Violence in Bhola preceded with a familiar pattern of events, blaming a member of a religious minority for demeaning Islam, creating a frenzy and then mobilising the angry people to the street.

Burimari union, a border village nestling in a nook of the Indian district of Cooch Behar, is a village of stones and stone-crushing yards.

In America’s Northeast, including New York, the dramatic explosion of colour during fall season starts typically in late September. It peaks in mid-October when leaves on the trees are emblazoned in gorgeous shades of red, orange, yellow and gold.

This year, all the precursor conditions—chilly nights and sunny, warm days—were in place for a fabulous fall foliage season.

After six months of reading 151 books longlisted into 11, narrowed down further to six, the Booker Prize judges on October 14 announced this year’s winner—the “best novel” produced in English in the UK and Ireland (regardless of the author’s nationality) over the past one year.

I woke up with a start at 06:09 am that morning on April 10. It was the sharp ring of the alarm clock going off at this ungodly hour that made me jump up.

It took two years for 42-year-old Solema Begum to meet a gynaecologist for a lump that was developing in one of her breasts.

Rural households across Bangladesh are spending a staggering 158 billion taka a year on repairing the damage caused by climate change and on prevention measures, new research ‘Bearing the climate burden: how households in Bangladesh are spending too much’ reveals.

These modern times are dangerous because at any moment we are required to react with more than just an angry emoji.

Maybe it was Anita Desai’s book The Village by the Sea or was it that movie My Japanese Wife—I do not remember so clearly now—that had us all riled up during that short four-day long journey down to the last villages of the Sundarbans.

Winter came early that year. Mid-October, a steady wind appeared and transformed Dhaka into a dust bowl; by November, a fog descended and obscured the moon.

The fourth industrial revolution is under way and bringing with it a series of upheavals—robotics, automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are gradually making their way into the production process all over the world.

Speaking as a representative of the students, I want to reiterate that the BUET students are demanding that only party politics be banned on campus—not student politics in general. To be more specific, they are demanding the ban of Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL).

For those who believe in the fairy tale of original sin, Adam and Eve, so goes the narrative, partook of the forbidden fruit, fell from grace, and were forever banished from the garden.

Sahera Khatun Shimul, a young working woman, has to travel from Dhanmondi to Khilgaon regularly to attend her office.

Along the banks of the Sitalakhya river in Narayanganj, some 20 villages in Sonargaon, Rupganj, and Siddhirganj in particular, women villagers starch yarn in lime and toasted rice to make warp yarn—the vertical, lengthwise weaves that make up a fabric.

For months, our public universities have been erupting in protests, with students demanding some very basic things: vice-chancellors who are not corrupt, teachers who cannot bribe their way into the university, student political wings who do not extort or oppress (or murder), effective sexual harassment policies, and freedom of expression.

What would we learn sitting in an air-conditioned and well-furnished classroom if the pedagogical practice remains the same—copy-pasted slides from SlideShare with watermarks still on them, exhibiting incompetence and indolence? Which path of knowledge would we be treading on, with a fancy library reading MP3 BCS guides, while a thick layer of dust covers the library books, longing for human touch? With teachers being transmitters of knowledge and students only passive receivers in a high-tech environment, would we not be annulling curiosity and participation—two fundamental qualities of knowledge as observed by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire?

The latest, but probably not the last, victim of this culture of impunity is Abrar Fahad, a second-year student of the electrical and electronic engineering department of Bangladesh University of Science and Technology (BUET).

A few months back, I installed a meditation app. It had good reviews and offered guided meditation for different circumstances—to reduce stress, improve focus, “balance and awaken the chakras”, guide mindfulness, etc.