Rethinking international aid practices in Bangladesh
While the pandemic was a first in recent times, there has been an international aid system in place for decades now to deal with the fallout of war, hunger, poverty, refugees, and forced displacement.
3y ago
LAILA NUR: A force of resilience
Laila Nur first stood up against the Pakistan government as a schoolgirl of only 15, just about to sit for her SSC exams in 1948.
4y ago
Lost decades in Rohingya camps
Long before August 2017, there were Rohingya refugees who lived in camps in Cox’s Bazar, who had left Myanmar decades ago.
4y ago
A city free of fear: what women voters want
A 21-year-old DU student was raped and tortured in a notoriously dark stretch of the Airport Road in Kurmitola on the evening of January 5. The lone suspect, who was arrested a few days later, had allegedly raped and mugged other women near the spot in the past.
4y ago
The misleading claims
Suu Kyi: Please allow me to clarify the term clearance operation. Its meaning has been distorted. As early as the 1950s has been used against communists. It simply means to clear an area of insurgents or terrorists.
4y ago
THE LAST HUSTLE
The soft light of the setting sun illuminates the entire section every time I walk in, mostly because I AM ALWAYS LATE. On one side white balloons hang, on another side a dart board.
4y ago
“I never start writing until I can hear the voices of the main characters in my head”
I always had a desire to write fiction from school days onwards, but ‘to be a writer’ seemed like an unattainable goal.
4y ago
Lost in documentation
A long-awaited and yet-to-be released ‘Ethno-Linguistic Survey of Bangladesh’ identifies 14 indigenous languages on the verge of extinction. Completed in 2015, this is the first large-scale linguistic survey undertaken in the country since the colonial-era ‘Linguistic Survey of India’ by George Abraham Grierson in 1928.
4y ago
July 6, 2018
Through the doors
There cannot be a book more for our times than Mohsin Hamid's Exit West which came out last year, at the peak of the European migration “crisis”. Hamid's earlier The Reluctant Fundamentalist too tackled contemporary issues of identity, Islamophobia, and disenchantment with US foreign policy, against the backdrop of 9/11.
June 29, 2018
The European Dream
Rubel Ahmed from Sylhet had gone to the UK on a short-term working holiday visa in 2009 and started working as a chef. After working at several restaurants and starting to send money home, the 26-year-old applied for leave to remain in the UK. Denied, he was detained and sent to Morton hall immigration removal centre in Lincolnshire (with others awaiting deportation) in July 2014, according to UK reports.
June 22, 2018
The Last Bastion of Traditional Boatbuilding
73-year-old Boidhonath Chondro Shutrodhar is one of the last remaining master carpenters in the country making traditional river boats. Living by the Jamuna river in Pabna, he started working at the age of around 20 under an ustad. In his early days making boats, he would earn just two taka per day.
June 8, 2018
Where does all our waste end up?
Matuail landfill, located about eight kilometres from Gulistan in the south of Dhaka, is one of two landfills serving Dhaka city. Spanning 100 acres, the site is used by the Dhaka South City Corporation (DSCC) to dispose of its municipal solid waste. Now 23 years old, it will reach capacity in a year at most. The Amin Bazar site, used by the Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC), has already expired last year. Putrid waste swarming with flies and rodents towers in hills tens of metres high.
June 1, 2018
Literature's #MeToo
The committee that decides the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature every year is in shambles. The Swedish Academy, rocked by a sexual harassment scandal against an individual close to the committee,
May 25, 2018
Sexual abuse at the hands of UN peacekeepers
In November 2015, a 14-year-old girl in the Central African Republic (CAR) said that two peacekeepers attacked her in November as she was returning home near Bambari airport. Peacekeepers at the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) base were stationed there to guard the airport and allegedly committed numerous such acts of sexual abuse and exploitation.
May 18, 2018
Bringing life into a refugee camp
Giving birth was nothing new to 32-year-old Somuda, a mother of six. The only extraordinary circumstance was that she now lived in a small shack on a hilltop of Balukhali which merges with the Kutupalong settlements to make the largest refugee camp in the world.
May 11, 2018
Being Black In Dhaka
On the busy Mirpur Road of Dhanmondi, students mill around outside a standard university building, converted from a shopping mall. Standing out, yet blending in, among the students are several Somali and Nigerians students—a small but growing body adding to foreign students studying at public and private universities in Dhaka.
May 4, 2018
OD-ing on contraceptive pills
Sadia (her name and some others in this article have been changed), 24, while preparing for her upcoming wedding was also worrying about something else—what form of birth control to use. She had been warned by her aunt against using oral contraceptive pills because of the side-effects—that she would gain weight, experience hot flashes. Sadia herself was particularly worried about the hormonal changes due to the pill. Ahead of her wedding, she chose instead to stock up on emergency pills.
April 27, 2018
How the quota reform movement was shaped by social media
The recent quota reform protests took place as much on the streets of Dhaka as it did online, particularly on Facebook. Pitched battles in the middle of the night resulted as people responded to updates in real time. Events at the University of Dhaka (DU) led to uproar spreading to other universities in the city and other major cities of the country, where the youth took up protests in solidarity as well as a shared demand that the quota system, which reserves
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