Badiuzzaman Bay

Twenty-eight years is a long time to wait. It takes a lot of sitting, sweating and soul-searching to do to get through it, a lot of courage to start again once it’s over, and a lot of catching up to do as a new phase begins under a different sky and far different circumstances.

Like all things bad and ugly in Bangladesh, the latest offensive against our sanity is playing out in a wearily predictable fashion.

As of July 23, seven people died and at least 35 were injured in mob beatings sparked off by a rumour about human heads being collected—yes, you heard it right—for the construction of Padma Bridge, the dream project of the Awami League government.

On April 17, 1971, in the midst of a genocidal operation by the Pakistani forces, a quiet voice of sanity reminded the world what was at stake, and went on to lay the groundwork for an independent Bangladesh.

Of all the dysfunctions that plague life in Bangladesh today, none is perhaps more pernicious than the transport sector. Just consider the fact that an average of 20 lives is lost to road accidents every day.

The 2019 Indian general election, which will have its third round of polling today, is proving to be as challenging as predicted.

We launched the quota movement on February 17. It lasted for nearly eight months, until October 4 when the public administration ministry issued a circular officially scrapping the quota system.

The Ministry of Primary and Mass Education has recently decided to discontinue exams at grades 1-3, which means students of those classes will no longer have to sit for formal exams. How do you see this development?

The March 11 election to Ducsu, or Dhaka University Central Students' Union, marks a moment in the history of student politics that is

One more day and it's election time for the northern part of the capital city. Residents of the Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC) will choose their mayor for the second time in four years since the first mayoral election of a bifurcated Dhaka was held in 2015.

On February 18, while raising a supplementary question in parliament, Jatiya Party leader Fakhrul Imam offered a glimpse into two of

Rivers are no longer just rivers bound only by the laws of nature. The High Court has recently given a verdict awarding the status of “living entities” to the country's rivers in a bid to protect them and raise awareness of their importance.

Who among us, if we were parents of a daughter, would not want to protect her from the perils of our world? Who among us does not

The 11th parliamentary election of Bangladesh will go down in history as the election of simultaneously many firsts and many contrasts. Billed as the country's first “participatory” election in a decade, it gave the incumbent Awami League a landslide victory—and reduced its arch-rival BNP, once again, to irrelevance. While an Awami League win was largely

Two parties have ruled Bangladesh for most of its 47-year-old life since the independence and one of these parties will form the

Since the campaign season for this month's election began on December 10, news headlines were dominated by violent clashes in

There is no last word in politics. Politicians are rarely the ones to acknowledge this truth about their vocation and rarely, if at all, are they in the habit of being candid about it.

Eminent thinker and writer Professor Serajul Islam Choudhury, in this interview with Badiuzzaman Bay of The Daily Star, outlines his views about the current state of leftist politics, the upcoming election, and the future of politics and youth leadership in Bangladesh.

Rumour is the new buzzword in Bangladesh's political lingo after it was thrust back into the limelight in October when students launched a nationwide movement for road safety. Since then, the government has launched a crusade against rumours, going to great lengths to monitor and suppress them.

Director Steven Spielberg's 2017 newsroom thriller The Post, set in the 1970s America when a group of journalists try to expose a massive cover-up of government secrets about the Vietnam War, beautifully captures the tension between the press and a corrupt administration.