While in Dhaka, I’ll try to write up a weekly wrap of some random thoughts that pop up between my ears. Hope you enjoy them. I cannot stress enough that what follows is not based on anything other than my subjective opinion.
November 29, 2008
The nomination drama — or why BNP may yet surprise everyone
Anyone who knows anything about what happened in 1991 would see the parallel. I am not predicting a BNP win. But I am willing to wager that BNP will do much better than what the conventional wisdom holds.
November 28, 2008
An unexpected honeymoon?
Politics is the price of rice, wrote fellow blogger Rahnuma Ahmed earlier this year. Rising prices, or more accurately, rising inflation, is intricately linked with political fortunes in Bangladesh. Regardless of the election result, could the incoming government receive an unexpected honeymoon from softening inflation?
November 27, 2008
What did 1/11 achieve?
When in Dhaka, I like to go out for a walk at least once a day — to the tea stall for a cigarette, for a shave, or my favourite, to the local bazaar to witness the invisible hand in action. It’s during such a walk couple of mornings after the coup when I saw the visible hand of the regime. I was in a kacha bazaar in Jasimuddin Road in Uttara when an army platoon arrived and told the vendors to pack up within an hour. A chaos ensued. After the hour was over, with mechanical efficiency, the jawans demolished the thriving market — an illegal establishment — in minutes.
I walked to Jasimuddin Road the other evening and saw the bazaar fully restored.
That bazaar is real, but it can also serve as a symbol of everything else this regime has tried to do. What did 1/11 achieve?
November 11, 2008
War: what it is good for?
Why does anyone commemorate the Armistice Day? The cessation of the ‘war to end all wars’ wasn’t followed by a new dawn, not even a mottled dawn. In the West it brought economic upheavals that led to the Depression. It brought fascism. In the Middle East the peace ended all peace – they are still fighting the wars of Ottoman succession in Gaza and Baghdad. Further East, it brought communism. So why commemorate this non-event?
Well, it is an appropriate day to honour the veterans. After all, are most of the veterans not the poor and the dispossesed, or the simpletons who buy the line about the God and the Flag? What better day then to commemorate the lot whose is to simply obey and die than the non-end of a pointless conflict?
More importantly, it is a day to remind everyone that wars are pointless. It is a day to remind everyone that wars don’t have winners or losers, they have survivors. And those who start wars are seldom better off for it.
