The Biddable Intelligentsia

The average IQ of the Bangladeshi intellectual is woefully low. There does not appear to be an atom of original thought in the Bangladeshi mind. Now, why's that?

You'd think that the hot shots like Mozaffar Ahmed, Rehman Sobhan, Mosharraf Hossain, Debapriya Bhattacharya, et al., would say something refreshing when they opened their mouths.

Why this antipathy towards the intellect?

One tempting answer is authoritarianism. Our culture, it may be argued, does not permit originality. This argument would be stupid. The Muslim civilisation has been around for fourteen hundred years. It has produced men of the highest calibre.

The answer lies elsewhere: in Bangladesh, the intellectual can be bought. He serves the interest of the neocolonial powers. He's the collaborator to the imperialist.

One striking aspect of the Bangladeshi intellectual is his total silence on Palestine. As a country of 150 million Muslims, one would expect us to show a flicker of solidarity for the Palestinians. There isn't a glimmer.

One wonders how much money is disbursed by the Israel lobby to the local intelligentsia. I suppose there will never be any research done on the subject, and for obvious reasons.

Mind you, young Bangladeshis don't start off as imbeciles. But they learn from their university teachers and their elders that they are required to be corrupt. I have taught very intelligent young boys and girls but somehow they later lose their steam. They become socialised.

In The Beginning Was The Word (fiction)

In The Beginning Was The Word

(click above for fiction)

I have argued elsewhere that 'freedom' is an empty word without meaning in Asia because Asia lacks the experience of large-scale slavery. Zafar Shah tries to teach that words have meaning only in context but doesn't stand a chance against the tide of media indoctrination, historical defeat and the flood of dosh from the west.

Excerpt:

General Haroon-ur-Rashid came to my flat, all pips and gongs.

"Well, Zafar, do you think the students will overthrow me?"

"No, not the students." I put my cold mango juice down. "The donors. By means of the students."

"And why’s that?"

"They don’t need any anti-communist bulwark, anymore."

"But I’m popular."

"I know. They know that, too. But they want free and fair elections. Something they call freedom."

"What can I do?"

"If we had had enough time, we could have fought one idea with another idea. Rather, one word with an idea."

"What are you going on about, Zafar?"

"The idea of freedom has gripped the students: they don’t understand the word, but they like the sound. And who can blame them? The entire western media have indoctrinated them. A few years ago, we could have countered the word with a Perso-Arabic expression: zel Allah."

"Eh?"

The Raj is Still Here

I know an old man who has nothing better to do than pick holes in other people's English.

"Can you imagine that he said that!" he guffaws in bed.

He's a product of the British Raj, when the quality of your English ingratiated you with the sahiblog. Today, he's a buffoon. All that he has left in life is the ability to criticise other people's bad English.

This is what the intelligentsia has come to in Bangladesh. There are no honest writers or commentators - all of us are still lackeys of the Raj.