ON A pillar of the metro station in Shahbagh, within view just after the flight of stairs by the side of the Pubali Bank, is a graffiti. While the form has drastically exploded in popularity during and after the July uprising of Bangladesh, there remains a political distinction. This one, evidently hastily sprayed on well after the fall...
AS THE euphoria surrounding Sheikh Hasina鈥檚 ouster to India slowly died down, we have slowly begun to excavate the wreckages of her authoritarian rule in our surroundings as well as our collective memories. If we look critically, the immediate past 鈥� the period immediately preceding her departure 鈥� appeared to be...
BANGLADESH experienced its first transition from autocratic rule after the fall of the regime of president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in August 1975. The second instance of transition from autocratic rule commenced with the fall of president Ershad in 1991. The third transition from autocracy to democracy has started with the fall of the Sheikh Hasina regime on August 5 this year...
INDIA鈥橲 sheltering of Sheikh Hasina following the mass uprising in Bangladesh will shape the future of India-Bangladesh relations. The collapse of Hasina鈥檚 government also signifies a decline in India鈥檚 dominance over Bangladesh. However, it is an oversimplification to view India鈥檚 relationship with Bangladesh in such...
THE World Bank measures per capita national income using the Atlas method. The total national income (GNI) of a country in local currency is converted into US dollars. In this case, the average exchange rate for three years is adjusted, accounting for inflation and fluctuations in the exchange rate. There is often a difference...
INDIA is now grappling with the delicate task of finding a sanctuary for the ousted Sheikh Hasina, who had long been a steadfast and trusted ally in South Asia. The decision is aimed at preventing further deterioration in its already strained relations with Bangladesh. Meanwhile, the new interim government, led by Nobel laureate Dr Muhammad Yunus...
鈥楤E READY, there is a chance that they can take you away any day now.鈥� This was the warning my editor, Nurul Kabir, gave me after more than two decades of career as editorial cartoonist at the daily 抖阴精品. It was July 23, and by then, the student鈥檚 movement for reforms in the quota system in public services had already...
GENDER鈥� is always a thorny topic at times of mass uprising. Historically, leaders of countless mass uprisings around the world decided to put away the gender question for dealing with later. The 鈥榤ass鈥� had been typically framed as a body that does not have any gender in the common imagination, only to eventually reveal...
BANGLADESH, following the overthrow of an extremely repressive government of the Awami League, in the face of a great democratically oriented student-mass uprising and subsequent voluntary disappearances of all the League leaders from the country鈥檚 political scene, obviously with a view to escaping court proceedings...
IN THE annals of human civilisation, democracy stands as a magnificent garden, a living, breathing ecosystem that requires constant care and attention. This garden, with its countless plants representing the diverse voices and ideals of society, is not a barren, untamed wilderness but a carefully cultivated space where the fruits of freedom and justice can flourish...
RESUMING teaching after my doctoral degree, I soon found myself in a new situation. One of the formidable aspects of this newness was, of course, the big class sizes I was having to deal with. In the academic department where I have worked in the past many years, I have usually taught a class size of around 25鈥�40 students. When I first began...
ARCHAEOLOGY 鈥� as a modern discipline encompassing other two areas of study 鈥� humanity and social sciences 鈥� helps us to understand the living activity of pre-historic people covering 99 per cent of the human past from the Paleolithic period until the advent of literacy in societies around the world. It deals with the material culture of human...
IN THE recent rise of secular authoritarian government and the rise of religious orthodoxy in response to the so-called development-focused regime, let us take a step back and reread Lalon Fakir (d. 1890) to find what he professed and practiced in a similar situation. Lalon鈥檚 reformulation of the concept of spiritual practice was informed by the...
THE constitution of Bangladesh had been the core legal instrument to provide protection of the fundamental rights of the citizens, and that should have been the primary task, albeit creating institutions to run the state and to set rules for running those institutions. But our constitution at the very outset wrongly attempted to define the ethnic identity of...
JAMES C Scott, who passed away on July 19 this year, was a prominent political scientist and anthropologist known for his interdisciplinary work platforming the ways ordinary people resist domination, emphasising the value of local knowledge, hidden transcripts of resistance, and the limits of centralised power. To me, the character is vehemently...