Mohammad Shamsuzzaman

Writing is not an art suddenly discovered. It’s a craft gradually developed. Writing–both creative and critical– is formulaic, the way math is.

Why does the year 2020 still linger around? The Covid-19 pandemic has brought our civilisation to its knees this year. We’re already tired, scared, and hopeless.

We are almost at the tail-end of the year 2020. What a year this has been! We haven’t lived it.

Back in the mid-90s when I was majoring in English literature at a public university in Dhaka, Bangladesh, I was a cricket buff. For the Bangladeshis, cricket was a transnational love affair in the 90s.

Money can’t buy knowledge, but the knowledge industry of the modern world, centred in our universities, runs on money. Universities worldwide are money-strapped now.

The Covid-19 pandemic has altered all of our professional beliefs and behaviours. I used to believe, for example, that teaching is a flesh-and-blood experience and that human interaction is essential to education.

It’s already been several months since we’ve been hurled into the vortex of the coronavirus. The virus lives among us, silent and invisible.

When the lockdown was imposed because of the Covid-19 pandemic in March, I shifted to online teaching at a university here in Dhaka.

I always wanted to be a professor in English. When the pandemic hit and lockdown began, I ended up being a professor in pandemic.

Any pandemic is crushing. COVID-19 is no exception. It strains cognition and emotion. It tanks economies. It disrupts communication. It alters psychology. It breeds panic and paranoia.

I always knew that life is unpredictable. But between February and April this year, I started to discover what it truly means to live an unpredictable life.

I’m panicked, as is everyone around the world now. We’re faced with an existential threat. A death sentence hovers over us as it has hovered over Wuhan, China, since December 2019.

To answer this question, let me hazard an analogy -- good writing is much like good food. Good writing tickles our senses the way good food does.

Fairly recently, I was working with two of my colleagues here in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to propose a panel for a conference in North America.

If it is, where is this gift coming from? God? Ahem! As off-putting as it might sound, biographies and autobiographies of writers reveal that most so-called gifted writers are scoundrels.

Writing is a struggle for everyone. If it seems easy, a writer is not doing it right. Because writing is mired in myths and misunderstanding, most writers – aspiring writers, in particular – consider the essential difficulty in writing as a pathology. They feel

Writing entices me. But every time I get down to writing something, I feel like a bumbling idiot. Nothing emerges. Ideas evaporate. Thoughts tangle. Language languishes. My frustration mounts.

I teach English at a private university in Dhaka, Bangladesh, having attended universities on three continents. I’m persuaded to think as such that I know what a university is and does. I wish I did! Joe Moran in First You Write a Sentence claims, “A university is a factory

I always tell my students that I’m not their language nanny. I’m an educator, and I deal with content. Ironically, however, I blue-pencil as many errors–mostly grammatical–as I can while checking their assignments. Mangled grammar turns me off. That’s understandable. Writing initiates a verbal transaction

Back in 2005 in California, I was reading Edward Said’s Power, Politics, and Culture. This book is a collection of twenty-eight interviews