From a very young age, Gazi Shahabuddin was a voracious reader. He would read whatever he could lay his hands on.

Has anyone asked what Bhutan—the tiny kingdom hidden in the folds of the eastern Himalayas—has to say?

Interestingly though, most people in Bangladesh would not consider mental health a disease. It raises hope, therefore, that the conversations about mental health, are beginning to occur in the context of general health issues as has been on the occasion of World Health Day on the 7th of April this year.

Even after long seventy years of the most catastrophic event of the last century, the jury is still out on whether the bombings of the two Japanese cities were justified, morally or strategically.

Dhaka is a paradox. The more we build assuming we are “developing,” the more we dig ourselves into an urban mess: Transportation is a chaos. Travelling is a nightmare. Khals vanish, and roads turn to khals. Public space is non-existent. Housing is in disarray.

First, the daughter – a student – was kidnapped, and then raped. As if that was not enough, she and her mother were then tortured, mentally and physically, for hours, and their heads shaven in an attempt to humiliate and hush them up. In the end, they were asked to leave the town and never come back.

Judicial decisions have become arbitrary since the last presidential election when the court interfered in the process and suspended the Election Commission and the Deputy Election Commission. Contempt of Court is used as a tool to silence those who criticise the judiciary's proactive policy and its open siding with the government. A bill criminalising defamation was passed by the parliament undermining free speech and media freedom.

Southeast Asian countries today are far more integrated than they have ever been in the modern history of the region, but ASEAN has some way to go before it can call itself a real community.

Siddiqur Rahman, while protesting, was injured in his eyes by a tear gas canister in yet another case of police brutality. One eye will never see again, another one is damaged.

There is no doubt that Sri Lanka's President Sirisena's visit to Dhaka earlier this month and the 14 Agreements and MOUs signed with the Bangladesh government, mark a new and significant advance in bi-lateral ties.

First things first, let's recall that a current account shows the flow of goods and services, primary and secondary income between a country and the rest of the world.

A Facebook post shared by a man named Rushad Faridi caught my eye recently. He shared an article with an intriguing title, which he had written for Prothom Alo. But it wasn't the article that grabbed everyone's attention at first. It was the fact that Faridi, a professor in the economics department at Dhaka University, was placed on forced leave less than a week after the article was published on July 7.

When Vichy France's puppet government headed by Philippe Pétain rounded up thousands of Jews for deportation to Nazi camps, it was to protect his imaginary sovereignty. France was under Nazi occupation, but Pétain cared so much about his country's pseudo-sovereignty that he would carry out the deportation instead of letting his Nazi masters take the trouble to do so.

It was a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman of good breeding must be in search of a life led in humble anonymity.

On the eve of the May 2016, West Bengal Assembly elections, Arun Jaitley shared his campaign experiences with some editors. When

It's been a month since heavy torrential downpours caused a landslide and mudflow in the hill districts of Rangamati, Chittagong and

. On one side, commentators are rightly holding the government accountable to generate enhanced youth-based human capital growth. However, on the other side, we also need to look at non-public policy factors which are preventing individuals in Bangladesh from being employed.

It is sickening how rape is becoming a regular occurrence in our society and there is a report of an incident of sexual violence every day from various parts of the country, each more vicious and more heinous than the one before. The victim profile is so diverse indicating that no girl, no woman is safe. When I started writing this article, the number of rape cases reported in 2017 was 93. By the time this article was ready for publication, that figure had risen to 138. This was within a matter of 4 weeks. I cannot help asking myself, what is happening? Why the rise in sexual violence? Why have the men in our country become so cruel?

Under President Donald Trump's leadership, the United States took another major step toward establishing itself as a rogue state on June 1, when it withdrew from the Paris climate agreement. For years, Trump has indulged the strange conspiracy theory that, as he put it in 2012, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” But this was not the reason Trump advanced for withdrawing the US from the Paris accord. Rather, the agreement, he alleged, was bad for the US and implicitly unfair to it.

On July 1, 2016 Faraaz Ayaaz Hossain, Abinta Kabir and Tarishi Jain lost their lives along with 19 other hostages and two police officers in the worst terrorist attack of our history. They were bright young individuals, brilliant students and most of all, the best of friends.