Shamsad Mortuza

A good story is hard to find. Niaz Zaman, the editor of The Demoness: The Best Bangladeshi Short Stories, 1971-2021 (Aleph Book Company, 2021), has found 27 “best” short stories to create an appetite for Bangladeshi fiction.

There have been changes in the way we live and the way we die. We have learned to live carefully during this time of the pandemic, yet we have been dying carelessly.

The onslaught of Covid-19 shows no signs of relenting. While the infection-death curve has been arrested by some countries, our one is still climbing, as if it wants to put a flag of our collective irresponsibility at a greater summit.

The cargo vessel involved in a hit and run incident in Narayanganj on Sunday, leading to the capsize of a passenger launch that killed at least 34 people, was seized at a dock in Gazaria, Munshiganj.

Covid-19 is back and it is back with a vengeance, as if to puncture the false confidence we were assuming about the antidotes.

"Why do they even try? They don’t sound like us!” My mother was referring to the “bong” accents emulated by some of the Indian actors who occupy our living rooms every evening. That does not stop these characters from becoming regular guests of our evening party.

News of the pandemic waves of Covid-19 and political waves of the three-fingered protest is making the rounds.

The footage is harrowing. A speech-impaired girl is pushed off a running bus for not being able to pay her fare. She was wearing a note saying that she did not have any money on her.

During a trade dialogue held at the Ministry of Commerce on February 17, the UK envoy to Bangladesh announced that at least nine British universities are keen on coming to Bangladesh and opening their campuses.

There used to be a TV advert in which a husband was rebuked by his judgmental wife for not being able to kill even a mosquito that was sitting on her cheek.

In academia, the status of English is often contested in the Bangladeshi context. Is it a second language or a foreign language? There should not be any such question about our first language, our mother tongue in our everyday life. Bangla is our number one language.

Dhaka is growing right before our eyes. Every day it is birthing new projects.

Five students of a private university went to a restaurant at Uttara to get a drink.

Growing up in the 80s, one of the silliest things we used to do was to play loud music in our cassette decks.

In our Viber group, a departmental colleague shared an excerpt from a student’s exam script. The student wrote down the title of Jhumpa Lahiri’s book “The Interpreter of Maladies” as “The Translator of Disease”.

A national newspaper ran a story on January 10 featuring the research expenditure of public and private universities of Bangladesh.

On January 17, 1972, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was featured on the cover of Time magazine.

Getting the news of vaccine was a figurative shot in the arm for the human race plagued by an ever-evolving crown-shaped virus.

Ever since a London based agency Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) partnered with Times Higher Education to measure “academic excellence” against a host of quality indicators at the beginning of the millennium, universities all over the world have been attracted to the idea like ducks to water.

National Professor Rafiqul Islam, speaking at a virtual event organised by ULAB in remembrance of the martyred intellectuals, mentioned that the job of writing the history of the Liberation War should have been given to the universities from the start and not to the politicians.