John Dryden, an English poet, literary critic, and social reformist of the 17th century, believed that “it is only for poets to translate a poet”.

So, unlike Rabindranath Tagore, who left documented comments on Jibanananda, Nazrul did not leave an authenticated body of criticism on him. What survives is essentially that famous humorous remark, whose authenticity cannot be verified beyond later recollections.

Ask any room of people about their deepest fears regarding artificial intelligence, and eight out of 10 will likely invoke a takeover narrative—the “Frankenstein syndrome”, where the creation turns against the creator.

Famously known to Bengalis as the rebel poet, Kazi Nazrul Islam in most of his poems and verse-lyrics raised a strong voice against every form of oppression the British colonisers, representing the capitalist West, systematically unleashed on their subjects in India.

At the beginning of “A Day Eight Years Ago” (originally published in 1954) by Jibananda Das, we learn that a man has been taken to the morgue.

It is a Tuesday afternoon in Dhaka. Cars are honking, fumes are rising. A banker named Anirban rear-ends another car—typical for the city. Until he steps out. He sees that the other driver has been dead for what seems like days but is still moving. And he wants to talk.

It sounds flippant to put it that way but, the Aeneid, at its core, really is a continuation fic—picking up where Homer’s Trojan War ended and following Aeneas, a minor character in the canon, as he stumbles through an entirely new narrative along with original characters and incredibly expanded lore.

But it goes without saying that Rabindranath, as the most famous member of the Tagore family and one of the cornerstones of Bengali culture, is thoroughly intertwined with the most significant day of the Bengali calendar. His thoughts on PohelaBaishakh are complex and evolved over the years, alongside his own development as an artist and the changing societal circumstances, as can be seen through his three essays on this day.

Romance has never existed apart from inequality. The genre depends on distance—on obstacles that make love feel hard-won.

Existentialism is a philosophical theory and a literary perspective. Its central proposition is that the world has no a priori meaning or purpose.

In classical studies of sensory experiences, philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggest that bodily sensations constitute our lived reality.

Just as Bengali women played an important role in the Liberation War, they also played a fearless role in the movement for the Bangla language before it, participating alongside men as fellow warriors.

In addition to today’s transnational corporations and the global explosion of their advertisements, the works of William Shakespeare and Karl Marx keep teaching us a great deal about the relationship between money and language.

For years, speculative dystopian fiction has trained readers to expect the worst: scorched planets, collapsing governments, ruthless technologies, and futures where survival is the only victory left. Solarpunk pushes back against that narrative. Instead of asking how the world ends, it asks a far more radical question: what if we fix it? What if cities worked with nature instead of against it? What if technology served communities, not corporations? And what if hope wasn’t naive, but necessary?

It is undoubted that George Orwell is one of the most important political writers of the 20th century. Labelling him a political writer reflects how deeply his life and works were influenced by the events he lived through.

In a wilting summer swelter of 1797 in London, a name was born twice–mother Mary Wollstonecraft wound the clock of daughter Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin)’s life, for the very first time.

Fiction has long chronicled that women have always worked more than what is counted, felt more than what is acknowledged, and lost more than what anyone will ever quantify.

If the girls we read about could speak today, their voices would be both sharp and unflinching.

To understand the deep-seated relevance of this modern debate, we must embark on a journey into the heart of Sarat Chandra’s literature, where these battles first found voice.

I first heard Taylor Swift’s song “The Fate of Ophelia” on the radio during a road trip to New Hampshire the day after it was released on October 3.