About me
My parents hoped for an engineer. I perplexed them by wanting to be a writer. We reached a compromise: I read law, trained as a barrister, and became, at best, a middling lawyer. The years of nomadically drifting through the legal profession was me taking the scenic route to writing. Now that I am attempting to be, at worst, a middling writer, my parents are amongst my fiercest supporters.
I write because I am from Bangladesh, and because of the accident of birth that made Ekusher Prothom Kobi (author of the first poem about the Language Movement of 1952), Mahbub ul Alam Chowdhury my Nana (maternal grandfather). The former makes me value justice, humanity and the need for, and power of words. The latter instilled in me an unwavering belief in freethinking and freedom of speech, and inexorably sewed me into the fabric of our culture and literature. We belong on the world stage. I write to elevate us to our rightful place.