Pick of the week

Pick of the week

Brazen Violations, Bizarre Charges

It was quite a sight. Viewers of television channels and readers of the dailies that carried the images of incarcerated journalist Rozina Islam were baffled at the scale of security measures taken by the state.

Your land is my land: Environmental injustice in Bandarban

Land is the closest thing that we know. We cultivate it, build on it, transform it to meet our needs, commercialise it to maximise economic gain, and derive our identities from its widely varying geographic characters.

The myth of martial race: Seared into a schoolboy's memory!

The years 1968-1969, were a tumultuous period in the political history of the state of Pakistan. My father a Bengali civil servant from East Pakistan, was an official in the then central government in Islamabad.

Hefajat’s Mayhem / Commentary by Mahfuz Anam: A wake-up call for AL, for us all

The ostensible reason for the recent protests was Indian PM Narendra Modi’s latest visit. The real reason was to signal that Hefajat-e-Islam (HI) under its new leadership was not the same party as it was under its former chief Shah Ahmad Shafi and his immediate followers and to announce that HI was ready to emerge as a new political force under the guise of protecting the majority faith.

The journey towards fighting corruption

Debates on any global index and ranking where a country does not perform well are common almost everywhere.

Land grab and resistance in the Chimbuk hills

The Mro community of the Chimbuk hills is passing days in great uncertainty.

The burning man, and our national addiction to violence

Barely a month had passed since one of us wrote about rape, scopophilia and collective rage, and barely a day since we began an intergenerational dialogue on gender, rage and violence, full of hope at the emergence of passionate and resourceful young allies, when the world dutifully punched back.

Contra capital punishment even in this ‘rapedemic’

The demand was predictable. Given the outrage that has been generated by the vicious acts of assault and dehumanisation that have been inflicted on women over some time, it even appears justifiable.

A case of laudable progress

The 2018 update on the global human development indices and indicators was released on September 14. Covering 189 countries of the world, the update has revealed for these countries the levels of human development in different dimensions, their progress, the inequalities in human development achievements and the extent and nature of deprivations.

ICT cases and lack of justification for remand

When we talk about cases filed under the ICT Act, 2006, Section 57 of the Act crosses our mind almost instantly. Since its enactment in 2006, there were no charges under Section 57 until April 2013 when four bloggers were arrested for alleged incitement of religious hatred. There wasn't even a tribunal to try the cases, as the government had never felt the need to establish one until the end of 2013.

Farewell to a master: Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

VS Naipaul, to use his most common appellation, died at his London home on August 11, six days short of his 86th birthday.

Making sense of the nonsensical

It is said that cruelty is a many-faced demon that can take any form to serve its purpose. This week, we have had a glimpse of the demon through nurses, people we usually trust our life with when we are at our most vulnerable.

‘People can never trust a government that issues press notes based on falsehoods'

Waking up in the morning, I heard that in the course of the night police had managed to fill the jail up with prisoners. A lot of people lay sprawling in the jail office in the morning as well. By 8 o'clock in the morning, approximately 300 people had been brought to the jail. Among them were six to fifty years old people! Some were boys who were crying for their mothers.

Could these all have been avoided?

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”, lamented Hamlet. Though the context is different that's the pervasive thought of conscientious Bangladeshis irrespective of their economic status and social standing at the moment.

Barisal set on a collision course as old meets new

As we cruised into the Kirtankhola River near Barisal, the sun had just begun to rise. A faint outline of a long line of trees and structures appeared on the horizon. It was a welcome sight after a night in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, sailing through mile after mile of unknown waters.

Hammer, remand, inaction and innuendo

For more than two weeks in campuses across the country students demanding a review of the controversial quota system for appointments to civil bureaucracy experienced brutality of a monumental scale.

Rising above the sea of "yes-men"

In Shakespeare's great tragedy King Lear, a powerful man comes to a tragic end because he surrounds himself with flatterers and banishes the friends “who will not varnish the truth to please him.”

When does development equal freedom?

In the more than four decades since independence, Bangladesh has made remarkable strides on many fronts. It is no longer the “basket case” as Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state, had dismissively remarked about the newborn country in 1971.

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