Moments in the Mirror: Volume 2

The weekly columns under the caption Through the Glass Darkly written over the last twenty-five years have been classified theme wise into 7 groups of which 3 have already been published in the first volume. The remaining groups are i. education ii. politics and governance iii. society, culture, heritage and iv. international affairs which make up this second volume. This volume contains greater number of pages and is more reflective of the political, social and cultural problems the country had to live through. The views are personal and aim at giving the reader an objective picture of the problems that the country had to grapple with. Problems in education have been highlighted and discussed with more incisive interest since that concerns my own area of professional activity where I have been working for the last 51 years. As I was rummaging through the bound volumes of the last 25 years trying to select the essays for publication, it just occurred to me that they will come in handy in future to anyone attempting to write a history of the period. To my regular readers and admirers I must confess that I have intentionally omitted two very popular sequences of the column. The sequence captioned ‘My Cambridge’ will be published in a separate volume. The other sequence ‘English for Bangali Learners’ has already been published.