I am delighted to be returning to Bangladesh in its Golden Jubilee year, and I look forward to celebrating the tremendous achievements of the past half century with friends old and new.
As is known, the current provisions of the EU’s Generalised System of preferences (EU-GSP) scheme are being revised at present in anticipation of the new scheme to be put in place as of January 1, 2024.
Upon reading the news headline for the incident I am about to discuss, I only felt a momentary, dull pain in my gut or thereabouts. Because while it is a shocking incident that would rob you of hope, the elements of the story are all too familiar to us all.
As tensions over the Taiwan Strait mount, everyone needs to think about whether war is inevitable. Ukrainian revolutionary Leon Trotsky once said: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” And if we slip into war by what World War I historian Barbara Tuchman called the March of Folly, can the Great Powers step back from mutual nuclear annihilation?
The year 2020 marked a watershed in global efforts to end tuberculosis (TB) by 2030. First, it was because, by 2020, the TB-affected countries aimed to achieve the first set of “End TB” milestones: a 35 percent reduction in TB deaths, a 20 percent
I have been feeling unwell since October 13. After the mayhem in Cumilla, I knew it wouldn’t be the last. With a broken heart, my father-in-law and I, along with my son, decided to continue with our tradition of puja visits and mandap-hopping, yet we were all deeply disturbed, witnessing the carnage unravelling with a helpless rage.
Today, on October 22, we celebrate National Road Safety Day. But why? Not why we care about safety—the devastating toll of accidents makes it clear why it is important—but why call it Road Safety Day? If we are using roads to travel from place to place, and we want to be able to do so safely, why not call it Safe Travels Day?
I was around 10 when I first heard about the idea of, as it was then known, global warming and how Bangladesh will one day go underwater as sea levels rise.
It would have gone unnoticed as another suicide of a heart-broken young woman, a forgettable statistic among the thousands of desperate individuals taking their own lives to escape some harsh reality or the other.
In the early hours of Monday morning, when most of us were tucked comfortably in our beds, eight-year-old Meem lost her entire family after the speedboat she was on crashed and overturned in the middle of the Padma river, drowning and killing 26 passengers.
The second wave of the pandemic has hit life and livelihood hard and has thrown us all into deep anxiety. For 40 million students,
One can argue that the issue of tackling climate change in Bangladesh has already achieved a whole-of-government approach, and is also rapidly moving towards a whole-of-society approach. However, our international diplomacy on tackling climate change also needs to develop both approaches.
The 2021 West Bengal assembly polls have been a tussle for power between the centre and the state government.
Elon Musk’s mission to populate Mars seems to be always on trend, even when nobody is particularly talking about it. It’s been several years since the announcement of such an endeavour, and in 2020 we’ve seen some stories about the first space crew for this grand mission (even though nothing has been finalised).
Food insecurity in Bangladesh during the pandemic is rising. Even in the best of times, millions of people in the country go hungry.
Bangla nijer meyer kachei thaaklo (Bengal has stayed with its own daughter). When Trinamool Congress (TMC) came out with the slogan “Bangla nijer meyekay chai” in February, it could not have been more prophetic.
"Last year, in February-March, a lot of experts had said that India will be the worst-affected country, there will be tsunami of cases.
As a nation Bangladeshis commemorated the golden jubilee of their independence a little more than a month ago.
