Let me begin my speech in this birthday webinar organized by the High Commission of India in Dhaka to commemorate Rabindranath Tagore’s 159th birthday by referring to his last public address, Sabhyater Sankat or Crisis in Civilization.

In 1980 while I was pursuing PhD in the U.S.A. I stumbled into the world of philosophy. Beyond my engineering studies, I devoted myself to my new-found passion. Since that time, I have been maintaining a diary. The following episodes are based on selected journal entries.

There were six of us, bosom buddies who had studied together in the same school and college, friends for years—“good” boys. And there were the same number of them, if not more, from the same Dhaka school and college—“nice” girls.

Ha, there you go, this is how you suffer:

If only I had stopped her from drinking!

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.

The man walks Bending on his cane, picking

Aha Aji E Boshonte

Afreen is in the third grade. She is shy, quiet and keeps to herself. Being the shortest one in class, she has to stand in the front of the line everyday at the morning assembly. She often gets bullied by classmates for her below-average height. The fact that she’s extremely skinny too doesn’t help.

Perhaps, the time has come to Love, Love again

Based on a true story (‘...poets, as everybody knows,

It all started with someone responding to a Facebook post on Coronavirus—wishing that all the problems would be over before the

Like nationalism, Tagore’s perspectives on patriotism are also characterised by certain paradoxes and ambiguities; he was a fervid patriot, yet he openly denounced and deplored the sentiment of patriotism.

The crunch of snow beneath our pads was cracking like the breaking of bones between our teeth. The tundra, echoing for miles, a vast white desert, and our breath is the only warmth in the barren winterscape.

The keepers of law

Even one individual turns into

Listening to summer breeze, smelling the raw pages of an old book my mind went wandering into the sea of nonexistent dreams. I drifted there like a lost sailor. And I hunted for a thousand-year old pale blue star.

The American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Certainly, Tagore was above this puerile mindset.

So, I was about to slip under my bedcovers to give my back some rest and close my eyes and savour the moment till I fell asleep.

During the Pakistan days my father was in the army, and we moved frequently, every few years. Soon after I finished Grade 10 in 1966, we made a big move: from Chittagong to Rawalpindi.