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

[for Samuel on his 15th birthday]

I can never use the past tense verbs in your case

In the space of just a few months, Bangladesh has become a land of vanishing greatness.

Two kinds of spaces are shrinking around us as we speak—one for books and creativity, as it starves from a lack of revenues, and another for our physical existence in the public sphere, caused by the coronavirus.

The book explores our inability at the level of literature, history, and politics to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.

As Abida Chowdhury addresses in her piece on The Great Derangement, narratives that engage with the natural world are scarce. Here are some books, both

Ever since social isolation began in an attempt to contain the Corona virus, the internet has flooded with references to the American realist painter Edward Hopper, especially his iconic work, ‘Nighthawks’ (1942).

Dear friend, are you sure you want to listen to this? I am a person with a harsh exterior and a soft heart. When you insist that I have to tell you my story, I feel very emotional and stressed out.

Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976)—one of the greatest Bengali poets—has by now been fully assimilated into the literary canon and even into public discourse in Bangladesh.

The Other Side of the Divide by Sameer Arshad Khatlani journeys through the precarious landscape of people who live on both sides of the divide — the divide caused by the line drawn by Radcliffe in 1947 to split the subcontinent into Pakistan and India. The angst, the wounds linger on through even pandemics like COVID 19.

It is I, a “rajpath” as they say. I had to suffer the same fate as Ahalya who was cursed into becoming the unfeeling being that she was.

Rabindranath Tagore’s (1861-1941) childhood and adolescent memories of stage performance involve both Jatra and theatre.

Let me begin my speech in this birthday webinar organized by the High Commission of India in Dhaka to commemorate Rabindranath Tagore’s 159th birthday by referring to his last public address, Sabhyater Sankat or Crisis in Civilization.

In 1980 while I was pursuing PhD in the U.S.A. I stumbled into the world of philosophy. Beyond my engineering studies, I devoted myself to my new-found passion. Since that time, I have been maintaining a diary. The following episodes are based on selected journal entries.

There were six of us, bosom buddies who had studied together in the same school and college, friends for years—“good” boys. And there were the same number of them, if not more, from the same Dhaka school and college—“nice” girls.

I always knew that life is unpredictable. But between February and April this year, I started to discover what it truly means to live an unpredictable life.

The man walks Bending on his cane, picking

Ha, there you go, this is how you suffer:

If only I had stopped her from drinking!

Aha Aji E Boshonte