About the podcast
Two lifelong learners unpack books and ideas through honest, cross-cultural conversation.
Between Lines and Lands blends deep reading, economic insight and playful banter into episodes that question what we think we know, and how we know it. Created by Shakil Ahmad, with co-host Towheed Elahi, the show lives between disciplines: where public policy meets personal ethics, where economics meets lived experience, and where literature reveals the systems we live under.
Each episode starts with a book, an idea or a real-world puzzle. We’re not here to lecture. We’re here to wonder aloud, sometimes seriously, sometimes sarcastically, about how the world actually works. Episodes are in Bangla. Titles, notes and this site are in English so anyone can follow what we are reading.
The hosts
The Californian capitalist
Shakil Ahmad
Fulbright Scholar. CFA Charterholder. Business intelligence lead with over a decade of experience making sense of financial data, one dashboard, SQL query and Excel formula at a time. He builds models that don’t just report numbers but explain why they matter. Between Lines and Lands is where he finally gets to talk about the bigger questions behind the numbers, and a few good books.
The Bangladeshi bureaucrat
Towheed Elahi
Laura Bush Fellow. Senior civil servant. A public-policy thinker navigating the machinery of governance from the inside out, with a master’s from Texas A&M and years of frontline experience in the civil service of Bangladesh. He turns bureaucratic labyrinths into plain-language insight, delivered with the calm of someone who has read the memo and drafted it.
What you’ll hear
Every argument gets dissected from the capitalist’s chair and the bureaucrat’s chair before anyone is allowed to win.
Academic ideas connected to rent, onions, jobs, elections and the price of a bus ticket.
Ambiguity, contradiction and changing our minds on air are features, not bugs.
Intellectual depth without academic pretension. Jokes are permitted. Footnotes are encouraged.
Who it’s for
If you have ever questioned a policy after watching a show, found footnotes more interesting than headlines, or wanted depth without the lecture hall, this is for you.