The man was up against a cave wall, holding his freshly ground and moistened haematite pigment in a coconut shell. He had spent the morning painting two Babirusas (pig-deer) with the chewed, bristly end of a twig. It was a hot day in Borneo; the forest breeze did not reach inside the cave. He was about to wipe the sweat off his brow, when the sight of his arm gave him an idea. He placed his hand against the cave wall and blew paint all over it, leaving an unmistakable imprint on the side of the wall. Little did he know that 40,000 years later – his work of art would dethrone European caves as the earliest instance of human creativity. Unknowingly, he had also become one of the first, deliberate users of biometric information.

In 1988, Ershad's predictably dictator-esque declaration of a state religion led to the formation of the Committee to Resist Despotism

It should be no surprise to us that the political 'strongman' has resurged. The very word evokes images of a bare-bodied Vladimir...

Sixty or seventy years back, higher education for the people of Bengal was a rare commodity. Racial and socioeconomic barriers held

Psychologists have suggested that humans have a natural preference for negative news, the public experience of which they enjoy via mass media. The reason is not necessarily 'schadenfreude' or secret pleasure derived out of other people's misery.

For Bangladesh's global image, January 2016 was not a good month. Allegations of sexual abuse by Bangladeshi peacekeepers

It was a windy August day, 1877 C.E. A young, darkish and mostly unimpressive youth was at Nulo Gopal's door...

Like many Bangladeshis, I started concentrating on and paying closer attention to blogging from 2013. February 2013, to be precise.

Sometimes it seems that Bangladeshis have been debating the same thing over and over again, failing to reach any consensus and only

World War I was once thought of as 'the War to End All Wars'. But the hypothesis that “violence can be extinguished with greater violence” has since been thoroughly disproved and should have no place in modern statecraft. Yet it is the bedrock of anti-terrorism.

Wars on abstract concepts (e.g. terror, freethinking) are dangerous because they can be aimed at virtually anyone and can be invoked to launch every missile and curtail every freedom.

Would the news stories be the same if the apparatus were based in Muslim countries and owned by Muslims? Would we not hear more of the ravages perpetrated by western colonialism and invasions? Would Facebook profile picture campaigns then be about Paris or Beirut?