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

Aha Aji E Boshonte

Afreen is in the third grade. She is shy, quiet and keeps to herself. Being the shortest one in class, she has to stand in the front of the line everyday at the morning assembly. She often gets bullied by classmates for her below-average height. The fact that she’s extremely skinny too doesn’t help.

Perhaps, the time has come to Love, Love again

Based on a true story (‘...poets, as everybody knows,

It all started with someone responding to a Facebook post on Coronavirus—wishing that all the problems would be over before the

Like nationalism, Tagore’s perspectives on patriotism are also characterised by certain paradoxes and ambiguities; he was a fervid patriot, yet he openly denounced and deplored the sentiment of patriotism.

The crunch of snow beneath our pads was cracking like the breaking of bones between our teeth. The tundra, echoing for miles, a vast white desert, and our breath is the only warmth in the barren winterscape.

The keepers of law

Even one individual turns into

Listening to summer breeze, smelling the raw pages of an old book my mind went wandering into the sea of nonexistent dreams. I drifted there like a lost sailor. And I hunted for a thousand-year old pale blue star.

The American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Certainly, Tagore was above this puerile mindset.

So, I was about to slip under my bedcovers to give my back some rest and close my eyes and savour the moment till I fell asleep.

A thorn in the bushes they beat around

During the Pakistan days my father was in the army, and we moved frequently, every few years. Soon after I finished Grade 10 in 1966, we made a big move: from Chittagong to Rawalpindi.

Some weird things happen sometimes. It was just midday when his mother was done with her cooking. She got up from sitting position with her two hands on her knees and went to sit in the yard to relieve rheumatism in the sunlight. On her way, she called out to her second daughter, “Mitu, serve Milu his lunch. I’ll rest awhile.”

I often consider war as a quasi-synonym for memory. After all, memory is nothing but our present in constant war with our glorified, vilified, expressed, suppressed, erased, and fragmented selves floating in past space and time.

Unloved and unnoticed

To aptly celebrate the Birth-Centenary of the Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, one initiative, among others, by Bangla Academy has been to publish Syed Shamsul Haque’s Ballad of our Hero Bangabandhu, together with its translation in English, as part of its grand project named “Birth-Centenary Publications of the Father of the Nation Bangabadhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is widely read as a classic feminist novel. Published in 1953, Villette, however, still resides in a shadowy region.

In the intellectual evolution of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 played a decisive role.