A youth from West Bengal’s Baharampur district cleared the West Bengal civil services examination more than two years ago but is yet to get his appointment letter. When he went to enquire about the delay in getting the letter, he was advised by an official of the West Bengal Public Services Commission that he could get the letter expedited by paying Rs 5 lakh to a Trinamool Congress leader.

Learning languages can open up the world for you. The world is going through dynamic changes, which are occurring at a fast rate.

Percep-tions of peacefulness can vary from person to person, nation to nation, depending on various factors such as the interplay of religious convictions, ethics, with real-life experiences. So logically, everyone’s views will not be reflected in, and can even be contradicted by the “Global Peace Index”—a measurement of “relative” position of peacefulness in 163 nations around the world,

It is customary to assess aspects of the performance of a country using composite indices such as the Ease of Doing Business Index or the Network Readiness Index.

Impelled largely by curiosity and not a little by the inner kid in me that is still in awe of fairy tales, I went to the cinema to watch a Disney film, a pleasure I strictly avoid.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina herself presented the proposed budget this year! While it was completely a new phenomenon in the history of any country, she was praised for extending her affectionate hands to take on the finance minister’s budget speech when it

Visualise a sunny convo-cation day—students beaming with pride and their four years of strenuous academic struggles finally summing up to them tossing their graduation caps as a symbolic gesture to commemorate the end of their undergraduate life.

The Annual Jamboree of global defence leaders at the Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore is much more than just a talkathon. Amidst the wining and dining, and in the chambers and corridors, policymakers and thought leaders get the opportunity to interact with one another intensely

All for one and one for all, united we stand divided we fall,” is a famous quote traditionally associated with the titular heroes of the novel The Three Musketeers written by Alexandre Dumas, first published in 1844.

Lost in thought, Shafiul is standing in a long queue at the centre of a crowded area, and staring unmindfully at everyone who walks by.

In his book titled The Tao of Cricket (2000), Ashis Nandy wrote that “cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English.”

At one high point at the Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh, the mountains of Myanmar appear so close that it looks like you could reach out and touch the trees.

Information is key, knowledge is key, hard work is key, perseverance is key—all lead to success but what about happiness? Let’s take a sigh and start. Unhappiness is a part of our lives. It happens, period. But are we focusing on that too much? Is it true we are losing our enthusiasm to live? If this isn’t a catastrophe, then what is.

Leonardo da Vinci was an extremely talented man of wide versatility. Other than famously and fortuitously puzzling generations with the enigma of a Mrs Giocondo, okay Lisa Gherardini, his Mona, he excelled in architecture and drawing, painting and sculpting, astronomy and mathematics, science and engineering, music and literature, anatomy and botany, geology and cartography, writing and history... Phew if you will.

It seems that the present crisis in the state-owned jute mills will hardly be over with the Tk 169.14 crore allocated by the government to the Bangladesh Jute Mills Corporation (BJMC) to pay the workers their dues.

An evil that is meta-stasising in a lethal fashion across the face of our planet is the culture of hate. If the spectre of global warming threatens humankind’s physical existence, the rise of hate has become a scourge to the very soul of humanity.

“No, not even water,” I explain to my friend, whose eyes grow wide at my description of fasting during Ramadan. We’re walking down Boulevard Raspail on the sixth arrondissement of Paris, past rows of people sitting out on café tables, past a noodle shop, a Pizzeria, a sandwicherie, and a Lebanese restaurant. It’s a hot summer afternoon. The air smells of cheese and caffeine, and I still have eight hours to go before I can eat or drink anything.

Bangladesh has been making good progress in the Global Gender Gap Index presented by the World Economic Forum. The index is usually calculated based on four parameters including health, education, economy and politics to gauge the state of gender equality in a country.

Amid the extreme suffering of farmers caused by the low price for paddy, the government has said that it can do nothing about it.

As a nation, we should be proud that Bangladesh has become one of Asia’s most remarkable and unexpected success stories in recent years and has been ranked 41st among the world’s largest economies in 2019 in a report published by the UK-based Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR).