Mohammad Badrul Ahsan

An average person measures three and a half times the length of his or her own forearm in height.

It was once a familiar refrain amongst the restaurant-goers in Dhaka that even if one didn'teat or drink anything in a restaurant, one could still end up paying twelve annas for breaking a drinking glass. That saying embodied concerns over the costliness of eating out and its incidental hazards, but eventually acquired a deeper meaning of life. It implies a Kafkaesque helplessness when one has to pay for something without partaking in any of its pleasures.

The appointment of the new Chief Election Commissioner was an elaborate undertaking that had a curious resemblance to the

In my student days I worked as a bartender in a nightclub in downtown Washington, D.C.,where my colleague was a bespectacled nerdy-looking Vietnam veteran.

An assistant technician of Bangladesh Railway did last Friday what nobody does these days. Not since those fateful days of 1971 and some of the political movements in this country when our martyrs laid down their lives for their countrymen. Dying for others has long

Mirza Ali Behrouze Ispahani, chairman of the Ispahani Group, one of the largest business conglomerates in the country, died as quietly as he lived.

The Observer Effect in science has it that the act of observing will influence the phenomenon being observed. If we're looking for an answer ten months after the brutal killing of a young girl named Sohagi Jahan Tonu, this effect comes closest to explaining what has happened since then.

After Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu came to power in 1965, he called himself "The Genius of the Carpathians". He had even

The recent textbook fiasco has been a textbook case of how a dot becomes a circle. First we ignored the quality of teachers. Then we

Russian leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, in their spare time, used to make fun of Western sympathisers who blindly supported them.

As we stand on the cusp of another new year, many of us are preparing for the revelry of a boisterous night. Private clubs and posh

Aleppo is now more than a historic city; it's the boiling point of mankind where human lives are changing into vapour. In this nether region, the forces of evil have come together.

Industry standards dictate that a flaw in the mirror is acceptable if you can't see it from a distance of ten feet. What's that significant distance for our history? How far back should we stand so that we don't see those flaws, which have divided this nation? At what distance could we tell if the distortions we see in the mirror are nothing but deformities of our own? How many more years should it take before we know which to blame between history and our very own histrionics?

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,” writes Arthur Conan Doyle in The Boscombe Valley Mystery.

A tyrant to some and a liberator to others, Fidel Castro of Cuba died on November 25, a decade shy of a century.

Thirty years after his death in Hawaii, ousted Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos got a hero's burial in Manila last Friday.

If premeditated murders aren't accidental deaths, and if planned meetings aren't chance encounters, then the attacks on the minorities in Gobindaganj, Nasirnagar and Ramu aren't hate crimes.

As much as the world has been shocked by the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States of America, an aftershock of that earthquake is beginning to set in as we ask ourselves what happened to the hordes of pollsters, analysts and pundits who had predicted otherwise.

One of the insipid ironies of Dhaka City is that double mayors haven't solved a single problem.

In eleven days from today, either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is going to be elected the 45th president of the United States. But, for the first time in the American history, a cloud of uncertainty is hanging over the election night since Donald Trump said he would accept the election results only if he won.