“The naked passion of self-love of Nations, in its Drunken delirium of greed, Is dancing to the clash of steel and the howling verses Of vengeance.’ Rabindranath Tagore, The Sunset of the Century, 1899. The Rebellion Against
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
Situated in Dhaka’s diplomatic area Gulshan, Holey Artisan Bakery prior to the fateful night of July 2nd 2016 sold expensive happiness. Ensconced in affluence for hours on end, one could let themselves be impervious to the fact that Bangladesh is
Sometime back, while reading Milan Kundera’s, ‘The Art of the Novel’, a certain passage struck me as one of the perennial ironies with which we are confronted with as a global community. Situating the novel within a particular social ethos
It is a singular experience to be shocked into awareness of our virtually unsafe lives, one fine day at the age of 13 – more so, when the threat of execution is immediate, and almost tangible because of its geographical
News of systematic air strikes in the Levant region seldom grabs us by the scruff of our neck. The world has silently grown immune to bombings, these bombings, and to countless others. They fall into those little spaces between headlines
In the span of two months, Omar Hafiz, a well-known development practitioner from Kashmir travelled to 17 states of India and met young artists in an attempt to sensitise them about the Kashmir issue. Hafiz has in the
Six-year-old Shrikant Shukla didn’t know what the word Muslim meant. When his father’s old friend, Mr. Imam, arrived one evening at his house with Mrs. Imam and their two kids Sakina and Hamid, his mother summoned him into the kitchen. She
It is nearing the end of winters in Kashmir. A thick, grimy fog, black and white tinged with grey, hangs over Srinagar for most of the day. Morning visibility is bad-clears up a bit with a dull sun in the
Indian folklore and epics are the two recurring motifs in your narrative. In this country, there is a tradition of passing on of stories from one generation to another, from the mother to her daughter, from the grandfather to his