English Language Society of MBSTU

𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐖𝐢𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐬' 𝐃𝐚𝐲

There are approximately 3.5 million widows in Bangladesh. Many of them are among the most economically vulnerable members of Bangladeshi society. In rural areas, a woman who loses her husband frequently loses her home as well, when in-laws claim the property he owned. She may lose access to her children in custody disputes conducted within a legal system she lacks the resources to navigate.

Bangladeshi law provides widows with inheritance rights, but legal literacy is low, enforcement is inconsistent, and women in rural areas rarely have access to lawyers who will represent them at a cost they can afford. International women's rights frameworks under CEDAW - the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which Bangladesh has ratified - contain specific protections for widows. Most Bangladeshi widows have never heard of CEDAW, let alone been able to invoke it.

Social stigma compounds economic vulnerability. The restrictions placed on widows' participation in celebrations, on their remarriage, on their social lives - these are not tradition. They are choices. And choices can be unmade.

They held their families together through grief. They deserve a system that holds them.

𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟐𝟑, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔

👔 𝗛𝗮𝗽𝗽𝘆 𝗙𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿’𝘀 𝗗𝗮𝘆 👔

A father’s love is often measured not in words, but in sacrifices, hard work, and countless moments of support. Every lesson taught, every challenge faced, and every dream encouraged becomes a priceless gift that shapes our future.

💙 Thank you to all fathers for being our first heroes, greatest supporters, and lifelong guides.

🌟 𝗛𝗮𝗽𝗽𝘆 𝗙𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿’𝘀 𝗗𝗮𝘆!

𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗵 𝗟𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗦𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘁𝘆, 𝗠𝗕𝗦𝗧𝗨
Learn English | Access the World 🌍📚

𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐃𝐚𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐘𝐨𝐠𝐚

Yoga originated on this subcontinent, in the ancient texts and practices of a civilization that understood the inseparability of body and mind thousands of years before modern neuroscience confirmed the same thing. The word comes from Sanskrit, meaning to unite or to join - the practice of bringing breath, movement, and awareness into the same space at the same time.

Bangladesh has a growing wellness community. Interest in yoga, meditation, and mindfulness is increasing particularly among young people navigating high-pressure academic and professional environments. The mental health benefits of regular yoga practice are well-documented: reduced cortisol, improved sleep quality, meaningful reduction in symptoms of anxiety and depression. For MBSTU students managing academic pressure, these are practical tools available to everyone.

The global yoga community, international teacher training programs, and the growing body of research on yoga and mental health are largely accessible through English-language platforms, journals, and institutions. Bangladesh's wellness practitioners and students deserve full access to that knowledge.

International Day of Yoga is a reminder that wellbeing is not a luxury. It is the foundation on which everything else is built. Take care of yourselves. Begin now.

𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟐𝟏, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔

𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 𝐌𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐜 𝐃𝐚𝐲

Fete de la Musique began in France in 1982 as a celebration of music-making on the summer solstice - free concerts filling city streets, professional musicians and first-time players sharing the same stages. Today it is observed in over 120 countries. The principle is simple and profound: music belongs to everyone, and the best music is the music played for the love of playing.

Bangladesh is a land of extraordinary musical heritage. Baul music, the mystic folk tradition carried by wandering bards of the Bengal delta, is recognized by UNESCO as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The songs of Lalon Shah continue to be sung from Kushtia to Kolkata. Nazrul Geeti - the body of work created by Bangladesh's national poet - encompasses resistance, love, spirituality, and joy in a way that few individual artists in any tradition have achieved.

This heritage deserves a global audience. But the infrastructure of the global music industry - the streaming platforms, the international festival networks, the ethnomusicological communities that document traditions like Baul - are primarily English-speaking.

Today, make music. In whatever language, with whatever instrument, at whatever level of skill. Music is one of the few human things that has never needed a translation.

𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟐𝟏, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔

𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 𝐑𝐞𝐟𝐮𝐠𝐞𝐞 𝐃𝐚𝐲

Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh hosts the largest refugee settlement on Earth. Over one million Rohingya people fled genocide in Myanmar and crossed into Bangladesh, primarily between August and October 2017. They came with almost nothing. Many walked for days through jungle. Many crossed rivers at night in vessels not designed to carry people. Bangladesh absorbed them, at enormous national cost, with international support nowhere near proportional to the burden it accepted.

The Rohingya crisis now enters its ninth year with no durable solution in sight. Myanmar has not been held accountable. Rohingya children in the camps have severely limited access to formal education. Rohingya adults face a legal limbo that makes it impossible to work legally, seek asylum formally, or plan for any future beyond the camp perimeter.

International refugee law, UNHCR resettlement processes, asylum claim mechanisms, and the legal advocacy networks that represent displaced communities in international courts are all conducted in English. Communities that cannot access those frameworks are at the mercy of systems designed without their input.

Bangladesh has shown the world what hospitality looks like under impossible conditions. The world owes a great deal more in return.

𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟐𝟎, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔

𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐃𝐚𝐲 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐞𝐱𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐕𝐢𝐨𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐭

In 1971, an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 women in Bangladesh were r***d during the Liberation War. The Birangona (the brave women, as they were later named) returned to a society that too often punished them for what had been done to them. Many were abandoned by families who could not bear the social stigma. Many never received recognition, justice, or formal support in their lifetimes.

This is Bangladesh's own wound. It is also a mirror held up to the patterns that repeat in conflict zones everywhere - from Bosnia to the Democratic Republic of Congo to the Rohingya camps, where Rohingya women documented systematic r**e as a weapon of the military campaign against their people.

We saw shadows of this pattern again during the July Revolution of 2024. In the historic Student-People's Uprising, brave female students and citizens stood on the front lines for freedom, only to face targeted gender-based harassment, physical assaults, and violence by state forces attempting to terrorize them into silence. Whether in historical wars or modern mass movements, the female body is continuously turned into a battlefield by oppressive regimes.

UN Security Council Resolution 1820, passed in 2008, recognized for the first time that sexual violence in conflict is a matter of international peace and security. The entire international legal framework around conflict-related sexual violence, including survivor reparations processes and perpetrator accountability mechanisms, is conducted in English.

Bangladesh's Birangona and the brave survivors of the July Uprising deserve justice. Their stories belong in every room where justice is decided.

𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟏𝟗, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔

𝐒𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐆𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐲 𝐃𝐚𝐲

Bangladesh has one of the most extraordinary and underrecognized food cultures in the world. The hilsa fish, the national fish of Bangladesh, is the subject of poetry, seasonal festivals, and intense gastronomic devotion across the entire delta region. The varieties of rice cultivated in Bangladeshi soil number in the hundreds. The pithas - the winter rice cakes filled with date palm jaggery - represent techniques passed directly from mother to daughter over generations. These are not just food. They are civilization expressed through flavor.

Sustainable gastronomy recognizes that what we eat is inseparable from how land is managed, how food systems are organized, and what cultural knowledge is preserved or lost. Traditional Bangladeshi food systems carry encoded knowledge about local ecology, seasonal cycles, and nutritional balance that modern food science is only beginning to rediscover.

The Slow Food movement, UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage frameworks, and global food culture preservation networks could be powerful allies for Bangladesh's culinary traditions. These networks function in English.

Bangladesh's food deserves a global table. It is long past time we pulled up a chair.

𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟏𝟖, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔

𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐃𝐚𝐲 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐇𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐒𝐩𝐞𝐞𝐜𝐡

Bangladesh has a complex and painful history of communal violence. Hindu minorities, Buddhist communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Christian communities, and indigenous groups have all faced periodic violence driven by hatred weaponized through language. The incitement happens on social media. It spreads through mobile messaging. It can turn a peaceful neighborhood into a danger zone within hours.

In recent years, incidents of communal violence triggered by social media posts have been documented in multiple districts. In almost every case, the initial content was hate speech - a post, a rumor, a fabricated image - deliberately designed to provoke one community against another. Language did the first work. Violence followed.

The UN's global strategy on countering hate speech, platform accountability mechanisms, and civil society counter-messaging frameworks represent a body of international knowledge advancing rapidly. That knowledge is accessible primarily in English. Bangladesh's civil society organizations, digital rights advocates, and community leaders deserve access to the tools and frameworks the world has developed.

Language can cage. Language can free. ELS MBSTU chooses the second purpose. Every time.

𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟏𝟖, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔

𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 𝐃𝐚𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐛𝐚𝐭 𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐃𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭

Bangladesh is not a desert country. But in the northwestern Barind Tract - covering parts of Rajshahi, Chapai Nawabganj, and Naogaon - groundwater levels have been falling for decades due to over-extraction for irrigation. In the coastal zones of Khulna and Satkhira, salinity intrusion driven by sea-level rise is making farmland uncultivable, consuming soil that fed families for generations.

Land degradation is among the most underreported dimensions of Bangladesh's environmental crisis. It does not arrive with the dramatic imagery of a cyclone. It comes quietly, through soil that produces a little less each season, through farmers who gradually find that the land their parents cultivated will no longer support the same crops, through migration driven not by flooding but by the slow failure of the earth.

The UNCCD, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, provides international frameworks for land restoration and drought resilience. Land rehabilitation science, drylands recovery programs, and global soil health research are documented almost entirely in English.

Bangladesh has land to protect. Protecting it requires access to the science that can save it.

𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟏𝟕, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔

𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐃𝐚𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐅𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐲 𝐑𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐬

Bangladesh receives over 21 billion US dollars in remittances every year. This figure - the single largest source of foreign exchange income in the country - represents approximately 13 to 15 million Bangladeshis working abroad, in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Malaysia, and dozens of other countries. They build other nations' infrastructure, clean other nations' hospitals, and raise other nations' children, and send money home every month.

The human cost of this economic contribution is hidden in the numbers. Many migrant workers signed contracts they could not read. Many are paid below what was promised, work in conditions that violate international labor standards, and cannot effectively report abuse because complaint mechanisms are in Arabic or English. Many have not held their children in years.

International labor migration frameworks, the ILO Multilateral Framework on Labour Migration, and the global remittance reduction initiatives that could save families hundreds of dollars per transaction are negotiated and published in English. Bangladesh's migrant workers, who keep this country financially viable, deserve full access to the protections those frameworks offer.

They sacrifice proximity to provide for those they love. The least the world can do is make the rules in their language.

𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟏𝟔, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔