Dhaka, April 18 -- Part 1

Perhaps the most popular poet in the Bengali speaking world is Sukumar Roy. It's not a rhetorical statement but of simple demography. Just about every middle class child reads him and if one includes school goers the numbers will rise and rise. Parents fearlessly gift their children with his first book of rhymers, "Abol Tabol" knowing that it's the most entertaining and harmless book possible, a collection of 'nonsense rhymes" as people know it to be.

But that's only one kind of reading for within that lies a web of construction of imageries that children and adults both find amusing but also much more complex as it also serves a critique of the colonial hybrid culture of which the poet himself was part of. Tha...