Shamsad Mortuza

“And my last ask is: if you’re someone’s sister, the next time you see your brother, please hug him… as tightly as you can, for as long as you want, because that’s all I want to do every time I see those photos. But I will never be able to hug Fahim again.”

Attending the peace summit on the occasion of the 100th birth anniversary of Nelson Mandela in 2018, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina quoted both Nelson Mandela and our Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

In an op-ed published on July 27, Prof Syed Saad Andaleeb reviewed the DU annual budget and argued that the dearth of funding should not be blamed for the lack of research.

Cross border cattle smuggling prior to Eid-ul-Adha is an irritant that keeps officials in both Bangladesh and India nervy.

During his regular stroll in the palace garden, Emperor Akbar once saw many crows flying around. He asked his minister, “How many crows are there in our kingdom, Birbal?”

The coronavirus crisis posed serious threats to the global stock markets.

Let’s admit it: our education today is in crisis. And it was in crisis even before the pandemic was here. The pandemic has exposed the skeletons we have been hiding in the open for a long time.

There was a broken black chair by the window near the gate. On it there was a thin plastic bag containing some mixed up rice, daal, and probably vegetables or curry.

Uncertainties loom large over the holding of Higher Secondary Certificates (HSC) and its equivalent exams.

I had a senior colleague at Jahangirnagar University who was known to his students at the Pharmacy Department as an eccentric genius.

The Amazon rainforest, spread over 2.1 million square miles, is dubbed as the “lungs of the planet” as it produces 20 percent of the oxygen in our planet’s atmosphere.

His visiting card had two office addresses: one in Scotland and the other in Estonia. There was nothing wrong with it, but the architect who just shared his card explained the oddity.

Online teaching, at its best, can create a learning environment to ensure transference of knowledge. However, I am not sure if technology and innovations have reached that point to replace the tribal needs of human interactions that define the complex teacher-student relationship in a physical classroom.

Remember getting caught by your parents for trying out roadside pickles or tawdry coloured crunchy ice outside your school?

I was a young lecturer when private universities appeared for the first time in the higher education scene of Bangladesh. I remember when one of my colleagues left us to join a pioneer private university as a full time faculty, we at the department felt that he had sold his soul to money, deciding to work under a corporate system. The same thing happened when one of my teachers left for a financially lucrative BCS job.

My Face-book newsfeed has been experiencing a little tremor ever since the Dhaka-based action movie Extraction started streaming on Netflix on April 24.

The horrific images of white plastic body bags in which the final journeys are set during this great pandemic add to the myth of coronavirus as the great leveller.

My generation grew up with masked heroes. They could shoot heat beams from their eyes or knock down a skyscraper with a single punch—“kavoom”! They could lead double lives: during the day they could be aristocratic noblemen or dashing socialites, and at night, they could put on their vigilante masks and raid the neighbourhood in search of culprits and criminals.

How will the world look like once this not-so-coveted Covid-19 crisis is over? Is this pandemic a virus-driven Ice Age that will change the world the way we know it? Can we ever go back to being normal? Or are we going to have “the new normal”?

Too little money, too much screen time, and uneven distribution of household chores and childcare—a recipe made in hell.