Dhaka, Oct. 31 -- The struggle for the future in Bangladesh, as elsewhere in the world, reminds me of vanished times that keep reinventing themselves. The struggle makes me think of an earlier me.

It was mesmerising in 1974 to encounter Walter Benjamin in the Seminar Library of the English Department of Presidency College, Kolkata. It was not a physical meeting, of course. The German Jew had committed suicide in 1940, at the age of 48, during the Nazi onslaught on Europe. I had been born in 1957. But Benjamin's books had outlived him. They introduced me, a Bengali Muslim, to a kindred spirit in 1974. What was interesting was that my college's union was then under the political sway of the Chhatra Parishad, the students' wing of the rulin...