Zakir Kibria is a writer, policy analyst, entrepreneur based in Kathmandu, Nepal. Chronicler of Entropy | Chasing next caffeine fix, immersive auditory haze, free falls. Collector of glances. “Some desires defy gravity.” Email: [email protected]
The Western adventurer, armed with a historically cultivated obsession and corporate capital, comes to a land where the mountains are woven into the spiritual and daily life. He relies on the unparalleled skill and strength of the Sherpas, whose names are too often relegated to the fine print of history, to achieve a personal zenith.
I am profoundly thankful that Senehma exists. And I am profoundly terrified that she does. Because the world we have built demands that we learn to doubt miracles, just so we can survive the unrelenting noise of the horrors.
Why the $6 billion expressway must be financed by the people who will drive it -- and what the Global South can teach the West about infrastructure.
The binary is brutally simple. Nations that negotiate as supplicants get extracted. Nations that negotiate as sovereigns get developed.
When a person dies at a railway crossing, we do not abolish the railways. When a pilgrim is trampled at a religious gathering, we do not demolish the shrine. We install gates. We create safety protocols. We manage risk. In Bagerhat, none of this was attempted.
The images of her with the cat and the milk aren't just pictures. They are a manifesto for a very specific kind of dignified living -- a life where glamour and domestic intimacy sit side-by-side, looking off into the middle distance, accepting the world exactly as it is.
But the Strait of Hormuz never read your book. It does not care about Hegel. It does not care about the "universalization of liberal democracy." It cares about the presence of a warship within 500 kilometers of its shores -- and it has learned to fire a missile that can make that warship regret its existence.
The compact’s energy architecture amplifies rather than mitigates geopolitical shock exposure. A rational energy-security doctrine would diversify suppliers, transit routes, and contract structures; this agreement funnels us toward a single, unbuilt source over which we possess zero strategic control.
This was hauntology made personal -- the past haunting the present -- but my ghosts were .mp3s, glitching in the digital afterlife.
The Cyber Security Acts vague language, a $190 million surveillance machine, and a political culture that hasn't reformed itself: This is the dystopian architecture of a pre-crime reality.
In 840, the mayor always wins. The machine keeps humming. The tenders keep flowing. But the film exists. Someone made it. Someone watched it. Someone wrote about it. And that, perhaps, is where the next story begins.
A government that reduces VIP protocol but continues to evict vendors without rehabilitation has merely exchanged one performance for another.
Albert Camus wrote that we must imagine Sisyphus happy but for those caught in Bangladesh’s cycles of performative governance, happiness is not the point. Each new deadline, each “operation,” each raid is a boulder pushed up the hill. The problem rolls back down, and we begin again.
We now know exactly where we are, but we have lost all sense of where we could be.
