Fakrul Alam

Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was rooted in the land and loved Bangladesh’s natural features. He wanted them to be as they were—green, open spaces full of water bodies and flora and fauna.

If I get to live forever— then forever, I’ll be all alone— If I return to the paths of the world, I’ll see green grass Sprouting—will see yellow grass scattering— the sky Whitening in the morning—like a tattered munia bird, Breast blood-stained in the evening—again and again I’ll see stars And view a strange woman untying braided hair and leaving Alas, her face devoid of traces of the setting sun’s soft glow

Sudeep Sen’s Anthropocene is the third work on the subject by an Indian writer that I have come across in recent years, but it is truly sui generis.

As my siblings and I grew up in the first half of the 1960s, the radio set was the most sought-after device in our house. Till Baba bought a television set for us towards the end of the decade, it was our main source of entertainment, news and small talk.

Younger people might find this too dated, but I will stick by what  Jorge Luis Borges once said: “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of a Library!”

Empathy, the Wikipedia entry on the word tells us, includes “caring for other people and having a desire to help them; experiencing emotions that match another person’s emotions; discerning what another person is thinking or feeling; and making less distinct the differences between the self and the other.

The second volume of Dhaka University: The Convocation Speeches, 1948-1970 (Dhaka University Publications, 1989), assembled assiduously by Emeritus Professor Serajul Islam Choudhury, is an important publication like the first one for anyone trying to understand Dhaka University’s extraordinary role in the genesis and identity formation of Bangladesh.

In Dhaka University: the Convocation Speeches, a volume compiled with an introduction by Serajul Islam Choudhury in 1988, we read that DU was established by the British as a "splendid imperial compensation" for the Muslims of East Bengal (Choudhury, 26). They had wanted the current rulers of India to make up through it for the loss they felt they had suffered because of the reunion of Bengal in 1911.

In the song-lyric numbered 230 in Gitabitan, Rabindranath Tagore’s comprehensive compilation of such verse, we find his delight at capturing the loveliness of the world outside his window in a song-lyric: “I’ve caught uncatchable loveliness in rhyme’s binds—/The loveliness of a distant night-bird/Singing at a late hour of the night/ Wings crimsoned by ashoka flowers of a departed spring/And a heart filled with the fragrance of fallen flowers” (my translation).

Clouds pile upon clouds And the world darkens Why keep me waiting by the door then, All, all alone?

In “Gandhi and Nehru: The Uses of English,” an essay written by Sunil Khilnani from the 2010 collection of essays edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, A Concise History of Indian Literature in English, we are told about how the two leading figures of Indian independence not only used the English language to write back against empire, but played important roles in “the long, uneasy and interminable task of making English an Indian language.”

Soon after Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Oshomapto Atmojiboni (Unfinished Memoirs)came out in an English translation as well in the original Bangla in 2012, I heard at least a few people express their skepticism about the book’s authorship to me.

This is a must-read book for anyone worried about the vulnerability of democracy in our time and the rise of authoritarian governments everywhere.

Numair Atif Choudhury’s Babu Bangladesh is a tour de force of a novel. Exuberant, extravagant, learned, zany, ingenious, whimsical, irreverent and provocative, this is a work of amazing merit.

How Freedom Became Our Own Word

In these pandemic-plagued times, ceremonies commemorating the beginning of the celebrations of the University of Dhaka (or DU) that were to culminate in July 1, 2021 have been scaled down drastically; the chances of alumni and well-wishers of university students and faculty members thronging the campus on July 1, 2020 to inaugurate the year-long events have all but gone.

It was probably on a day in the second week of March that I last saw and heard professor Anisuzzaman—our Anisuzzaman sir—speak publicly.

There were six of us, bosom buddies who had studied together in the same school and college, friends for years—“good” boys. And there were the same number of them, if not more, from the same Dhaka school and college—“nice” girls.

Art has always been both a mirror of and a balm for human experience through disaster. In this short series, an author of Daily Star Books—our book publishing imprint—will periodically explore a facet of this link between literature and our ongoing battle with Covid-19.

One of the most striking characteristics evident in The Unfinished Memoirs is how the young Sheikh Mujibur Rahman showed