Tragic week in Dhaka and a strange world

A very tragic week in Dhaka indeed… First the collapse of an unapproved “makeshift” building that took over 25 lives in Tejgaon and now the inferno that started and spread into several building in Old Dhaka killing 86 and counting. It almost seemed like the headlines of major newspapers flipped from one to the other just like that. My heart goes out to those victims and the survivors during this tragic event.

The news made it to almost all international news outlets – at least the ones I follow. Yahoo’s main page also had this news (LINK FIXED NOW) at second spot at one point today. I couldn’t help but notice the high volume of comments made to the news and started reading some.

Many of them read like this from caring souls around the world:

“A terrible tragedy. My condolences to the families of those who have lost loved ones.”

And like this:
 
“My heartfelt condolences to the family and relatives of these victims. God bless Bangladesh.”
 

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However, there were also ones from people with sense of inappropriate and insensitive humor:
 
“IT WAS THE INDIAN’S FAULT. BANGLADESH SHOULD NUKE INDIA”

From people still believing colonization was a good thing:

“No sympathy here whatsoever. Bangladesh was a part of British India and a colony. It was doing ok back then. Now look what has happened (ridiculious overpopulation, floods, no real government). You wanted independence, ok, handle your own problems. Same thing with Burma & Pakistan”

From people with anti-islamic view:

“How pleasant! I am always so thrilled to hear of mass muzzlim death.”

From people that still think Bangladesh is part of India:

“hell, surprised. India does not really enforce proper building safety regulations. Probably smelled like curry out there…”

From those with little respect to culture and ethnicity:

“HOPE THE PEOPLE INSIDE ARE OK… ONCE AGAIN A BUNCH OF CURRY MONKEYS GET CREMATED A BIT SOONER THAN EXPECTED. SO SAD THAT THE DOT HEADS CAN’T PULL IT TOGETHER AND FIGURE IT OUT BEING 3RD WORLD IS A CHOICE…”

And from Bangladeshis protesting the insensitive and tasteless comments:

“Many of the westerners hate Bangladesh because we are poor and over populated. The fact is that we consume recourses much less than any other countries. Most of the people are living on less than a dollar. Not a whole lot of help we are getting form the western countries. We borrow money and pay them back with interests. It’s sad to read all this negative comments here. Our people don’t get good education and exposed to extreme poverty. What is your excuse?”
 

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It’s truly sad to think how insensitive and self-centered some of us have become to make mockery of a tragic event of this magnitude. We are talking about suffering of lives as tender as year and a half to elderly as sixty plus here. The headlines will change to World Cup or June 27 hartal or something else – our concern will change to another natural or man-made disaster – spotlight of our celebration will be another Musa or Brazil or Argentina and few insensitive and ignorant souls will find another tragedy to make fun of – this is a strange world we live in.

Amar Desh and cost of free speech

Facebook’s ban last week didn’t bother me as much as it did for the closure of the Daily Amar Desh. My strong view on privacy issue of Facebook since their inception was probably the reason I didn’t care so much. However, regardless of my personal view on Facebook and its privacy loopholes, it obviously breaches our freedom of expression especially when we are touting “Digital Bangladesh” at the same time. I am not so sure if depiction of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) is truly the justification behind Facebook ban… no need to elaborate here since plenty of other blogs and forums suggest otherwise. I strongly feel that there are other ways of approaching and stopping blasphemy against our holy prophet in Facebook then to outright banning it.
 
The closure of a two private satellite channels earlier and then banning Facebook and now shutting down the Daily Amar Desh reminds me something that can happen during a military–controlled government and not in a civilian one. What is more frightening is to think is what can possibly happen next. We will either see continuation of crackdown on free speech or see media self censor themselves to avoid the government axe. Either way, a possible great demise of free speech unless we speak up. We have already gotten used to the idiotic act of “name change with power change” but let’s not allow yet another absurdity into the mix especially when it’s about our freedom of speech.

Uncharted waters

Many of us Bangladeshis who had the privilege of going abroad to study have many stories of their experiences in foreign lands. We often bring bits and pieces of those stories and events during our Adda sessions. I even remember reading a book by Humayun Ahmed that is all about his real life experience during his stay in the US. When I was glancing through The Newage today, this piece caught my eyes in the Xtra section that talks about the reverse. The reporters highlighted the experience of international students studying in Bangladesh that we seldom hear about.

It was with quite a lot of difficulty that Adil Amin paid heed to the thought of completing his higher education in Bangladesh. And upon his arrival, the idea of fleeing back to Mogadishu, his hometown in Somalia, had occurred to him on many an occasion. More…

The dream lives on…

During our liberation war against Pakistan, majority of the leaders and the voices of the so called free world chose to stand in the sidelines. None intervened, not even for the cause of morality; instead they blanketed the desperate urgency with an imaginary cloud. There were few good men that stood up and saw clearly what was going on when others chose to support dictatorship of convenience instead of condemning the consequent injustices going on in the then East Pakistan. One of those heroes was Ted Kennedy who passed away today – may his good soul rest in peace. I read about many heroes of our independence in my text books growing up and many of those stories and heroes have been changed overtime due to political jugglery. I am not sure if the likes of Ted Kennedy and Archer Blood are mentioned in those text books these days but they will always be in the hearts of those that cherishes our independence. The dream lives on…

Food shortage? No food shortage?

It is bad enough to have a problem and it’s even worse to deny that the problem exists. While watching the news last week, I unexpectedly caught a clip of general Moin touring the Dhaka’s Kawran Bazaaar market to survey the food shortage and price hikes that is widespread in the country and making a remark that there is no crisis. Of course, this is far from reality considering the price increase of essentials that we have seen in the last one year. Price of rice alone doubled in this period and the poor (which makes up the majority in Bangladesh) are ending up spending 70% of the income on food alone.
 
I recall another comment made by the general recently that advised his fellow countrymen to alter their eating habits and eat more potatoes (which had bumper production this year) with rice in order to alleviate the shortage. Though this statement contradicts the previous one – given one claims we have a problem and the others claims not, I will leave that argument out for now. The argument here is that, it not easy to alter food habit for anyone. The poor people in Bangladesh have one luxury of having rice with their two meals and for many that is the only thing that they can afford on their plates – please don’t take that away. We ought to exhaust all options before suggesting to give up the only luxury for millions of Bangladeshis. How about rechanneling the food distribution and putting all energy in the short-term to make sure the ‘Jono Shadharon’ have the highest priority on food at an affordable price. Yes, BDR Najjo Mullo stations are one way but way more needs to be done.

For long-term solution, enough resources and necessary attention for the growth of the agriculture sector needs to given priority. If India with economic growth rate of over 8% for the last five years only had meager 2.5% growth in agriculture in the same period in a free flowing democracy; what chance we have under ‘democracy on-hold’ to overcome this problem in the long-term?

Voter ID cards done!

After 4 months of mobilization and procurement and 8 months of rigorous data collection, the voter registration and ID cards are done!
 
Obviously we all know that the above statement isn’t true based on the latest report on voter ID preparation status. It’s not a wishful thinking but that’s exactly what all the newspapers reported based on what was projected exactly a year ago.
 
You have to love the online news archive that most of our newspapers implemented few years ago. You can find this news from the archive here and here and also here.
 
Based on the report submitted by the eight-member committee formed by the interim government to assess the cost and time it would take to achieve this important task, the voter list would be done by now. At least, we would be very close to being done but the reality of course is far from it

Cyclone Sidr: Three months later

Today marks the third month since devastating cyclone Sird leveled many lives and livelihood in coastal Bangladesh. Three months have passed yet over a million people are still living in inadequate makeshift shelters. How long will it be before these people are rehabilitated and brought back onto their feet?

BBC photo journal: Bangladesh cyclone recovery

Making do
Thousands of people across Bangladesh are still picking up the pieces after Cyclone Sidr. The southern part of Bangladesh was particularly battered by the cyclone on 15 November last year. Even now, three months on, the poor especially are just having to make do. Some have tried to rebuild their homes, but others are dispirited and don’t have the energy to rebuild.
Continue…

Lets not slaughter Bangla

Languages evolve and that’s how it develops and enriches itself. There is a clear difference and a fine line between evolutions influenced by ‘pop culture’ and one that is influenced by time and context. Regardless what’s influencing it; changes clearly indicate that the language is progressing and not one that is dying. Our dearly loved Bangla Bhasha (language) is a progressing language and we should encourage that development. However, all of us should have the aspiration to not “slaughter” the basic framework in sentence building, spelling and pronunciation especially the ones who are regarded as public figures, journalists, reporters, writers, speakers, artists, educators etc.
There is a good editorial on today’s Daily Star on this topic even though I beg to differ on certain things in the editorial like cohesion in speaking the language (of course we can have difference and should have difference otherwise the language will not evolve), reference to using 1/11 like 9/11 in the US (it is absolutely OK to adopt and correlate). Here is the editorial:

All these years after the Language Movement, it makes sense to ask what we have lately been doing with Bengali, or Bangla as many would like to call it. That sense of inquiry becomes rather important, indeed acquires urgency of a sort, considering that in a very large number of instances the Bengali language has been getting pretty mangled and, in the end, muddled altogether.

Think of a time, in school, when the stress, on the part of our teachers, was on a clear enumeration of the language, with the appropriate emphases on pronunciation and the like. We were taught the proper grammatical use of the language. We came home from the classroom knowing that no matter how much of a dialect we employed in our interaction with our families, in terms of a formal use of Bengali it was always standard language that we needed to keep going in our interaction with broader society. More…

Humane capitalism

Critics of Bill Gates and company (Microsoft) are plenty especially in the world of technology. Technologists including myself have had aversion of Microsoft over the years after repeatedly seeing some of their products conferred as the de facto standard by the IT governance over other significantly better products from their competitors – simply because Microsoft was and is the leading player in the field. There are many cases when small players with their innovative products trying to compete with Microsoft, either went belly up or were simply eaten by them. No matter what we say – Bill Gates and Microsoft had a significant role in shaping the technology world as we know it today. Many good things came out of Microsoft that redefined technology over and again.

Bill Gates is now seen more as a philanthropist than an entrepreneur technologist as he gets ready to retire from his day to day activity at Microsoft in June of 2008 to devote fulltime to his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates, a perfect practitioner of capitalism, is now pondering upon the thought on how to take the benefit of capitalism to those at the bottom of the pyramid. He has been talking about it for quite sometime now but his ideas were sketchy. Even at the speech that he delivered at the graduating class of Harvard in June of 2006, he touched on his fuzzy logic on “creative capitalism” and how it can work for the poor. Well “fuzzy logic” works well in solving many complex problems in computing but not so in alleviating poverty. His vision on “creative capitalism” may no longer be fuzzy as he delivers his speech at World Economic Forum in Switzerland today. His ideas are beginning to look more like the masterminds on this front – C.K. Prahalad and our very own Muhammad Yunus.

Read the article “Bill Gates Issues Call For Kinder Capitalism” by Robert A. Guth of the Wall Street Journal:

Free enterprise has been good to Bill Gates. But later today, the Microsoft Corp. chairman will call for a revision of capitalism.
In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the software tycoon plans to call for a “creative capitalism” that uses market forces to address poor-country needs that he feels are being ignored.

Outgoing Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates talks to The Journal’s Rob Guth about his concept of creative capitalism. (Jan. 23, 2008)
“We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well,” Mr. Gates will tell world leaders at the forum, according to a copy of the speech seen by The Wall Street Journal. More…

Blackberry in Bangladesh

I finally became a Blackberry wearing drone after denying its supremacy over my Windows Mobile PDA for years. Just when I stepped into the world of Blackberry few months ago, I was wondering if I could use my Blackberry device in Bangladesh. The disappointing answer was NO at that time but not so anymore as Grameenphone (GP) just announced the availability of Blackberry devices and services in Bangladesh.

In the west especially in North America, it is unimaginable to see corporate executives and IT professionals without Blackberry. As emails replace phone calls to be the primary mode of communication in the corporate world, nothing works as seamlessly as Blackberry to make those email messages available to you like phone calls at all times. Whether it is getting a message from big wigs on a critical mission, a message from co-workers for a run to Starbucks, a message to your subordinate to give a pat on the back or a system generated message on something going haywire somewhere – it is done through Blackberry in many companies in the North American corporate world.

Bangladesh will not be the first in this region to get Blackberry services – Blackberry is available in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka for a while now. Blackberry services is not common or an economically practical option among regular users even in North America and that’s why they are primarily targeted towards corporate world. It will be interesting to see how well it is received by the business class of Bangladesh as GP can simply rule out the MPs and corrupt government cronies, lucrative would be customer groups.