Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, portrayed on a pyramid, is an essential tool to understand why people act the way they act.
Fiction collides with the aphasiac state, as reality swirls out of the conscience. Drowsing past that holds much grief wakes up like strangers with all my secrets. Where burning tail-lights read stories brought back from heaven’s whorehouse.
“They say when you take a picture, you end up saving that moment forever. They are wrong.
I am a Pangolin. Humans have killed most of my kind. My burrows are home to dozens of other species. If you lose me, you lose many others.
I first started taking these photographs, confined to my home during a protracted illness. Shumi was full of life, always prancing around.
Love Studio is a portrait series about a studio in Jurain, which is a predominantly commercial area.
"Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain." - Henry David Thoreau
Endangered are the spirits of the forest. Harmless creatures worn around feeble bodies for the exposure of grandeur. Their cries unheard by their wearers.
Every other minute, a child drowns in Bangladesh. Sometimes the waters rise creeping up and up until it enters homes, ready to claim small lives that cannot stay afloat.
It's midnight; I hear a distant cry of a stray dog and the sputtering of engines at rhythmic intervals. On the other side of the bed, my mother is napping, holding my newborn close to her. I am wide awake though.
I was chasing a new light led by a star a couple of years ago. Born and raised in Naogaon, I later migrated to Dhaka. Shaken by the gravity, I started exposing films on a plastic medium format camera and a mechanical SLR. Negatives were full of evaporated, burnt memories. I loved experimenting with multiple camera types and different film formats and making it into one visual narrative.
Bengali folk songs, which have their roots in rural Bengal and are inspired by Sufism, often talk about another entity that lives inside each human being. Poets lament about never seeing or fully understanding this entity. Being the uprooted person I am of a busy metropolitan, I have never been very spiritual; I have never felt sure about the presence of this entity. Sometimes, however, I feel it lurking in the shadows, hiding behind everyday objects. Who is this person? Where is the rest of her?
Chaitra Shongkranti—those hours between the setting of the last sun of the year, and the first dawn of the next, has captivated the psyche of this land for ages. Hope is at its strongest, forgiveness its most benevolent self, and thoughts of the past turn into bittersweet remembrance.
Among the thousands that throng the railway station every day, are those who make their homes and some, their livelihoods, in and around the station. They hawk goods, or more often, beg for a living travelling on the trains from station to station. Amidst the hubbub of the arriving and departing trains, they live and sleep on the busy platforms. Children roam around recklessly.
Early morning of March 12, a fire broke out at the Ilias Mollah slum of Mirpur-12, burning down around a thousand shanty settlements. The shanties crammed on the 70-bigha land were home to approximately 25,000 people, most of whom were garments workers. No casualties were reported, save for one elderly woman with burn injuries. The cause of the fire is not yet known. Left homeless, their belongings and savings were destroyed in the course of just four hours. The victims are to be temporarily housed at an under-construction building nearby.
Though the government has made an announcement to recognise our gender identity as "Hijras" or "Third Gender" in 2013 and promised to rehabilitate us by appointing 12 of us in government jobs in the first phase, they have failed to keep their promises so far. When we were going through the medical tests for the job, the doctors of the government hospital refused to touch us and instructed their assistants to strip
The world's youngest country, South Sudan, has been caught in the throes of a violent civilian conflict. Now in its fourth year, the ongoing war is afflicting the lives of millions of people, especially women and children, in irredeemable ways. Here's a snapshot of how poverty, disease and famine are plaguing the nation. Its people, however, continue to hope against all odds for a better, peaceful, tomorrow.
