Shamsad Mortuza

A Chilean feminist song about rape culture and victim shaming has recently gone viral. The performative piece, based on the work of Rita Segato by a group called Las Tesis, was first presented on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on November 25, 2019.

Shamsad Mortuza is Professor of English, University of Dhaka. Currently on leave, he is the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of ULAB.

Among the flurry of e-messages (including a surprise “phishing” one), there was one worthy nugget available in my year-ending inbox: a random warning about not writing the year 2020 in short format.

I was explaining the apocalyptic fear in Blake’s poetry to my students. To offer a contemporary example, I mentioned the Y2K software problem that led to global panic responses, almost creating a doomsday scenario at the turn of the century.

Legend has it: the black magician Doctor Faustus sold his soul to devil in exchange of 24 years of earthly knowledge and pleasure.

For Aung San Suu Kyi, December 10 could have been a date to remember. It is the day when she received her Nobel Prize in 1991.

I hate my name, particularly my nick name: Shuman. It’s so common that some of my classmates at Jahangirnagar University used to call me “common.”

Crew members in flights to/from Dhaka are known for being notoriously rude, especially in routes that carry our migrant workers. The attendants in these flights bring out their ring-master selves to harness the feral passengers.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to post about it on Facebook, has the tree really fallen? The moment an image is posted on Facebook (or any other social media),

Why didn’t Hamlet kill Claudius soon after learning about his uncle’s involvement in the murder of his father? In Greek or Roman tragedy that would have been the accepted norm. Even the vengeful God of the Old Testament would have endorsed a similar action.

Matthew Arnold famously called Oxford University a “home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!”

Desperate times require desperate measures. The Road Transport Act 2018 was endorsed by the Cabinet Division on August 6, 2018 on the heels of the nationwide student protest that

There is this image which pops up here and there in many pedagogical conferences or academic sessions: a teacher deciding on a standardised test for a bunch of animals involving a wolf, a seal, a fish, a penguin, an elephant, a monkey and a bird. For a fair selection, the teacher declares that everyone must take the same exam of climbing a tree. Ignoring the possible danger of comparing our students with animals, one doesn’t need to be a genius to see the absurdity of such a testing system.

It is one of those rare moments in which you thought visiting Facebook was not a total waste of time. Someone had posted an award-winning short-film in which a young woman was seen alighting from a boat and taking photographs.

In 1891, shortly after the death of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “One wonders, how God, in the process of producing forty million Bengalis, produced a man.”

The combing operation to nab Aedes mosquito at its larvae stage can very well be described as scenes from dystopian fiction. Then again, citizens are not machines farming insects for their sustenance, and the government is not an oppositional category. In a fight

Had I but an eternal life (“Ananta Jibon Jodi Pai Ami”)

There’s no end, why then the last word needs to be said. What strikes as a blow will become a flame; Once the clouds have their part, the rain has its start.. The light of my eyes, brings the world in my sight I’ll then have insight, when there’s no light The world out of reach comes alive in my mind And lights you up in its own light.

First a disclaimer: this piece does not include any monstrous crocodile that will eat you up the moment you get into its terrain. It is about our national psyche that harbours fear against going out to sea and thinking of our deltaic islands as the limit of our political existence.

Anik Dutta's 2017 movie Meghnadhbadh Rohoshya is a clever evocation of naxalgia. Fifty years after the Naxalbari movement, the