In the creative writings of eminent author Ahmedul Huq, popularly known as “Banglar Rumi” throughout Bangladesh, is a perfect

My father, a prolific reader of literature about the historical events connecting India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, was a great admirer of Indian writer-columnist Kuldip Nayar. “Don't miss it,” he would tell me, about Nayar's weekly column published by The Daily Star. I often heard my father say that Muhammad Ali Jinnah used to be called an “ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity”.

It isn't easy being the writer of the family, especially when your only competition is your grandmother who had written over 100 books in two different languages, like our legacy, our beloved Didu Dr Halima Khatun.

For us in The Daily Star, Kuldip Nayar was a guiding spirit and a symbol of the values of the best in the profession. His occasional visits would be occasions for us to learn from his long and vast experience, a learning that would be made easy by his generosity.

Eminent Indian journalist and a regular columnist of The Daily Star, Kuldip Nayar died on August 23, 2018 at a hospital in Delhi, India. He was 95.

VS Naipaul, to use his most common appellation, died at his London home on August 11, six days short of his 86th birthday.

If PV Narasimha Rao was the initiator of the process of India's globalisation diplomatically and economically, it was Atal Bihari Vajpayee who cemented that process irrevocably.

Tajuddin came much before his time and we are not yet ready to understand him properly.” Professor Sardar Fazlul Karim's famous words aptly describe the key architect of Bangladesh's Liberation War. In the physical absence of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Tajuddin Ahmad was the key actor, who led the war with remarkable diplomacy to achieve freedom from the Pakistani colonial occupation.

Tajuddin Ahmad was the one who filled a crucial void in leadership during Bangladesh's most important nine months in 1971 after Bangabandhu had been taken prisoner by the Pakistani army.

He confronts, challenges, and combats the world with words. But his words become more than words. They morph into weapons in our struggles against oppression and injustice. For him, of course, writing is fighting. But, then, he is more than a combative writer.

Sufia Kamal, (June 20, 1911–November 20, 1999), lived a long and eventful life. She not only witnessed great cataclysms in history but played a major role in empowering women in an oppressive society.

It was only last month that I found myself in La Fuente Alemana on a busy street in Providencia in Santiago, Chile.

When many prominent leaders of Awami League were imprisoned, including Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman,

The last time I met Dr Hafiz GA Siddiqi was at a seminar or a conference. VC Sir, as many of us still refer to him, was surrounded by crowds of his former students,

For most people who live to be 90, life is usually one long, painful journey troubled by debilitating illnesses or loss of mobility or memory, or both; they have to depend on others for the simplest of tasks like pouring a glass of water or turning in bed.

Being married to Begum Sufia Kamal was certainly an important part of Mr Kamaluddin Ahmed Khan's life. He derived much joy and meaning, and perhaps some recognition, from this. But he never derived his identity from this relationship. In that, he was fiercely independent, and quite unique.

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”.