Shamsad Mortuza

I had a senior colleague at Jahangirnagar University who was known to his students at the Pharmacy Department as an eccentric genius.

The Amazon rainforest, spread over 2.1 million square miles, is dubbed as the “lungs of the planet” as it produces 20 percent of the oxygen in our planet’s atmosphere.

His visiting card had two office addresses: one in Scotland and the other in Estonia. There was nothing wrong with it, but the architect who just shared his card explained the oddity.

Online teaching, at its best, can create a learning environment to ensure transference of knowledge. However, I am not sure if technology and innovations have reached that point to replace the tribal needs of human interactions that define the complex teacher-student relationship in a physical classroom.

Remember getting caught by your parents for trying out roadside pickles or tawdry coloured crunchy ice outside your school?

I was a young lecturer when private universities appeared for the first time in the higher education scene of Bangladesh. I remember when one of my colleagues left us to join a pioneer private university as a full time faculty, we at the department felt that he had sold his soul to money, deciding to work under a corporate system. The same thing happened when one of my teachers left for a financially lucrative BCS job.

My Face-book newsfeed has been experiencing a little tremor ever since the Dhaka-based action movie Extraction started streaming on Netflix on April 24.

The horrific images of white plastic body bags in which the final journeys are set during this great pandemic add to the myth of coronavirus as the great leveller.

My generation grew up with masked heroes. They could shoot heat beams from their eyes or knock down a skyscraper with a single punch—“kavoom”! They could lead double lives: during the day they could be aristocratic noblemen or dashing socialites, and at night, they could put on their vigilante masks and raid the neighbourhood in search of culprits and criminals.

How will the world look like once this not-so-coveted Covid-19 crisis is over? Is this pandemic a virus-driven Ice Age that will change the world the way we know it? Can we ever go back to being normal? Or are we going to have “the new normal”?

Too little money, too much screen time, and uneven distribution of household chores and childcare—a recipe made in hell.

Any bored individual who has nothing better to do than to read the comment threads while listening to some old songs on YouTube must have come across these two ideas: “Who is listening to this in 2020?” Or “So-and-so brought me here”.

The closures of academic institutions for two weeks in response to the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping the globe have caught many of us involved in the academia by surprise.

I have seen it on TV, read about it in newspapers, but never thought it would be this bad. I watched it from the deck of a launch, looking forward to a spectacular river cruise that our departmental picnic poster promised.

With the number of coronavirus cases crossing 100,000 mark, the official death toll standing at—and forever climbing over—3,652 (live update, worldometers, March 8), and the US flashing 8.3 billion green bucks to shoo away the spread, the outbreak of COVID-19 is no longer a “told-you-not-to-have-that-bat-soup-or-fox-meat” gossip.

With Imax plan-ning to supersize the Netflix streaming service, the merger of our viewing habits is in sight. Last September, there was this David and Goliath agreement between these two opposing movie services that would allow blockbuster cinemas to be made available on small screens, while fringe films under the rubric of Netflix Originals in large cineplexes.

While at the Uni-versity of Arizona, we had a visiting professor from Stanford University, Prof. Joshua Fishman.

Finally, a breath of fresh air—winds blowing through the higher stratosphere are causing some thought clouds to loosen up and shower good news on higher education.

In the 80s, one sarcastic comment—for reasons better not stated out of respect for the deceased—was aired every now and then: hurl a stone in Dhaka’s air and you are sure to hit either a poet or a crow. On the surface, it was an innocent joke about the sheer number of creatures—those who fly with their wings and those others who dream to do so with their imagination.

By the time you will be reading this piece, I “should” be on board our national carrier, Biman Bangladesh. I write “should” because nothing about Biman can be said with certainty; listen to the passenger’s mumbling at the boarding bay or lend your eyes and ears to the incidents on the aircraft itself, you are sure to get an endorsement.