Shah Tazrian Ashrafi

Black. Glossy in the moonlight. Its white whiskers asserting an implicit, involuntary dominance. Its supple body effortlessly sliding up and down the teak trees that are abundant here. A shadow – a dark emissary of the night – drifting among the plant kingdom like a fugitive.

Freshman year is when students expect to navigate through the untouched terrains of a new environment and educational system. It is also considered a time when academic pressure is the least. However, due to Covid-19, the present and the future look very different for the newly admitted.

In the 1950s, giddy with the glory of a blood-soaked independence, Bollywood churned out films that were high on “Nehruvian nationalism”.

“My senior, junior doctors and I need your prayers,” Dr. Shawkat Osman, the C.A. of surgery Unit-5 at DMCH, writes in his Facebook post.

Airports beef up security, a ship full of passengers remains quarantined and docked at Yokohama, while racism takes root and flourishes under the shadow of an outbreak.

We emerged victorious in a burning city of chaos,

In the face of history’s death and patriarchy’s indomitable presence, Leesa Gazi’s Rising Silence comes as an undying beam—one that can stir the nation’s collective psyche and present the realities of “a forgotten genocide” before the current generation (and the ones to come).

When fires hold the earth captive and the trees grow alive dancing Like fiery beacons,

Rehana takes hesitant steps towards her house. Her Niqab renders the landscape a transparent shade of black smoke.

I glide through the salt wind;

As a six-year-old obsessed and fascinated with the wild, I remember asking my mother once: “How do tigers protect the environment?”

In Dhaka’s Korail slum, futures are made and unmade. It is bloated with vulnerabilities. Lack of basic living conditions, sudden fires,

The aforementioned statement by John Muir, a renowned naturalist, inspired the title to a collection of short stories, which presents the nascent realities invited by climate crisis through the windows of literature.

Night flight to Earth;

Perhaps, the Pakicetus had metamorphosed into Ambulocetus and then into whales only to be plucked out of their kingdom of waters centuries later.

Gabriella is a 40-year-old obstetrician-gynaecologist from Australia, a godsend for the violated women spat out by the nine-month

Her death has sent out a clarion call. But we don't know how long it'll take for the call to make a veritable change. How long the call will keep blaring in the air. Our hearts remain suffused with questions.

It took not only one but two crows to herald the arrival of death. As they settled themselves, their talons rough against the cool of the wires shooting out like rail tracks in air from the transformer's crown, the transformer seemed to take great offence.

According to estimations, around 200,000-400,000 women were tortured and raped by the Pakistani Military and their collaborators

I still remember one morning in 2006 when we escaped death by an inch, as one of those popular “city” buses struck the rickshaw I was in with my mother and sibling. Had it rolled its wheels a little more, I wouldn't have been able to write an op-ed piece today.