It was around 7 pm in Dallas, Texas on April 27 (6 am on April 28 in Dhaka), when I received a phone call from a colleague at BRAC University.

There was every reason for Jamilur Reza Choudhury not to return to the Dacca of 1968 after completing his PhD at the University of Southampton, UK.

Dr Saadat Husain, a career civil servant of Bangladesh, passed away on April 22 at United Hospital after suffering from meningitis and renal complications.

It often takes the life of one man for a nation to wake up or to gather the courage to call a spade a spade.

It was about ten or twelve years ago that Ruhul Amin Mazumder called me one day to say, “Ramendu, I am giving you a responsibility.

A Bangladeshi pioneer departed this world on Saturday, April 4, 2020. Architect Bashirul Haq was a poet who crafted his poems with the language of brick, green, light, air, and tactility.

Abul Mansur Ahmad is a revolutionary name in the history of our culture and literature. A star in our literary firmament, he emerged at a time when society was plagued by ignorance, bigotry and superstition, and his bold messages of social reform and intellectual freedom were largely a response to that time.

February 21 is an important day for our country and for the world. This is the day when we remember the sacrifice that brave martyrs made for the Bengali language and culture.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan, the inimitable author of the sparkling “Cross Talk” column in The Daily Star and Editor of the now defunct biweekly “First News” is no more, his life cut short abruptly at the age of 60, when his full potential as a writer was yet to blossom.

This is to redeem my pledge to my friend and classmate Ambassador Harun ur Rashid and write his obituary if I survive him.

It is with deep sadness that we learned of the passing of Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, our Abed bhai.

I had my first encounter with Sir Fazle Hasan Abed in 1971 in Oxford. Abed called to inform me on the efforts by him and his group in London in support of Bangladesh’s liberation struggle.

It was in March 1979 when I met Sir Fazle Hasan Abed for the first time. He called me for a job interview. I met him at his modest office of the then Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) on Circular Road, Moghbazar.

Lord Campden is what his friends would call him, in the heady days that lie between youth and adulthood. He was a sharp dressing, cigar smoking, culture-loving European aesthete—a finance executive leading a privileged life in London, one of the great world cities.

Syed Mohammad Ali, popularly known as SM Ali, a distinguished journalist of Bangladesh, was born ninety-one years ago in this month—on December 5, to be specific—in a well-known literary family of Sylhet. His is a candid portrait of a journalist who decided early in life to devote his intellectual and writing gift to serving the nation.

Ajoy Roy has worn many hats throughout his life—as a bright scientist; professor of physics; human rights and secular activist; author; and perhaps

Sher-e-Bangla was an “institution” rather than an “individual”. So say his critics as well as his admirers.

Mohammad Shah, a well-known scholar and professor of history at University of Chittagong, died on September 29, 2019. After a fatal road accident at Hathazari, Chattogram, in which he was involved, he was put on life support, and on the eighth day in hospital, he breathed his last. What a tragedy! We, his students, couldn’t hold back our tears.

While learning how to subtract and multiply, a boy surprised his uncle, Kazi Abul Hossain, by discovering the rules of division in advance. Later, this young boy gained fame as the first statistician, scientist, educator, chess player and prominent literary figure of

In 1891, shortly after the death of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “One wonders, how God, in the process of producing forty million Bengalis, produced a man.”