November 15, 2025

On a late autumn afternoon in Rangpur, I sat quietly at the back of a cramped classroom as a 17-year-old girl named Samia solved an accounting problem faster than the teacher could erase the board. She didn’t boast. She didn’t seek praise. She simply worked with the calm precision of someone who knew exactly who she wanted to become. Later, on a long, rattling bus ride back to Dhaka, I found myself replaying our conversation—her dream of becoming a chartered accountant, her determination to build a firm that would hire women “who deserve better than the world gives them.” She said it lightly, but her conviction stayed with me long after the landscape faded into darkness. A week later, in Khulna, I met two sisters—Nusrat and Nuri—who ambushed me with questions about scholarships, interview skills, and how to convince parents that girls can build careers in technology. Their energy was electric. Their curiosity was relentless. If ambition made a sound, the room would have been thunderous. Again and again, across districts and classrooms, their faces returned to me: bright, articulate girls with sharper plans than most young men their age. Girls with focus. Girls with hunger. Girls with momentum. And yet, months later, when I walked through offices, factories, leadership workshops, and professional meetings across the country, those girls were nowhere to be found. It was as if someone had switched off a constellation. That absence—silent but unmistakable—began to haunt me. Where were the girls who once sat in front rows? Where were the ones who topped their classes, carried their families’ hopes, and spoke with a confidence that suggested they were ready to break barriers? The uncomfortable truth is that these young women do not vanish.They are erased—slowly, quietly, systemically. The Promise That Fades Too Soon Bangladesh’s girls excel early. They outperform boys in almost every academic category. They take school more seriously. They articulate career goals clearly. They thrive in structured learning. When you speak to them, you encounter clarity; when you speak to their male peers, you often encounter improvisation. And yet the pipeline that starts full in classrooms becomes nearly empty by the time you reach boardrooms. This is not because women lack competence.It is because the system lacks courage. The Barriers Have Familiar Names The obstacles facing young women in Bangladesh are depressingly predictable. Family expectations arrive first:“Help in the kitchen.”“Don’t stay out too late.”“Girls must be careful.”“Career is important, but marriage is more important.” These expectations are presented as love, but they operate as limitations. Girls are overloaded with domestic responsibilities not because they lack ambition but because society assigns them an endless list of unpaid, invisible jobs. Then societal norms follow. Women are expected to choose “safe” careers, avoid late-night work, prioritise family reputation, and carry the burden of everyone’s honour except their own. And finally, organisational biases seal the fate.A young woman is passed over for leadership because she “might get married soon.”She is denied a project because she “might struggle with travel.”She is excluded from management tracks because “women don’t handle pressure well.” Talent is not the problem.Opportunity is. The Vanishing Act The disappearance is not dramatic. It is incremental. A girl drops out after her HSC because marriage is arranged “just in time.”Another completes a degree but cannot move cities for work.A third joins a company but resigns after childbirth because flexible work arrangements simply do not exist.A fourth stays in her job but is kept away from leadership roles through the soft violence of discouragement. In every case, the system extracts brilliance and returns confinement. During a late-night ride back home after a research trip, I stared at my own reflection in the bus window and wondered:How many Samias, Nusrat, and Nuris have we lost?How many dreams have we domesticated into silence?How many ambitions have we negotiated out of existence? The answer is this: an entire generation’s worth. The Ambition Gap That Should Alarm Us Fieldwork reveals something striking. Boys are drifting; girls are planning. Boys hesitate; girls prepare. Boys imagine success vaguely; girls map it meticulously. If this trend continues, Bangladesh will become a country where half its workforce is discouraged and the other half disengaged. It is not a talent crisis.It is a translation failure.We simply do not translate girls’ early brilliance into long-term opportunity. What Must Change The solutions are neither mysterious nor complicated.They require willpower—not workshops. Most importantly, celebrate women’s achievements publicly and consistently, so girls grow up seeing leadership not as exception but as expectation. The Cost of Ignoring Reality If we fail to act, Bangladesh will lose something far more valuable than GDP points or productivity—we will lose the very women who could transform this nation. A country cannot grow if half its potential workforce is confined to kitchens or silenced in office corridors. The tragedy is not that girls disappear.The tragedy is that we let them. Reclaiming the Light So where do these bright young women go? Into early marriages.Into unpaid domestic labour.Into organisational corners where ambition goes to die.Into cultures that fear female independence.Into silence—because silence is what society trains them to carry. But here is the truth: they do not disappear willingly.They disappear because the world around them dims the light. If we want the constellation to glow again—if we want to see the bright, fierce, determined women we keep losing—we must stop demanding that they shrink. Bangladesh’s future is not male.It is not female.It is the brilliance we allow to live. Let us not extinguish another star.

Why an Exhausted Nation Believes It Is Working Harder Than It Actually Is If effort alone produced prosperity, Bangladesh would be a global superpower. We are a nation that works 56 hours a week, often more—an impressive statistic until you pair it with the uncomfortable question: working on what? Because beneath the surface of long hours and heroic exhaustion lies a secret we’re too ashamed to confront: much of our labour is performative. Bangladeshi productivity, as officially measured, is an illusion held together by tired bodies and tired traditions. Walk into any office, and you’ll find employees glued to their desks long after the workday ends. Not because they are needed, but because leaving on time is interpreted as disloyalty. Workplaces treat lateness as a crime and presenteeism as a virtue. Managers equate visibility with efficiency, turning the office into a stage where everyone acts busy but nobody gets to be effective. This culture was not born accidentally; it is a synthesis of history, hierarchy, and habit. For decades, advancement depended on obedience, not output. Employees learned to impress through sacrifice—long hours, skipped lunches, unused leave days—rather than through innovation. Employers, in turn, grew addicted to this martyrdom. Productivity became a moral performance, not a measurable outcome. The consequences are devastating. We have a workforce that is chronically exhausted yet chronically underperforming. Creativity collapses under pressure. Decision-making slows to a crawl. Meetings multiply like bacteria in a warm room. Every organisation becomes a theatre of busyness, where activity replaces achievement. Meanwhile, the global economy moves in the opposite direction. Companies measure impact, autonomy, and smart systems. Bangladesh measures sufferings. We confuse endurance for excellence, mistaking burnout for brilliance. And so a young professional who works 14 hours a day is celebrated, while another who finishes the same work in six hours is suspected of laziness. The emotional cost is even greater.People skip family events to attend unnecessary meetings.Mothers hide their fatigue to prove they’re “committed.”Young men apologise for wanting weekends.Women are penalised for needing flexibility.Everyone privately resents the system but publicly complies with it. This masquerade is particularly cruel to the youth. They enter the workforce full of enthusiasm, only to be taught the first rule of adulthood: efficiency is punished, compliance is rewarded. Within a few years, bright minds dim down, creativity is boxed in, and ambition is replaced by fear. Many quit—not because they lack dedication, but because they are drowning in a culture that confuses productivity with punishment. The irony is that Bangladesh desperately needs actual productivity. The world is moving toward automation, AI, knowledge economies, flexible work, outcome-driven cultures. Meanwhile, we cling to outdated managerial habits invented during the colonial era—when the goal was not output, but surveillance. But change is possible. We need workplaces that measure outcomes, not hours.Leadership that values efficiency, not ego.Policies that reward innovation, not imitation.Cultures that respect evenings, weekends, and human limits. And above all, we must let go of the national obsession with appearing hardworking. A productive nation is not one that works itself to death.It is one that works smart, thinks boldly, and rests when needed. Bangladesh deserves that future.Its workers desperately need it.And its economy cannot advance without it. It is time to tear off the mask.

When a Rat, a Refugee, and a Locked-Down Paris Apartment Became a Battlefield for Memory Exile is not movement. It is suspension. A state of being uprooted yet unplanted, displaced yet not allowed to settle. For Pinaki Bhattacharya, physician, blogger, and dissident, exile became both a punishment and an unexpected canvas. And in that suspended state—far from home, stripped of safety, watching his country from the silence of a Paris apartment—he wrote Fulkumari, a novel that is less a story and more an act of defiance stitched into prose. The pandemic locked the world indoors, but for Bhattacharya, the lockdown carried a different weight. He was already living in political lockdown—unable to return to Bangladesh, marked as an enemy by a state allergic to dissent, punished for the crime of telling the truth loudly and too well. So he sat alone in his apartment, haunted by news from home: disappearances, censorship, intimidation, the slow suffocation of public debate. And then a rat appeared. In another writer’s hands, a rat would be a nuisance. In Bhattacharya’s hands, it became a companion, a witness, a metaphor, and eventually the title character—Fulkumari. She was scrappy, persistent, uninvited. More importantly, she was unkillable. Bhattacharya named her not out of affection, but out of solidarity. In his loneliness, she became proof that life, no matter how marginalised, insists on surviving. Thus began one of the most quietly radical literary acts to come out of Bangladesh in years. Fulkumari is not merely a novel. It is a chronicle of exile, state repression, and the unbearable weight of remembering. Like all great political fiction, its power lies not in anger but in clarity. Through the narrator’s conversations with the rat, we are taken into the memories the state wants erased: the betrayals of 1971, the distortions in textbooks, the lives shattered for inconvenient truths. The rat becomes a stand-in for the reader—listening, absorbing, refusing to look away. This dynamic echoes a lineage of global literature born from displacement.Solzhenitsyn wrote from the shadow of the Gulag.Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote from imprisonment.Roberto Bolaño wrote from exile that never ended.Bhattacharya writes from the limbo of political banishment. What connects them is not geography but defiance.Their survival weapon is the same: narrative. The genius of Fulkumari lies in its structure. The novel blends satire with sorrow, absurdity with accuracy, tenderness with accusation. Bhattacharya dissects the authoritarian playbook: the rewriting of history, the manufacturing of fear, the criminalisation of dissent. But he does so with a calmness that is more terrifying than rage. Rage is expected. Documentation is dangerous. He lets the rat speak by listening to her, and in doing so, he lets truth speak by refusing to smother it. The rat and the refugee form an ecosystem of resistance—two creatures pushed to the margins, surviving through memory, refusing erasure. There is also a deeper grief running through the narrative: the grief of distance. Exile magnifies the pain of witnessing injustice because you cannot reach it, cannot intervene, cannot even shout into the streets that once felt like home. Bhattacharya writes with the ache of someone trapped in safety while the people he loves remain in danger. It is the paradox of exile: you escape, but you never stop burning. Yet the novel is not merely a personal lament. It is a global mirror.Across the world, truth is under siege.Journalists vanish in Mexico.Activists are silenced in India.Writers flee Pakistan, Myanmar, Russia, Egypt. What Bhattacharya captures is a universal political tragedy: when states fear truth, they fear storytellers most. This is why Fulkumari matters. Not because it is about a rat.But because it is about a citizen who refused to stop being one. In a time when authoritarianism dresses itself in the language of patriotism, when memory is distorted into propaganda, when exile becomes a tool of punishment, Fulkumari stands as a reminder that stories are the last country tyrants cannot conquer. Bhattacharya may be far from home.But through this novel, he performs the bravest act a dissident can:he remembers publicly. And he teaches us that sometimes the most dangerous animal in the room is not the one gnawing at crumbs—but the one refusing to play dead.

How Childhood Longing Becomes the Most Expensive Currency We Carry They say people do not buy products; they buy emotions. After two decades working in development and human behaviour, I would amend that: people do not buy emotions; they buy wounds. They buy memories. They buy repairs for things they never learned to name. My own wound begins in 1986 on Elephant Road. I was a schoolboy trailing behind my father, dreaming of Adidas sandals with three white stripes—the kind that made boys walk differently, with accidental swagger. But my father, practical to a fault, bought me a pair of expensive leather sandals instead. He wasn’t wrong. Leather lasts longer. Leather is sensible. Leather is what fathers who know hardship choose. But childhood rarely understands logic. That night, I cried quietly not for the sandal, but for the feeling that my dream had been dismissed. The wound planted itself quietly, like a seed waiting decades to bloom. Fast forward to Ramadan 2022. My wife said, almost casually, “You need new sandals.” She meant it pragmatically. But my brain, trained in emotional archaeology, knew there was something deeper clawing under the surface. So I dragged an MBA student with me—poor soul—through Dhaka’s humidity in search of something I refused to articulate. After hours of wandering, a Bihari shopkeeper pulled out a pair. Navy blue. White stripes. Size 39.The exact sandal I never received. I didn’t buy footwear that day.I bought closure. When I gave them to my son, my heart thudding with nostalgia, he stared at them blankly. Days later, I found them soaking wet by the bathroom door—relegated to slipper duty. A familiar ache pulsed inside me. History, it seems, is circular. Pain, hereditary. But the story isn’t just about sandals. It expands into fish markets in Mohammadpur, where my father went every Friday. He insisted I wait outside, in heat or rain. At fourteen, I finally asked why. He smiled—tired, kind—and said, “Let me protect you while I still can. Life will make you stand in enough lines later.” Decades after his death, I still go to that market—not for fish, but for the ghost of a hand that once shielded me. Some places aren’t destinations; they’re pilgrimages. We misunderstand love because we expect it to be tidy, eloquent, cinematic. But love is rarely poetic. It is practical, clumsy, misaligned. Fathers love through restrictions. Children love through rebellion. Nobody speaks the same language, but everyone keeps trying. Economists talk about supply and demand, but they miss the most powerful economic force of all: longing. Longing shapes purchases, decisions, identities. A sandal becomes a scar with a sole attached. A market becomes a memorial disguised as routine. Love is always a strange economics.We either overspend on what we never had or underspend on what we desperately needed. What remains constant is this: even the smallest objects carry the weight of our deepest stories. And healing sometimes comes disguised as a size 39 slipper.

How Office Politics Became the Most Toxic Religion in Our Working Lives If there were ever a religion that refused to die in Bangladesh—even as modernity bulldozes everything in its path—it would be the quiet, persistent, ever-evolving religion of office politics. It has no prophets, no scriptures, and no spiritual promise. But it has millions of followers, a nationwide congregation, and a level of devotion that would make ancient priests jealous. Office politics is the most widely practised faith in this country. And like all dangerous religions, it demands total loyalty, thrives on fear, and rewards the worst among us. This reflection began on World Mental Health Day, when a corporate “coach” on LinkedIn wrote a condescending sermon about how office politics is necessary for survival. His thesis was simple: if you are being attacked, learn to attack; if you are ignored, learn to manipulate; if you want to rise, learn to flatter. This is not advice. It is a manifesto of cowardice. In Bangladesh, office politics is not the background noise of organisational life—it is the main soundtrack. It overwhelms productivity, suffocates creativity, and turns workplaces into battlefields where competence is treated as a threat and mediocrity as a qualification. Walk into any office—public, private, NGO, multinational—and you will find the same characters.The Gatekeepers: middle managers who have never led anything but believe their true calling is obstruction.The Loyalists: those who confuse obedience with intelligence.The Whisperers: experts in gossip who treat misinformation as currency.The Survivors: the few employees doing all the real work while quietly counting the days until burnout. None of them are evil. They are simply products of a culture where fear is the primary leadership tool and insecurity the dominant emotion. Office politics thrives here because workplaces are rarely safe spaces. Decisions are made in corridors, not conference rooms. Promotions are earned through proximity, not performance. And people in power are often too fragile to allow talent to bloom around them. The tragedy is this: talented professionals don’t leave jobs because of workload. They leave because of emotional corrosion. They leave because loyalty is weaponised, because transparency is viewed as rebellion, and because the office becomes a stage where everyone must act—but nobody is allowed to speak the truth. One of the most bizarre features of Bangladeshi workplaces is that adults reenact childhood traumas with astonishing dedication. Some never learned autonomy and thus become micromanagers. Some never received validation and thus become tyrants. Others grew up fearing authority and thus cling to it like a security blanket. These are not leaders. They are emotional refugees wearing ID cards. The cost of this culture is enormous—not just financially, but psychologically.Innovation dies.Collaboration dies.Curiosity dies.And worst of all, courage dies. When people are punished for speaking up, they learn to stay silent. When people are penalised for honesty, they learn to lie. When people are rewarded for pretending, they learn to hide. The entire workforce becomes an assembly line of caution, caution, and more caution. And then organisations wonder why their brightest employees leave. But the biggest myth of all is the idea that office politics is inevitable. It isn’t. It is a choice—a collective cowardice. And like all cowardice, it survives only because too many people participate in it. There is a different path. A path where leadership is not a performance of authority but an act of service. A path where decisions are transparent, communication is honest, and mistakes are not treated as character defects but opportunities for learning. A path where people are rewarded for competence rather than compliance. Bangladesh is full of intelligent, hardworking professionals who want to build meaningful careers. But they are trapped in systems that value survival tactics over strategic thinking. They are assessed not by the value they create but by the egos they manage. If we want workplaces that grow instead of decay, that inspire instead of drain, that nurture instead of punish, we must stop treating office politics as a natural phenomenon. We must call it what it is: a culture of cowardice. And cowardice has never been a leadership skill. Not for individuals.Not for organisations.Not for nations.

What Our Darkest Days Reveal About the Light We Still Carry During the pandemic, my son watched Messi videos obsessively—match after match, goal after goal, as if the world outside wasn’t collapsing. Messi, to him, was proof that brilliance could still exist, even when life felt unrecognisable. Adults know better. Or worse. We learn early that real life offers no Messis—no heroes who dribble through corruption, score against injustice, and celebrate victory while a nation cheers. What we get instead are moments. Messages. Fragments of courage scattered across ordinary people. In Bangladesh, the past decade has been a masterclass in suppressed hope. Students disappeared. Journalists fled. Activists were crushed under the weight of manufactured accusations. The public learned a new vocabulary of fear: safe houses, “unknown assailants,” mysterious arrests. But even in the bleakest times, the message persisted. It surfaced in whispered conversations in university corridors. In coded Facebook posts. In poems circulated secretly. In the quiet decisions of families sheltering persecuted youth. And most powerfully, in the resilience of a generation that refuses to be gaslit into silence. There is no Messi after the revolution. But revolutions do not require Messi. They require memory. And this generation remembers everything. They remember the nights when social media became a lifeline. They remember the funerals of friends whose only crime was idealism. They remember the tear gas, the courtrooms, the barricades. They remember betrayal too—the people who looked away, the intellectuals who stayed neutral, the institutions that bent like reeds in the wind. Yet somehow, they remain unbroken. This, I have come to believe, is the true revolution: not victory, but refusal. Refusal to surrender dignity. Refusal to normalise injustice. Refusal to let truth rot. We may not have Messi sprinting across our political landscape.But we have a generation quietly rewriting the rules of courage. That is enough for now. Not because the struggle is over, but because the message is alive.

What a Small-Town Visionary Revealed About Leadership in Bangladesh Leadership in Bangladesh often arrives wrapped in expensive suits, flanked by protocol officers, and padded with a vocabulary of self-importance. We are a nation raised to believe that leadership is a birthright, inherited through networks rather than earned through merit. Which is precisely why the afternoon I met Ashik Mahmud—a youth organiser from rural Bangladesh—felt like a slap of fresh air in a stale room. It was a typical development-sector gathering. The usual suspects had assembled: bureaucrats who mastered the art of speaking for twenty minutes without saying anything; NGO royalty rehearsing their moral superiority; donors scanning the room for photo opportunities; and “project men” who believed the world could be saved through bullet points alone. And then came Ashik. He walked in with a six-slide PowerPoint presentation he had rehearsed a hundred times, not because he was nervous, but because he respected the audience more than the audience respected him. His voice didn’t boom. His presence didn’t intimidate. But his clarity had weight. His vision—simple, actionable, and unpretentious—exposed the hollowness of the room. While others spoke in development jargon (“capacity enhancement,” “cross-sectoral leveraging,” “multi-stakeholder facilitation”), Ashik explained how he mobilised farmers, trained youth, negotiated with local power brokers, and sustained his initiative without a single foreign consultant. As he spoke, the room shifted. Bureaucrats leaned forward. Donors scribbled notes. “Project men” looked deeply uncomfortable. Because what Ashik demonstrated—efficiency, honesty, community trust—was everything our institutional machinery pretends to have but rarely practices. His leadership didn’t come from privilege. It came from substance. And in that moment, it became painfully obvious: Bangladesh has never lacked visionary citizens. It has only lacked systems brave enough to embrace them. The men with muscle—the loud, the powerful, the obstructive—have built careers out of gatekeeping. But men like Ashik remind us that real leadership is not about commanding authority. It is about earning trust. Bangladesh doesn’t need more policy papers. It needs fewer gatekeepers. It needs fewer meetings. It needs fewer people who believe that leadership is an inheritance. It needs more Ashiks.