Essay Issue 4 — June 2024
Among Sand and Stones
By Ayaan Halder
Ayaan Halder explores marginal life, masculinity and what it means to have a home in India’s North East.
Essay Issue 4 — June 2024
The Mission of Undocking a Ship
An excerpt from the recent English translation of Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Joley Dangay
Essay Issue 3 — March 2024
Roots and Routes
Snapshot of the cultural and emotional transitions faced by a child in a foreign land. Jannat Ferdous reflects on the challenges of adapting to new environments, forming connections and the evolving concept of home and identity.
Essay Issue 3 — March 2024
Sportsman and Scholar: the Story of an Unlikely Friendship
The prologue to an unlikely friendship between an aspiring cricketer and an aesthete. Excerpted from Ramachandra Guha’s memoir “The Cooking of Books”.
Essay Issue 3 — March 2024
Music at Home: A Portrait of Provincial Life
What is the intersection of music in everyday life? Mursalin Mosaddeque on the music of chance, surprise and delight.
Essay Issue 3 — March 2024
Towards Utopia
By Sarah Islam
Anxieties of living in a metropolis in the midst of perpetual political crisis. Sarah Islam navigates the promise of a new beginning and its utopian potential.
Essay Issue 2 — November 2023
Flesh and Bone
By Ayaan Halder
Recollection of childhood memories in India’s Northeast while underscoring the communal tensions at the preamble of a meat market in Shillong.
Essay Issue 2 — November 2023
Education Reform in Bangladesh and Disenfranchised Policy Analysis
By S. B. Shams
Bangladesh’s glossy experiment in education reform involves listening to foreign experts with little local experience or importing a global solution and applying it here uncritically. But there is more to it than meets the eye.
Essay Issue 2 — November 2023
Resilience in Crisis: Bangladesh’s Covid-19 Paradox
By Jayanta Sen
A woefully unprepared health infrastructure meets a pandemic—Bangladesh’s experience with Covid-19
Essay Issue 2 — November 2023
Shonar Tori: On Questions—the Agrarian, the Literal, and the Literary
Rabindranath Tagore’s famous poem “Shonar Tori” is typically interpreted as an existential encounter between man and himself. A different reading emerges when the objects in the poem are taken literally at their historic moment.
Essay Issue 1 — October 2023
Growing Up in Red China — My Peking Days
From musings on ancient antiques, domestic and dictatorial father figures, to pristine observations, driven by child-like wonder, this essay is an exploration of the author’s memories and provides a sweeping yet nuanced lens to view Red China.
Essay Issue 1 — October 2023
All Flesh is Grass
What is it about grass that has fascinated the great American poet Walt Whitman, the transcendentalist thinkers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau? Why do grasslands on horror novels and movies have such an uncanny effect? A personal narrative meets an exploration of the arts.
Essay Issue 1 — October 2023
The Colonial Legacy of Bangladesh’s Education System
By S. B. Shams
On the evolution of the education system in Bangladesh and the subcontinent, the challenges in today’s education policy and its implementation
Essay Issue 1 — October 2023
Narsingdi/Noshundi
On reminiscing wedding feasts–this essay explore the textured versatility and jolliness of rural culinary practices, while being intertwined with humor and amusing notes on the essence of Bangladesh’s hinterlands.