Forty-year old Xulhaz Mannan’s life was brimming with creativity, talent and hope. An employee of the American embassy in Dhaka, he was also an avid photographer, traveler, activist and the editor of Bangladesh’s only gay magazine, Roopban. We had been
I The Day of Ashura, 2010 Woman 1: I followed her. A frail woman in a cheap synthetic sari, covered in a machine-embroidered black chador. ‘Come, I will show you the way to the imambara’ ,she said. I seemed a
Yamuna is not a well-known river in the West. It is not as wide as the Amazon, nor is it as long as the Nile; even amongst Indian rivers it is outclassed in fame by both the Indus, the subcontinent’s longest
The annual cattle race in Canning, Kolkata is one of the most horrifying examples of torturing animals for the sake of entertainment. The cows are kept on empty stomachs to make them run faster. They are also injected with drugs
Ismat Chughtai needs no introduction. Born on 15 August, and with a name that implies infallibility, Ismat Chughtai prefigured the struggles of common women in the sub-continent.[1] My ‘affair’ with her began at the time I was studying Comparative Literature at
Like the uncle who offered you candy when you were small only to later sexually abuse you, cities can be both irresistible and ruthless. The struggle to keep body and soul together brings men to the city in droves, but
A million deaths might be a statistic, but each one is a tragedy. Syed Shahriyar poignantly captures the agonising funeral of a civilian in the village of Shah-Gund in Kashmir. Crossing villages in the dark is not unusual for a
Epsita Halder takes a photo walk through the Hussaini Dalan in Dhaka, and brings to us alluring snapshots of the Imambara. “In old Dhaka, you will find the Shias,” said Mafidul Kaka, my guardian in Dhaka, while handing me an
A photowalk through Pete chronicling the Karaga festival …by Vivek Muthuramalingam…. The lasting impression that lingers in my mind after having witnessed one of Bangalore’s oldest and biggest festivals is strangely not that of visual nature. It is of a sustained
Human beings are in a way much like the computers they have created, that operate in a binary domain. Nature does not operate like that. Life is a celebration of the diverse variations in nature. Like the colours of a