Sun 29 Jun 2008
[ Graph: The Fund For Peace, Washington, D.C.] (more…)
Wed 21 May 2008
It appears that the Shahjalal Bank has made it mandatory for female employees to wear the headscarf. The decree was given yesterday, according to the Sachal blogger. I have not seen this story covered elsewhere, so I cannot vouch for its truthiness. Readers back home may have better information.
The question is - would such a move be legally permitted? At the very least, the decree would appear to discriminate against minority employees. Then again, if you were to go through the staff rolls of Shahjalal Bank, I wonder how many minority employees you would actually find.
Subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) discrimination against Hindu, Buddhist and Christian employees is commonplace in Bangladesh. But this move appears to institutionalize such discrimination. It is also further evidence of the creeping Islamization of the public sphere that started as far back as Zia/Ershad and which seems to be gaining pace with time, as its practitioners become more and more emboldened.
It’s almost enough to make one wish for the appearance of our own Ataturk.
What does the constitution have to say about this? In the West, such a move would be immediately hammered with lawsuits from all sides - bodies like the ACLU or Liberty exist to challenge such discriminatory practices. Does an outfit like the Ain O Shalish Kendro have a remit to look into the legality of this decree? Although I do not doubt that the merest whiff of a legal challenge will bring the bearded cave-dwellers out on to the streets, armed to the back-teeth and screaming Kaffir or Murtad at the top of their voices. O tempora, o mores.
Tue 20 May 2008
Congratulations are in order. As many of you already know, Tahmima Anam has won the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book for A Golden Age, her acclaimed novel about the Liberation War. This is a great honour, and we are certain that this will be only the first of many such accolades in her career. Tahmima’s novel has been translated into Bangla by Leesa Gazi, and this edition was released at the February Boi Mela in Dhaka. The Bangla title is ‘Shona Jhora Din’. The novel has also been transformed into a 30-minute playscript by the Drishtipat Creative group in London, and this has already been performed a number of times at various arts events in London.
Tahmima also writes regularly in the UK press, for the New Statesman magazine (where she is a contributing editor) and for the Guardian newspaper. Click to read her pieces.
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Congratulations also to Tanveer Islam, a regular writer in our Bangla blog, on the publication of his first heavyweight academic tome - Cyclone Wind Analysis and Disaster Planning - An Integrated Approach for the Bangladesh Coast. Tanveer is a specialist in urban planning and disaster management, and teaches and conducts research in the United States (on the Katrina-hit Galveston coast, among other places). He has the enviable gift of explaining complex environmental issues as they relate to Bangladesh in a clear and insightful manner. His ongoing series on the planning problems of Dhaka (and possible solutions) is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of our cities. We hope our policymakers are taking note of the valuable work that the new generation of Bangladeshi academics is performing in these areas.
To read Tanveer’s Dhaka series, click here (this is best viewed on Firefox).
Thu 15 May 2008
Na Bola Kotha, our Bangla blog, with a spate of interesting articles in quick succession:
Snigdha writes about Africa, biodiversity, development and globalization in an essay discussing the documentary Darwin’s Nightmare.
Shubinoy discusses the rising backlash against biofuels, specifically ethanol production in the West, which has turned primary crops away from the food chain and contributed to spiking food prices worldwide.
Husainuzzaman, who is an environmental scientist as well as a popular blogger in the Banglasphere, contributes his first piece to NBK - an in-depth look at water conservation techniques for the future. Lessons for our policymakers in this piece; the writer also contributed a fascinating piece on how to clean up the river Buriganga in Sachalayatan a few weeks ago. Highly recommended. Go to Na Bola Kotha.
Fri 9 May 2008
“What is exercising me is not the identity of our next PM or his or her government. Well before the aborted 2007 election, I said we should ignore the election and focus on the following one (then slated for 2012). I continue in that belief that we should focus on the election after next (assuming we have one this winter)…What I mean by that is not the identity of the future winner, but the basis on which our political debate will be conducted in the future. The victor of the election this winter will have hell to pay. The new regime will not be able to control the country. Two years into its tenure, it will be in crisis. For those who have greater ambitions for this country I would suggest minimising the debate about who will be PM in Dhaka come March 2009. Rather, I would ask for a radical overhaul in the terms of the debate about national development. For those exercised about protecting resources such as gas and coal, an equivalent “committee” to protect the small farmer and landless is needed. While some doubt where the money will come from, I prefer to ask, where is the money going?”
Read the whole write up by Farid Bakht where he asks the political agenda to move to the left and learn from Nepal.
Tue 29 Apr 2008
As part of a programme marking the International Women’s Day, the government announced a National Women Development Policy on 8 March (see here). The announced policy was condemned by a section of the clerics as un-Islamic. Specifically, the clerics objected to any possible change to the inheritance laws such that women could get equal inheritance rights as men. On 11 March, the government announced that it had no intention of passing any law that is ‘anti-Islam’ (see here). On 27 March, the government formed a 20-member committee to identify inconsistencies in the policy as per Islamic rules and suggest steps (see here). While the committee deliberated, the clerical opposition continued. Following the Friday prayers on 11 April, violent protests broke out around Baitul Mukarram (see here). On 17 April, the committee recommended that the government amends its policy, replacing any commitment to equality between the sexes with ‘just rights’ for women (see here).
Drishtipat is committed to equal rights - irrespective of age, gender, ethnicity or faith - of all citizens. As such, it supports, without any reservation, equal property and inheritance rights for men and women. But this post is not about the commitment to these rights. Nor is it about theological discussions about what Islam has to say on the matter. Rather, it is about some lessons to be drawn from the developments described in the first paragraph.
Thu 17 Apr 2008
..via Zadie and Monica. A terrific new piece by Jyoti in the Bangla blog, exploring the fate of our immigrants and ultimately asking questions about the nature of our politics. A must-read.
Mon 14 Apr 2008
শুভ নববর্ষ । Please discuss any subject, raise any issues, ask the UV bloggers any question, or request a post. Regards.
Sat 12 Apr 2008
Around 4000 police and armed police battalion stormed through 12 villages around Kansat in the middle of the night ransacking houses, looting, indiscriminately beating up women, children, and elderlies, and finally firing upon fleeing villagers killing at least 6 people, including a 10 year old boy, and injuring more than 300. Hundreds of rounds of bullets, rubber bullets, and tear gas canisters were fired on the people. They had also arrested 29 people on the sixth day of indefinite hartal called by PBUSP.
3rd year anniversary of Kansat killing today.
This website by drishtipat volunteers documents the people’s uprising in Kansat.
Fri 4 Apr 2008
Dr. Yunus is a nobel laureate. Widely popular outside Bangladesh and arguably inside Bangladesh as well. However, is Dr. Yunus a good role model for Bangladeshi youth? Before you answer that with a simple yes, or no, if you could also tell us what kind of qualities you look for in a role model and which of those are there in him and which of those are not there, it will be great. This will give more context to your answer.
Sun 30 Mar 2008
For a long time, I thought it was just me. So, feeling a bit guilty, I told no-one about it. Thought it might fade with time. Then I realised it was here to stay. I’m talking of course of my secret fantasy of driving down Dhaka’s streets in a massive industrial digger. Yellow: it has to be yellow. Every time I come across an irritating driver, I simply scoop him up with my steel grey claw and hurl him, car and all, into a bush. Or alternatively roll over his vehicle like a tank and squash it.
Imagine my relief when, in a moment of weakness, I disclosed this to a close friend, an urbane and respected professional, only to have him reveal that he too had a personal fantasy. His involves having football stadium floodlights attached to his car. Each time someone comes up behind him with their headlights on full beam, he turns on his extra lights and dazzles them, He’s obviously thought this through in some detail, and adds, with a touch of relish, “I’d actually like to burn their retinas”.
Then, at a sophisticated dinner party one evening, I am chatting to an articulate woman, who seems the embodiment of politeness and charm. But in the course of the conversation, when I discuss my intention to write this article, she discloses that she has her own demonic side which only emerges in Dhaka traffic, letting slip that she occasionally dreams of having an automatic machine gun fitted to her car, so that she can simply wipe out those drivers who annoy her, in a hail of bullets.
It seems that Dhaka traffic brings out the worst in us, proving our careful cultivated social demeanour to be a thin veneer. Underneath all of us, the psychopath lurks, brought to the surface by the driving habits of our wonderful metropolis.
Read more here
Mon 17 Mar 2008
Some excellent posts in our Bangla blog -
Tanveer Islam who is a specialist in urban planning and disaster management has just started a series on the planning problems of Dhaka city. Does our capital city have a future? Tanveer, an academic in the United States, is still in his 20s. We are hopeful of many more posts from him.
We have also added a new post on the shipbreaking industry in Sitakunda. This industry was the subject of a recent award-winning documentary by Shaheen Dill-Riaz. Lohakhor (The Ironeaters, or Eisenfresser to call it by its original German title) has already won multiple awards on the international film festival circuit. It is showing next month in London at the British Museum. The film review we have posted is by Tirondaz, a writer and translator who also recently published an anthology of German short stories translated into Bangla. Kafka, Boll, Zweig - these are the writers Tirondaz chose for his volume, which was released during last month’s Boi Mela.
On the lighter side, there is a profile of Akram Khan, the British Bengali dancer who has taken the world of contemporary dance by storm. Definitely something to make a song and dance about.
Indeed, just like the blog! Please read, register, comment and participate. (We are best viewed through the Firefox browser.) The use of Bangla on the net is becoming easier by the day. In particular the introduction of the Avro Keyboard marks a quantum leap in the ease of writing Bangla. Even better, Avro is actually available in a portable format, so you can literally plug your USB into any computer on this planet and start typing away in Bangla within moments!!! What could be easier than that???
Sun 16 Mar 2008
Started writing again, and thought I might share it with UV, seeing as DP helped me get off the ground in the first place!
It could be a library reading room. Several men, some in suits and ties, poring over texts, heads bowed. Early evening sunlight casting geometric shapes on the walls. Silence, except for the occasional whisper of a turned page, or the harsh cry of a crow on the windowsill.
Your eye travels round the room, taking in these greying, learned readers, many of them retired or senior professors, who have gathered together for a weekend to edit educational texts. And it comes to rest, registering just a faint sense of surprise, on an elderly man sitting in the far corner. Diminutive, bony, long-bearded. He wears a high floppy woolen hat which topples rather comically to one side, and sits, quiet as a shadow, engrossed in his text. At a distance, his eyes appear closed. Perhaps he is actually sleeping gently. And why not? It’s been a long day, and the subject of our gaze is after all approaching eighty years old.
Read more here
Mon 3 Mar 2008
Prospect is one of the UK’s leading monthly magazines, with every issue carrying heavy-duty essays on politics, economics and society. This month’s cover story is one of their most interesting to date. It is a lengthy exploration of the Chinese intellectual classes - how a new generation of thinkers and scholars are trying to chart a viable future for the world’s next superpower. The essay is highly recommended for its analysis of many different facets of Chinese intellectual life. Choice quote on the debate over the political system:
Many intellectuals in China are starting to question the utility of elections. Pan Wei, a rising star at Beijing University, castigated me at our first meeting for paying too much attention to the experiments in grassroots democracy…
Chinese thinkers argue that all developed democracies are facing a political crisis: turnout in elections is falling, faith in political leaders has declined, parties are losing members and populism is on the rise. They study the ways that western leaders are going over the heads of political parties and pioneering new techniques to reach the people such as referendums, opinion surveys or “citizens’ juries.” The west still has multi-party elections as a central part of the political process, but has supplemented them with new types of deliberation. China, according to the new political thinkers, will do things the other way around: using elections in the margins but making public consultations, expert meetings and surveys a central part of decision-making. This idea was described pithily by Fang Ning, a political scientist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He compared democracy in the west to a fixed-menu restaurant where customers can select the identity of their chef, but have no say in what dishes he chooses to cook for them. Chinese democracy, on the other hand, always involves the same chef—the Communist party—but the policy dishes which are served up can be chosen “à la carte.”
What with our so-called two-party “democracy” frequently degenerating into an ugly food fight, it certainly gives one pause for thought. Read the whole thing.
Sun 2 Mar 2008
In the liberation war of 1971, Jayanta Ray of Pabna gave his life for a free Bangladesh. And yet, after his death, his property was snatched under the Enemy Property Act. For 36 years, his family has been fighting for justice - for the removal of his name from the Enemies list, for restoration of his property to his rightful heirs. But to no avail.
Read a post by his nephew Anjan that will make you hang your head in shame, that will make you rethink all the easy cliches, all the convenient patriotic slogans that we love so very much to treat ourselves with in this the month of our Muktijudhho.
A nation is defined not by the pride and jingoism of the majority, but by the way it treats its minorities, the weakest of its members. By that definition, we have fallen a very long way indeed.
The Enemy Property Act must be repealed now. It is the dirtiest stain on our national character.