This letter is in reference to the cover story “How independent and effective is the NHRC?” published last week.

Every day, us Dhaka residents (and from every other Bangladeshi city) do not realise how close we come to death, mutilation and further death. Only when you hang out with a bideshi do you take in the magnitude of the possibility that the end is so near. We are

Debris of the night

Bourdain, the genius both in and out of the kitchen, once famously said, “Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you.” There

I am a Pangolin. Humans have killed most of my kind. My burrows are home to dozens of other species. If you lose me, you lose many others.

Laal Kono Rong Noy (‘Red is Not a Colour’), curated by Mustafa Zaman, is displaying the works of artist Sanjoy Chakraborty from July 12 to 25 at Dwip Gallery, Lalmatia. Sanjoy Chakraborty studied History of Art at Rabindra Bharati University, India and has

This May, an online portal deliberately used a photo of Shrabonty Ananna—a model and social media influencer—in one of their reports with the title, “Illicit relationship with the uncle, girl arrested for killing her newborn”. Since stories accusing women never fail

Namapara village is like any of the 84,000 villages of Bangladesh. Located in Rowmari upazila of Kurigram, the poorest district in Bangladesh, this village is inhabited by some 200-250 families, most of whom are impoverished farmers. The Jinjirum, a meandering

Thus, reads an article published on BBC News World Edition by the BBC Reporter in Dhaka, Alastair Lawson. It paints a bleak picture of the people at the helm of Dhaka’s ‘lowest’ form of transport—the cycle rickshaw. Considering the propensity of articles that cover a

On July 7, I was in the auditorium of the Bangladesh national parliament house, holding my breath, squeezing my colleague’s hand, and bursting in excitement when the deputy Speaker took votes and passed the new bill. From the time the cabinet approved the draft

The harder a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is.”

Growing up in Bailey Road, Shagor Publishers was the place for me. It was owned by the renowned writer M.R. Akhter Mukul who started the shop as a sort of a glorified book club. He would sit on a stool at the small entrance where he would greet readers. If I inquired of a

Petrichor is the word for when rain hits dry soil, releasing a fragrance almost impossible to describe—the earth smells wetter somehow; richer, browner, greener. It was petrichor I smelled as I roamed, shuffled, and tiptoed my way through rain-drenched parts

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Our education policies are based on the three divisions—science, arts, and commerce. This is why so many of our youth are leaving the country. Abolish this policy; we’re neither giving proper education or the budget to expand/improve our science and technology sector

This is outrageous if Pathao couldn’t ensure such quality. I always wonder why, in most of the cases, Bangladeshi companies can’t keep the standards that they set at the beginning of their journey. Either they don’t know how to be stable in the long run or they are just

When it comes to allegations of human rights violations against law enforcement agencies, the NHRC claims that its hands are tied in investigating themselves and it can only ask for reports from the government.

They came home and found the backdoor open. Stan, who was the last one out, had forgotten to lock it. But there was no I told you so from Carla as she traipsed around to assess the damage, which wasn’t much—one smashed chair and a bed that looked slept in, both Junior’s.

When I was 12 years old, I was a wide-eyed girl in sixth-grade history class, learning about the First World War—how the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a young man by the name of Gavrillo Princip triggered a war in Europe and plunged the world into chaos.

Seven years ago, Sazia Hasan Izu, a second-year student of home economics from the University of Dhaka, could not have imagined that she was going to shape her profession as a businesswoman by selling her grandmother’s homemade oil for hair fall solution. But