Milia Ali

Thank you, Gurudev, for making the finite journey of my life an infinite experience!

I write this column with some hesitation, since many may regard it a bit preachy or elitist.

Now that we have stepped into a new year, it may be time to take a brief pause from our hectic schedule.

She gave visibility to the invisible by exposing the exclusion of women from development activities.

Recently, I have been reminiscing about my music guru, the late Kanika Banerjee (known to her intimate circle as Mohordi).

I begin with an apology to my readers for my long absence. Covid played havoc with our lifestyle and livelihoods. Even then, we could make choices still within limited parameters.

Today, after a period of hiatus, I have once again taken up my pen (metaphorically) to remember and celebrate a hero—a woman of courage and integrity who changed the world, not with fire and fury but with her soft touch.

It has only been a month of isolation, yet it feels like “One hundred years of solitude”.

As my daughter and I drove to the polling booth last week to vote at the Democratic Primaries in the United States, I asked: “So,

Over the past three months, I have lost many nights of sleep, abandoned my favourite political TV programmes, and ignored household chores.

I am sitting at my desk, with a hot cup of tea, peering out at the foggy winter morning enveloping the placid Gulshan Lake.

Forty-eight years have elapsed since we overthrew the yoke of exploitation and oppression and gained our Independence, through blood, sweat, and tears.

Common sense tells us that life’s experiences should help us acquire a degree of certainty about most issues. However, I seem to be the exception to this conventional wisdom.

I often wonder about the psyche and motivation of people who choose to resist unfairness, inequity and tyranny at a great personal cost. And I don’t mean luminaries like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr., but the unsung heroes who feel it their bounden duty to act in the public interest and ensure that future generations benefit from their selfless acts of moral valour.

In the midst of all the political chaos and confusion reigning in our world today, we are perhaps overlooking an important issue—the basic fibre of our social structure is going through a tectonic shift. One would have thought that, over time, class barriers would be

As some of you may have noticed, I have been absent from the writing scene for about six months. No, I haven’t retired from column writing—rather it has been a forced hiatus. Forced by an eye condition that struck without any prior warning. The affliction that stole part of my right eyesight came stealthily and silently—a white fog refusing to be dislodged obstructed my vision.

I never imagined that most of the values and precepts I learned while growing up would become dated and rendered almost irrelevant during my lifetime. In particular, the lessons in humility that our parents and teachers taught us seem to have simply gone out of the window.

In the “long 18th century” (1685-1815), European politics, philosophy, science and communications were radically reoriented during the course of a movement referred to by its participants as the Age of Reason, or simply the Enlightenment.

The past week has been tumultuous and agonising for most Americans. A week of speculation, media hype, and political and personal

Years ago, when I first migrated to the United States, I was asked to read Robert Ringer's Winning through Intimidation as part of my acculturation process.