Star Literature
ESSAY / Humayun Ahmed and the language of Bangladeshi novels
His written language came close to spoken language due to the primitive and original style of Bengali syntax—simple sentence structures.
Poetry / Black swan
from my blood fangs, disarrayed cold / looting my sore body / that has done so much for me, while I ached
Tribute / Remembering Melville in his bicentenary year
Melville's critics, inevitably, panned him for what he had characterised self-deprecatingly and in his frustration as his fictional "botches," although his works were rarely that.
Poetry / House of god
I wonder where God sits in that tower. I wonder whose cries are louder.
Opinion / Living a feminist killjoy life
The way we perceive the word “emotion” through the gendered lens contributes to systematic oppression because it dismisses those who fall under the umbrella of the emotional radar and it is easier to silence their voices as emotional beings because they are often, according to the patriarchal society, deemed as unstable, illogical, or disoriented.
Essay / Why Nazrul was at loggerheads with language purists
I proposed a panel at a North American Bangla literary conference. ‘Is translation itself a form of activism?’ I queried.
Fiction / The Rakshushi by Kazi Nazrul Islam
‘It’s been two years today, a full two years, and it continues to amaze me that people run for their lives the moment they see me.
ESSAY / Kazi Nazrul Islam’s short narratives
Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), was a poet, novelist, lyricist and musician in Bengali, and was popularly known as the rebel poet.
Poetry / Equality
I sing the song of equality– Of a country where fresh joy blossoms in every heart
Poetry / Oak cognacs
From moon beamed mountains To plains deltaic; In Diasporas–detached
Tribute / The poet who shook the Ershad regime
As he had actively protested against Ayub's dictatorship, and was indeed jailed, he felt compelled to protest against Ershad's dictatorship through his poetry.
‘In Extreme Need of Guidance’: Afterword
'In Extreme Need of Guidance', the book being serialised here, captures the first 16 years of writer Sultana Nahar's life. This is the Afterword by the author.
‘Bare life’ and Partition
“Can one break a country...Will the earth bleed?” asks eight-year-old Lenny in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988)–a tale about Partition. “No one’s going to break India. It’s not made of glass!”
7 minutes to midnight
In exchange for the presidential suites at the Ritz and so on, the men holding our city keys have already opened our skies to all that may come.
Crooked lines
To sit on thy laurels seems apposite, Yet to dig graves for perceptive pleasure resemble a breach Of lines bridging the things learned, unlearned.
The astounding optimism in Tagore’s songs
His words convince the listener that the world is actually a beautiful place where truth, honesty, and simplicity are the quenching clouds above a desolate desert of dry despair and monotony.
Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Gora’: From notions of purity to an all-embracing Bharatborsho
Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora, written between 1907 and 1909, reveals the ways in which Tagore addresses the all-important issues of his time—national identity formation, the coming together of people over time, and obstacles or barriers put in the way of the progress of a nation. The novel captures Tagore’s fascination with envisioning a future based on human amity or moitri, one where the powerless and the dispossessed transcend the barriers of division and distrust.
In the domain of mirth, in the realm of ecstasy
Truth and beauty reign supreme in the domain of mirth, in the realm of ecstasy. Thy glory resounds within the vast heaven, And the entire world lay at thy gem-bedecked pes. The stars, planets, sun, and the moon are impetuously
On remembering Rabindranath
One can find Rabindranath anywhere—he’s there in the words we whisper, in the tunes we hum, in the ethos we believe in, in the ideal of the human we wish we were.
Jauhar
We walk past the singing bells and our chambers, Blind to the perils beyond our walls.
