Media today has transformed into a spectacular performance focused on visibility.
What is perhaps more insidious than the acts themselves is the language that now surrounds them. The lexicon of liberation has deliberately opted for expletives.
We need to change our mindset and up our game to improve our universities’ standing.
The collective numbness contradicts the spirit with which the masses stormed the streets in July last year.
Central to the formation of the panel is the objective of minimising political interference in the selection of top university managers.
Central to the JnU crisis is a list of broken promises.
It’s easy to dismiss Dhaka as an unliveable city. The challenge is to replace that tantrum with the determination to make the city better.
The closures of academic institutions for two weeks in response to the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping the globe have caught many of us involved in the academia by surprise.
I have seen it on TV, read about it in newspapers, but never thought it would be this bad. I watched it from the deck of a launch, looking forward to a spectacular river cruise that our departmental picnic poster promised.
With the number of coronavirus cases crossing 100,000 mark, the official death toll standing at—and forever climbing over—3,652 (live update, worldometers, March 8), and the US flashing 8.3 billion green bucks to shoo away the spread, the outbreak of COVID-19 is no longer a “told-you-not-to-have-that-bat-soup-or-fox-meat” gossip.
With Imax plan-ning to supersize the Netflix streaming service, the merger of our viewing habits is in sight. Last September, there was this David and Goliath agreement between these two opposing movie services that would allow blockbuster cinemas to be made available on small screens, while fringe films under the rubric of Netflix Originals in large cineplexes.
While at the Uni-versity of Arizona, we had a visiting professor from Stanford University, Prof. Joshua Fishman.
Finally, a breath of fresh air—winds blowing through the higher stratosphere are causing some thought clouds to loosen up and shower good news on higher education.
In the 80s, one sarcastic comment—for reasons better not stated out of respect for the deceased—was aired every now and then: hurl a stone in Dhaka’s air and you are sure to hit either a poet or a crow. On the surface, it was an innocent joke about the sheer number of creatures—those who fly with their wings and those others who dream to do so with their imagination.
By the time you will be reading this piece, I “should” be on board our national carrier, Biman Bangladesh. I write “should” because nothing about Biman can be said with certainty; listen to the passenger’s mumbling at the boarding bay or lend your eyes and ears to the incidents on the aircraft itself, you are sure to get an endorsement.
I did myself a favour, as pleaded on Facebook by a colleague, and read Greta Thunberg’s chapbook, “No one is too small to make a difference.”
In the first few minutes of 2020, nearly 30 animals, mostly apes, were burnt to death in Krefeld Zoo in West Germany.
