Experts tell us that it should take another 150 to 170 years to close the gender pay gap around the world. Bad news for the mothers, sisters, wives and daughters! They have to wait that long for an equal footing with their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons. Especially so, when it comes to salaries and jobs. Living together for centuries, the two genders have been living centuries apart.

Source: thejerseytomatopress.com

Neither is it different between the strong and the weak. Conquests and subjugations go back to the dawn of mankind, but slavery originated about 11,000 years ago. Historians believe that mass slavery must have proliferated after the invention of agriculture because it required economic surpluses and high economic density to become viable. We’re hearing about the resurgence of slavery in this century amongst the refugee population, who are fleeing their countries to seek shelter elsewhere.

These are but three abiding examples of how history enters the equation of eternity as a function of time. Human beings started to exhibit evidence of behavioural modernity around 50,000 years ago. In so many years though, the flow of history has been negotiated between the surging tide and its indomitable undertow. In many instances, the change altered the constant. In many respects, the constant arrested the change.

Religious intolerance still simmers in many countries, resulting in frequent outbreaks of violence. Racial hatred is quietly seething under the surface of organised harmony. Sexual discrimination persists despite the most intimate relationships between men and women. Many loose ends are still dangling out there since the anatomically modern homo sapiens rose in Africa 200,000 years ago.

If you’ve ever dropped a stone into a well, you would know there’s a time lag between releasing the stone and hearing the splash. Everything in history has been going back and forth, one generation throwing the stone and another hearing the fall. In between, history has been punctuated by the eerie silence of truths held in abeyance. These are the times of insidious interregnums when the sublime turned into the ridiculous.

And that’s the underlying secret of human existence, talkative beings relentlessly mocking the terrible silence sitting inside them. Even the most outwardly popular person is inwardly lonely, emptiness swirling inside like howling gales. Driven by fear, uncertainty and hopelessness, every exhausted human soul feels like a deep tube well drawing water from exhausted aquifers.

Modern minds are even more miserable. Fickle and flimsy, their challenge is to stay focused on the fundamentals. The moral life for them is a trip to the museum, which houses the exhibits from a bygone era. It’s more like an excursion than an immersion. They believe to live, not live to believe. The physical is forever at odds with the spiritual.

That discrepancy creates hypocrisy mirrored in human character. Opportunism is hypocrisy exploited for convenience. Cowardice is hypocrisy used in self-defense. Greed is hypocrisy applied for self-gratification. Courage is hypocrisy leveraged for admiration.

These are the four walls that enclose the human condition. If populism is rising, religious tension is growing, racial hatred is spreading, and gender equality is lagging behind, it’s because that dismal condition runs in a loop. Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 AD, explained this ever-repeating loop in his famous saying that all things from eternity are like forms and come round in a circle.

The circular motion of history reinforces itself through a feedback loop. When human endeavours run their course, they trigger the feedback of hitting the wall, and it throws a monkey wrench in the works. Word eludes action. Crime evades punishment. Convenience takes over conviction. The Yeatsean Apocalypse sets in when things fall apart and the centre cannot hold.

Individuals, ideologies and institutions are the three levers of every civilisation, history mapping the terrains of their shifting coordinates. Power, wealth and gender haven’t changed much in the incessant flux of time. Persecution, hunger and discrimination still maintain their iron grip on the world.

Tears of the oppressed, cries of the hungry, and sighs of the deprived are markers that show the locations of human engagement in its purported evolution. Material acquisition and mindless ostentation are roadblocks, which divert the journey from time to time. And, when men and women can’t close their gap despite the fatal attraction between them, the fate of mankind must be a wild goose chase.

The writer is Editor of the weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star.
Email: badrul151@yhoo.com

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

An increase in elevation lowers air pressure, which makes breathing difficult for a climber. The underwater world becomes increasingly blue and eventually black as a diver goes deeper. Great ideals in their height or depth similarly vary, conception changing when it approaches perfection, and perfection changing when it approaches conception. In the end, neither is like how either appears to be.

Source: Nature

But the ideal exists in the real world in the same manner a dew drop wobbles on the tip of a leaf. The difference between God and His creatures perhaps draws the closest parallel to the difference between the highest forms of values and their actual manifestations. Humans have set lofty but unattainable moral goals for themselves.Not an overreach to say that the measures of existing human values are made of non-existing scales.

In that sense, we all worship virtues that are invisible like deities, and forever live in the twilight zone between the actual and the imaginary. And, that dichotomy is prevalent in the disappointing duplicity that we don’t practice what we preach. Hypocrisy is lodged in human nature as naturally as oxygen in the air we breathe.

This is the reason why every human civilisation collapsed at its peak. According to German philosopher Oswald Spengler, “civilisations” are decadent phases of highly developed cultures. He characterised the social and intellectual patterns of a great people or empire in its prime as a “culture”. When that culture passed its primeand became ossified or fixed, he called it a “civilisation”.

Decadence setting in the culmination of a culture is proof that ideals ultimately don’t stand it in good stead.And every civilisation has this truth buried in its ruins. Even worse, most civilisations were destroyed by the barbarians, which started with the earliest known civilisation of Sumer, in Mesopotamia. It collapsed under the strain of recurring invasions in the second millennium B.C.

Which amounts to the nightmare of a manicured lawn trampled by depraved beasts. The finest human emotions and beliefs stand helplessly before dishonesty, incompetence, hatred and violence. Rape during wars, persecution of citizens under dictatorships, ruthless killing in civil wars, and all of those happening ensemble during an invasion more than exemplify that the human condition is a contradiction in terms.

All humans are made of two instincts: animal and rational. Their condition in itself is a struggle between these two instincts that goes back and forth with more of one or the other. Thus the human condition is a struggle inside a struggle, as the physical constantly seeks alignment with the spiritual. It works like a weight-driven clock where the canon pinion drives a minute wheel and pinion. The latter drives an hour wheel, which carries the hour hand.

God may have made man in His own image, but the wheels and pinions that drive man are certainly not of the same industrial grade. Man’s life is short, his means are scarce and his capacity to ingest eternity is immensely limited. Ideals are clumsy adventures of man to fit hismortal feet into God’s shoes.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that human beings are uncomfortable and sloppy in their walk through life. The cycles of crime and punishment, truth and falsehood, virtue and vice, hope and despondency, sympathy and vengeance, guile and gumption, compassion and aggression, so on and so forth keep repeating as the ideal falters through the realspewing imperfections. This dynamics is comparable to energy passing through water and creating waves.

Since the dawn of mankind, the quest for perfection has changed the style not the substance. The hunters and gatherers are still the hunters and gatherers, their tools and clothing transformed by the paroxysm of inventions and discoveries. But their primitive instincts have been honed even further either by rationalising animality or animalising rationality. Today’s humans are devoid of humanity. They cling to their virtues to hide their vices like pre-historic men used fig leaves to cover modesty.

Idealism is thus a double jeopardy, at once misleading humans in their confused journey. This undertaking is difficult because wrong assumptions are incessantly driving wrong conclusions. What happens between womb and tomb is an ever-repeating experiment in whichthe finite is inexorably tested against the infinite.In that process, an idealistic individualis merely a parody of his destiny.

Great ideals are the ghost lights in the dark nights, and some travellers take them seriously. Those who sacrifice their livesfor greatcauses remain unaware that dying for a cause is just another cause of death.

The writer is Editor of the weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star.
Email: badrul151@yahoo.com

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

It was once a familiar refrain amongst the restaurant-goers in Dhaka that even if one didn’teat or drink anything in a restaurant, one could still end up paying twelve annas for breaking a drinking glass. That saying embodied concerns over the costliness of eating out and its incidental hazards, but eventually acquired a deeper meaning of life. It implies a Kafkaesque helplessness when one has to pay for something without partaking in any of its pleasures. Almost five years later, the Padma Bridge scandal looks like a throwback to that disturbing despair. Some people may have paid the price without doing anything significantly wrong.

Unless the World Bank knows something we don’t. The bank now seems to be the sole custodian of a scandalous secret, dutifully guarding the entrance of truth like Anubis guards the entrance of the underworld in Egyptian myths. The global lender, for reasons best known to itself, seems to have taken an unbreakable vow of silence.

Meanwhile, others have spoken out loud. On February 10, a Toronto court acquitted three former officials of SNC-Lavalin, who were accused of planning to bribe Bangladeshi officials to secure a consultancy contract in the Padma Bridge project. This accusation formed the eye of a storm that forced a minister to resign, a secretary sent to jail, and the project director removed from his post. It also brought shame for us watching our country dragged through the mud.

Now we feel ashamed of being ashamed, and only the World Bank can save us from this terrible embarrassment. It knows what had happened and why it cancelled the USD1.2 billion IDA credit for the bridge. The construction of the Padma Bridge, which is going to connect 21 districts with the country’s capital, got delayed while the cost multiplied. Lucky for Bangladesh, it stuck to its guns and mobilised Chinese loans and internal resources not to give up on that dream.

Whatever transpired between their government and the World Bank, the people of this country have paid the price. They not only suffered the awkwardness of a scandal that involved their government, but also withstood the anguish of watching their country being put on the spot. They have also lost time on the benefits of a more connected country. The budget for the bridge multiplied to Tk. 288 billion from Tk. 102 billion in 2007.

What the World Bank has done compares to a hit-and-run accident. The international agency made a serious accusation and then fled the scene, leaving behind a wounded nation of 160 million to live with the consequences. If this is how the bank wished to behave, it should have been more discreet about the whole thing. Nobody is guilty until proven. The World Bank upended that maxim of law by maligning our country before it proved anything beyond doubt.

The burden of proof always lies with the accuser. The World Bank owes it to the people of Bangladesh and the rest of the world to show how it’s right. So far this global body appears to have demonstrated the scruples of a village hag, who goes around spreading slanders just for fun. The bank may use its policies as a shield for its reticence. But after it brutally defamed a country, it simply can’t hide behind that purported smokescreen.

The Bangladesh government couldn’t have thrown out a more open challenge than it did after the recent Canadian court verdict. Our Prime Minister has even named the names to establish her claim that the cancellation of the World Bank loan for the Padma Bridge was a part of the sinister design to twist her arm. The World Bank should realise that while it may think silence is golden, its silence is actually giving consent to that cynicism.

“Speak now or forever hold your peace,” is a trope usually used in Christian matrimonial proceedings. If the World Bank doesn’t open its mouth now, it should never talk about it again. It has already confused us twice, first by levelling an accusation against this country and again by refusing to corroborate it. If nobody has eaten or drank anything, nobody should have to make the ludicrous payment for breaking a glass.

Will the World Bank eat humble pie? It depends on how confident our government feels that no wrong was done. It can pursue this matter in international forums, work with the international media, and take it up with the governments of countries which donate big money to the World Bank. Going to the court is another option.

Oscar Wilde defines scandal as gossip made tedious by morality. We have had enough gossip over the Padma Bridge scandal for almost five years. Now is the moment of truth. If the World Bank doesn’t open up, morality will degenerate into scandal made tedious by gossip.

The writer is Editor of the weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star.
Email: badrul151@yhoo.com

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

A tyrant to some and a liberator to others, Fidel Castro of Cuba died on November 25, a decade shy of a century. While his own countrymen stay divided on his legacy on two sides of the Straits of Florida, the revolutionary icon was a towering figure for the rest of the world. The cigar chomping, fatigues-clad, bearded man, who famously survived more than 600 assassination attempts, was the last stalwart defending communism to his last breath.

Che and Fidel. Photo: AFP

The man, whom the Cubans endearingly called Fidel or Elcomandante, remained an island of ideology unto himself in an island nation ensconced in a continent submerged in antithesis. He never openly renounced Communism, even though it kept his country almost frozen in time. He never changed his mind, even though his own life and his country were constantly targeted by imperialist plots, hatched not too far from the Cuba’s coast.

Fidel Castro’s Cuba survived like a fading picture in a shining frame. Any picture of Havana befuddles imagination. The stricken faces of its inhabitants against the background of shabby roads, houses and dinosaur cars conjure the image of a country that stands still in a time warp.

The frame around Cuba for more than a half-century was the charisma of Fidel Castro. The man and his country remained synonymous, and if one sifts through the archives, one will find that most of the news about Cuba has been news about Castro. It was Castro threatening the United States and the United States threatening Castro that made countless news headlines. It was Castro visiting foreign leaders and foreign leaders visiting Castro that appeared in most of those pictures.

Like Yaseer Arafat and Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro’s popularity was rooted in his appeal that transcended other considerations. The world seldom bothered to ask if he was right or wrong in the way he ruled Cuba. Teeming millions, who admired him across the world, were clueless how his own people suffered under his regime. Nobody questioned how it was justice to hand over power to his own brother!

The abiding mystery is how none of those diminished his aura that inspired many in the world. He remained a father figure for many politicians, athletes and writers, particularly in Latin America and Africa. Poor in quality assurance of the revolution in his own country, he marketed that product like an adept salesman. In the words of his friend Ernesto Che Guevara, he was the man who had made revolutions sexy.

It was Camus who also wrote that a rebel always rebels for freedom, whereas a revolutionary can suspend freedom in order to demand justice. One of the criticisms levelled against Fidel Castro is that he had turned into an autocrat himself, who killed his enemies, threw them in jail, and asked those who condemned his regime to leave the country. If every revolution devours its children, it also devours its ideas. It’s a matter of debate how much Castro adhered to the ideas that catapulted him to the world stage.

Poverty and unemployment persisted in Castro’s Cuba, but his health and education initiatives earned praise worldwide. Gun crime is virtually nonexistent and murder rates are below those of most Latin American countries. If Cuba under Castro didn’t make great strides towards improving the economic indicators, its social indicators didn’t slide much either.

Nobel Prize winning Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote on the eve of Castro’s 80th birthday that Castro’s attitude would seem to obey a private logic: he didn’t even admit his failure, and didn’t have a minute’s peace until he succeeded in inverting the terms and converting it into victory. Sadly, Castro made a cryptic confession in the end. He had once said that he would not shave his beard until Cuba had a good government. Pogonotrophic to the last day, he must have subliminally affirmed that in his subconscious mind he had accepted defeat.

Cuba will change now that the wizard and his spell are gone. Friends and enemies will debate over Fidel Castro’s legacy long after his ashes mix into the soil. But he will be remembered by the downtrodden, the oppressed and the deprived whenever they look for an icon to invoke courage. Because he was the last relic of a bygone era, when it was still honourable to fight against injustice and exploitation.

The writer is the Editor of the weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star.
Email: badrul151@yahoo.com

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Persistent indigestion may point to the cancer of esophagus, throat or stomach. This prognosis is a sufficient hint for the wise to understand why development without democracy isn’t good for a nation. It’s no solace for people to know that highways and bridges are being built unless they also feel connected to their country, because it altogether misses the point. A free country is desirable so that people can enjoy, not the freedom of luxury, but the luxury of freedom.

Illustration: John Shakespeare

Birds in captivity forever cherish the open sky despite the safety and comfort of a cage. Scotland wants to leave the UK. The Kashmiris want to break from India. The Palestinians refuse to accept Israeli occupation. The human desire for the right to self-determination is as natural as the reflex of an eye blinking to puff of air.

The US Declaration of Independence gives three examples of the inalienable rights given to all human beings by their Creator. Thomas Jefferson, who composed the original draft of this document, argued that governments are created to protect these rights. Throughout history though, despotic rulers have always turned that game on its head. They have crushed the rights of people to protect unlawful governments.

It goes without saying that people must work hard to build their country. The GDP is definitely an unmistakable indicator of that correlation between human endeavour and growth of an economy. The plantation economy ran on that underlying principle that justified slave trade. It’s believed that there are more slaves in the world today than any other time in history; an estimated 45 million.

An idea must start somewhere, and it did in a tiny kingdom named Bhutan, which since the 1970s has rejected traditional development indicators such as GDP. Instead it measures its citizens’ gross national happiness. The kingdom values the mental and spiritual well-being of its citizens more than their material growth, and the results look impressive. Between 1970 and 2000, the average life expectancy doubled and net primary school enrolment increased from 23 percent in 1978 to 86 percent in 2014.

Ideally, a nation should be like an amusement park run by governments elected every five years. And these governments are like the park management, whose job is to keep the park clean, enforce security services, maintain rides, sell tickets, and plan expansion. The management should not tell visitors which rides to take unless certain rides are risky or temporarily out of order.

That idea has lately dawned on countries other than Bhutan. The United Arab Emirates has appointed its first-ever minister of happiness to oversee “plans, projects, programmes and indices” that improve the country’s overall mood. Last July, Madhya Pradesh in India decided to create a Ministry of Happiness. The Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur is supposed to open a centre this month to study the science of happiness where students will be able to take a 12-14 hour microcredit course on happiness. India’s unhappiness problem is reflected in the mental health of its citizens. One in five to one in 10 Indians suffer from depression at some point in their lives.

American economist Jeffrey Sachs pioneered the idea that the satisfaction of citizens was an important part of economic development. That brings the issue of development to contention when people have dissatisfaction bottled up inside them. Nobody can be wise on an empty stomach, and neither can a full stomach make people wise.

The best balance to strike is having happy people build a happy nation. Happiness doesn’t mean high level of development for the same reason money can’t buy sleep. Nothing satisfies like satisfaction, which is a measure of contentment like the proof of the pudding lies in the eating.

One of the biggest satisfactions of free citizens in a free country is drawn from their right to choose their own government. Development without democracy puts the cart before the horse. It gives people a creeping sense that they are strangers in their own land.

People can be fed through tube, or they can eat with their own hands. While both may ensure nutrition, the latter is much more fun. When people cast their votes, they feel empowered and recognised. Nothing gives the taste of freedom like this small exercise, which is why development without democracy is an absurd proposition. It forces people to enjoy a delicious meal while their hands are tied.

The writer is Editor of the weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star.
Email: badrul151@yahoo.com

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

The Americans had their eye on Asia since Commodore Perry opened Japan in 1853, but now they have their heart set on this distant continent. It’s clear as daylight that a quiet showdown is imminent, if not already at work. The United States signed a 10-year defense framework agreement with India last month. Japan is trying to reel in Russia. The purpose is to build a bulwark against China, and isolate it in its own backyard.

History will vouch that such manoeuvrings go back in time. The rise of Athenian power and the fear it inspired in Sparta constituted the true cause of the Peloponnesian War lasting from 431 BC to 404 BC. This observation of Thucydides became famous as “The Thucydides Trap.” If you put China in place of Athens and the United States in place of Sparta, that ancient trap is returning with a vengeance, this time in Asia. The conflict between ruling and rising powers has, most of the time, led to war.

Underneath the surface of sublime diplomacy are surreal tensions. The United States wishes to thwart China in its ambition to become a global power. India has its own territorial concerns in Arunachal Pradesh besides countering the Chinese predilection for Pakistan. Japan is locked in a bitter dispute with China over the South China Sea islands, which were annexed by Japan during World War II.

In the coming years, if not months, the resulting rift system is likely to split the continent. While the United States has united with India and Japan, Pakistan and Myanmar appears to have sided with China. North Korea’s position doesn’t need a second guess. Russia, which is currently holding an eight-day naval exercise with China in the South China Sea, might sit on the fence for sometime before making up its mind. Other Asian countries will eventually fall in line with one side or another. Long-time US ally Philippines has a new president, who not only publicly insulted the US president in a recent outburst, but also asked the American forces to leave his country.

It’s not rocket science that the theatre of confrontation is shifting to Asia. The crux of this confrontation is cross-directional. China is pivoting west with its ambition to expand its reach across the continent and towards Europe. The United States, on the other hand, is pivoting east. It’s convinced that its future should be entwined with the Asian prosperity instead of being sucked further into the quagmires of the Middle East.

To cut to the chase, the real fight is over energy and markets. The US goal is to kill two birds with one stone, which is to contain China. First, it wants to ensure that China doesn’t get to flex its muscles in Asia. Second is to cut down to size the Chinese ambition to march its influence overseas.

China desperately needs Europe and the Middle East for markets and oil. Experts believe it’s now more concerned over America’s superior sea power that can squeeze its oil supplies. The American armada dominates the Pacific and Indian Oceans and every body of water in between, particularly the two choke points in the Straits of Malacca and the Persian Gulf.

In its desperate bid, China is heavily investing in West Asia to create a sophisticated network of roads, railways and pipelines stretching home from the oil and gas fields of northern Iraq and Central Asia. Besides developing overland alternatives, China is also building a navy and has invested in the so-called “string of pearls” strategy of building maritime centres in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Maldives, and Somalia to protect its sea routes to Africa and the Middle East. The seaport China attempted to build in Sonadia in Bangladesh has been apparently pushed back under the US and Indian persuasions. Japan is now going to build that seaport in Matarbari as an affront to the Chinese option.

In 1941, the “sleeping giant” that the USA was, was drawn into the war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. It was a time when the world was smarting from the excesses of Nazism. Between 1947 and 1991, the US engagement spanned every continent mostly due to the spread of communism. The rallying cry in today’s world is the fight against terrorism.

The US has military presence in Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. It’s possible the Americans will look for more touchpoints to strengthen its military buildup in Asia. The defence pact with India has already secured a new destination.

As contenders vie for control, this continent is heading for turmoil. Terrorism will escalate, countries will vacillate, and politics will fluctuate. Lives will be lost, institutions will be tossed, and humanity will be debased. Asia must brace for rocky times ahead marked by bloodshed and chaos.

The writer is Editor of the weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star.
Email: badrul151@yahoo.com

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

The world is demographically lopsided more than ever before: old people are concentrated in the rich countries, and the rest of the world is crowded with the young. Whoever said that the young shall inherit the earth must think again. As nations get more affluent, their populations also get more aged. In an increasingly prosperous world, the future generations are losing entitlement.

The young are between the ages of 10 and 24, making a fourth of the global population. In 2010, an estimated 524 million people were aged 65 or older. By 2050, this number is expected to triple to 1.5 billion, nearly one-fourth of today’s total population. Late marriage, singlehood, and fewer children might further skew the global demography with greying population.

Illustration: dvrlists.com

In today’s world, the young have diminished clout and visibility. In the immediate past century, they fought wars, led revolutions, organised protests and spearheaded cultural movements. It was they who defied authorities, toppled tyrants, and broke barriers in the name of equality, freedom and justice. But this century already seems barren for them. Except for gang fights, drugs, pornography and militancy, the commitment of youth is vague and weak.

True, more of them are going to school, and more of them are working. Yet the figures released by the International Labor Organization show that two out of five young people are either not working or working in such ill-paid jobs that they can’t escape poverty. Surprisingly, youth unemployment is high in richer countries. It’s 25 percent in Europe. In the USA, 17 percent of those between the ages of 16 and 29 are neither in school nor working.

The picture is opposite in developing countries. China, facing a shortage of young workers, had to end its decades-old one-child policy in 2015, allowing married couples to have two children. Many developed countries are tweaking their immigration policies to welcome young workers from less developed countries.

But the power of youth seems limited to the job market only. In the larger context, the young generations don’t have an agenda to push. Excluding religious zeal, ideological footing is next to nothing. In so much as the youth of today are concerned, they are more prepared to follow than lead.

In 2010, the Tunisian revolution sent a wave of demonstrations, protests, riots and civil wars across the Arab world that came to be known as the Arab Spring. Multitudes of young people gathered in public squares for days and weeks, determined to overthrow governments and change the system in their respective countries. It fizzled out by mid-2012 as tired and disillusioned youths returned home empty-handed, many of them dead.

Idealistic youths in America gathered in Zuccotti Park in New York City in 2011 and launched the Occupy Wall Street Movement against social and economic inequality worldwide. Protesters turned their focus to occupying banks, corporate headquarters, board meetings, foreclosed homes, and college and university campuses. It resonated with young people in many western cities before fading within the same year.

These two consecutive failures remind one of an English teacher named David McCullough Jr. at Wellesley High School in Massachusetts, USA. About four years ago, he asked the graduating class to climb the world so they could see the world, not so the world could see them. The youths of our time are evermore obsessed with climbing the world, while the world is all the more persistent to ignore them.

In this exchange, young minds are getting marginalised. Not a single sphere of life exists where they can dictate the terms. Whether in politics, education, invention or any other thing, young people are stuck in the mud. The status quo is beating down on the propensity to change.

Instead of changing the world, the world is changing them. Most youths don’t like to enter the social discourses because other things are more interesting to them. In fact, a significant percentage of young people are suffering from internet addiction. According to Time magazine’s cover story of May 9, 2013, a Pew survey found that kids in America send an average of 88 texts per day. It’s yet to be determined how many selfies they take on average between waking up in the morning and going back to bed.

Always a bundle of energy, youth once found expression in doing daring things. Young people could go without food, shelter and medication for days to write poetry or explore a region or fight for a revolution. They could die for love, kill for it too. But all of these changed since they started indulging in pleasurable things. Sex, drugs, video games, mobile phones, internet and temptations of easy life took the bite out of youth.

The youth of today shaped the world of tomorrow, which has changed. It’s a pity that the world of today is shaping the youth of tomorrow.

The writer is Editor of the weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star.

Email: badrul151@yahoo.com.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

The Muslims make 14.2 percent of India’s 1.25 billion people. But, 25 percent of India’s 370,000 beggars are Muslims. The newly released data by researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the London School of Economics, published in the journal Human Nature, also show that the Muslim population inside Indian jails is rising. For example, Maharashtra jails have 31.09 percent Muslim prisoners against a state average of 19.06 percent. Arthur Koestler famously writes that statistics don’t bleed, but it’s the detail which counts. What counts in this instance is that the plight of the second largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia is nothing but dismal.

Illustration: thyblackman

The Khans in Bollywood and business tycoons like Azim Premji are exceptions that prove the rule. There are a few mafia dons in Mumbai, and a handful of politicians, who still signify the sporadic highpoints of the Muslim might. But the preponderant majority of the Muslims have their fate sealed in poverty and squalor. The glories of emperors and nawabs are mocked by the worries that clutter the downtrodden Muslims in India.

The researchers measured not just income and wealth but also occupation, education, and longevity, and found that upper-class families took 300 to 450 years before their scions fell back into the middle class. Throughout society, poor families, taken as a whole, took an equal amount of time. They worked for 10 to 15 generations to climb their way up into the middle class. Illiterate English village artisans in 1300 took seven generations to incorporate fully into the educated elite of 1500.

If 25 years make a generation, then the Muslim influence in India dissipated in over six generations. Times of India reported in 2010 that a sixth generation descendant of Bahadur Shah Zafar was struggling to make ends meet in Hyderabad, still hoping that the Indian government would release properties of the erstwhile Mughals to their legal heirs. Not all the Muslims are royal descendants and many insolvent families many years ago must have moved up the social ladder.

But an overwhelming number of Muslims in India appears to have slipped below the poverty line. And they are punching above their weight for all the wrong reasons. In an interview with Deutsche Welle in 2011, a leading Muslim thinker of India, Asghar Ali Engineer, explained that the Muslim middle class shrank in India after 1947, and it was too small to assert itself and failed to produce effective leadership.

Engineer then elaborated that although a new Muslim middle class began to emerge in northern India from the 1980s onwards, it emerged largely from the Muslim “low” castes. Their quest for upward social mobility and assertion is often expressed in the form of a very conservative religiosity, such as building fancy mosques or patronising madrassas. He claimed that it only exacerbated the malaise of the Muslims rather than solving it. Almost all Muslim organisations in India are led by mullahs because the vast majority of Indian Muslims are disadvantaged – economically, educationally, socially and intellectually, he explained.

How does it compare with the minorities in Bangladesh in all of the above four categories? Not to incite bias or resentment, we should have a factual assessment of where we stand in minority relations compared to our “big-brother” neighbour. We have heard the minority leaders of this country complaining about their conditions.

For the sake of all, we need to have a social intelligence dashboard to clearly understand our relationships. That will tell us if we are doing enough to smoothen the spikes. When we hear about minorities being dispossessed from their lands, businesses and homes, it is more about power struggle than anything else. The strong has forever bullied the weak, who are physically, economically and politically disadvantaged.

The true test is whether all citizens have an equal opportunity to seek education, find jobs, buy property, and enjoy legal protection. That alone tells who’s advantaged in a society and who’s deprived. Statistics don’t bleed alright, but opinions based on them can cause, contain or check bloodshed.

The writer is Editor of the weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star. Email: badrul151@yahoo.com.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Ever since the Chilcot Inquiry vilified former Prime Minister Tony Blair on July 6 for taking the United Kingdom to war in Iraq, the world is waiting for the other shoe to drop. If Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, the report assessed he had done it at the behest of his American ally George W. Bush. That gives sufficient ground for the Americans to have their own Chilcot. Blair had bought the distribution rights on this of the Atlantic for the biggest lot of hogwash Bush sold to the entire world.

Bush and Blair remind one of America’s most notorious criminal couple, Bonnie and Clyde. In the movie made on their life in 1967, Bonnie Parker tells Clyde Barrow after he rebuffs her romantic advances, “Your advertising is just dandy… folks would never guess you don’t have a thing to sell.” We don’t know if the former British premier ever had the pride of an embarrassed Bonnie to tell his friend Bush before, during or after the Iraq invasion that he didn’t have a thing to sell when he lied about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

The world knows that George Bush lied. It knows he fabricated that story to invade Iraq for more reasons than overthrowing its ruler. And, it doesn’t seem to be an honest mistake or an error in judgment because Bush has never apologised, accepted responsibility or shown remorse for his decisions. Meanwhile, the global chain reaction he set off has already killed thousands of men, women and children, and continues to convulse the world.

UK foreign secretary Philip Hammond said after the Chilcot report was released that the US blunder in Iraq led to the rise of IS. He criticised the US decision to dismantle the Iraqi army, when 400,000 unemployed soldiers, many of them Saddam loyalists, were let loose to graze on the fields of anger and vengeance.

In fact, it’s not clear till today what has been accomplished by trashing a country to topple its dictator. It has been more than nine years since Saddam was hanged on an Eid day, but Iraq is bloodier, ever more violent and ever more confused. Pakistan is paranoid, Afghanistan is antsy, Syria is seething, Yemen is yelping, Turkey is terrorised, and European cities are reeling under terrorist attacks. Even a previously quiet country like Bangladesh has to look over its shoulder. IS has also turned its wrath on Indonesia, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.

An American Chilcot inquiry should look into what goat George Bush had in this fight. Did he want to seek vengeance for the plot Saddam once had allegedly hatched to assassinate his father? Did he have a crusade mission to invade a vulnerable country and throw a monkey wrench into the Muslim world? Did he go after Iraq’s oil? What did he actually want?

That Bush didn’t go for the WMDs is clear already because he knew he couldn’t find what wasn’t there. He also didn’t go there to fight terrorism because Saddam hasn’t been linked to terror groups, which carried out the 9/11 attacks. He also didn’t go to liberate Iraq, which is squirming under the oppressive burden of foreign invasion.

The United States needs a Chilcot-like investigation to answer these questions. It may take seven years or so, but better late than never. The Americans don’t need to carry the burden of one man’s guilt on their conscience. They, like the British people, have the right to know why their former leader had lied to take their country to a wasteful war.

It will be nice if the American inquiry summons Tony Blair as a witness. The investigators should have him sit together with George Bush at the same table and observe how they defend each other. Then both men should be provided with calculators to work out this simple math. Problem: Saddam was executed for the murder of 148 Iraqi Shi’ites. Solution: How many times should a devious duo be hanged for their misguided or mischievous policies that have killed nearly a million in Iraq, thousands in Syria and many more in other countries as collateral damage?

If the United States sincerely wishes to help other countries in their fight against terrorism, it must go back to the original sin and exonerate itself. It must explain to a disgusted world how an architect of anarchy could trigger turmoil worldwide and then enjoy the perks of a retired president without having so much as a rap on the knuckles!

Injecting air bubbles into the bloodstream can lead to brain damage or even death. An American inquiry needs to investigate how George Bush’s “hot air” has created a similar medical condition across the world. Those left brain-damaged are ruthlessly killing, while others are helplessly dying in vain. Shame!

The writer is Editor of the weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star.
Email: badrul151@yahoo.com.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Greek historian Herodotus, living in the fifth century, couldn’t have known in advance that a headmaster was going to be humiliated in Narayanganj on the second Friday of May 2016. But when he said that men trusted their ears more than their eyes, it set the standard of mob justice for all time to come. Those who’ve watched the disgusting video of that outrageous incident couldn’t believe their eyes while ears burned with shame. The headmaster was doing earholding sit-ups while an all-daddy lawmaker wagged his finger, keeping count. When the exhausted and embarrassed victim fell on the floor after the third time, he was pulled up to stand on his feet. Then like a mechanical toy, the poor man was made to raise his folded hands to his forehead asking for forgiveness before a hysterical crowd.

Infuriated by the incident of public humilation of a school teacher in Narayanganj, netizens have stirred social media in protest. Photo: Star

The foreign media touted it as yet another instance of minority persecution. The teacher being a Hindu man has largely contributed to that apprehension, particularly when religious sentiments are being deployed to do dirty work for devious minds. What happened in Narayanganj was a low-down showdown, when powerful people exploited holy sentiments to settle an unholy score. The family of the student, who was disciplined by that teacher, may have pulled the strings to get even with him. The influential school committee members also saw an opportunity to get rid of him.

The teacher was allegedly roughed up by the unruly mob before the circus that followed. As far as this victim is concerned, he was already humiliated before the humiliation was recorded on video. The rest of us in this country have been humiliated afterwards. We have been humiliated when the authorities sat on their hands, despite so many outcries across the country, when nothing happened after a number of ministers condemned the act. The final humiliation came for everyone in the final blow of cruelty after the school committee, instead of being repentant and apologetic, went ahead to sack the headmaster.

I would like to plead with this teacher to take comfort in the fact that while he bore the physical brunt of the humiliation, the sensible people of this country have felt the shame. And I ask him not to think he was targeted for his professional or religious denomination. We all live in a country, where the powerful have sadly and perversely taken the powerless for granted.

I can assure him that in any civilised country, the lawmaker would have been arrested, the Parliament would have condemned their rowdy colleague, and the state would have rushed to the protection of the victim and his job. Since none of these has happened until now, he is free to draw his own conclusion. I recommend he should consider this as an option. He should think as if wild animals have badly mauled him in a dangerous jungle.

In shame and despair, human chains around the country had people holding their own ears. It was symbolic, of course, a gesture to express solidarity with the victim and indignation for his embarrassment. One of the limitations of human condition is that it’s confined to its own limitations. After initial reactions, this entire episode is either going to taper off or will be forgotten soon.

What will persist is the horror that, in future, will haunt every teacher in every school of this country. Teachers will think twice before taking a student to task, or grading papers, or even assigning homework. They will feel nervous to lance with the school committees, lest their intentions will be taken out of context and brutalised. After all, why should anybody risk their safety and honour if doing a job well should cost them both?

This isn’t to rule out the possibility that the headmaster in Narayanganj could have said or done anything wrong. But the public humiliation of a teacher has mislaid the moral compass, because more than a man was harassed on that day. An entire institution was stripped of its honour, its glory mocked as if neighbourhood kids taunted a raving madman.

Alexander the Great said he owed his living to his father and his life to his teacher. We grew up ingesting that same value, respecting teachers no less than parents because we knew and still know it for a fact that they’ve largely made us who we’re. The lawmaker in Narayanganj must be holding repressed anger against his teachers. The sit-ups could be a Freudian slip to do unto them what they may have done unto him!

The writer is Editor of the weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star.
Email: badrul151@yahoo.com.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

By Mohammad Badrul Ahsan
Apr 23 2016 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

Ever since the Panama Papers hit the fan, the leak has been working like a series of introductions at a high-profile gathering. It’s putting a bunch of names to a bunch of faces, men and women leading a double life because of their money. It also shows that these folks have something in common with the squirrels. The rodents hide their nuts, and they hide their assets.

Don’t forget that the squirrel hoarding has a purpose for it. The animals collect and store nuts so that they will have food to last through the winter. But their thriftiness has social benefits. The nuts they bury result in trees growing in many new places.

What’s the purpose of hiding money? The simple truth is that anything that can’t be revealed is concealed. And two things are simultaneously concealed when it comes to money. Money and its source are like fire and smoke. If one is visible, the other can’t vanish.

Thus the overriding purpose of creating the shadow network of shell companies and tax havens is to create a conduit for dirty money. Offshore banking, as it appears now, is a huge Mephistophelean enterprise to provide forward linkage to kleptocracy. Capitalism needs it to accommodate greed for the same reason nuclear plants look for disposal sites to dump radioactive waste.

But it’s shocking to see how the world has been shocked by the scandal. Politicians were stealing. Dealers were dealing. Wheelers were wheeling. Banks were billing. And all that time those who know knew already that all of those things were happening. Yet the reaction of the world has been as if it was expected that all these seismic waves shouldn’t have shaken the ground.

Whether capitalism invented hypocrisy or hypocrisy invented capitalism calls for a separate discussion. But these two wheels balance the bi-cycle of modern life relentlessly pedaling itself to create more wealth. And if the president of this country and the prime minister of that country have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar, it only confirms how a runaway system has been running.

It belies the basic principle of double entry bookkeeping. Take the example of the billions of taka that evaporated in this country after stock market manipulation, bank swindling and other forms of embezzlement. While we know how much has been debited, who knows where all that money has been credited? Who knows how much of that missing money has washed up on which shores?

Not to say the Panama Papers can track that missing money for us, but the scandal should shake us out of our pretentious slumber. Some of the stolen money exists around us, flaunted in the lifestyle of crooks and thieves hiding behind their fabulous masks. That flaunting has a hierarchy of its own starting with the baseline perps. Office clerks, police constables and linemen for various utility services like to have their palms greased in their quest for a solvent life.

Then it gradually goes up the totem pole of greed, climbing from necessity to luxury like mercury does in barometer. At the top of the pecking order are those who aren’t satisfied with extravagance alone. They want to steal enough to guarantee the same high life for their future generations.

Thus Panama, the Cayman Islands, the Virgin Islands and similar destinations are sanctuaries for sick money like leper colonies are for lepers. These are the places where capitalism hides its excesses outside national boundaries devoted to the care of dubious money like orphanages are to illegitimate children. These are the exotic places where toxic money takes vacation to get away from the monotony of scrutiny and suspicion at home.

In the ultimate analysis though, these tax havens are boutique shops compared to department stores for financial irregularities. How about those countries which, on the whole, are allowing foreign citizens to invest money in their economies and buy second homes? What about the Swiss banks which until recently refused to divulge the names of people who kept black money in their accounts? What about other places like Beirut, the Bahamas, Uruguay and Lichtenstein, which have taken the Swiss model to heart? Even in the United States, places like Delaware and Nevada have loose regulations and low taxes so that people can hide their activities and assets behind a corporate façade.

The Panama Papers are going to do no more than summer cleaning. It will prepare the ground for new names, new law firms and new destinations for newly stolen money, perhaps to precipitate another scandal umpteen years later. The wave of indignations triggered by the scandal is keeping us busy upstream, while nothing changes at source.

Capitalism and hypocrisy are intimately built on each other. That relationship persists because we’re hopelessly reluctant to tell the face from the façade.

The writer is the Editor of weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star.
Email: badrul151@yahoo.com

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh