Maisha Islam Monamee

For over a decade, cinematic universes trained audiences to think in timelines, phases, and post-credit scenes. Films evolved into chapters, chapters evolved into phases, and phases evolved into cultural calendars. Watching a movie stopped being about a single story and started feeling like homework with a very expensive visual budget. In 2026, that structure looks different—driven by audience behaviour, financial realities, creative priorities, and measurable performance data across film and streaming.

End-of-year (EoY) conversations often feel like performance reviews, but they are so much more than that. If done right, they are a chance to showcase wins, reflect on growth, map out your next moves, and strengthen relationships with your manager.

As the global technology sector moves deeper into the second half of the decade, 2026 is shaping up as a year of structural transition. The emphasis is shifting from experimentation to systems that can scale, integrate smoothly and operate reliably in everyday life.

We now live inside a series of dashboards. If Spotify is the most visible example, it is hardly alone. Everything from our sleep to our steps to our language-learning streaks comes with a neatly packaged scorecard at the end of the year.

In Bangladesh, however, Christmas occupies a different cultural register. It arrives through Netflix thumbnails, holiday episodes that resurface every December, mall décor inspired by Hollywood aesthetics, and Instagram captions borrowing emotions from films we have watched far more times than we admit.

There are exhibitions you walk into, and there are exhibitions that feel like you are stepping across a threshold into someone else’s world. “Pawmum Parban”, currently underway at Alliance Française de Dhaka, unfolds like the latter; carrying a depth that quietly rearranges how you look at a culture you thought you vaguely knew. I went in expecting an art show and left with the sense that a small group of children from the hills had succeeded in doing something the city often fails at: making us feel something beyond our own noise.

In July 2024, we, the Gen-Z, stepped into the streets, frightened yet resolute, wounded yet unwilling to break, because we believed Bangladesh could be rewired around dignity.

Your first job feels a bit like walking into adulthood with Google Maps turned on, praying the little blue dot knows where it is going. You are excited, anxious, overprepared in weird ways, and underprepared in the ways that matter.