Every year around this time, I get a phone call from someone or the other of the loose fraternity of Sector 7 veterans to remind me that May 6 is Lieutenant Colonel Quazi Nooruzzaman's death anniversary; he passed away in 2011.

Fifty years ago, America's iconic civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr, was slain in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4. In the United States, King's following words are famous to the point of being clichéd, but they bear repeating nonetheless: “I have a dream that little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”

It is both difficult and painful to write an obituary of a spouse, particularly if the death is an untimely one. Yet many friends and academic colleagues of Simeen, my wife who has recently died at a Harvard hospital within hours of being rushed to the emergency room, have requested me to do so since they think that she was both my “intellectual and life's partner”.

IN a historic 1999 civil lawsuit of the King family against the US government, 12 jurors in the Shelby County Court in Tennessee reached a unanimous verdict on December 8, 1999, after about an hour of deliberations, that Dr Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. When asked whether the jury found “others including governmental agencies” to be “parties to this conspiracy,” the jury answered, “yes”.

March 16, 2018 marked the fifth death anniversary of Professor Jamal Nazrul Islam. I know everyone is still mourning Professor Stephen Hawking, but Professor JNI was also a larger-than-life figure. It is unfortunate that many people in Bangladesh don't know about him. In my mind, Hawking's greatest achievement was helping fund and create the Centre for Mathematical Sciences (CMS)—the largest

On the chilling morning of March 26, 1971, Pakistani soldiers kicked open the back door of our Dhaka University bungalow, and violated our residence for the second time.

The world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking passed away on March 14, 2018. His death has left me saddened like millions around the world. But I was happy to see that The Daily Star had published a couple of articles on Stephen Hawking, one of which was written by a Bangladeshi academic. It inspired me to express my thoughts and feelings about how Hawking's work has influenced me.

Stephen Hawking died on Pi Day—March 14, which is also Einstein's birthday. He was born on another special day—Galileo's 300th death anniversary. It goes without saying that Hawking had a massive impact on not only gravitational physics, but also the world at large.

I have always been fascinated by writer Abul Mansur Ahmad's boldness and his political consciousness.

Like those of my age and experience, I can bear witness to some of the major developments in the recent political and constitutional

When Stephen Hawking postulated in the mid-1970s that black holes leak radiation, slowly dissolving like aspirin in a glass of water, he overturned a core tenet of the Universe. Ever since Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity in 1915, predicting the existence of black holes, it was thought they devour everything in their vicinity, including light. Black holes, it was thought, were bottomless

I woke up on March 6 and was devastated to hear that Ferdousi apa, Ferdousi Priyabhashini—the famous Bengali sculptor, survivor of wartime rape and a protagonist campaigning against it in Bangladesh—had passed away.

The Raju Bhashkorjo is dedicated to the memory of Moin Hossain Raju, an activist of Bangladesh Chatra Union, who was gunned down near where the sculpture now stands, on this day in 1992 while protesting terrorism in the name of student politics on campus.

ASHFAQUE was not well the last few months. He had to deal with two major illnesses where either one would have been difficult for anyone to deal with, even if they were not of his age. One of them was a heart condition and when he was recently admitted to hospital for his heart related ailment and was on the operating table, he unfortunately suffered a cerebral attack that left him partially paralysed. Yet when Ambassador Shamim Ahmed and I

A tribute to artist and freedom fighter Ferdousi Priyabhashini on a day we celebrate women could not be more befitting except for the fact that it should have been a tribute to a living legend not a eulogy for a hero who is no more. She passed away on March 6. When one looks at the life of this incredibly brave and beautiful woman one cannot help but feel that we as a nation have failed miserably to pay our dues to this freedom fighter.

That Ferdousi Priyabhashini's driftwood creations are more sentient than inanimate becomes apparent the second you enter Shilpangan, a contemporary art gallery tucked away in a cosy corner of Dhanmondi 13. Her current exhibition, Megher Shongi, is a tribute to the monsoon, her most loved of the six seasons, and the inspiration for her woodwork orchestrations. With boats and boatsmen, long-legged water-birds, and stranded figurines, her characters and forms look like they've emerged straight out of a tempest.

Today, February 24, marks the second death anniversary of the iconic central banker AKN Ahmed who presided over the Bangladesh banking sector in the turbulent days of the 70s. His towering presence at the defining moments in the country's history reminds us of his inspirational leadership to resuscitate the country's seriously ailing banking industry.

It has been almost 12 years since my grandfather, Barrister Shaukat Ali Khan, passed away.

The late Chief Justice Syed Mahbub Murshed was arguably one of the most distinguished constitutional lawyers and eminent jurists that our South Asian sub-continent has ever seen.

December 27 is the 144th birth anniversary of Khanbahadur Ahsanullah, the renowned academician, educator and social reformer, a reputed philanthropist, a famed literary figure and Sufi thinker of the sub-continent.