Inevitably, Kaiser Haq’s The New Frontier and Other Odds and Ends in Verse and Prose is about the poet, his poetic predilections, and situatedness at this time of human existence. In many ways it is typical of the verse we have come to expect from our leading poet in English for a long time now, but in other ways it articulates his present-day concerns in new and striking poetic measures.
You know how that day the wind brought out/ The crazy thoughts I had in me all the while.
The title of this book suggests that it is based in Bengal but it really meanders deftly across time and space, more often than not in “mazy motion”.
Be a tree Get wet in sorrow’s shower and you’ll recover. From envy’s scorching sun gather strength
The title of the first of Professor Rehman Sobhan’s two-part memoir suggests that it is about his “years of fulfilment”; the subject matter of its sequel therefore would be about the “untranquil” years that followed.
The postcolonial and feminist lenses Chatterjee deploys in his discussion of the works of the selected women writers seem to suit his analysis of the works of these "enlightenment" period British women writers, for their biases, fixations, and anxieties often come into view then.
As my siblings and I grew up in the first half of the 1960s, the radio set was the most sought-after device in our house. Till Baba bought a television set for us towards the end of the decade, it was our main source of entertainment, news and small talk.
Younger people might find this too dated, but I will stick by what Jorge Luis Borges once said: “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of a Library!”
Empathy, the Wikipedia entry on the word tells us, includes “caring for other people and having a desire to help them; experiencing emotions that match another person’s emotions; discerning what another person is thinking or feeling; and making less distinct the differences between the self and the other.
The second volume of Dhaka University: The Convocation Speeches, 1948-1970 (Dhaka University Publications, 1989), assembled assiduously by Emeritus Professor Serajul Islam Choudhury, is an important publication like the first one for anyone trying to understand Dhaka University’s extraordinary role in the genesis and identity formation of Bangladesh.
In Dhaka University: the Convocation Speeches, a volume compiled with an introduction by Serajul Islam Choudhury in 1988, we read that DU was established by the British as a "splendid imperial compensation" for the Muslims of East Bengal (Choudhury, 26). They had wanted the current rulers of India to make up through it for the loss they felt they had suffered because of the reunion of Bengal in 1911.
In the song-lyric numbered 230 in Gitabitan, Rabindranath Tagore’s comprehensive compilation of such verse, we find his delight at capturing the loveliness of the world outside his window in a song-lyric: “I’ve caught uncatchable loveliness in rhyme’s binds—/The loveliness of a distant night-bird/Singing at a late hour of the night/ Wings crimsoned by ashoka flowers of a departed spring/And a heart filled with the fragrance of fallen flowers” (my translation).
Clouds pile upon clouds And the world darkens Why keep me waiting by the door then, All, all alone?
In “Gandhi and Nehru: The Uses of English,” an essay written by Sunil Khilnani from the 2010 collection of essays edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, A Concise History of Indian Literature in English, we are told about how the two leading figures of Indian independence not only used the English language to write back against empire, but played important roles in “the long, uneasy and interminable task of making English an Indian language.”
Soon after Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Oshomapto Atmojiboni (Unfinished Memoirs)came out in an English translation as well in the original Bangla in 2012, I heard at least a few people express their skepticism about the book’s authorship to me.
This is a must-read book for anyone worried about the vulnerability of democracy in our time and the rise of authoritarian governments everywhere.
