Remusings

This is a story set in my city, Dhaka, when one autumn day in the early '90s, hundreds of people gathered outside Dhaka Central Jail in protest. They were seeking to stop the hanging of a man who was apparently on death row, within the premises. However, the problem was, the man was not in the jail at all. In fact, he never existed. When I was 8 years old, Bangladesh was a country of 120 million. Dhaka was a city of 7 million. And we all had 1 television channel we could watch - Bangladesh Television. Back then, a TV was a matter of novelty. And coloured TV sets were only the luxury of a select few in Dhaka. It was a time when people across the country were crowding around the one television set in their villages. Congregations formed inside lone huts juiced up by a stolen power line, where scores of people would gather to watch the entertainment. The magic box would bring us a select range of programming - from the state-scripted nightly news, to heavily censored 80's Ame...

We are beautiful. Together we shine. We are loud, we are music. We are dance, dance, all night. We are permanence, like love, like hope, like time. We are ephemeral, like wisps of hash smoke, Exuding like visual poetry from your lips to mine. We rise and we fall, to the moods of the skies, To the drone of the planet, to the hum of the cosmos that never dies. We live, to live hard We choose it - living hard, over hardly living. To live, is to keep moving, We understand this truth. And we pay homage to it in our dance moves. We seek moments. Moments of laughter, boisterous and great. We take our laughter with a side of stomach ache. We seek moments of ecstasy, piercing and soulful. We feed off the lifeforce of numinous truths. We seek moments of caring, compassion and tenderness. We bask in the warmth, the buzz, the fuzziness. And we seek moments of meaning. Meaning so overwhelming, that words collapse before it. Meaning so profound, that silence is its true la...

Yesterday, my city, the place of my birth and childhood, was bathed in blood and tears. Deep wounds were inflicted, during an overnight orgy of brutality and violence, in a stunning degradation of all things sacred we have ever held dear. For 13 hours the nation watched, helpless, petrified, and terrorized. The victims: They were one of us Reports that emerged first read '20 foreigners killed in terrorist attacks in Dhaka'. Even as the standoff was diffused, the narrative remained the same - ISIS militants have specifically targeted foreigners in Gulshan area, the diplomatic zone of my city. Its reiterations had reverberated worldwide by last night, when I get a call from a friend abroad. He says 'I am sorry to hear it man. A tragedy. Although it is not a direct tragedy for Bangladesh, really.' Really? Did it really make a difference? I told him how confused we were all feeling about what had just happened. Does it have to matter that apparently no Bangladeshi...

There exists an open secret in the heart of Physics, that stands to challenge all sciences of matter. It appears in the form of two theories within quantum physics, that profoundly reorient truths previously held, and shed light on the nature of reality as a whole. These theories have shaken up our understanding of the world and universe in the 20th century. Yet, oddly enough, the news of their implications seems not to have trickled down to the other disciplines as one would have expected. Nonetheless, their congruence with some of the axioms of spiritual doctrines is not to be ignored. Having abandoned the formal pursuit of the sciences at a young age, there are limitations in my grasp of these Quantum Mechanical theories. Yet, I present here approximations of my understanding, reached through casual self-education, and highlight my perception of their implications. As I understand it, the behaviour of subatomic particles, at the quantum mechanical level, demonstrate many pec...

It is obvious that there exists many definitional ambiguities with regards to the phenomenon that we call "life". Interestingly, in a world where hegemony of description is essentially the seat of power, the term has yet to be completely hijacked by the authoritative establishments under which we live today. Therefore, when I decided to Google "define life", the output was multifaceted, diverse and often vague. Nonetheless, conversation cannot be stopped short, simply for lack of exact descriptors. Among the many definitions I found, there is the scientific one (defined by the dynamism of biological processes), the pragmatic one (defined as the necessary condition to be 'alive'), the temporal one (defined as the phenomenon that occurs between birth and death), the philosophical one (defined as the existential conundrum within which we all dwell). And among the various other articulations on the net, Terence McKenna provides a definition of life that I...