Creative nonfiction / Growing up with a new nation: The Dhaka we once knew

A few months ago, while waiting for my matter to be called in court, I watched a young lawyer rise to make a submission.

Management says irregularities and misconduct were recently detected

Ultimately, these authors reject the fantasy of the flawless matriarch, proving that devotion and ambivalence are often delivered from the exact same source. This Mother’s Day, let us celebrate the mothers who nurtured us, mourn the ones we’ve lost, and hold space for those whose experiences of motherhood exist in the shadows.

You’re a traffic island in our consciousness, O Rabindranath!

Though his characters breathe through very human emotions, yearning, hesitation, separation, regret, Tagore lifts love gently away from the limits of the human hand. It becomes something inwardly vast, where feeling matters more than outcome, and presence matters more than possession. This is why his lovers often come close, yet never arrive.

His voice still inspires humanity to love and protect earth

The gift Tagore leaves us is not perfection. It takes a lot of courage to even ask the question in the first place. Therefore, let us take up the work he left unfinished, under the same banyan tree he sat under, with the same soft breeze he felt, as the soft afternoon light turns gold when the sun starts to set. Was it his time? Yes. Would he be different today? We will never know. But us, asking, is our tribute.

Banu Mushtaq, an Indian writer who writes in Kannada language, was awarded the International Booker Prize in 2025 for “exploring the lives of those often on the periphery of society” in her collection of short stories, Heart Lamp (And Other Stories Publishing, 2024).

It is a Tuesday afternoon in Dhaka. Cars are honking, fumes are rising. A banker named Anirban rear-ends another car—typical for the city. Until he steps out. He sees that the other driver has been dead for what seems like days but is still moving. And he wants to talk.

The winners of the 2026 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced, recognising publications, publication staff, individual journalists, and authors across 23 award categories for journalism, reporting, criticism, photography, authorship, and overall excellence in their fields. The winners for each category were announced on May 4,2026 via live broadcasts on the Pulitzer Prizes website and YouTube channel.

Bengali literature had already seen its fair share of tall-tale storytellers—most notably Ghana Da by Premendra Mitra and Tenny Da by Narayan Gangopadhyay. Tarinicharan Banerjee, or Tarini Khuro, is not entirely different in essence. He lives in Beniatola Lane and walks to Ballygunge to narrate his stories to a group of eager listeners—among them Poltu, the narrator, and Napla, a slightly rebellious boy who delights in interrupting him. As I read those stories late into the night, I found myself, willingly or not, becoming the sixth member of their circle.

That censorship is not only malign but also stupid and, in the long run, futile, is a lesson that every tinpot dictator and overzealous bureaucrat has to learn afresh.

One of the most interesting adaptations that I have read recently is the 2025 novel I, Medusa by African American novelist Ayana Gray.

When I was younger, I would wait for days like these with a kind of breathless excitement. My cousins and I would run out with buckets to collect the first hailstones, laughing as they bounced off the floor and stung our fingers with their tiny, icy weight. To my five-year-old self, they felt like strange little creatures dropped from another world, cold and impossible to hold for long before they slipped back into the water.

On her birth centenary, Harper Lee’s spare canon endures as a vast moral inheritance

North South University’s Department of English and Modern Languages (DEML) hosted the closing ceremony for its inaugural Certificate Course in Creative Writing on 25 April 2026. The event, executed successfully through the combined efforts of DEML faculties and students alike, was attended by Pro Vice-Chancellor Professor Nasar U. Ahmed, Treasurer Prof. Abdur Rob Khan, and DEML Chair Dr Nazia Manzoor, among other distinguished faculty members of various departments at NSU.

It always felt like modernity flatters itself with a simple story: history moves from darkness to light, from superstition to reason, from inherited authority to critique.

The rooftop is where she breathes.

Every word I write is contemporary  My pain is urban

Thorns in My Quilt (Rupa Publications India, 2024) unfolds through address rather than disclosure. Written as a series of letters to her father, Mohua Chinappa’s memoir traces memory not as a sequence of events, but as an emotional inheritance shaped by silence, expectation, and the subtle negotiations that govern family life.