Author: CulturalUniverse

A few years ago, I stated that the Urdu language was also a Bangladeshi language. This attracted some dismay, surprise and hostility towards me. Some couldn’t understand how I could say something like this when Bangladeshi Bengalis fought against the imposition of the Urdu language as the only state language in Pakistan. One person asked […]

Russia is not a normal country where people are free to express themselves and have a say in its politics. It does not have a properly functioning diversified economy, and the country has been under the grip of Putin’s authoritarian rule for several decades. Any invasion of Ukraine by Russia will be disastrous for all […]

Human languages are something incredible. They enable us to communicate with each other, understand what others say or write, theories about the world, introspect to go deeper into things, transmit knowledge through generations, express feelings towards others and do thousands of other things. Languages evolve and change through internal dynamics within a linguistic group and […]

I am sharing some notes from a seminar I delivered in 2001 on ‘Is Sylheti a language?’ as a contribution to the debate generated by the MyLondon article, ‘The East London man ‘who’s been threatened with death’ for trying to revive a language’, (20/1/2022) (The East London man ‘who’s been threatened with death’ for trying […]

In the light of the recent successes by the Bangladesh women’s football team in international matches, I have decided to publish in my blog an interview that I carried out with two players in 2004 in Bangladesh for my exhibition on Dhaka City in the UK. This interview was part of my exhibition which toured […]

https://www.facebook.com/DbcNewsDaily/videos/1070485057039921 I found what happened during the Bangladesh-Pakistan cricket match very surprising.  I did not expect any open support for the Pakistani side by some Bangladeshis, especially when the match was between Bangladesh and Pakistan. The images of Bangladeshis wearing Pakistani supporting garments with Pakistani flags were also a double surprise, especially in the era […]

The conventional view is that he committed suicide but there are some people who believe that he may have been murdered. After the Battle of Plassey 1. More than a decade of total plunder of Bengal by both the East India Company and its officers. 2. Many of the nouveau rich, who made money from […]

(I have written this piece in response to this article in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/oct/31/honour-based-offences-soared-by-81-in-last-five-years?fbclid=IwAR0oPAtHezw6ciy4Ra3vbnmTaFI0Yy8awMMsl3bzMdlqfPE1zt3p0zaRCq8) The so-called honour-based violence against girls and women are perverted acts of maniacs created by systems, developed over long historical processes, to keep women in a state of fear and subordination all their life, and to justify that situation and keep […]

This is a contribution to Bangladesh 50. In 1947, would I have supported the creation of Pakistan and East Bengal included in the new country? It would have all depended on the state of my mind and how I felt and interpreted things around me at that time- created by propaganda, personal experiences, ideological aspirations, […]

In recent days, several Hindu temples in Bangladesh got attacked and vandalised, including causing damage to idols of Hindu gods. From the Bangladesh media reporting, it is difficult to understand what happened, the scale and the magnitude. Their coverage has been very limited and disappointing given the impression created in social media and Indian reporting […]