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

Dakkhin Asiar Diaspora Shahitya: Itihash, Tatta o Shongkot: A Book on South Asian Diaspora by Mojaffor Hossain

The classic collection of marble sculptures from Parthenon at the British Museum, commonly known as the Elgin Marbles, has been a vexed source of doubt, appreciation, enthusiasm, disapproval, and envy ever since they were brought to England during 1802-1812.

I say “No” to the jungle’s call.

“Room to roam” remains my indelible imprint of this idyllic historical island. A less trodden route.

Old friendship like cold tea waits at your side

Shaheen Akhtar is a notable Bangladeshi author, who won the Prothom Alo Best Book Award in 2004 for her novel Talaash, (translated into English as The Search and published by Zubaan, Delhi, in 2011).

John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) is a fine specimen of the prose polemic defending the freedom of expression and opposing the governmental licensing of publications and procedures of censorship.

Where Hopes Don’t Die

With a familiar hunger

A part of my life over.

My father was in the Pakistani army, so we moved frequently, every few years. Soon after I finished Grade 10 in 1966, we made a big move: from Chittagong to Rawalpindi.

When I came here, to our new abode, I was quite surprised to see the letter box outside our flat. “Who writes letter these days?” I was wondering. After the death of my mother, my father decided to shift to this new flat. He wanted me to overcome the grief caused by the death of my mother as soon as possible. He was terribly worried about my well-being.

The pale yellow moon shone through the leafless winter trees. Their silhouettes were the only beauty in the dark between the lights of town. I hunted the imagined monsters that live in the dark. I was out in the fields where no one should walk alone.

“In Your Eyes I See Endangered Me”—Rabindranath Tagore

The wind sighs as if upset; the snow’s anxiety is audible, A capricious sky causes a few docile stars to descend, Horse-driven sledges home amidst the din of strewn snow— Portrait of a deserted highway at the edge of a horizon!

The Reading Circle (TRC) a book club in Dhaka, started the new year with a Literary Encounter at the Goethe Institut onSaturday, January 4. The book for discussion was Charges by Elfriede Jelinek.

It is undoubtedly a challenging task to characterize the world of medieval Bangla literature, given its rich diversity and staggering magnitude.

Poet-professor-translator Kaiser Haq is the most thorough man I have ever come across. Taking things with a grain of salt is not his style. His casual, albeit western, demeanor, may suggest otherwise and even hide the seriousness of purpose with which he approaches life as well as his creative works.

To think of Syed Manzoorul Islam—Manzoor bhai to me (but let me call him SMI in the rest of this piece!) —is to think of someone always in motion, whether in the everyday world we inhabit, or the life of the mind that he lives so intensely.

The aforementioned line rises to utmost significance once the novel reaches its end. It would be better to leave this explanation untouched in the review for the readers’ sake.