ls Editor’s Note | The Daily Star

  • Splendour of colour

    What I really love about my kitchen is the bright and colourful ceramic and porcelain crockery against the backdrop of my white walls.

  • The pay cut chain reaction

    Normality as we knew it might never come back, and it would only be wise to accept this new normal and act accordingly.

  • Half-hearted lockdown diaries

    The story of the humble jilapi starts with the Turkic invaders, even before the Mughals took over the subcontinent. A flour based twirled dessert, the jilapi is dunked in sugary syrup and devoured by the tens, and is the most sought-after sweets during iftar.

  • Cool meals for summer fasts

    Similarly, watermelon with mildly salty feta cheese sprinkled with Vietnamese basil is a match made in heaven. Caesar salad, coleslaw, shrimp cocktail, crunchy vegetables wraps in rice paper rolls are all dainty comforting snacks for summer iftars.

  • Catching your breath

    Attending conferences, seminars, talks are always a big deal for most of us; we must not only be at our intellectual best, but also at our fashionable finest. After all, first impressions are the lasting ones, they say.

  • Maintaining grace

    For the last few weeks, I have been thinking about certain things. Stuff that we tend to do as a society; some good, some not so good. Things that we say without judging its consequences on others — blatant lies, exorbitant showing-off, some know-it-all like comments.

  • Limitless boundaries

    Getting your chores and errands done virtually is already something quite new for me, but if you had told me that I could even get my backache fixed virtually,

  • Light amongst darkness

    This Pahela Baishakh’s weather forecast is cloudy with a light summer breeze whooshing past you; the perfect weather to be outdoors all day from the crack of dawn till the late hours of the night.

  • Personally speaking

    In my imagination, I see myself in a beautiful home showered by the golden afternoon sunlight, the slant rays flirting with my plush

  • Shoot to thrill

    My first Bond movie was Thunderball at Madhumita Cinema Hall sometime in the late seventies. For lack of a baby sitter I tagged along on my parents’ movie date, thereby spoiling Sean Connery’s awesome action moments as James Bond for them.

  • Fresh off the stalks

    We are often under the illusion that eating healthy is a tedious process, but that could not be further from the truth.

  • Green all the way

    There is something comforting about greens; large trees, small shrubs and bushes, potted plants, indoor plants, even weeds.

  • Call of the rivers

    Majestic all the way, the sail is a sight to behold, and you can feel the wind propelling you onwards.

  • Everybody’s welcome to my city

    I love my city! Yes, this very tattered, tainted, and terrifying (and just about every other bad adjective my dictionary can conjure up) city has a profound pull on me.

  • The saga of roses

    Personally speaking, roses never topped my favourite flowers’ list; they do very little to move me. That claustrophobic red bouquet I once got on a Valentine’s Day from someone I was not too keen on, and that half dead rose stick I get on every Woman’s Day has ruined the flower for me. Even visiting the rose village at Savar did little to change the situation.

  • Set a picnic, please

    I have quite the humongous extended family. For the sake of clarity, just my first cousins alone sum up to a hundred plus figure. My eldest cousin is older than my mother, and my mum is now in her early ’70s!

  • A walk towards prosperity

    I woke up with a longing that rainy morning, my plants were all beaming in the rain drenched sunlight, and the air was thick with a muddy, grassy scent and I wanted to go on a long drive; in fact, I wanted to drive to an unknown remote place and buy fresh organic vegetables.

  • Brave new world

    Last evening, I had to avail an Uber ride home, and since I was flat broke, and only had the smallest of changes, I had to stop by an ATM.

  • Sweets for my sweet

    It was an early autumn morning. The village was cloaked in a blanket of mild mist, and the cool breeze of the wee hours carried with it the scent of the rain soaked muddy paddy fields.

  • All day, everyday!

    My mornings are pathetic. Like all the ladies out there, juggling work and family; with crying toddlers or school going kids, with angry teenagers, or nerdy university-going grown-ups, and not to forget a difficult child-like adult heading for work — our mornings are worse than any migraine headache.

  • Heaven on earth

    I found paradise at a quaint pond on the crack of dawn last Friday. I must jot down the exact moment before memory fades, as I wish to return to that exact moment time and again, even if it is only through the words I write.

  • Our forgone rustic ways

    The emerald green taro leaves stoutly stood its ground amid my peridot bush of bracken ferns. It’s an unusual place for taro leaves to sprout, but nonetheless, the sun and the rains did bless me with an expectant gift.

  • Herbs for my heart

    It would inevitably be late in the afternoons; after wrapping up her daily household chores and completing Zuhr prayers, Nanu would sit down to have her lunch, which in itself was an art, almost like a ceremony of relishing heavenly manna.

  • It’s good to be back

    If it was a 25-day Caribbean holiday (mum says you always have to dream big, that’s beside the point though) coming back to work would have been a dread and almost a matter to contemplate desertion.

  • A summertime Eid story

    His desirous lovey-dovey stare and her coy smile says that the young couple on the rickshaw on that breezy sunlit Chaitra afternoon are in love, and perhaps soon to be wedded. They are a good-looking couple, the girl holding a packet with lowered gaze and the boy looking at her in a manner

  • Aggression: It’s the name of the game now

    What separates man from animal? The fact that we can speak? Or the fact that we have opposable thumbs? How about that fact that we have a complex society and technology that hurtled us to the moon?

  • All about regrets

    At the cross roads of life, we all contemplate on the what if’s? Yes, that includes the ‘what if I took a sound decision on my finances,

  • Celebrating Shab-e-barat

    It was almost like Eid, with the slight difference being in the exchange of trays full of gourmet goodies with neighbours and friends, and praying with family the entire night instead of visiting them

  • Deshi begins at home

    Walking down the brick lane of the 200-year-old Panam Nagar had me in a fully nostalgic mood, my usual dreamy self reminiscing of the bygone glamour, and the grandeur of the lifestyles of traders and landlords.

  • Life of the party

    My friend is a brilliant orator; even her most illogical arguments seem reasonable because of how she narrates them.

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