On October 12, 1492, the world changed. It was a blind "date" that went awry. The poster boy of this historic(al) date is a maritime explorer, Christopher Columbus who was hell bent on finding a western route to India.

No building symbolises the advent of professional architectural education in Bangladesh during the 1960s more appropriately than the Department of Architecture building, designed by Richard Edwin Vrooman (1920-2002), at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET).

Dhaka, the capital of present day Bangladesh, is supposedly a 400-year-old city, established by Islam Khan in the year 1608 or 1610, and has also been the capital of the Mughal Subah (province) of Bengal intermittently. The city started on the banks of the Buriganga and expanded along the river.

Alongside his work as a photographer and teacher, Shahidul Alam has always spoken out for the rights of all Bangladeshis, and for free speech. He has been imprisoned for more than a month now for alleged "provocative comments". He has been repeatedly denied bail, with the next hearing likely to take place on Sunday.

In the summer of 1970, our prestigious Notre Dame College in Dhaka went on recess for three weeks. I was a student there, having recently relocated from Islamabad after my matriculation for a better prospect of a good college education.

September 12 marks the 124th birth anniversary of author Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, best known for his novel Pother Panchali. This week's In Focus explores how the devastating Famine of the Fifties was reflected in Bibhutibhushan's writings and how he humanised the suffering of the victims of this "man made holocaust".

If after thousands of years of human civilisation, we crawl on our roads in our vehicles at 7km per hour and die untimely deaths just by walking, there is something wrong with the picture.

Before my first solo photography exhibition in February 2010, I went to the Farashganj neighbourhood and walked through its narrow streets—something I had never done before. I found myself lost in the glorious past of Old Dhaka. Magnificent architectural structures built on the bank of the great Buriganga River caught my eyes. I was witnessing the decaying beauty of some of the greatest ancient buildings of Dhaka, struggling for survival in silence.

Lal Shalu ends with a storm, perhaps intended to destroy Majeed when his fellow human beings fail to exact a suitable punishment. In Tree Without Roots, however, Waliullah seems dissatisfied with this supernatural ending.

2018 is being celebrated as the bicentenary of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. As the world eerily embraces the possibilities of human cloning,

According to the World Bank in 2017, the unemployment rate in Bangladesh was 11.4 percent, far greater than that of our two largest neighbouring countries, India and China, where the rates of unemployment were 3.5 percent and 4.05 percent, respectively.

Metaphors of "war" and "tribalism" have been invariably used in writings on football by observers ranging from eminent writers like Arthur Koestler and George Orwell to professional historians and media commentators of sports.

In 1932, Tom Smith, a local councillor and Rotarian, formerly chairman of Tufnell Park FC, from London, England, founded a football club named Islington Corinthians FC in order to raise money for local charities.

Practically all the institutions of our state are institutions that we have inherited from our about-200-years of British colonial rule. Pax Britannica was intentionally designed to be of everlasting nature. In imperial Britain's imagination, the sun would never set on the British Empire.

To visit Ahsan Manzil (construction: 1859–1872; historic preservation: 1985–1989; inauguration: as a museum 1992) is to learn the colonial-era history of Dhaka. The 5.5-acre premises of this palace remain today as an architectural reminder of the elite life of the Nawabs of Dhaka during the heyday of the British Raj in the 19th and early-20th centuries.

On June 16, 1756, a young Siraj ud-Daulah led a force of some thirty thousand soldiers to attack Fort William in Calcutta, unhappy that despite his directives, the British were heavily reinforcing the fort and at the company's interference in internal politics of his province.

DAC: Dhaka is a story of Dhaka told through 25 buildings—from the Lalbagh Fort of 500 years ago to buildings barely 10 years old. Put together by architects Adnan Morshed and Nesfun Nahar, this is a fascinating account of how architecture has evolved in a city often described as a concrete jungle, perhaps even as an environmental disaster in the making.

It was the Dhaka of 1970. Unlike today, it was then a laidback provincial capital city. I was a student at Notre Dame College.

It is, of course, not an easy feat to understand the history of Bangladesh. Over the course of time, several factors have had influences on how history is perceived here. The strange geography and shifting political perimeters have constantly reshaped this region's art, culture, architecture and ways of living.

Meet Manik Bandopadhyay— wounded by the critics who had glanced at the title of his novel to dismiss it as fatalist or feudalist. Manik's tongue-in-cheek reply shows that readership is the real mandate that an author needs; engagement with the society is the real commitment that an author desires.