Fakrul Alam

In the song-lyric numbered 230 in Gitabitan, Rabindranath Tagore’s comprehensive compilation of such verse, we find his delight at capturing the loveliness of the world outside his window in a song-lyric: “I’ve caught uncatchable loveliness in rhyme’s binds—/The loveliness of a distant night-bird/Singing at a late hour of the night/ Wings crimsoned by ashoka flowers of a departed spring/And a heart filled with the fragrance of fallen flowers” (my translation).

Clouds pile upon clouds And the world darkens Why keep me waiting by the door then, All, all alone?

In “Gandhi and Nehru: The Uses of English,” an essay written by Sunil Khilnani from the 2010 collection of essays edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, A Concise History of Indian Literature in English, we are told about how the two leading figures of Indian independence not only used the English language to write back against empire, but played important roles in “the long, uneasy and interminable task of making English an Indian language.”

Soon after Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Oshomapto Atmojiboni (Unfinished Memoirs)came out in an English translation as well in the original Bangla in 2012, I heard at least a few people express their skepticism about the book’s authorship to me.

This is a must-read book for anyone worried about the vulnerability of democracy in our time and the rise of authoritarian governments everywhere.

Numair Atif Choudhury’s Babu Bangladesh is a tour de force of a novel. Exuberant, extravagant, learned, zany, ingenious, whimsical, irreverent and provocative, this is a work of amazing merit.

How Freedom Became Our Own Word

In these pandemic-plagued times, ceremonies commemorating the beginning of the celebrations of the University of Dhaka (or DU) that were to culminate in July 1, 2021 have been scaled down drastically; the chances of alumni and well-wishers of university students and faculty members thronging the campus on July 1, 2020 to inaugurate the year-long events have all but gone.

It was probably on a day in the second week of March that I last saw and heard professor Anisuzzaman—our Anisuzzaman sir—speak publicly.

There were six of us, bosom buddies who had studied together in the same school and college, friends for years—“good” boys. And there were the same number of them, if not more, from the same Dhaka school and college—“nice” girls.

Art has always been both a mirror of and a balm for human experience through disaster. In this short series, an author of Daily Star Books—our book publishing imprint—will periodically explore a facet of this link between literature and our ongoing battle with Covid-19.

One of the most striking characteristics evident in The Unfinished Memoirs is how the young Sheikh Mujibur Rahman showed

In the intellectual evolution of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 played a decisive role.

To think of Syed Manzoorul Islam—Manzoor bhai to me (but let me call him SMI in the rest of this piece!) —is to think of someone always in motion, whether in the everyday world we inhabit, or the life of the mind that he lives so intensely.

Two narratives counterpoint each other in Tawfiq-e-Elahi Chowdhury’s Chariot of Life: Liberation War, Politics and Sojourn in Jail. The first is the absorbing story of major events in the author’s life till the closing years of the first decade of this century. The second is

Bangabandhu spent almost one-fourth of his nearly 55 years of life in prison. The first time he went to jail was when as a schoolboy, in his hometown of Tungipara, he and some of his friends got into a fight with Hindu leaders who had beaten up a Muslim one.

A rough count of the songs collected in Gitabitan in the section titled “Prakriti” or “Nature” reveals that Rabindranath Tagore composed about 16 songs of summer, over 100 monsoonal ones, 33 songs of Sharat or early autumn, 5 of Hemanta or late autumn, and a dozen

Having lived in the world’s pathways for a long, long time

Imagine a Japanese man in Dhaka in the first decade of the twentieth century bent on being employed in the town and ending up marrying a Bengali Brahmo woman, the daughter of a soap factory owner, who has offered him a job. Think of the woman later going to a village near Nagoya with her husband

For anyone harboring misgivings about Rabindranath Tagore but doing so with an open mind, as well as anyone who treasures his works but is realistic enough to know that though superhuman in some ways, he was human—all too human!—this is a must read book. Certainly, I found it unputdownable.