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.
Much like buying a free-size robe that needs no trial, motherhood is expected to fit all women who give birth. When it comes to
We live in parallel worlds—one in which everything seems to happen in a single moment and another in which nothing seems to happen at any moment.
I am 25 years old, from Bogra. Biologically I am a woman but I cannot declare myself as gender conforming. Nor do I have an exact answer to give when asked whether I am gender non-binary.
As soon as I left college, I decided to keep long hair. Having studied in Cantonment School and College, I never had the leeway to do this thus far. Whenever my hair grew an inch, it attracted the immediate attention of my teachers.
This October, UNESCO recognised Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's March 7 speech as part of the world's documentary heritage. One of the most influential speeches of the country, those 20 minutes at the Ramna Race Course inspired tens of millions of Bangladeshis and laid the seeds for the country's freedom.
About two years ago, James May, mop-haired British TV personality and certified automotive encyclopedia-on-legs, was still presenting for Top Gear, the BBC's acclaimed show on cars.
The power of words can move a nation to war, or spread the spirit of love and hope, and in-between, arouse a whole range and scale of passions and emotions in men that may change their fortunes forever.
The colleges and universities established during the colonial period have, hitherto, contained, concealed and, in many cases, carried out this colonial purpose in the subcontinent.
Tucked in a remote corner at the tip of the Northern Territory (NT), Australia, lies a little known city called Darwin—first named in 1839 by John Lort Stokes after his former shipmate and evolutionist Charles Darwin.
I woke up one day with a song stuck in my head. For the longest time, I couldn't recall where it was from. After two hours of obsessive tinkering on YouTube, I found that what I was remembering was one of the catchiest tunes from a Star Ship commercial of the 90s that would appear on BTV.
