Azfar Hussain

Today—June 23—marks the ninety-first birthday of Serajul Islam Choudhury, our foremost intellectual and writer in Bangladesh. A literary and cultural critic, historian, political analyst, educationist, essayist, editor, translator, activist, and organiser, he has been speaking truth to power with clarity and consistency for decades now.

History, too, bristles up, staging and restaging questions and concerns that remain unresolved. They persist, stubbornly, as we continue to inhabit a conjuncture marked by chasms and contradictions: between rhetoric and reality, between what has been and what is yet to be. And so, as we step into the 56th year of our independence, these contradictions compel a crucial, even urgent, question: whose independence is it, anyway?

Abstract The spatiotemporal evolution of drought patterns has drawn growing attention, particularly in the Yellow River Basin of northern China. However, the previous studies have primarily focused on unidirectional drought propagation. We extended the three-dimensional connectivity identification method to quantify the migration direction and distance between the centroids of drought initiation and termination, thereby improving the tracking and measurement of typical drought event trajectories.