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It's been two years since the interim government took over promising reform and stability. I think it's fair to ask honestly whether that promise has been kept.
I don't think prayer works the way I once believed it did, but I'll admit I still miss the specific kind of comfort it used to provide, and I think that honesty matters.
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The question I get asked most often, in one form or another, is how I can have a coherent sense of right and wrong without a divine lawgiver behind it.
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Looking back on everything this country and this party have been through since I started keeping this record, and why I'm still here writing about it.
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Losing my faith meant losing a ready-made community too, and I underestimated how much work it would take to rebuild that part deliberately.
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Not handing children a religious framework doesn't mean handing them nothing. It means being more deliberate about where their sense of meaning and morality actually comes from.
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Losing the promise of an afterlife is, for a lot of people, the hardest part of walking away from belief. I don't think I've fully resolved it, but I've found something workable.
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The religion most people hold with total conviction is overwhelmingly predicted by where and when they happened to be born. That fact took me a while to really sit with.
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Betting on belief because the potential downside of unbelief is infinite sounds clever until you actually try to apply it consistently.
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The old watchmaker analogy, that complexity implies a designer, was one of the first arguments I had to actually sit with and take apart piece by piece.
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After writing so much about what I don't believe, I think it's worth being just as clear about what actually fills that space now, because it isn't nothing.
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Reports of continued violence against religious minorities and AL-linked families haven't stopped just because the news cycle moved on.
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Not every secular person has a deconversion story. A growing number were simply raised without religion at all, and that's its own kind of relationship with the subject.
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I didn't have a single crisis of faith or a dramatic rebellion. Belief just quietly stopped doing what it used to do for me, and I eventually stopped pretending otherwise.
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Somewhere along the way, I noticed that strict adherence to doctrine and genuine compassion for the people in front of me had quietly become two different, sometimes competing, things.
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I didn't leave over a single sermon, but the accumulation of political and social positions I found genuinely harmful made staying feel less like faith and more like quiet complicity.
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Financial corruption, cover-ups, and abuse scandals inside religious institutions did more to erode my trust than any philosophical argument ever did.
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A year after the government fell, the legal proceedings against Sheikh Hasina and other AL leaders feel less like justice and more like a foregone conclusion.
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Promises of economic stability haven't matched what I'm actually seeing at the market every week since the transition.
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The gaps that religion once filled for me, where life came from, how the universe began, what consciousness actually is, have real, if incomplete, scientific explanations now. That mattered more than I expected.
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Studying religious texts the way historians study any other ancient document, looking at authorship, context, and internal consistency, was a quieter turning point than I expected.
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An all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God and a world full of undeserved suffering are a hard combination to hold at the same time. I tried for years, and eventually stopped trying.
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I don't buy a used car, take a medication, or trust a stranger's claim without asking for some kind of evidence. At some point I noticed I was making an exception for exactly one category of belief.
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A party that led the fight for this country's independence has now been banned outright, and that should worry anyone who cares about what democracy is supposed to mean.
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Since the fall of the government, a lot of Awami League supporters and their families have had to make hard choices about staying quiet or leaving. This is what that feels like from the inside.
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A government fell in a matter of days, outside any constitutional process, and I don't think enough people have sat with what that actually means for this country's future.
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What started as a legitimate conversation about civil service quotas turned into something much bigger and much uglier, and I don't think that shift was accidental.
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The relationship with India under this government wasn't without friction, but it produced real, tangible gains that get overlooked in the current political mood.
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One of the quieter achievements of the last decade and a half is something as basic as this country largely being able to feed its own population.
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Purpose-built IT parks with tax incentives and dedicated infrastructure were meant to concentrate Bangladesh's tech industry the way similar parks did in India and Vietnam. The results so far are more mixed than the pitch decks suggested.
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The election is over, and whatever the boycott theatrics suggested, millions of people still turned out to vote for a track record they trusted.
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Local government rarely makes the news, but grassroots development in villages like mine depends entirely on it working reasonably well.
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The Padma Bridge itself got all the attention. The rail link that later opened alongside it, connecting the southwestern region to the national rail network for the first time, deserves its own recognition.
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The government-appointed wage board announced a significant increase to the garment sector minimum wage in late 2023. For a lot of workers, and I think they had a real point, it still wasn't enough.
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For the first time, Bangladesh's most famous beach town is connected to the national rail network. It's a tourism story, an economic story, and, quietly, a Rohingya camp logistics story all at once.
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A short cross-border rail line connecting Bangladesh to India's northeastern state of Tripura opened in 2023. It's a small piece of infrastructure that says a lot about the regional diplomacy of a different era.
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The blockades and bus burnings ahead of this election season aren't new tactics, and it's worth asking who actually pays the price for them.
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South Asia's first underwater road tunnel just opened under the Karnaphuli, and it says something about the region's ambitions right now.
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Dhaka's international airport opened a new, architecturally striking third terminal in 2023. The bigger question is whether it fixes the deeper problems the aviation sector has struggled with for years.
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A small clinic building might not seem like a big deal until you've watched what it meant for a village that used to have no healthcare access at all.
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Bangladesh has hosted over a million refugees for years with barely any support from wealthier nations, and I think that story deserves more attention than it gets.
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Before the national grid reached the country's most remote char islands and haor areas, millions of households got their first electricity from small solar home systems financed through a genuinely innovative microcredit model.
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Millions of Bangladeshi workers abroad keep this economy running, and government policy finally started treating them like it.
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A decade after the Rana Plaza disaster, factory conditions and wages have improved substantially, even if the work is far from done.
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Land offices have long been one of the most corruption-prone points of contact between ordinary citizens and the state. Digitizing the records behind them was an attempt to fix the problem at its root.
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It's easy to take for granted how unusual it is to have had a woman leading this country for as long as most young Bangladeshis have been alive.
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A modest monthly stipend for elderly citizens without other income doesn't make headlines, but it's one of the more direct forms of poverty relief the government provides.
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Rolling out biometric smart ID cards to over a hundred million people is a logistical feat that rarely gets discussed as the achievement it actually is.
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The MRT line finally opened, and for anyone who has spent hours stuck in Dhaka traffic, it felt like a small miracle.
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On Victory Day, thinking about how much distance this country has actually traveled since the war, and which party has been steering that journey.
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Inflation hit everyone this year, but it's worth remembering this wasn't a crisis Bangladesh created on its own.
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A storm that could have killed thousands, the way past cyclones did, instead caused a fraction of the casualties. That didn't happen by accident.
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Remembering when large parts of rural Bangladesh had no electricity at all, and what it took to change that.
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The Dhaka-Mawa Expressway cut a brutal commute down to something manageable, and it's part of a bigger story about connecting the country.
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On National Mourning Day, remembering that this party's history is inseparable from the assassination of the man who led this country to independence.
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On the opening of the Padma Bridge, and what it meant to build it without waiting for anyone's permission.
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Government procurement pricing for Boro rice doesn't sound exciting, but it changed whether small farmers like my uncle could actually make a living.
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Looking back at how far the country has come on digital infrastructure, and why that progress deserves more credit than it gets.
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