Abida Rahman Chowdhury

As we talk about his ups and downs, tracing his life all the way back to his childhood, it feels as though this brooding man is one who has always been guided by his ideals. Oldest of his siblings, Kanchan spent very little time in his village home before moving to Dhaka—a student of Class 3 at the time.

I was a particularly anxious child, so much so that even as I tried to sleep, I would resort to visualising elaborate scenes in the dark.

The influence of social media does not stop just there with the “you need this useless product”, it is far reaching, so much so, that I have had friends and relatives come up to me and tell me if only I ate “clean” or smiled more often, I would find that I do not need to see a therapist anymore, but would find that my 'depression' has been magically cured by cumulative good deeds or a nutritious diet.

"NO excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness''—Aristotle. In a particularly distraught moment, I logged on to my Facebook account and reached out to all my friends who I knew battled with one or the other form of mental health issues. Some were going through troubled marriages, some disappointing their parents, some struggling adults, some unable to go to grad school and all battling their minds.

My introduction to war lore was an intimate one, removed from any political agenda—they were stories of fear, simplicity, and sheer resilience in the face of ultimate crisis.

It is the Bangladesh-Myanmar border; the calm of the forest is broken by piercing sounds of gunfire and screams. Everywhere, people are on the run and she too trudges on, heavy, weary steps one at a time, trying to find refuge. She eventually makes it to the forests of Bangladesh only to be stuck indefinitely.

From cartoons to books to movies, there is one recurring theme that catches the eye and engages all sensory experiences, and true to Proust's belief, it is the pure, unadulterated joy of a good meal.

Before she made it to our saris, chunky jewellery, phone cases, and magazine covers, Frida Kahlo was a genius, a socialist, a feminist, and an anti-imperialist nationalist, whose mere presence in history is radical.

Once upon a time in a land far, far away, a little girl got her hands on a book, a book about siblings, of living in the countryside, and going on adventures—a book that would later give way to other books on more adventures and misadventures, turning the little child into an adult who constantly daydreams of taking off to some faraway land.

As we all filed back to work the week after Eid holidays, my mind, unfortunately, was not-so-full of story ideas; rather it was in a post-holiday lull, full of not-taken vacations and the bad TV series that I binge-watched through the break.

I often murmur this overused idiom as I pack my bags for a trip to any place. Be it in the country or abroad. The budget woes take hold of me from the conception to execution and to the absolute end of any trip. There have been times, of course, when my soirees out into the wild have been fully paid affairs and I can say without a trace of doubt that if you somehow negate the money worries, travel takes on a

The Yamaha engine sputters before giving life to the speedboat which swerves a sharp right and zooms past the zigzag of large fishing trawlers, the smell of dried fish, and sea salt heavy in the air. Within a few minutes on the steely-grey ocean expanse, the green speck of Moheshkhali appears. Planted mangroves lend this place a Sundarbans-like feel.

A quick visit to the six no. Fisheries Ghat in the busy tourist town of Cox's Bazar and you will be greeted with the intense smell of the town's sludge flowing into the sea, and busy fishermen screaming their lungs out auctioning off their day’s catch of sea fish in all shapes and sizes.

Smells evoke emotionally charged memories. Like the smell of freshly picked green mangoes after the season's first Kalbaishakhi or the smell of clothes washed with Chaka Ball soap and laid out to dry on the wires running along the village front yard. However, Beautiful Bangladesh—our tagline for tourism—has its inimitable share of horrible smells that also manage to etch themselves into our memories.

From Halkhata to Balance Sheet, from Mela to Carnival

As the rickshaw, painted bright with a distorted Bengal tiger and even more distorted images of Dhallywood stars, breaks through the sea of other rickshaws, the kites appear almost suddenly through the narrow old Dhaka skyline.

"With their parallel lives, animals offer men a companionship different from any other human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species."

She is a friend and a foe. She is all encompassing and she can take away all. The mighty Sundarbans, the enchanted forest, the recipient of my modern-day love letters.

The story of saving the vultures of Bangladesh

The Proustian punch of eating food that stirs a nerve is something I have always been on a quest for.