FREE DE SOUL

Topic: The struggle of educating the next generation in scientific rationalism. As an educator, standing in front of a high school science classroom in Bangladesh is a tightrope walk. When the textbook reaches the chapter on natural selection and evolution, the room visibly shifts. Hands shoot up not with questions of curiosity, but with pre-packaged apologetics heard at local religious gatherings. Science education in our country too often suffers from a fundamental compromi

Topic: Honoring the legacy of Bangladesh’s secular bloggers. Anyone who picked up a pen or logged onto a blog in Bangladesh during the 2010s knows the weight of that era. Names like Avijit Roy, Ananta Bijoy Das, and Washiqur Rahman are not just memories; they are reminder markers of the price paid for writing freely in Bangla. When violence was unleashed on secular bloggers, the goal was simple: instill absolute silence. They wanted us to believe that logic had no place in ou

Topic: Reclaiming freethought from the accusation of "Western import." Whenever a freethinker in Bangladesh questions religious dogma, the immediate rebuttal is predictable: "You are brainwashed by Western ideas." This argument completely ignores our own regional history. Long before modern internet blogs existed, the Bengal Delta was a cauldron of radical skepticism. Think of the 19th-century Bengal Renaissance, Henry Derozio and his Young Bengal movement questioning every s