Shamsad Mortuza

Any bored individual who has nothing better to do than to read the comment threads while listening to some old songs on YouTube must have come across these two ideas: “Who is listening to this in 2020?” Or “So-and-so brought me here”.

The closures of academic institutions for two weeks in response to the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping the globe have caught many of us involved in the academia by surprise.

I have seen it on TV, read about it in newspapers, but never thought it would be this bad. I watched it from the deck of a launch, looking forward to a spectacular river cruise that our departmental picnic poster promised.

With the number of coronavirus cases crossing 100,000 mark, the official death toll standing at—and forever climbing over—3,652 (live update, worldometers, March 8), and the US flashing 8.3 billion green bucks to shoo away the spread, the outbreak of COVID-19 is no longer a “told-you-not-to-have-that-bat-soup-or-fox-meat” gossip.

With Imax plan-ning to supersize the Netflix streaming service, the merger of our viewing habits is in sight. Last September, there was this David and Goliath agreement between these two opposing movie services that would allow blockbuster cinemas to be made available on small screens, while fringe films under the rubric of Netflix Originals in large cineplexes.

While at the Uni-versity of Arizona, we had a visiting professor from Stanford University, Prof. Joshua Fishman.

Finally, a breath of fresh air—winds blowing through the higher stratosphere are causing some thought clouds to loosen up and shower good news on higher education.

In the 80s, one sarcastic comment—for reasons better not stated out of respect for the deceased—was aired every now and then: hurl a stone in Dhaka’s air and you are sure to hit either a poet or a crow. On the surface, it was an innocent joke about the sheer number of creatures—those who fly with their wings and those others who dream to do so with their imagination.

By the time you will be reading this piece, I “should” be on board our national carrier, Biman Bangladesh. I write “should” because nothing about Biman can be said with certainty; listen to the passenger’s mumbling at the boarding bay or lend your eyes and ears to the incidents on the aircraft itself, you are sure to get an endorsement.

I did myself a favour, as pleaded on Facebook by a colleague, and read Greta Thunberg’s chapbook, “No one is too small to make a difference.”

In the first few minutes of 2020, nearly 30 animals, mostly apes, were burnt to death in Krefeld Zoo in West Germany.

Poet-professor-translator Kaiser Haq is the most thorough man I have ever come across. Taking things with a grain of salt is not his style. His casual, albeit western, demeanor, may suggest otherwise and even hide the seriousness of purpose with which he approaches life as well as his creative works.

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.