Tariq Karim

Bangladesh this year celebrates its 50th anniversary of independence as well as the birth centenary of our Father of the Nation. On August 15, the nation also mourns the brutal assassination of Bangabandhu 46 years ago—a heinous act designed to erase all that he stood for.

We celebrate 2020 as “Mujib Borsho”, to mark our Founding Father Bangabandhu’s birth centenary; we also mourn, and reflect on, his brutal assassination 46 years ago on the 15th August 1975.

April 13 was Easter Monday, an everlasting testimony to the resurrection of Christ after his crucifixion and its symbolic assertion that there is life after what is perceived as death. In the midst of a somewhat stifling home confinement in fear of the ubiquitously merciless and relentlessly marauding novel coronavirus, somehow the day and its symbolism was comfortingly reassuring.

Three days ago, on March 25, listening to a briefing on the then available latest global statistics about the COVID-19, I learnt that the global total of recorded cases was then a little over 400,000, spread across over 169 countries.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues marauding the globe, flattening developed and undeveloped, urban and rural, national and regional landscapes, blithely jumping across oceans and continents, one may be forgiven for thinking, somewhat desperately: is this the advent of Armageddon in our times?

One cannot conceive of India emerging as an independent, modern nation-state without the leadership of Gandhi,

When political events in the domestic sphere of a state transcend the internal space of that state, through a process of empathetic osmosis, and impacts negatively upon the domestic political and governance harmony of one or more neighbouring states around or adjacent to it,

At the very core of our entire ecosystem is the location and availability of fresh water on which lives and human livelihood are fundamentally dependent.

India’s biggest challenge when dealing with its immediate neighbours is, first and foremost, the sense of its sheer size that dwarfs the combined size of all the others.

At the very core of our entire ecosystem is the location and availability of fresh water on which sustaining lives and human livelihood are fundamentally dependent.

The historical-civilisational Indian sub-continent, now known as “South Asia”, was for millennia the most integrated region in the world.

Our attitude to garbage disposal and plastic waste is flagrantly callous. What is particularly eye-soring is the mass of plastic waste of all types, ubiquitously filling up unending stretches of areas beside roads, railway lines, all conceivable nooks and crannies between buildings/shanties and, most egregious of all, as flotsam floating listlessly on all types of water bodies that have still managed to escape attention of insatiable land-developers.

These days, I assail myself with questions triggered by the everyday acts of thoughtlessness that I witness committed by the multitude around me everywhere, young and old, male and female.

Practically all the institutions of our state are institutions that we have inherited from our about-200-years of British colonial rule. Pax Britannica was intentionally designed to be of everlasting nature. In imperial Britain's imagination, the sun would never set on the British Empire.

In Shakespeare's great tragedy King Lear, a powerful man comes to a tragic end because he surrounds himself with flatterers and banishes the friends “who will not varnish the truth to please him.”

Despite our numerous achievements in domestic and international spheres, the following refrain has refused to go away in the last several decades: “why is Bangladesh so bitterly divided as a polity? Why are Bangladesh's political leaders so totally consumed by their personal animosities towards each other that they neglect good governance of the state? Why does Bangladesh, having rejected political Islam as the...