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In Golden: Bangladesh at 50 (University Press Ltd, 2021) edited by Shazia Omar, 23 of Bangladesh’s eminent writers and poets—including Kaiser Haq, Arif Anwar, Shabnam Nadiya, Farah Ghuznavi, and others—find home for their varied expressions of Bangladeshi life, culture, history, love, hate, as well as the lulls that defined our quarantined existence this past year.
Desi Delicacies: Food Writing from Muslim South Asia (Pan Macmillan India, 2020) is a delightful anthology edited by Claire Chambers—no stranger to the lifestyle of Muslims.
In memory of eminent writer, scholar, academic, diplomat, and freedom fighter Professor Abu Rushd Matinuddin (1919-2010), the Abu Rushd Memorial Committee has decided to introduce the Abu Rushd Literary Award from this year. Any novel published in Bangladesh in the last three years will be considered for this year’s award. The winner will receive one lakh taka and a certificate of recognition.
The Water Dancer (Random House, 2020) follows the life of one Hiram Walker, whose biological mother is a slave and father a slaver. Born as a slave bound to the shackles of a plantation in Virginia, Hiram is unique from the others who work beside him. He has a sharp and photogenic memory. And as he grows up with a pang of grief left by the absence of his mother, he discovers another life-changing superpower: Conduction, a form of teleporting through time and space and inspired by Harriet Tubman’s phenomenal work of secretly ferrying slaves to freedom. His extraordinary powers bring him under the mercy of some privilege—like private tutoring alongside his white half-brother—that other slaves cannot enjoy.
In the American South, until the 1960s, Jim Crow laws legalised racial segregation in every sphere, starting from education to transportation. It took the Civil Rights Movement and a series of Supreme Court decisions and laws passed by the Congress to finally dismantle the nightmarish structure that legally kept African-Americans shackled well into the 1960s. The shadow of these laws loiters even today.
After three successful years of sehri-time storytelling, Sehri Tales is back with their annual month-long “boot camp for creativity”. The fourth iteration started off with the prompt “Mercy” on April 14, 2021.
Bangladesh, the former East Pakistan, may have separated from India in 1947, but the centuries of shared history, society, politics, culture, and religion remain etched in the countries’ fabric. Some decades later, Bangladesh, too, carved out a space for themselves, becoming an independent nation with the help of India’s military operations in December of 1971. Thus, the Liberation War connected Bangladesh and India as historic allies, a relationship that has carried over through the years, with varying congeniality. Fifty Years of Bangladesh-India Relations: Issues, Challenges and Possibilities (Om Publications, 2021), evaluates these “contested” relations between the two countries from various perspectives, from both a contemporary and historical standpoint.
I’ve lost count of the number of people who have recommended Jennifer Mathieu’s best-selling book Moxie (Roaring Brook Press, 2017) to me. All I ever saw about the book were torrents of positive reviews on social media, one following another.
All things colourful make up the Bangla New Year—boisterous celebrations of nature, art work, music, food, the quintessential Bengali warmth, and the Mongol Shobhajatra as its crowning jewel.
Very few visitors were seen on the last day of the Boi Mela yesterday, it being a working day.