Shafi* sensed the unrest in Kashmir before it happened. An MBBS student in Bangladesh, he was in class at Dhaka’s Green Life
When Nana was 24, he saw Muslims slaughtered in prayer. As men prostrated before God, the cold of steel met the warmth of flesh,
When the concrete casting of the ceiling at Gausia market broke off and fell on my head last week, I was determined to hold someone
About a month back, a 20-year-old man—a university student—was accused of sexual harassment and assault by multiple girls who came forward on social media. Following the circulation of posts exposing his alleged behavior, he faced, at max, a blast of “angry” emojis and hateful comments.
On the busy Mirpur Road of Dhanmondi, students mill around outside a standard university building, converted from a shopping mall. Standing out, yet blending in, among the students are several Somali and Nigerians students—a small but growing body adding to foreign students studying at public and private universities in Dhaka.
For as long as anyone growing up in the Noughties can remember, Dhaka has had a traffic problem. In fact, an entire generation did much of their growing up stuck inside various forms of transport on Dhaka's gridlocked roads, waiting, sweating and cursing. The government took steps—building flyovers, introducing stricter policing and enforcement on the roads, uprooting streetside businesses to make space—but to no avail. With a growing economy and expanding purchasing power, more people bought cars and found more reason to go places.
It's 11 am. Mosammat Ayesha rushes to the classroom of grade four to take attendance. After the roll call, she asks the students to open their English grammar book and go through a grammar lesson. While the students fumble through their books, Ayesha quickly moves to the classroom of grade five. There, she again takes the attendance and asks the students to open their mathematics books. Instructing them to solve some arithmetic problems, she returns to the classroom of grade four to help students with grammar lessons.
The quota reform movement that exploded on to the nation's radar last week enjoyed enormous public support, especially among university students. I can't underscore enough the extent of its popularity—in a series of surprise resignations, university-level leaders of the ruling party's student wing broke ranks to join the movement.
Tanvir Ahmed was a student of University of Dhaka. He committed suicide at the very beginning of this month . According to his
The bedtime of weekends turns out to be the most intimate moment of exchange between us, mother and daughter. That is the time when my mother opens her heart to me and reveals her darkest fears, her deepest pains and disappointments from the past.
One of the most trending quotes shared by the activists of the ongoing quota system reformation movement is Italian poet Dante Alighieri's “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality”.
Rupa shows me the broken glass of a bookshelf in the bedroom, which her son Rakin had shattered by banging his head against it, not half an hour before I entered their home in Mohammadpur last week. He had done something similar last year, which had required 10 stitches on his face. This time, luckily, Rakin had no injuries. His mother was still shaken, the accident a vivid reminder that her world can be turned upside down in a second, though she works hard all day to ensure a regular routine for her autistic son.
I listen in abject horror as my three-year-old comes back from school one day and proclaims that his playtime with his afternoon neighbourhood playmates will now consist of “the boys on one side and girls on the other”. My carefully constructed gender-equality declarations and almost repeated bad gerings over the past few years on his swiftly developing brain seems to have collapsed in one session of rough
Growing up, I was always told to be prepared when embarking on something new. Sometimes, however, there is very little one can do
