Maisha Islam Monamee

End-of-year (EoY) conversations often feel like performance reviews, but they are so much more than that. If done right, they are a chance to showcase wins, reflect on growth, map out your next moves, and strengthen relationships with your manager.

As the global technology sector moves deeper into the second half of the decade, 2026 is shaping up as a year of structural transition. The emphasis is shifting from experimentation to systems that can scale, integrate smoothly and operate reliably in everyday life.

We now live inside a series of dashboards. If Spotify is the most visible example, it is hardly alone. Everything from our sleep to our steps to our language-learning streaks comes with a neatly packaged scorecard at the end of the year.

In Bangladesh, however, Christmas occupies a different cultural register. It arrives through Netflix thumbnails, holiday episodes that resurface every December, mall décor inspired by Hollywood aesthetics, and Instagram captions borrowing emotions from films we have watched far more times than we admit.

There are exhibitions you walk into, and there are exhibitions that feel like you are stepping across a threshold into someone else’s world. “Pawmum Parban”, currently underway at Alliance Française de Dhaka, unfolds like the latter; carrying a depth that quietly rearranges how you look at a culture you thought you vaguely knew. I went in expecting an art show and left with the sense that a small group of children from the hills had succeeded in doing something the city often fails at: making us feel something beyond our own noise.

In July 2024, we, the Gen-Z, stepped into the streets, frightened yet resolute, wounded yet unwilling to break, because we believed Bangladesh could be rewired around dignity.

Your first job feels a bit like walking into adulthood with Google Maps turned on, praying the little blue dot knows where it is going. You are excited, anxious, overprepared in weird ways, and underprepared in the ways that matter.

Rewatching has quietly become one of the most dominant forms of entertainment consumption, even though it rarely gets framed that way. It is often dismissed as laziness, nostalgia, or lack of curiosity.

Real life is messy; algorithms tidy it up. Maybe that’s why we love Wrapped so much. Maybe that’s why we forgive it when it gets things wrong. And maybe that’s why we laugh every year when the Pritam meme resurfaces, because the truth is, no matter what we listen to, Wrapped tells us a story we are secretly eager to believe.

In 2025, fandom is a central part of storytelling, and studios and creators design worlds that fans can live in, expand, debate, and emotionally inhabit. Stories are co-owned and these fandoms are where ownership is vocalised.

"Wicked" has spent two decades dismantling that framework. What began on Broadway as a renegade act of revisionism has now expanded on screen into Jon M Chu’s two-part cinematic saga, which is unhurried, emotionally layered, and audaciously uninterested in letting romance or heroism overshadow the real heart of Oz: the evolving, often painful bond between Elphaba and Glinda. Chu’s adaptation understands that audiences come pre-loaded with assumptions.

The first time you watch it, it feels like a love story with a quirky adventure at the start. But the more your own life begins to scatter into contradictions and compromises, the more Imtiaz Ali’s world starts sounding familiar.

Guillermo del Toro has spent most of his artistic life circling that question, and his new cinematic adaptation finally dives into it with both hands. It arrives like a long awaited confession. The result is a film that is lush, wounded, often brutal, and strangely hopeful, a vision that honours Shelley’s philosophical bones while draping them in del Toro’s unmistakable flesh.

The decision to hold Hasina accountable is not merely judicial but also personal.

Financial sanity in our twenties is not about becoming a finance bro overnight or rejecting every impulse purchase that brings us joy. It is about building a system that can survive our bad weeks, unexpected expenses, and the constant oscillation between “I am going to be rich” and “why is everything so expensive?”

In an industry often content to either idolise or invisibilise women, Nair managed to carve a cinematic language that neither glorifies nor redeems them. She allows them to take up space, to be complicated, to have appetites.

It has become almost fashionable for companies to claim they are using AI. Every boardroom, every quarterly report, every strategic offsite seems to revolve around the same language of transformation.

SRK is not just the last of the superstars because of what he has achieved, but because of how he has done it. In an era where stardom was built on distance, he created intimacy.

It is a clever premise for a modern romance as a data-driven Delhi businessman finds his match through an algorithm, only to realise that love, unlike code, cannot be debugged.

They emerge from social injustices, unfulfilled desires, and forgotten histories, and in their persistence, they remind us that the supernatural is often an allegory for the very real.