Marginalizing Sylhet and other peripheral districts is more than a regional grievance. It is a strategic mistake that weakens Bangladesh’s national economy, even as policymakers tout the country’s global competitiveness. Yet it also reveals the contradictions and idiosyncrasies in modern nation-building exercises.
Bangladesh does not lack visible women, women in campaigns, women in commemorative posters, women seated at consultation tables, women repeatedly invoked in speeches. But visibility without authority is not empowerment; it is performance.
To return to democracy, we endured another undemocratic government after removing one. During this time, there were many human rights violations, many provocations. The people of Bangladesh gritted their teeth and waited for stability.
We now know exactly where we are, but we have lost all sense of where we could be.
The masculinity crisis in Bangladesh is not a psychological issue alone. Young men possess smartphones but lack jobs, security, or agency. Powerless in real life, they become powerful on screens. Their remaining sense of control is exercised through digital domination of women’s bodies.
Certain cultural celebrations are deemed sinful by a segment, and overt religiousness seems inconsistent with culture by another group. Even in my own clan, I have seen relatives disown placing wreaths on the Shahid Minar as un-Islamic, versus those who believe that wearing a headscarf or burqa is being culturally backwards. However, I am grateful to have a place in the US where I can offer my prayers in Arabic and then pay respect to those who died defending the Bengali language, all on the same ground.
This is a silent but sure shift in how our outgoing women are viewing their freedom on the move, and prioritizing their choice of shoes accordingly. They seem to have realized that every step matters, and shoes are there for liberating, not constricting.
The night is not one thing. It is a thousand negotiations, a million small decisions about where to stand, how long to stay, who to trust. The city's soul is not a fixed thing but a process -- an ongoing negotiation between collapse and creation.
Critical thinking should not be optional, If young people grow up learning how to think -- not what to think -- the appeal of simplistic grand narratives will naturally weaken.
One institution will carry three kinds of weight at once: The grief of a country that has buried its young; the fragile hope that it can still build rules stronger than instinct; and the scrutiny of a world deciding what kind of Bangladesh it must now learn to live with.
Who is the Facebook or Instagram of this era? Which AI platforms are being deployed into children’s bedrooms, classrooms and social lives without full transparency about internal research? Which companies are already measuring how certain prompts, filters or recommendation engines affect adolescent self-image, loneliness, or compulsive use?
The Epstein files test a basic democratic claim: That no one is above the law. If the outcome is curated transparency, where victims are exposed and the influential are obscured, the test will have been failed. If the outcome is a victim-centred process, the files might finally serve the purpose they were invoked to serve
Andrew's arrest is a reminder -- imperfect, belated, incomplete -- that has sometimes been possible for a society to rebalance kinship and the law so that even the most protected men eventually face the consequences of their actions.
Bangladesh remains socially conservative in many ways, but voters demonstrated political moderation. Economic stability, welfare support, and social peace mattered more than ideological confrontation. The electorate did not reject religion. It rejected restriction. It did not embrace radical liberalism. It embraced balance.
Bangladesh has debated itself intensely this season . Now the debate shifts from imagination to implementation. Dhaka is not beyond saving. But it will not be saved by manifestos alone.
Trolling is hit-or-miss politics. It is unstable, often unserious, and frequently destructive to governance. But when it works, its impact is asymmetrical -- geometric, even gigantic-- compared to traditional campaigning.
