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

September 7, 2018; a big hall in Ibsenhuset (The Ibsen House; museum, archive and theatre dedicated to Henrik Ibsen in his birth town, Skien). An actors' session of

I remember 6-7 years ago, I was telling my cousin Zaima that our family has Arabic ancestry. It took a little while for my six-year-old cousin to process the fact, and ask, "Didi, does that mean we are supposed to wear bikini tops with pretty skirts and do belly dance?"

When my ancestral home

Sentences are the workhorse of writing—so much so that we forget that they do more than just say something. Of course, a sentence communicates some sort of meaning, but how it says is as important as what it says.

Literary adaptations on-screen struck big in 2018 with Crazy Rich Asians (book by Kevin Kwan), Mowgli (adapted from The Jungle Book and the nth adaptation so far), The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and A Wrinkle in Time.

Music is like a bridge, Between real and unreal It is the door that opens on the surreal.

In his lips was written submission. His moon shaped beard neatly combed,

I saw him. It was no mistake that it was him. No doubt, no confusion. He was there and it was him. It was that same face, nakedly visible over the pile of luggage surrounded by a number of people here and there, smoking, sipping tea, reading newspaper, or chattering among

Somerset Maugham famously said, “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” Similarly, there are many ways in which a writer can achieve success — usually through a combination of luck, talent and connections — but the majority of writers struggle to work that combination to their own benefit.

To an immigrant Canadian, such questions are really very tough to comprehend: “Which are the best novels in Canadian literature” or “Who are the most celebrated poets of the country?”

In a previous article titled “Rokeya and Woolf: Souls That Have Lived” (Daily Star, 8 Dec 2018), I discussed similarities and differences between Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941).

O Son of Ben-Zion, why have you not

Marx correlates the decrease of Indian textile exports with the monopoly exerted by British muslins to India and the decimation of the population of Dhaka. To quote what he says about the impact of colonization on our city and the outcome of the fatal embrace of British colonial policy in our part of India:

I've never told the truth

What's in a name? Suppose you are given the name of a well-known character in fiction, could this determine the sort of person you

The bench was deceivingly inconspicuous with its chipped paint and creaky wood. It practically promised that if I sat on it, I could enjoy a feisty lunch in a brown paper bag and watch the pigeons fight over crumbs without any life altering events. Yet sometimes the unexpected happens in the most ordinary of places.

Anik Dutta's 2017 movie Meghnadhbadh Rohoshya is a clever evocation of naxalgia. Fifty years after the Naxalbari movement, the

In a Delhi bookshop this October, I came across Karl Marx on India. Edited by Iqbal Husain, former Professor of History at Aligarh

In Manzur Elahi's garden

Perhaps it is a little late, but here it is. A two-day international conference on Karl Marx's birthday titled “Language, Literature, Culture