Imtiaz A Hussain

Today’s Red Sea skirmishes raise multifaceted concerns, which range from the war in Gaza widening and awakening old wounds, to geopolitical frontlines being rewritten by shifting chokepoints.

“Graduation” has become a Bangladeshi buzzword. Journalists, scholars, and technocrats were working on that term even before November 24, 2021. On that day, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly green-signalled a possible exit from the “least developed country” (LDC) to join the “developing” list from 2026.

“What goes around comes around” may be an apt and oft-used cliché, but in referencing 9/11 and Afghanistan, it only embitters. US President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from “forever wars” was supported by 54 percent of US adults, according to a September 4 Pew survey.

Full US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan was announced by President Joe Biden on April 14, 2021. It raised eyebrows but did not ruffle public feathers.

Identity matters. It matters most amid flux, which the 21st Century is riddled with. Compromising the past and adding “new” components always knock on identity doors. Distinguishing the non-negotiable identity components from the negotiable gives us a head start.

Behind every “age”, as if by definition, lies a spark. Ironically, although the “digital age” may be the most profound of them all, as deducible from its own so-called “digital revolution”, its time-span is too fluid and that “revolution” is more revolutionary linguistically than it is on the ground.

Remember those expansive aphorisms, “Britannia rules the waves” and the “empire where the sun never sets”?

A rolling stone, as the cliché goes, gathers no moss. According to musician Robert Zimmerman, it is “like a complete unknown,” indeed, “with no direction home.” Under his more popular identity, Bob Dylan, he penned “Like a rolling stone,” often regarded the crème de la crème song in its genre. It might also be the swansong of a fabled bilateral relationship. Gone awry, that relationship arguably symbolises the upended global status of two partners.

Remember those first words ever spoken from the moon? In the half-century since Neil Armstrong uttered them, the space race has invited many other countries—from the rich to the poor, from the developed to the developing—and even attracted private-sector

What do the following civilisations have in common: Mesopotamia four millennia ago; the 8th-century Viking Greenland settlement; Mayas from the 10th century; and the Khmer empire in the 15th century?

Historians are often bemused by how the millennia-old Holy Roman Emperor was not holy, nor Roman, nor even an emperor.

Grumpy” was her name. In the flower-filled month of May, the world’s most famous cat of the same name bid her ever-cheering audience a sad adieu. Perhaps not the best of analogies, but it highlights grumpiness in another area, that, fortunately, we can do something about.

Don’t judge a book by its cover.” So goes a popular cliché, though appraisals become more sanguine the more one opens the volume. Recent (April) reports about the country’s top-flight economic growth-rates expose why heeding that message helps keep us on track.

"Tragedy” only mildly describes Sri Lanka’s bombing spate. It was heinous, stirring the wrong juices, pitting the wrong spiritual brethrens against each other. It was evil, not only fanning flames between two religious groups...

Fire,” Don McLean wrote in “American Pie”, “is the devil's only friend.” It must have been so for Roman Emperor Nero: he anecdotally “fiddled while Rome burned” in 64 AD.

Civil society cannot be built this way, upon the salacious preferences of home-builders, bus-drivers/conductors, and environment abusers.

At least two truisms can be said about children: every mother and father goes out of her/his way to build the best possible future for them; and the state does not have a choice but to follow suit.

It is not enough to alert the public of social cracks: how they can be repaired must be part and parcel of any de-constructing exercise.

It was not, as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern noted, “one of the darkest days,” in New Zealand's history, but “the darkest”. New Zealand

Green is “the colour of nature and health,” according to Jacob Olesen, a Dane lover of colours.