Amiya Halder

Amiya Halder works as In-Charge for Daily Star's weekly career supplement Next Step. She has the daunting task of turning dull, sleep inducing articles into interesting content. She often steps in to create info-graphs which happens to be one of her specialties. Amiya has a recurring worry that her arms are too short for taking selfies, rather like the Tyrannosaurs Rex. This IBA student refuses to let her poor selfie taking skills hamper her team building activities. Most of that involves accepting LAN games of NFS and beating the guys most of the times at races. It's called team building exercise and she practices what she edits.

Nobody the Girl

It was the hour of waking on Winter Solstice and yet a radiant sun was rising on the already bustling borough of Colony. From the first glimmer of sunlight on the shortest day of the year, the citizens of Colony would take the Choice, till the World were momentarily plunged under the cover of darkness. Once the sun rose on the new season, a new Commandant would be named.

5y ago

Invoking the “Mantoiyat”

“This is a particularly timely film and in many ways, and perhaps self-contradicting ways, a comforting film.

6y ago

ALTERED CARBON

Although it's been out for over two months, the visually-thrilling, ultra-pulp tech-noir Altered Carbon has enjoyed relatively little fanfare. Created by Shutter Island screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis, Altered Carbon is set in a depraved new world 400 years in the future. Human consciousness now exists on “stacks”, and if you're rich enough, it can be downloaded and

6y ago

Priyabhashini's orchestrations of carbon

That Ferdousi Priyabhashini's driftwood creations are more sentient than inanimate becomes apparent the second you enter Shilpangan, a contemporary art gallery tucked away in a cosy corner of Dhanmondi 13. Her current exhibition, Megher Shongi, is a tribute to the monsoon, her most loved of the six seasons, and the inspiration for her woodwork orchestrations. With boats and boatsmen, long-legged water-birds, and stranded figurines, her characters and forms look like they've emerged straight out of a tempest.

6y ago
Tickle your intellect this Lit Fest

Tickle your intellect this Lit Fest

It's that time of the year again—to soak in the muted, winter sun on the dewy early-morning lawn, sipping shatkora and lotkon sherbets as you give up body and soul to rapturous lines of poetry, all eyes and ears for the literary luminaries and cultural icons who grace the grounds of Bangla Academy this weekend-and-a-half as Dhaka Lit Fest (DLF) returns for its third year.

7y ago

Rules of engagement

A nine-to-five workday spent dangerously close with the opposite sex in a sequestered office cubicle makes it painstakingly difficult for things not to get steamy once in a while.

7y ago

Tall, handsome and deathly—the enduring allure of vampires

Growing up, vampires were never quite the James Deans of the undead that they are today. Vampires that I would encounter were middle-aged, had an unwholesome pallor, the same coiffure as Alfalfa from The Little Rascals, and god-awful vaguely-European accents.

7y ago

Phoenix of Longadu

“After the landslide, it became all too clear where the aid was headed. Of course there would be an inclination to send relief to the Bengalis,” says Mrittika Kamal, Director of Terracotta Creatives and one of the curators of Phoenix of Longadu, a charity exhibition, held between October 16 and 19 at Drik Gallery, dedicated to raising funds for the affected families.

7y ago
October 13, 2017
October 13, 2017

Epic fails: Jack Dorsey

The founder of Twitter and biggest US mobile payment chip service, Square, faced a heavy blow when he was kicked out as CEO of the microblogging site for his poor management style.

October 13, 2017
October 13, 2017

Is spitting it out the best way to break bad news?

People pick up on when they're being buttered up for bad news—it only amps up their anxiety. Why make a person go paranoid waiting for you to get the point just because you can't find the right words?

October 6, 2017
October 6, 2017

Leaving no one behind: “Hijra Lives in Bangladesh”

"When I was a volunteer for UNYSAB, a bunch of us were distributing sandals to rickshaw pullers who didn't have any. A group of hijras came along and took the sandals away, but a little while later, they returned and apologised for having done so. Assuming we were NGO workers, they said: 'Rickshaw pullers have parents, children, siblings, a family. We have nobody. Can't you do something for us too?'”

September 22, 2017
September 22, 2017

Job hunting? Get a personal website

With your résumé and your cover letter, you have to tell hiring managers all about your skills. But why tell them, when you can show them?

September 22, 2017
September 22, 2017

Television for the bibliophile

It is often said that the book is better than the movie, and it is certainly not every day that a movie improves on the novel that inspired it, or that a masterpiece like Rashōmon springs out of the mind of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and into the hands of Akira Kurosawa to mould into the vivid piece of storytelling and cinematic brilliance that it is. With filmmakers determined to take a shot at breathing new life into literary greats, here are six exciting on-screen adaptations you don't want to miss this fall.

September 15, 2017
September 15, 2017

What happened where [INFOGRAPHIC]

We map the shortest possible distances Rohingya families needed to take to reach Kutupalong Refugee Camp, as well as the destruction at Maungdaw and Rathedaung.

September 8, 2017
September 8, 2017

The 'other' side of the Wall

Envisaged as vast, impregnable structures in their inception, walls have been proclaimed to defend realms and their inhabitants from invaders for time immemorial. The same can be said to apply to the Wall in George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, televised on-screen as Game of Thrones.

September 8, 2017
September 8, 2017

Secrets to success for the fresh grad from C-suite hotshots

Top managers in Bangladesh on what they really look for in new recruits.

September 1, 2017
September 1, 2017

A thousand gardens

Where have the fish in the Buriganga gone? Bubbling with rich, garish tones that can belie the grim reality, the waters of the Buriganga, once the lifeblood of the capital, tell our very own tale of woe.

August 25, 2017
August 25, 2017

3 more ways to motivate yourself [INFOGRAPHIC]

Why are we so good at thinking of what to do but terrible at doing them?