Dhaka, April 4 -- April is the cruellest month, as T S Eliot put it. And then there was Robert Browning who longed to be in England in April. William Shakespeare, in his jocular way, had this to place before his readers: 'Men are April when they woo, December when they wed.' Cyril Tourneur celebrates April thus: 'I shine in tears like the sun in April.'

And now that April is back in our lives, we look to Pahela Baishakh in the middle of the month. If that causes happiness to arise in our souls, there is too the unending sense of tragedy associated with the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. There are at the same time memories of the near disaster the astronauts of Apollo-13 came up against in April 1970 when their moon-bound spacecraft was ...