Empathy, the Wikipedia entry on the word tells us, includes “caring for other people and having a desire to help them; experiencing emotions that match another person’s emotions; discerning what another person is thinking or feeling; and making less distinct the differences between the self and the other.

Shengdey awoke suddenly on a bed with an old man sitting beside him. “Are you okay, my child?” He asked, idly stirring a boiling pot of tea.

Darkness on a piece of paper Black soaks the white

They took away my land, I said: Thank you for building the railroad.

Two flats facing each other He’s on the stairs, she’s at the door

In Metaphor, David Punter reads Chinua Achebe’s postcolonial novel, Things Fall Apart (1958) which draws upon Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (1921) for its title, arguing that the centre is “responsible for the very social, political and cultural problems now being encountered in Africa, and perhaps globally” (117).

A Brief History of Silence (by Manu Dash) was an enjoyable read on my silent rooftop spanning a silent week. But as I sat on the silent table for a review, I sat amazed and brooding. The poet must have had a frightful toil, and it’s not easy to write a poem on his silence by shifting, correcting, combining, constructing, expurgating, expunging and tasting words, phrases, images as well as the empty spaces between them to pen his dreams and intellect. And I wonder what is left for me to write more on it!

It was a hot August afternoon when I stood on the tarmac at the St Louis airport staring at the tiny 7-seater that looked like a toy plane. What? I thought. I would have to get on that? Was this some kind of a joke? Three other passengers were also waiting, but they seemed strangely unperturbed.

Where do you stand on this matter of pulling down statues, a hot topic during the ongoing Black and Indigenous Lives Matter campaigns? Do you favour putting up statues at all? Who, if anyone, would you put one up to?

To love a country as if you’ve lost one  Is to feel the freezing sun on your body Form icicles on your cheeks as you train your feet To dance hopscotch on rough asphalt;

A book may look like a house or a coffin But a maker of books cannot be contained between ordinary covers. Between the Muses’ minions, stodgy academics, Smarmy marketing men and discount-hungry retailers He waves a baton to conduct a chorus That threatens to collapse any moment into cacophony, Yet keeps the show going,

I have had the opportunity of living for some time in Conrad’s fictional places, namely Democratic Republic of Congo (Congo) and Malaysia’s eastern province Sarawak’s adjoining country in Borneo Island, Brunei Darussalam.

Many of us still remember the year 1998 when Chitra Nadir Paare (Quiet Flows the Chitra) was released in Dhaka; with Afsana Mimi’s smiling face on the big posters around Dhaka University campus, the film became the talk of the town.

Yes, you have no reason to trust me: I am not your elder, I am not from your tribe;

 A hood of iron thread Drawn over face,

the first time i saw a tiger was in someone’s house all tall and lifeless; yet a tiger --

In Dhaka University: the Convocation Speeches, a volume compiled with an introduction by Serajul Islam Choudhury in 1988, we read that DU was established by the British as a "splendid imperial compensation" for the Muslims of East Bengal (Choudhury, 26). They had wanted the current rulers of India to make up through it for the loss they felt they had suffered because of the reunion of Bengal in 1911.

I have described this disturbance as I saw it happen, an unedifying affair, confused and inconclusive, as a symptom rather than a causative episode of the growing friction between East and West Pakistan.

DU. How those letters conjure up a sense of awe and bittersweet memory. Always in the vanguard of political, progressive movements… Language (1952), Constitution (1962), Democracy (1968/69) and Independence (1971)… but distinguished too, for its intellectual environment and academic excellence. Dacca University's endless graffiti marked corridors were a daunting place for me, a teenager and a female, in the politically momentous years of the late 1960s.

“About a hundred years ago, our ancestors used to live in the Porir Desh.”