Creative nonfiction / Growing up with a new nation: The Dhaka we once knew

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.

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,

Amitav Ghosh’s passionate engagement with the Sundarbans has brought out his best as a socially conscious fashioner of narrative in The Hungry Tide (HarperCollins, 2004) and Gun Island (John Murray, 2019); enriched his intervention in the discourse on ecology, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Penguin, 2016); and perhaps most felicitously, has brought to light the poet hiding behind his voluminous prose.

Rachel Clarke reminds us of the intensity of the ongoing tragedy in her autobiographical Breathtaking (Little, Brown, 2021), told from the extraordinary perspective of a palliative care doctor.

There is no better way to show someone that they are on your mind than to recommend a book you think they would love.

Iraq once boasted one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities, encompassing 2,600 years of rich cultural history punctuated with moments of benign tolerance, blatant discrimination, and outright intolerance and persecution.

Md Tajdin Hassan and Shuvashish Roy, leaders of business development at The Daily Star, have jointly compiled and released a new book, Think Like CEOs (Daily Star Books, 2021), which seeks to impart management tips from 20 eminent business leaders of the country. Conducted from September 2020 through to February of this year, the interviews with the 20 CEOs took place virtually through a Facebook Live series called “The Chief Executive Show”, broadcasted on The Daily Star.

Be it the desolation in Tahrir Square or the barbarity of Islamist jihadis in Syria, what is the one thing common to each of these instances of violence and fury?

In an episode of Star Book Talk aired live on Friday, July 9, author-anthropologist Tahmima Anam and DS Books Editor Sarah Anjum Bari discussed Anam’s latest novel, The Startup Wife (Penguin India, 2021). They discuss writing tactics, feminism in literature, and Anam’s influences on the path to becoming an award-winning author.

Central to Kim Bo-Young’s winning I'm Waiting for You: And Other Stories (HarperCollins, 2021; transl. Sophie Bowman & Sung Ryu) are duality, symmetry, and (dis)harmony. This new four-story collection is divided right down its middle—where the first and fourth stories are continuations of one another, while the second and third merge to form a tessellation of one overarching narrative. In its 314 pages is a constellation of imagined lives, imagined realities, that try and verily succeed in drawing the reader into its bizarre, brilliant, and frequently confounding orbit. Bo-Young has done well in structuring the two main stories of the book, though the hooking nature of the first forces a halt when one turns the page over to the contemplative and shape-shifting second.

A launch event titled “Longing and Belonging, a collection of narratives on 1947 partition” was held virtually on Friday, 9 July on the Facebook pages of Goethe-Institut Bangladesh and Goethe-Institut/ Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata. Supported by the Goethe-Institut Bangladesh as part of its Inherited Memories project, Longing and Belonging “presents a collection of chronicles, fragments, stories, morsels of reflection from Indian émigrés living in Mirpur and Mohammadpur of Dhaka who or whose families were affected by the 1947 partition”. Friday’s event featured readings, discussions, reflections, and a poetry recitation in commemoration of this project, which spanned from the autumn of 2019 through to the eased COVID-19 lockdowns of late.

Shaheen Chishti, a descendant of the revered Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, and a London-based writer and women’s rights advocate, has just released his debut novel. The Grand Daughter Project (Nimble Books, 2021) touches upon a wide range of themes including gender inequality, racial oppression, war-time trauma, and female emancipation.

The first of the two-day memorial service for publisher emeritus Mohiuddin Ahmed was held at 7 PM on July 9. Family, friends, colleagues, and notable admirers gathered virtually to pay their respects to the late, great founder of the pioneering University Press Limited.

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 --

Needless to say, some of the best moments of my life have been spent inside bookstores.

Earlier this week, in a break from work-related correspondence, I sent author Tahmima Anam a personal email. I told her I was writing to her “as a reader” this time, because after months of scarfing down books for the sole purpose of writing reviews, The Startup Wife (Penguin India, 2021) made me forget that I was reading it for work.