• Still waiting for a free press

    In March 1923, acting Governor General of India John Adam promulgated an ordinance requiring compulsory licensing for all newspapers and periodicals.

  • Freethinking and Islam, not an unlikely coalition

    Today marks the 44th anniversary of the Pakistani army's systematic killing of pro-liberation Bengali intellectuals, of some of the brightest minds behind the political movement that fought for the very civil liberties that we, as Bangladeshis, now proudly claim to have.

  • Commemoration: Reading memorials as cultural texts

    LITERATURE on commemoration has rapidly grown in the past twenty years. Scholars from a variety of disciplines, for example, from archeology, architecture, history, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, geography – and the more inclusive field under the rubric of Cultural Studies – are mapping the significance and role of “memory “. Commemoration is defined as a “call to remembrance“.

  • From the archives: Tariq Ali's reflections on Muktijuddho Jadughar

    When one looks at the magnificent edifice that stands out amidst the other buildings at Agargaon,

  • Method in Madness

    Bangladesh paid a heavy price for its freedom. There are few nations which have to make such sacrifice for its freedom.

  • Identity Crisis: Current Challenges

    GLOBALLY every individual has two primary identities national and religious, which usually do not contradict with each other. Pakistan was created in 1947 as the homeland of Muslims of India based on the two nation theory in contravention to fundamental principles of cultural and historical basis of nationhood. Most countries of the world are nation-states where people of different faiths pursue their religious practices.

  • Recalling the Martyred Intellectuals

    An intellectual is a person who tries to understand the world and, not less importantly, to communicate his/her understanding to others around them.

  • AN ODE TO FREETHINKING

    44 years to the day, we lost some of the brightest stars of our intellectual firmament to the marauding Pakistani occupation forces.

  • The struggle of memory against oblivion

    He is Mirek in Milan Kundera's novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, who observed, “The struggle of man against power is the

  • GOD IN THE GOBLET

    Golden Bengal, what new fruits will your Fertile fields yield

  • Remembrance: Shahid Ghyasuddin Ahmed

    As a student of Dhaka University I was fortunate enough to come in contact with a remarkable person like Mr. Ghyasuddin Ahmed, an

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