It is with a heavy heart that I will be leaving my home of eight years tomorrow. It is with a heavy heart because I'm being hounded out of my residence.
The hounds are the local committe, who suddenly objected to my teaching students English on the premises. That I have been doing the same for eight years was an argument that had no importance to them.
And when, after the first illegal interview (illegal because it is not the committee that can speak to me; they must speak only to my landlord, as my lawyer later informed me), I filed a general diary, fearing violence.
When they found out that I had filed a GD, they were furious: how dare I excercise my rights as a citizen? In this building, only the committee had rights, and I was a mere individual.
Then, after browbeating my landlord, they came en masse into my apartment where only my wife and I reside. There they used minatory langauge and said that if I did not stop all activity in one week, they would bar the gates. This was illegal: they had no right to talk to me, for I had leased the house from my landlord, not from them. They could complain to my landlord: in fact, we had already decided to leave the flat rather than live with such hoodlums. But they paid no attention to what I had to say. This is the behaviour of moneyd 'gentlemen' in Bangladesh.
Through brute force and intimidation, they forced a law-abiding, harmless individual and his wife to leave. After all, there's a limit to the harassment and intimidation that a gentleman can endure.
And to think that they achieved all this, not through a court order, but by sheer bullying and coercion.
I hope the Supreme Court will take these matters under cognisance, and uphold the rights of tenants against a tyrannical majority.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
3,000 nations
There are around three thousand languages in the world, so there should be three thousand nations.
Some may be quite small - the size of a park, say. Some may be just a bedsit, with the residents offering visas at the door to curious tourists. There would be recordings of the language inside and a few trinkets. When the inmates die, the bedsit will become a museum. Or the heirs may wish to inherit it if it pays well. Otherwise patriotism might be squeezed out of such a small accomodation. The children may decide to emigrate en masse. That is, the nation might move out.
As for the parks, they may offer green credentials, a bit of boating and picknicking....Indeed, it is hard to see how these nations can make money. They'll have to be subsidised, of course. This is not as outlandish as it seems: take Bangladesh. It is a highly subsidised nation. Indeed, even today many nations do not earn their keep. Since they don't have the pennies, they don't have the pride, just a lot of hot air.
So I personally see no objections to a UN of 3,000 members. It's perfectly feasible. In fact, it's already happening.
Some may be quite small - the size of a park, say. Some may be just a bedsit, with the residents offering visas at the door to curious tourists. There would be recordings of the language inside and a few trinkets. When the inmates die, the bedsit will become a museum. Or the heirs may wish to inherit it if it pays well. Otherwise patriotism might be squeezed out of such a small accomodation. The children may decide to emigrate en masse. That is, the nation might move out.
As for the parks, they may offer green credentials, a bit of boating and picknicking....Indeed, it is hard to see how these nations can make money. They'll have to be subsidised, of course. This is not as outlandish as it seems: take Bangladesh. It is a highly subsidised nation. Indeed, even today many nations do not earn their keep. Since they don't have the pennies, they don't have the pride, just a lot of hot air.
So I personally see no objections to a UN of 3,000 members. It's perfectly feasible. In fact, it's already happening.
Law and Morality
In Bangladesh, thanks to the donors, we are focussing exclusively on legal measures to improve our society. This is disastrous.
What happens to morality? A society that attempts to rely exclusively on law is already moribund. Law without morality means a dead end. The NGOs have focussed attention on a 'rights-based' society. There's a reason for that. They have a parallel agenda of secularism, and the promotion of 'univeral [western] values'. And this precludes the morality that we have learned from religion. A hatred of religion is prevalent among the intellectuals - instead they import werstern ideas that have no resonance here.
Values such as compassion, empathy, altruism, commiseration are dead or dying. Without these values no society can function as a group of human beings, but as a bunch of animals - for even animals have their natural laws. When Nelson Mandela was faced with the task of nation-building, he went beyond rights and appealed to the Christian value of turning the other cheek. Unfortunately, he also imported secular western values which have devastated his society.
What happens to morality? A society that attempts to rely exclusively on law is already moribund. Law without morality means a dead end. The NGOs have focussed attention on a 'rights-based' society. There's a reason for that. They have a parallel agenda of secularism, and the promotion of 'univeral [western] values'. And this precludes the morality that we have learned from religion. A hatred of religion is prevalent among the intellectuals - instead they import werstern ideas that have no resonance here.
Values such as compassion, empathy, altruism, commiseration are dead or dying. Without these values no society can function as a group of human beings, but as a bunch of animals - for even animals have their natural laws. When Nelson Mandela was faced with the task of nation-building, he went beyond rights and appealed to the Christian value of turning the other cheek. Unfortunately, he also imported secular western values which have devastated his society.
The Ethnocidal Civilisation (essay)
(click above for article)
Western civilisation commits ethnocide and menticide, as seen in India and recently in the Middle East.
Ethnocide – culture murder – has been the repeated behaviour pattern of western civilization, as testified by Alexis de Tocqueville. The culture is not content with mere conquest: it must control the very thoughts of those conquered. A recently published book on a Christian mission in Bangladesh retells an old story against the background of both the Muslim and British invasions of India, centering the Garos and the loss of their ancestral religion.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
closed jamaat
The spectacle of high-rise buidlings has given rise to another: the closed jamaat. Nowadays, prayers are performed in some high-rise buildings - with the gates locked, and everyone except residents excluded. Keeping out the umma is not permissible in Islam.
A place of prayer must be open to everyone - the high and the low, the poor and the rich, the beggar and the millionaire. If you don't trust in the Almighty for security, you should at least have the decency and piety to go and say your prayers in a public mosque and not behind closed, guarded gates.
A place of prayer must be open to everyone - the high and the low, the poor and the rich, the beggar and the millionaire. If you don't trust in the Almighty for security, you should at least have the decency and piety to go and say your prayers in a public mosque and not behind closed, guarded gates.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Demoncracy
This installation art from the UAE deserves high praise. Firstly, it is from the UAE, where there's no voting and no protests. Secondly, it is an Arab country, and many misguided Arabs have chosen anarchy over stability. Third, it captures essentially the evil of western civilisation as well as the evil that comes to a democratising country like, say, Bangladesh.
The neon artwork is by Kader Attia and is from from the private collection of Sultan Sooud al-Qassemi, a cousin of Sheikha Hoor al-Qassemi, the daughter of Sharjah's ruler.
The N in 'demoncracy' should no longer be silent.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
A Disarticulated Body
A disarticulated body was found in Dhaka, Bangladesh. That was nearly two days ago. In a civilised polity, this would have set off a nation-wide alarum. Nothing of this kind has happened. The incident has been quietly ignored.
Why?
Democracy unleashed violence on a massive scale: by now, we have become inured to decapitations and disrticulations. This is what democracy has done for us.
The nation is agog at the spectacle of the opposition laying 'siege' to the capital tomorrow: dismembered bodies? Who cares?
Yesterday, the decomposed body was found in Kushtia, a small city in Bangladesh. It was reported in the inside pages of a daily. It just barely made the news.
We have become desensitised: indifferent to murder, no matter how gruesome. I have lived through autocracy and democracy, and I have seen the change in human nature.
On Clothes and Modernity
(click above for article)
"For example, I prefer to wear jeans and T-shirt too. Because I need easily to use my legs and arms." My 'modern' Turkish friend pleads efficiency for her attire; oddly, though, efficient farm girls in Turkey wear the shalwar, as they do in Bangladesh, along with the saree. 'Modernity' comes in many covers, and this one conceals less of its sinister side than most.
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