Sushmita S. Preetha

When you meet Ayub Bachchu off stage, it is easy enough to forget that he is a legendary rockstar. The signs are there, of course—in his all-black attire, the exclusive guitars that he fiddles with from time to time and the constant influx of different types of people hoping for an audience with the king of rock.

Renu Begum* can remember little of the life she had before she moved to Dhaka and joined a garments factory at the age of 12. Her father, a fisherman, had moved to Dhaka with his family in the early 90s. But there was not much an unskilled fisherman from the village could do in a city teeming with unemployed labourers who, like him, had migrated to the capital, dreaming of untold opportunities.

A year ago, when tens of thousands of destitute Rohingya, fleeing systematic violence in Rakhine State, had arrived at the outskirts of the small tourist town of Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh, locals had opened up their hearts and their homes to their “Muslim brothers and sisters” from neighbouring Myanmar.

There is a need for a descriptive narrative as opposed to a simplistic narrative. The Fhuljaan story is a clear example. Also the issue of anonymity vs confidentiality—do we anonymise these accounts or keep it confidential or publicise these names? I went for anonymising, but many of these women said, "these are my words, why isn’t my name there?"

Banu Begum, a 38-year-old garment worker, leaves home at 7.30 in the morning, drops off her two daughters at a nearby madrasa and then walks to her factory a few kilometres away.

People tell her she is lucky to be alive, to have escaped the “clutches of death”. They tell her to “count her blessings” for making it out of the rubble that was once Rana Plaza, with her limbs intact. They remind her of all those who didn't share her fate.

1971, for families torn apart or displaced by the war, was a time of profound uncertainty, of not knowing where or how their loved ones were, of waiting for news – any news – good or bad.

The word “development” - eliciting as it does grandiloquent notions of progress - has become, at least in Bangladesh, something of a red herring.

Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association's (BELA) chief executive Syeda Rizwana Hasan talks to Sushmita S Preetha of The Daily

When people resist what the government would like to wholesale, impose, or force-feed as “development”, democracy seems quite at ease to quell people's resistances, violate pledges and dismiss the age-old demands of the adivasi communities.

Last week, Freedom House, an independent watchdog organisation that conducts research and advocacy on democracy, political freedom...

On the onset, it seems women are everywhere in the media. You switch on the TV, there is inevitably an attractive woman luring you

Eleven years ago, on a hot, stuffy day not unlike today, a building had come crashing down on the sweating workers of a sweater factory.

We are quite happy, thank you very much, to superficially engage with an issue and then sweep it under the rug as soon as the day is over.

AS we celebrate another Amar Ekushey, we remind ourselves of the importance of language in forming and defining our identities. We

AT the risk of sounding “anti-growth” and “anti-exports” – and heck, of damaging the “image” of the country (because, apparently,

The impassioned descriptions all collide against, but dissolve into each other – the past, present and future, stories of pain, aspiration, fear and anger compete against each other to be heard.

We must confront the uncomfortable truth that beyond paying lip-service to the “ideals of secularism and tolerance” (if that!), we have done precious little to show we care about the Hindu population of this country.

Forty-four years since independence, must we remain a caricature of a dysfunctional, postcolonial state where law enforcers...

We have been taught contradictory versions of history that are outright lies at worst and simplistic at best, to the extent that we now either disavow the atrocities of the Liberation War or use “Muktijuddher Chetona” as a pretext for justifying repressive measures and silencing dissent.