Few intellectuals can claim to have reached their full potential in their life. Great names are formed by great events. This is also true

Masud Sadique Chullu was laid to rest with state honour on October 17. In this issue of In Focus, friends and family of the departed express their love, respect and admiration for this patriot who had once fought and suffered for the freedom of his country.

Dhaka was frequently decorated with flyovers, expensive roadside beautification projects including bonsai galleries, and water fountains, while ordinary city people struggled hard to eke out a minimal existence. There was a lot of anger on the street.

What we call Russian revolution, from a long-term view, is a revolution in three episodes. Lenin called 1905 a "dress rehearsal" and, as Paul Dukes among others notes, he was the first to argue that October must follow on from February. So did Trotsky.

Politics, patriotism, and palliatives for economic woes—all expressed themselves centrally in terms of the land and landscape of Bengal. The new province therefore fell apart and Bengal reunited.

Philately can be a useful means of garnering revenue for the postal department and can also provide young people alternatives to engage themselves in beneficial pursuits than the ills that now surround society at large.

Adnan Morshed, Professor and Chairperson, Department of Architecture, Brac University talks to Moyukh Mahtab of The Daily Star about the idea behind the project, making university students learn from hands-on experience and the need for a developmental approach that is sensitive to the environment, while the designers highlight the core ideas they tried to portray through their designs.

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?"

Sixteen years after a series of coordinated terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda (as the story goes) shook the United States and the world, the number of questions-raised-left-unanswered has perhaps never been any higher.

I had written on Colonel Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon (1914-2006) of the Indian National Army (INA), in an article published in The Daily Star on June 19, 2017 entitled, “A Letter from the Tiger's Den.”

When I think of Tareque and Mishuk, I carry in my mind's eye the image of the two of them bent over a camera monitor reviewing the day's footage or seated together high on a crane surveying the next scene to be shot.

He chose to settle down in Narail, his home village, not to seek refuge in the bucolic distance, but to lend voice to the subaltern and to "talk back to the centre", vigilantly abrogating the colonial legacies that burden us to date.

Ahmed Sofa, known in his lifetime as a firebrand, now appears to be no less memorable for his poems. I do not know yet how posterity is going to read him. But it is all apparent now.

Mahmudul Haque wrote and remained silent equally remarkably in his lifetime. And when he wrote, he wrote productively, even intensely, with a peculiar passion untrammeled by momentary vicissitudes. He wrote most of his novels at one stretch, taking a week or two. He wrote one novel even in a single day.

When the Nuremberg War Trial began more than 70 years ago, it marked a watershed moment in international law.

Jnanendra Nath Gupta was born in 1869 in colonial Bengal. His father, Ghanashyamdas Gupta, was a district judge and, therefore, he spent his childhood in various parts of Bengal and Bihar.

We left my mother's place early to finish packing. Driving through Gulshan Road 75, punctuated by irregular lights and leafy tall trees, we reached home after 8:00pm. I lay down with a headache. Minutes later, came the sound of firecrackers. An hour later came the SMS: "Holey Artisan Bakery is under siege; situation is NOT UNDER CONTROL."

The advent of the holy month of Ramadan, ever since the year 2000 CE, reminds me of an idealistic soul, a gallant freedom fighter against British colonial rule in India, who so graciously replied to my letter, that too, from an unknown.

In a country of 16 crore people, the central offices of all government bodies and institutions are in Dhaka. The most job opportunities, the best schools, colleges, universities, healthcare options and even the services required by business operators are far more readily available here than any other place in the whole country.

“The world watched through my camera [as] this soldier shot the boy in cold blood, and his life was not in any danger at all.