Humayun Ahmed’s Gouripur Junction: A Saga of Unforgiving Realities and Perpetual Uncertainties of the Marginalized People

Humayun Ahmed in his novel Gouripur Junction attempts to portray the picture of a train station along with the lives of the people depending on it. His sincere efforts are directed mainly towards the marginal people who are fated to be there, somehow eke out a living there and are bound to face the uncertainties and complexities in the struggle for living an unstable life. While the writer has made a comprehensive delineation of their lives along with relationships of different types, love and hatred, strengths and shortcomings, the basic aspect of their life is uncertainty, sufferings and struggle. Humayun Ahmed though commonly considered as a writer having good understanding of and compassion for the middle class, he has another strong but less attended area and that is his unflinching endeavor to portray the marginal people in a comprehensive way. In this novel, his manifest intention is to portray life in totality by a balance attention on the realities as well as the psychosocial aspects of those people and make the readers empathetic towards them. This paper aims at studying this strong but less attended dimension of Humayun Ahmed's fictional works with special attention on his short novel Gouripur Junction. To make the study, the researcher will avail the works of the writer as primary source and major prevailing works on him as the secondary source and hopefully open up a new dimension. Keywords: station, struggle, uncertainty, marginal, dimension

Maternal Depression and Its Associated Factors among the Mothers at Narayanganj in Bangladesh

Maternal depression is becoming a serious public health concern in the world day by day. The purpose of the current study was to assess the maternal depression and its associated factors among the mothers of Narayanganj city in Bangladesh. A cross-sectional study was conducted in six different areas at Narayanganj in Dhaka among 377 mothers having children of five to ten years between the periods of May, 2019 to September, 2019. The respondents were selected by simple random sampling method. All data analysis was done by using IBM SPSS version 20.0. The mean age of the pregnant women was 26±4 years. It was found that about 77% of mothers had high depressive symptoms whereas 10.7%, 6.63% and 6.36% of mothers had moderate, mild and no depressive symptoms, respectively.  It was observed that family income, family size, age of children and age at marriage were significantly (p<0.05) associated with maternal depression status. Further investigations might be carried out to assess the effect size of the associated factors mentioned above. Keywords: Maternal depression, mothers, children, associated factors. DOI: 10.7176/JHMN/102-06 Publication date:September 30th 2022