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

Their apartment was located on the ground floor of a three-storied building whose yellowish paint looked as if it was peeling off on its own.

'In Extreme Need of Guidance', the book being serialised here, captures the first 16 years of writer Sultana Nahar's life. This is the Afterword by the author.

Textbooks in Bangladesh tend to be written by foreign authors. Those that are written by Bangladeshi authors, emphasise on examples in a non-Bangladesh context.

Colson Whitehead’s sequel to his novel Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday, 2021) is a continuation of the exact same order.

“Can one break a country...Will the earth bleed?” asks eight-year-old Lenny in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988)–a tale about Partition. “No one’s going to break India. It’s not made of glass!”

In exchange for the presidential suites at the Ritz and so on, the men holding our city keys have already opened our skies to all that may come.

To sit on thy laurels seems apposite, Yet to dig graves for perceptive pleasure resemble a breach Of lines bridging the things learned, unlearned.

The novels are small revolutions, each seeking to energise and awaken the language. Together, they offer startling portraits of the current.

His words convince the listener that the world is actually a beautiful place where truth, honesty, and simplicity are the quenching clouds above a desolate desert of dry despair and monotony.

Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora, written between 1907 and 1909, reveals the ways in which Tagore addresses the all-important issues of his time—national identity formation, the coming together of people over time, and obstacles or barriers put in the way of the progress of a nation. The novel captures Tagore’s fascination with envisioning a future based on human amity or moitri, one where the powerless and the dispossessed transcend the barriers of division and distrust.

Truth and beauty reign supreme in the domain of mirth, in the realm of ecstasy. Thy glory resounds within the vast heaven, And the entire world lay at thy gem-bedecked pes. The stars, planets, sun, and the moon are impetuously

One can find Rabindranath anywhere—he’s there in the words we whisper, in the tunes we hum, in the ethos we believe in, in the ideal of the human we wish we were. 

“Who am I? “

Listening is stretching beyond ourselves and another, and if we were to listen to printed words on paper as non-verbal cues of communication, it too emits lower frequencies that moves us, beyond the I, towards new modes of knowledge.

With statistics backing her up, Broussard does a stellar job of portraying this bias for the readers with stories from individuals who have faced such discrimination. The book opens with the story of Robert Julian-Borchak Williams who gets wrongfully identified by a police facial recognition technology and gets taken into custody.

Having read an account of someone who stood by her husband and helped him through an assisted suicide out of love was extremely heart-wrenching.

We walk past the singing bells and our chambers, Blind to the perils beyond our walls.

The concept of self-improvement is by no means a new one, rather the notion is in the foundational structures of moral well-being. The centuries old Socrates commandment, “Know Thyself” is at the very crux of what self-improvement consists of.

I am from the 19 houses in 15 districts, none of which could become "my home, sweet home"  

The motor car is always a thing of darkness, In the sun and lighted roads of day And in the luminous gas at night though