Weekly Bangladesh Policy Outlook: Analysis, Truth, Debate.
Reading for pleasure has been quietly disappearing from the daily lives of young people in Bangladesh. While literacy rates have improved an access to information has expanded, the habit of reading books, especially outside the classroom, has weakened considerably. Understanding why this is happening requires looking closely at both behavioral tendencies and deep-rooted cultural attitudes…
Every year on 16 August, Bangladesh pauses to honour a man whose guitar strings carried the restlessness, heartbreak, and hope of an entire generation. Ayub Bachchu, known simply as AB, was born in 1962 in Patiya, Chattogram, and passed away on 18 October 2018, yet he remains the country’s most enduring rock icon. He was…
Read More “The Guitarist Who Taught Bangladesh to Rock: Remembering Ayub Bachchu” »
On the twenty ninth of August this year, Bangladesh marks fifty years since the death of Kazi Nazrul Islam, the man the nation calls its national poet. Half a century is long enough to judge whether reverence has been matched by responsibility. A recent article in The Oniket Bulletin, written by Tanzina Fardoush, reminded readers…
Read More “Fifty Years On: Has Bangladesh Truly Honored Its Rebel Poet?” »
Fifty four years after independence, Bangladeshi cinema has gathered a loyal domestic audience, kept its theatres breathing, and scattered a handful of critically lauded works across international festivals. What it has never done is arrive. Neighboring India, Iran, and South Korea each built recognizable national film brands; Bangladesh, after half a century of intermittent brilliance,…
Read More “Flickering Without Burning: Why Bangladeshi Cinema Keeps Failing the World Stage” »
In an age when people cross borders more easily than cultures do, questions of identity take on new urgency. For millions of Bengalis dispersed across continents, the challenge is not merely preserving heritage but finding meaningful ways to live it, share it, and pass it on. Against this backdrop emerges Atharo Ana Bangaliana (AAB), a…
Read More “Atharo Ana Bangaliana: Reimagining Bengali Identity for a Global Age” »
This article examines a question Bangladesh has avoided asking directly for too long: what happens to a nation’s cultural life when its singers, actors and film producers become instruments of party politics rather than independent voices. It looks at how state patronage, weak institutions and the absence of legal safeguards allowed this fusion to take…
The purpose of this article is to examine why Bangladeshi Bangaliana has struggled to develop a cohesive global presence despite the rapid growth of Bangladeshi communities across the world. While migration has created vibrant expatriate populations on every continent, it has not produced a connected cultural network capable of transmitting language, literature and identity across…
Read More “The Scattered Home: Why Bangladeshi Bangaliana Needs a Global Network” »
Humayun Ahmed remains the most widely read Bangla novelist of the post-independence era, a writer whose stories defined how an entire nation understood itself. Born in 1948 in Mohanganj, Netrokona, and raised across the district towns of a young country, he grew up in a household where literature and public service were inseparable. His father,…
Bangladesh holds a heritage inventory that few countries in South Asia can match on paper. Three UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the Mosque City of Bagerhat, the Buddhist Vihara ruins at Paharpur, and the Sundarbans mangrove forest, sit alongside seven Intangible Cultural Heritage designations and a growing tentative list that includes the archaeological landscapes of Mahasthan…
Read More “Can Bangladesh Compete Internationally on Heritage Tourism?” »
Following on from “Comilla’s Handicrafts: Weaving Modernity into a Canvas of Tradition”, an article published in the Oniket Bulletin, this article examines why Comilla’s centuries old handicraft traditions, terracotta and pottery from Mainamati and Bijoypur, and khadi weaving from Chandina, have not achieved the international brand recognition that comparable craft traditions enjoy elsewhere in the…
Read More “Comilla’s Handicrafts and the Missing Global Brand: Lessons from Europe and India” »