Tangents
Little Grebe
Early last month I decided to make a foray into Baikka Beel. The beel, part of Hail Haor, is a no-fishing-allowed swamp in Moulvi Bazar that attracts winter birds. It was still too early for most migratory birds, but the…
Tangents
Finding New Birds
How many species of birds are in Bangladesh? For a small country, perhaps we have more than our fair share. Bangladesh boasts about 650 out of the 10,000 species of birds in the world, or 6.5% of the earth’s species…
Tangents
Abusing Trees
The other day I went for my evening jog in the nearby park. The sun was setting and the mellow light of the early winter evening enveloped the world. Like me, many other visitors were also enjoying the tree-lined park…
Tangents
Homework
If you believe mischievous children over the ages, vast proportions of humanity’s homework have been consumed by the dog. However, joking aside, homework plays a critical role in our intellectual development. The boy in the photograph reminded me of all…
Tangents
Kingfisher
Two years ago, while visiting Sundarban, I spotted a kingfisher high on top of a gewa tree on the beach. It descended swiftly to the water fifty feet away, dived, caught a small fish, and flew to another perch –…
Tangents
Landscape Photography
The great photographer Ansel Adams once said that “landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer and often the supreme disappointment.” Adams was, I believe, talking about the difference between the experience of being outdoors and taking a picture…
Tangents
Drongo
In this land of numerous colourful birds, the unassuming and plain black drongo holds a special place. With shiny feathers and v-shaped tail, it is a recurring sight in both city and country. It will perch on a pole, a…
Tangents
Our Landscape
‘’Landscape” – in our mind’s eye the word recreates the world outdoors, the variety and greatness of nature, and our place within it. Forests and fields, rivers and lakes, mountains and deserts, and the lay of the land as it…
Tangents
The Portuguese Connection
I admire the agave plant. Its tall leaves are sleek and elegant; its bright yellow flowers delightful. When the flowers wilt and drop, new plants sprout from them. But I have often wondered how this plant, so distinctively American, came…
Tangents
Black Pepper
From a distance, the big, tall tree appears wrapped in a shimmering garland of yellow and green leaves covering the length and girth of its trunk. Coming closer, you notice that it is a vine that has climbed around the…
Tangents
Shatchori
In all my travels I never experienced anything like this. One moment I was walking fine, the next moment my entire left leg and half my thigh had sunk into the mud. It was only by shifting my entire weight…
Tangents
Green
Green is the most salient colour of our land. It appears in numerous varieties and has influenced our lives, our thinking, our emotions and our creativity from time immemorial. Our poets, story-tellers, painters, singers and photographers have all partaken from…
Tangents
Old Jackfruit Tree
Its branches are dying as its thick bark peels and falls off from its trunk. The jackfruit tree is growing old. Forty years ago my father sowed hundreds of jackfruit seeds in these hills. This tree grew from one of…
Tangents
Sander’s Germans
From the earliest days of photography, portraits of people have captured our imagination. They have also consumed a large proportion of the effort of photographers. And in the annals of portrait photography, none has attained the stature of the German…
Tangents
Pantomai
To reach the village of Pantomai, start out from Sylhet towards Tamabil. Just before reaching the Shari river and Shari Ghat, turn left on the Gowainghat road. After several kilometres, at the Y intersection near the Gowainghat Upazila complex, bear…
Tangents
Lena’s Story
I had spent many hours looking at Lena: her eyes, her hair and her hat. But then, so had dozens of other researchers working in a new field called digital image processing. It was the early 1980s, and while studying…
Tangents
Hakaluki in Rain
I had planned the trip with much anticipation. An engine boat would wait for me early morning at the ghat of Kushiara river in Fenchuganj. From there, I would set out to explore Hakaluki Haor – the site of hunting…
Tangents
Ratargul
Ratargul is a forest in Gowainghat upazila near Sylhet town. It is special because it is a freshwater swamp forest whose trees are inundated by water, particularly during the monsoon. To get there from Sylhet, I started out towards the…
Tangents
A Shifting Friendship
Through the course of civilization, people and plants have enjoyed a complex relationship with each other. Sometimes this relationship has changed in unexpected ways. Take, for example, the plant called Caesar’s weed (urena lobata.) It is common in our countryside,…
Tangents
The World of Type
While assembling a book of photographs and their accompanying text, I recently found myself looking closely at typefaces for printing text. Next thing I knew, I was immersed in the world of type. There are numerous designs for printing the…
Tangents
Rainy Day Flowers
The other day I was in the Botanical Garden in Mirpur. I wandered looking for birds to photograph, but the rainy season had put a damper on their activities. As I walked under some tall casuarinas trees thinking what a…
Tangents
The Heroic Reader
I was reading in Financial Times about John Mackey, the American entrepreneur who started Whole Foods Market, the international grocery chain. As a college student, he was required to read Jean-Paul Sartre’s massive and dense book Being and Nothingness, but…
Tangents
Coming to America
Coming to America is a bittersweet experience for me. I once called America home – for three decades, in fact – yet it seems like a foreign country now. Living for a few years in Bangladesh has changed me in…
Tangents
Film or Digital?
Film photography has, for all intents and purposes, become a thing of the past. Of film’s many charms, the most enticing for me was the element of surprise. When you took the picture, you did not know what you would…
Tangents
Happiness is Hibiscus
Its beauty is loved all over the world. In my childhood Sylhet, this large, bright-red flower brightened many courtyard gardens. Hibiscus, known as Joba in Bangla, is a family of flowers with over 300 species. The most common one we…
Tangents
Musical Morning at Mirpur
Some weeks ago, while photographing at Mirpur Botanical Garden in early morning, I was caught in a sudden downpour. I took refuge under the thick cover of a jarul tree. While I waited, the strains of a familiar melody wafted…
Tangents
Woodpeckers
Twenty five miles per hour. That’s how fast a woodpecker’s beak travels when it hammers the tree. This impact, so close to the head, would render most creatures senseless – or at least give them a massive headache. But woodpecker…
Tangents
The name game
The naming of plants and animals can be confusing. Take, for example, the bird fingey (drongo.) Within a distance of 100km from Dhaka, you will find people calling it fingey, fesa, feskuna or feskunda. Nor is this confusion an exclusively…
TANGENTS
Summer in Baldah Garden
I visited Baldah Garden recently, and this being summer, I was expecting to be surrounded by flowers. But the Garden always surprises: I could find hardly any flower. After some disappointed wandering, I was walking back towards the entrance when…
Tangents
Our Three Kites
About a year ago I was driving through Brahman baria when I noticed an unusual bird sitting on the roadside power line. It had the beak, talon and sharp looks of a raptor; for a second I thought it might…
Tangents
Weston’s Peppers
Among pioneers of photography, few have attained the stature of Edward Weston. Born in 1886 near Chicago, Weston turned to photography early in life and spent four decades pushing the boundaries of this medium making some magnificent and iconic images…
Tangents
Chandan’s Photographs
The great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once said that the difference between a good photograph and a mediocre one is a question of millimetres. Precision is key to making an everyday scene become an extraordinary photograph. Photographs by Chandan being…
Tangents
Pichash
On an early winter’s morning several years ago, I was wandering through hilly countryside near Moulvi Bazar when something caught my eye. Down the hill, framed through some large trees, was a dome-shaped shrub that was blooming with hundreds of…
TANGENTS
The Egret
About a year ago, I was returning from a trip to Sundarban when friends looking out from the boat’s deck called me with considerable excitement. Half a kilometre ahead a flock of white birds, perhaps three or four dozen, were…
TANGENTS
The Generous Shimul
Spring and summer bring my favourite quintet of flowers: shimul, krishnachura, jarul, shonalu and mandar. Of these, shimul (silk cotton, bombax ceiba) is perhaps the most fleeting, arriving the earliest and departing quickly. By mid-February, the deciduous shimul trees have…
TANGENTS
Hunting and Shooting
In one of my earliest memories of the outdoors, I am shivering at the edge of a gigantic marsh as winter’s dawn breaks. Several men stand nearby, guns in hand. Behind us, helpers carry boxes of spare cartridge, food and…