Mohammad Shamsuzzaman

Writing is not an art suddenly discovered. It’s a craft gradually developed. Writing–both creative and critical– is formulaic, the way math is.

Why does the year 2020 still linger around? The Covid-19 pandemic has brought our civilisation to its knees this year. We’re already tired, scared, and hopeless.

We are almost at the tail-end of the year 2020. What a year this has been! We haven’t lived it.

Back in the mid-90s when I was majoring in English literature at a public university in Dhaka, Bangladesh, I was a cricket buff. For the Bangladeshis, cricket was a transnational love affair in the 90s.

Money can’t buy knowledge, but the knowledge industry of the modern world, centred in our universities, runs on money. Universities worldwide are money-strapped now.

The Covid-19 pandemic has altered all of our professional beliefs and behaviours. I used to believe, for example, that teaching is a flesh-and-blood experience and that human interaction is essential to education.

When the lockdown was imposed because of the Covid-19 pandemic in March, I shifted to online teaching at a university here in Dhaka.

It’s already been several months since we’ve been hurled into the vortex of the coronavirus. The virus lives among us, silent and invisible.

I always wanted to be a professor in English. When the pandemic hit and lockdown began, I ended up being a professor in pandemic.

Any pandemic is crushing. COVID-19 is no exception. It strains cognition and emotion. It tanks economies. It disrupts communication. It alters psychology. It breeds panic and paranoia.

I always knew that life is unpredictable. But between February and April this year, I started to discover what it truly means to live an unpredictable life.

I’m panicked, as is everyone around the world now. We’re faced with an existential threat. A death sentence hovers over us as it has hovered over Wuhan, China, since December 2019.

To answer this question, let me hazard an analogy -- good writing is much like good food. Good writing tickles our senses the way good food does.

Fairly recently, I was working with two of my colleagues here in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to propose a panel for a conference in North America.

If it is, where is this gift coming from? God? Ahem! As off-putting as it might sound, biographies and autobiographies of writers reveal that most so-called gifted writers are scoundrels.

Writing is a struggle for everyone. If it seems easy, a writer is not doing it right. Because writing is mired in myths and misunderstanding, most writers – aspiring writers, in particular – consider the essential difficulty in writing as a pathology. They feel

Writing entices me. But every time I get down to writing something, I feel like a bumbling idiot. Nothing emerges. Ideas evaporate. Thoughts tangle. Language languishes. My frustration mounts.

I teach English at a private university in Dhaka, Bangladesh, having attended universities on three continents. I’m persuaded to think as such that I know what a university is and does. I wish I did! Joe Moran in First You Write a Sentence claims, “A university is a factory

I always tell my students that I’m not their language nanny. I’m an educator, and I deal with content. Ironically, however, I blue-pencil as many errors–mostly grammatical–as I can while checking their assignments. Mangled grammar turns me off. That’s understandable. Writing initiates a verbal transaction

Back in 2005 in California, I was reading Edward Said’s Power, Politics, and Culture. This book is a collection of twenty-eight interviews