Based on a true story (‘...poets, as everybody knows,

It all started with someone responding to a Facebook post on Coronavirus—wishing that all the problems would be over before the

Like nationalism, Tagore’s perspectives on patriotism are also characterised by certain paradoxes and ambiguities; he was a fervid patriot, yet he openly denounced and deplored the sentiment of patriotism.

The crunch of snow beneath our pads was cracking like the breaking of bones between our teeth. The tundra, echoing for miles, a vast white desert, and our breath is the only warmth in the barren winterscape.

Listening to summer breeze, smelling the raw pages of an old book my mind went wandering into the sea of nonexistent dreams. I drifted there like a lost sailor. And I hunted for a thousand-year old pale blue star.

The American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Certainly, Tagore was above this puerile mindset.

So, I was about to slip under my bedcovers to give my back some rest and close my eyes and savour the moment till I fell asleep.

The keepers of law

Even one individual turns into

A thorn in the bushes they beat around

During the Pakistan days my father was in the army, and we moved frequently, every few years. Soon after I finished Grade 10 in 1966, we made a big move: from Chittagong to Rawalpindi.

Some weird things happen sometimes. It was just midday when his mother was done with her cooking. She got up from sitting position with her two hands on her knees and went to sit in the yard to relieve rheumatism in the sunlight. On her way, she called out to her second daughter, “Mitu, serve Milu his lunch. I’ll rest awhile.”

I often consider war as a quasi-synonym for memory. After all, memory is nothing but our present in constant war with our glorified, vilified, expressed, suppressed, erased, and fragmented selves floating in past space and time.

Unloved and unnoticed

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is widely read as a classic feminist novel. Published in 1953, Villette, however, still resides in a shadowy region.

In the intellectual evolution of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 played a decisive role.

Things are dark and bleak?

Doesn’t anyone get that my soul cringes for a call?

Aum impatiently held on to his phone, hearing it ring without being answered. He hated having to start the day without hearing her voice. Then again, he also hated going to bed without talking to her. It was going to be a bad day.

Psychedelic noises – a cacophony so harmonious