Shamsad Mortuza

As the old joke has it, there is no lid in the mouth of hell where the Bengalis are kept.

In his Ode to the Onion, the Chilean Nobel laureate poet Pablo Neruda praises onions as “the miracle” that happens under the earth.

The title alludes to a very famous folk song by Abdul Alim, Premer Mora Jole Dobe Na. The song pits true love against so-called flings, suggesting that mere water cannot drown the “body” who is in love.

English professors are known for being sticklers for rules. Even if I try to disassociate myself from the grammar Nazis, there are times when I have to wonder about the usage of certain words.

“And my last ask is: if you’re someone’s sister, the next time you see your brother, please hug him… as tightly as you can, for as long as you want, because that’s all I want to do every time I see those photos. But I will never be able to hug Fahim again.”

Attending the peace summit on the occasion of the 100th birth anniversary of Nelson Mandela in 2018, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina quoted both Nelson Mandela and our Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

In an op-ed published on July 27, Prof Syed Saad Andaleeb reviewed the DU annual budget and argued that the dearth of funding should not be blamed for the lack of research.

Cross border cattle smuggling prior to Eid-ul-Adha is an irritant that keeps officials in both Bangladesh and India nervy.

During his regular stroll in the palace garden, Emperor Akbar once saw many crows flying around. He asked his minister, “How many crows are there in our kingdom, Birbal?”

The coronavirus crisis posed serious threats to the global stock markets.

Let’s admit it: our education today is in crisis. And it was in crisis even before the pandemic was here. The pandemic has exposed the skeletons we have been hiding in the open for a long time.

There was a broken black chair by the window near the gate. On it there was a thin plastic bag containing some mixed up rice, daal, and probably vegetables or curry.

Uncertainties loom large over the holding of Higher Secondary Certificates (HSC) and its equivalent exams.

I had a senior colleague at Jahangirnagar University who was known to his students at the Pharmacy Department as an eccentric genius.

The Amazon rainforest, spread over 2.1 million square miles, is dubbed as the “lungs of the planet” as it produces 20 percent of the oxygen in our planet’s atmosphere.

His visiting card had two office addresses: one in Scotland and the other in Estonia. There was nothing wrong with it, but the architect who just shared his card explained the oddity.

Online teaching, at its best, can create a learning environment to ensure transference of knowledge. However, I am not sure if technology and innovations have reached that point to replace the tribal needs of human interactions that define the complex teacher-student relationship in a physical classroom.

Remember getting caught by your parents for trying out roadside pickles or tawdry coloured crunchy ice outside your school?

I was a young lecturer when private universities appeared for the first time in the higher education scene of Bangladesh. I remember when one of my colleagues left us to join a pioneer private university as a full time faculty, we at the department felt that he had sold his soul to money, deciding to work under a corporate system. The same thing happened when one of my teachers left for a financially lucrative BCS job.

My Face-book newsfeed has been experiencing a little tremor ever since the Dhaka-based action movie Extraction started streaming on Netflix on April 24.