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.
Bangabandhu spent almost one-fourth of his nearly 55 years of life in prison. The first time he went to jail was when as a schoolboy, in his hometown of Tungipara, he and some of his friends got into a fight with Hindu leaders who had beaten up a Muslim one.
A rough count of the songs collected in Gitabitan in the section titled “Prakriti” or “Nature” reveals that Rabindranath Tagore composed about 16 songs of summer, over 100 monsoonal ones, 33 songs of Sharat or early autumn, 5 of Hemanta or late autumn, and a dozen
Having lived in the world’s pathways for a long, long time
Imagine a Japanese man in Dhaka in the first decade of the twentieth century bent on being employed in the town and ending up marrying a Bengali Brahmo woman, the daughter of a soap factory owner, who has offered him a job. Think of the woman later going to a village near Nagoya with her husband
For anyone harboring misgivings about Rabindranath Tagore but doing so with an open mind, as well as anyone who treasures his works but is realistic enough to know that though superhuman in some ways, he was human—all too human!—this is a must read book. Certainly, I found it unputdownable.
Pohela Baishakh, in other words, got momentum as a kind of counter-discourse -- a vibrant collective and spontaneous response to the damming of the Bengali nationalist consciousness by successive Pakistani military governments working in cahoots with Muslim League politicians.
Morning walks, or rather ambles, tip-toeing towards the rest of the day. One's day gathers pace seemingly hour by hour after one
An enjoyable read, Abdullah Khan's debut novel, Patna Blues is a thought-provoking and moving work as well. It is a book mostly
Marx correlates the decrease of Indian textile exports with the monopoly exerted by British muslins to India and the decimation of the population of Dhaka. To quote what he says about the impact of colonization on our city and the outcome of the fatal embrace of British colonial policy in our part of India:
In a Delhi bookshop this October, I came across Karl Marx on India. Edited by Iqbal Husain, former Professor of History at Aligarh
