You Are a Rickshawallah

A question that comes to mind is why does a book even need a playlist? There are two solid answers.

A visit to any bookshop today will attest to the reading public’s fascination with crime (and criminals).

Reading Rahad Abir’s Bengal Hound, despite the novel being written in English, felt a lot like reading in Bangla. While no two languages can ever truly be compared, there is much to be said about seeing Bangla and Bangladesh through an English language lens.

He told the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK that he was “surprised but also not” to have won.

This week, then, we're thinking: music and books, music and literature. In print and online, we're dreaming in tunes, dancing with words, daring to merge the two.

My mother’s house is beside a lake that separates the rich and mighty of the city from a little isle of people who work for them.

I cannot, for the life of me, definitively describe what makes music. Growing up in a family where music of any form was not typically paid any reverence, my exposure to it was tunnelled into mainstream pop songs for the longest time.

As someone who is interested in Muslim novels—by which I mean novels written by Muslims about Muslims—I always feel a scholarly tug towards Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (Scribner, 1995) when speaking of the at times uneasy but mostly comfortable marriage between music and literature.

Death dwells between is and was, Riding the final particle of a fading breath.

It is odd that nowadays One seldom hears the words

The door didn’t fully click shut. That was an ordinary affair in the house because the door locked to prevent escape. But, by chance or sheer good luck, it didn’t fully lock this time. The click was off. Someone hadn’t done their job correctly. Bloody hell, no one does their jobs correctly in this godforsaken country.

It’s a truism to say that modern life is complicated, but even a couple of decades ago, it would have been hard to predict the things we are dealing with today.

In this digital age, we are processing a large amount of information everyday and it’s important to learn media literacy in order to see the bigger picture.

You land in London with £210 in your pocket. It is the year 2009. You are able to pay the first month’s rent for the room, but not the deposit. You have to share it with an acquaintance from Dhaka. He arrived a week prior.

Even if you are not a film enthusiast, chances are high that you have watched the 2022 Telegu blockbuster RRR. At the very least, you should have heard about it.

As time passed by and as the poet made an introspection in seclusion, he dug up such verses which to the reader might feel like a revelation of truth.

Rarely does a book arrive, a debut no less, that feels as inventive and accomplished as Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s The Centre. Her novel is built on the crossroads of interpretation and ownership, of the power of language and of those privileged enough to reclaim it.

Bibhuti Babu’s pen tenderly reveals the nudity of apparently disturbing feelings and emotions that we are so ashamed and afraid to accept and express.

Dickens, a literary luminary of his era, exposes the vicious cycle where hunger and desperation divide society, laying bare the inequities perpetuated by an exploitative system.