Pahela Baishakh in Carbondale

Celebrating Pahela Baishakh is only getting more and more colorful. It is no less than a carnival these days. As far I can remember,
13 April 2018

A Review of His Chariot of Life: Liberation War, Politics and Sojourn in Jail

After Tawfiq-e-Elahi Chowdhury was slapped an uncertain prison term at the end of what he describes as a 'kangaroo trial,' on 18
13 April 2018

Women at War: Shongramee Naree 52 and 71

Since the Liberation War in 1971 the readers in Bangladesh have seen many narratives on 1971 and 1952. In most of these, the central
6 April 2018

A GREEN DOVE IN SILENCE: FORTY PROSE POEMS IN TRANSLATION

There is a feel good factor about Gauranga Mohanta's collection of prose poems A Green Dove in Silence. A neat jacket, crispy pages,
6 April 2018

BLRC Observes World Poetry Day

“Poetry should be free from Royalist Canada's university elites' hierarchy to come down to mass people” - was the resounding declaration
30 March 2018

REMINISCING HALCYON ELITE DAYS

Days with Dinko and other Memories, written by Monica Chanda, and edited and published by her daughter Malavika Karlekar, is a
30 March 2018

BRAVERY HAS NO AGE RESTRICTION

With the rise of fake Freedom Fighter certificates, it is nearly impossible not to be a cynic when one hears about early teen or eleven
16 March 2018

My Absence

In the sultry air of March yawns my absence.
16 March 2018

Colonial History Disrupted: Interpreting the Bottom Line

As Josh Katz says in a recent New York Times article, there has been a 540% increase in Fentanyl-related deaths over the past three
16 March 2018

Un-Romanticising the Colonial History

Shashi Tharoor's Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (2017, Hurst: London, 296 pages) does not tell any untold story. The
16 March 2018

The Tide of Nationalism in the Rise of Bangladesh

Nationalism is one of the most powerful political ideologies of the world and its wave still vibrates through the Indian subcontinent
9 March 2018

LOVE THE ENDURING KIND

"Love means never having to say you're sorry."
9 March 2018

A G Stock's Memoirs of Dacca University

“The book is a memoir, not a history, and makes no claim to a historian's detachment or research.” With this statement, A G Stock
2 March 2018

They Also Were Involved

The subtitle of the book proposes it all: fourteen writers reminisce about their own, or their dear ones' experiences immediately prior to, or during, or at the end of the Liberation War of Bangladesh.
16 February 2018

Verses on love and agony: Mashuk Chowdhury's Swarger Replica

Two years earlier I had reviewed one of Mashuk Chowdhury's poetry collections Nodir Nam Dusshomoy for The Daily Star Book Review
9 February 2018

Going Beyond Gossip and Name-Dropping?

“Biographies do walk the 'precarious high wire between fiction and non-fiction” (Claire Battershill in “No One Wants Biography”).
2 February 2018

Making Revolution Strange/r: Viktor Shklovsky and the Bolsheviks

1978. When Serena Vitale, an Italian writer and translator, managed her third meeting with Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984), the
2 February 2018

ALL WORK AND SOME PLAY AT RADA

Rada was a lot of hard work interspersed with a good deal of pressure releasers. Talk about the right doses of work and play—RADA
26 January 2018

Revisiting Banaphool's Stories

No life can simply be subsumed under a single category- nor is it possible to come up with a single term to define life's fluxes or
26 January 2018

Of Jean Paul Sartre and Imposture

In October 1964, Jean Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, a French philosopher and novelist, was declared winner of the Nobel Prize for literature for that year.
19 January 2018