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...

In Berlin, you can actually feel the air fossilized in its history. While one can argue about the phenomenological contradictions inherent in that, the sensation of it is undeniable. The city has seen itself as the focal point of geopolitical watersheds that have shook the foundations of human civilization in the last few centuries - blinding flashes of human achievement, alongside some of the darkest moments of human history. Keeping aside the subjective judgments on these historically gargantuan episodes, Berlin has been "the time" and "the place" of immense significance, many times over. I had heard that the Germans loved their beer. But their newfound pride in their wine was news to me. Therefore, although I found it strange to be having the grape brew one evening in Berlin, Professor I. F. was a man of very specific tastes - namely vino rojo. Sitting on the window ledge of a spacious apartment in Wedding, we had been mumbling through the didactics and reveri...

boundary ˈbaʊnd(ə)ri/: a limit of something abstract, especially a subject or sphere of activity. "a community without class or political boundaries" The human story on this planet can be viewed essentially as a progressive creation of boundaries, with the intended consequences of facilitating interpretation and bringing meaning to the cosmic data. In that sense, history then is not simply a "trendless fluctuation" or "random walk" of events, but more like a sprint in a specific direction - resulting in the creation of progressively more complicated boundaries. At an individual level, the first imposition of a boundary in our being, is in the very act of being born. By which, each and every one of us, without intention or consent, are destined to begin our journey by setting the most ephemeral (yet the very real) of all boundaries - between life and death. It is a preconditioned boundary, necessary for the possibility of the phenomenon of li...