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.
I was lying flat on my front, with my glasses askew and digging into my temple, on an empty, dusty street that was veiled with a heavy smog, courtesy of the pollution my city is infamous for.
Growing up schooled in an English medium curriculum can bring with it a certain disconnect with the Bengali language. Or at least it did for me.
Books and movies make pregnancy seem like a bout of ill-health, involving sporadic fainting spells, morning sickness and dramatic mood swings. I experienced none of those.
Jabeda Khatun (77 years) and Anoara Begum (68 years), two Birangonas of the Liberation War of Bangladesh arrived in The Netherlands on a gloomy winter day to join the
From the very moment I took it on, it felt like a Herculean task. To bring back a relic of the past, to clean off the dust from an unused side of the bookshelf and reread Tintin in the wake of the boyish reporter turning 90.
The influence of social media does not stop just there with the “you need this useless product”, it is far reaching, so much so, that I have had friends and relatives come up to me and tell me if only I ate “clean” or smiled more often, I would find that I do not need to see a therapist anymore, but would find that my 'depression' has been magically cured by cumulative good deeds or a nutritious diet.
July 29 was just another mundane Sunday, and one of us crossed the intersection of Shaheed Ramiz Uddin Cantonment School and College at around 10 am, on the way to work.
Newly-wed Munia spent this Eid cooking for, and serving, her in-laws, while pining for her parental home and a glimpse of her parents. When the 28-year-old had approached her husband about visiting her parents, he had simply dismissed the idea. Her first Eid after marriage was thus marked by a huge fight with her husband who chose to prioritise his family and some ill-formed notions of custom over the happiness of his wife and his in-laws.
This is the story of my life. But before I get there I want to tell you another story—the story of a mali who lived all by himself in a far-off land.
Nuclearism is the ideology of nuclear weaponry and nuclear arms-based security. It is the most depraved, shameless, and costly pornography of our times. Such an ideology cannot be judged only by the canons of international relations, geopolitics, political sociology, or ethics. It is also a well-known, identifiable, psychopathological syndrome. The following is a brief introduction to its clinical picture, epidemiology, and prognosis.
