In Shahbagh, a group of friends sat at a tea stall on an otherwise unremarkable evening on April 10, somewhere between the rhythms of the city and the anticipatory hum of Pahela Baishakh.

In a generous act of national service, men across the political spectrum have stepped forward to rescue women from the exhausting burden of political participation.

Can we imagine and construct a political system that refuses to subordinate human dignity to the demands of global accumulation?

The project of egalitarianism cannot be subcontracted to the very custodians of inequality.

The verdict is in. The Appellate Division through its observations has recommended that quotas be restricted to seven percent: five percent for freedom fighters’ descendants, one percent for ethnic minorities, and one percent for people with disabilities.

Why do authorities gamble with our lives?

That justice for rape survivors is a mirage in this country is no news, with a miserable conviction rate of three percent in rape cases.

With each new term of the ruling regime, and each new provision or law, we have learnt a bit more of self-censorship.

The government has heavily invested in purchasing surveillance equipment and enhancing the capacities of various agencies to use them over the years, but it hasn't shown an iota of the same interest in what should have been its priority—protection of citizens’ data

Rather than assuage the workers by announcing a respectable wage, the wage board has essentially fuelled workers’ outrage and made a mockery of the wage negotiation process

Will the wage board and our policymakers truly hear the stories of backbreaking work and heartbreaking debt of the garment workers, who have kept the economy going even at its worst phases?

Dhanmondi these days is a cacophony of people, traffic, events, vendors, schools, hospitals, restaurants, and construction sites.

Why should we pay for the government’s questionable policies?

There are two kinds of numbers that I find difficult to digest these days. The more I try to swallow the one, the more unpalatable the other becomes. 

Some of us may breathe a sigh of relief that Hriday Mondal, imprisoned for 19 days and denied bail twice, for trying to explain the difference between science and religion to his students, has been granted bail.

Two dangerous policy drafts regulating our online presence have been prepared right in front of our noses, and except for a few usual suspects crying wolf, there has been little public outrage over it.

Anyone who has seen the video of Chattogram-based journalist Golam Sarwar—taken shortly after he was found unconscious on the banks of a canal following a disappearance of three days—is unlikely to forget the helplessness and fear coursing through his bruised being, as he kept on uttering the words, “Please, brother, I won’t write anymore.”

The scenes are at once familiar and unfamiliar.

After a decade of ruthlessly pursuing the world’s dirtiest fuel, the Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources (MoPEMR) is contemplating closing down 13 of the 18 previously approved coal-based power projects around the country and apparently switching to “cleaner” alternatives.

The announcement that a five-star “Marriott Hotel and Amusement Park” is being built in Bandarban no doubt comes as welcome news to Bengali elites and the nouveau riche looking for novel and Instagrammable ways of spending their weekends and disposable incomes in the luscious hills of the CHT.