CROSS TALK
Iron grip of persecution, hunger and discrimination
Experts tell us that it should take another 150 to 170 years to close the gender pay gap around the world. Bad news for the mothers,
How can India win if Bangladesh does not?
Which between the two countries has gained more from Bangladesh prime minister's visit to India this month? The question appears no less intriguing than the long-standing debate over which came first between chicken and egg.
Who's going to save politics from money?
Bees make honey, but it's easier said than done. They have to fly 55,000 miles and visit roughly 2 million flowers to produce a pound of honey.
Cowards strung together in a daisy chain
Shame is thus the flipside of honour, and one can't exist without the other. Shameless people can't be honourable, and honourable people can't be shameless.
Terrorism was never in the DNA
The skein of yarn spun out of the Palestinian struggle, and then got twisted in the relentless Western maneuvering in the Middle East to defend Israel.
Great ideals are ghost lights at night
An increase in elevation lowers air pressure, which makes breathing difficult for a climber. The underwater world becomes increasingly blue and eventually black as a diver goes deeper.
Presidential humour and the irony of education
The President of the Republic went public with his academic records, while addressing the 50th convocation of Dhaka University on March 4.
Lies make us blind in full sight
If an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, what does a lie for a lie do to us?
Aleppo burning today, whose city is next?
Aleppo is now more than a historic city; it's the boiling point of mankind where human lives are changing into vapour. In this nether region, the forces of evil have come together.
The joy of victory and many defeats
Industry standards dictate that a flaw in the mirror is acceptable if you can't see it from a distance of ten feet. What's that significant distance for our history? How far back should we stand so that we don't see those flaws, which have divided this nation? At what distance could we tell if the distortions we see in the mirror are nothing but deformities of our own? How many more years should it take before we know which to blame between history and our very own histrionics?
Why child marriage is good for neither
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,” writes Arthur Conan Doyle in The Boscombe Valley Mystery.
Fidel Castro: The revolutionary outlived his revolution
A tyrant to some and a liberator to others, Fidel Castro of Cuba died on November 25, a decade shy of a century.
Two sides of the reversible popular choice
Thirty years after his death in Hawaii, ousted Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos got a hero's burial in Manila last Friday.
Let's not blame it on bigotry alone
If premeditated murders aren't accidental deaths, and if planned meetings aren't chance encounters, then the attacks on the minorities in Gobindaganj, Nasirnagar and Ramu aren't hate crimes.
Donald Trump's victory is a dent in democracy
As much as the world has been shocked by the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States of America, an aftershock of that earthquake is beginning to set in as we ask ourselves what happened to the hordes of pollsters, analysts and pundits who had predicted otherwise.
Two mayors, Don Quixote and the windmills
One of the insipid ironies of Dhaka City is that double mayors haven't solved a single problem.
A hypothesis test for the future of democracy
In eleven days from today, either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is going to be elected the 45th president of the United States. But, for the first time in the American history, a cloud of uncertainty is hanging over the election night since Donald Trump said he would accept the election results only if he won.
Isolation of Pakistan will not isolate terror
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has labelled Pakistan as a “mother ship of terrorism” at a summit of the BRIC nations held in the