I took this photo on Friday, right before I packed the flag for my big trip ahead. The plan was to hoist it on to the car that I’ll be driving to Mongolia over the next month. But today, I have nothing to be proud of. In a country where a little boy gets tortured…

You know what’s more annoying than হুজুগে বাঙালী turning their profiles into rainbow colors supposedly in ignorance? YOU, the obnoxious, self-righteous prick pretending to know better and shooting down LGBT rights on the basis of religion, calling it haram. The amount of hateful, intolerant posts I’ve seen leads me to believe that if you spent…

My experience with the Dhaka gym scene is likely to be as brief as my twice-a-year trips back home. While I generally tend to be a couch potato during my visits, attempting to spend as much time as possible with my parents and stuffing my face silly with good food, I had something additional on…

Anyone who has unknowingly signed up for a day in the sauna in Germany is bound for some culture shock. If you have friends who were kind enough to let you know how saunas ‘work’ in this country, you’ve probably had the good, common sense to steer clear. While I was warned about having to…

I believe the ball first started rolling after the decisive victory Germany earned in the semi-finals with Brazil. Rape and Nazi jokes started flooding social media. Reasons why analogies with rape for a sporting event is not just distasteful but appalling has been covered in this excellent article by Rashaam Chowdhury. I wanted to talk about…

I’ve recently had to renew my passport. I was out of pages. Ever since my brand-new, yet-still-handwritten passport came back from the embassy in Berlin, I’ve been feeling bouts of nostalgia. I’ve had my old, worn-out, faded passport for the past eight years, and they have been the most exciting years of my life –…

I noticed last night a post floating through social media on how at an event in North South University, my alma mater, free condoms were distributed as an effort to raise awareness about AIDS. From the information that I could pick up, the event was organized in collaboration with or with support from UNICEF. Of…

I work for a global company with almost half a million employees worldwide. While this makes for a work culture that can be incredibly rewarding through interactions with colleagues from almost everywhere, there can be situations that can leave you, for lack of a more eloquent expression, saying, “WTF?” I work in business development and…