(First published on Facebook on 21/2/2021) I am not a poet and don’t know how to write poetry. But about an hour ago, I developed an urge to write something on Ekushey February, so I started writing. But after a few minutes, I realised that it sounds better if the sentences are in verse form […]

Growing up with orphans I grew up with orphan boys and girls in a village in Bangladesh, and some of them looked after and cared for me when I was a little boy. Although I was relatively privileged and my family ran the orphanage, I was taught from the beginning that we are all equal […]

Did the British, under the East India Company’s rule, cut off Bengal weavers’ hands or thumbs and tongues to destroy the famous Bengal textile industry, particularly the weaving of the muslin fabrics? Since I was young I heard people – family members, teachers, community leaders, friends, media and so on – talking about how the […]

I love Bangla: my language, my mother tongue and the language of my motherland. But it’s not only the standardized Bangla that I love, which is erroneously called ‘Shuddo Bangla or correct Bangla’, but all the regional Bangla family language varieties. In fact, my heart and emotion respond more to my rural Bangla than the […]

I have slightly edited something I posted on Facebook more than five years ago, which was also published in Dhaka Tribune with a slightly different title. Of the major causes behind the current problems of social polarisation and destructive political culture/conflicts in the country, in my view, the existence of the above belief amongst the […]

(I have reproduced this from a Facebook post I made in July2019) The Bangladeshi Lady and Trump 19 July 2019 I would encourage Bangladeshis not to take a nationalist line on the complaint that this lady made to Trump about the persecution faced by non-Muslims in Bangladesh. See what Hindu nationalism is doing to India […]

Recently, an announcement was made in Bangladesh, published in many newspapers, that the original Muslin, the famous textiles of Bengal, has been revived, by cultivating and producing threads from the original Muslin cotton plants. If this is true, even partially, this would indeed be good news and something to celebrate. Hopefully, many new innovative and […]

The African-Caribbean culture at its best August Bank Holiday Weekend (2009&2010), London The Notting Hill Carnival has been an annual London event since 1959. However, due to the Covid-19 emergency, there is going to be no street carnival during this year’s August Bank Holiday, although the digital version planned will no doubt be very colourful, […]

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) and Karl Marx (1818-1883) are separated by five centuries of history and two civilisations and yet they exhibit some very important similarities. I discovered this when I was undertaking my Master of Arts (MA) studies in Political Thought at the University of Kent, UK. I realised that they both believed that history […]

On 16 December 1971, the nine months nightmare ended with the surrender and humiliation of the Pakistan army. It was an army under the dictatorship of General Yahya Khan that launched a completely unnecessary, bloody war on 26 March 1971 against a section of his own country, the eastern wing of the then Pakistan, that […]