You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September, 2007.
An alarming if hopeful article on the effects global warming on Bangladesh in today’s Washington Post:
http://http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/26/AR2007092602582_2.html
And another one from a few days ago about the role of DU in Bangladeshi politics. Is it really the students’ role to be the voice of the nation? Seems to me that there’s a lot of rot in DU. The university that our parents attended in the political heydays of the 1960’s is nothing like today’s corruption burdened institution, each department with a full quota of political toadies of various hues. Unfortunately, it is difficult to separate students and professors genuinely committed to democratic values from partisan hacks.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/22/AR2007092201129.html
On an unrelated note, had no idea that a Bangladeshi engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan (DU alum) was the engineering genius behind the Hancock and Sears towers in Chicago. See Post article above and also below:
I am back in Dhaka again for work. After I got home from the airport my father handed me a photocopy of the offending cartoon by Arifur Rahman. I liked its title, “Name,” which hints at the questions that the cartoonist is trying to raise rather than the offense that mullahs allege to be his aim. Since Saif gets to air his pet peeves from time to time, I will take the liberty of divulging one of mine. At least, Arifur Rahman, isn’t going by some strange hybrid name formed by a combination of the first name and the nickname, e.g. Shamsuddin Bablu, Sharmin Lucky etc. (so en vogue in the TV channels that it is refreshing to hear the first name-last name sequence). These trendy names are devoid of meaning and root. They are expressive and new only in the cheap neon polyester sense.
Getting back to our homegrown cartoon controversy, Arif probably had a run in with some mullah type who lectured him because he failed to identify himself as Mohammed Arifur Rahman. I certainly relate to his sense of frustration with such lecturing. Wouldn’t it be nice if the pious did not feel compelled to exhort? Is preaching the right path (however interpreted) a required part of being an observant Muslim? The learned participants of mushrooming Islamic TV programs here certainly think so. I’d be interested in thoughts on this from an Islamic perspective. So what’s the big deal about Arif’s cartoon? He effectively raises questions about the practice of placing the Prophet’s name as a prefix. This, rather than insulting the Prophet (PBUH), is key. The point he raises is important because the blanket application of this prefix rule could lead to such unwanted consequences as the Prophet (PBUH) sharing his name with any Muslim man, even someone of questionable character. Devout Muslims should consider this to be a valid issue. But of course the mullahs are going to read the cartoon as blasphemous, how dare he call a cat by the Prophet (PBUH)’s name! Lynch that boy! Perhaps it is unfair to expect nuanced reasoning from people who are ready to smite down all probing and thoughtful attitudes towards religion.
I think printing the cartoon was a slip rather than some grand gesture of the editors of Alpin/ Prothom Alo. Now, teel has become taal. Just last Friday, the day after I got in, a mob left Baitul Mukarram mosque militant style right after Friday prayers and marched towards the Prothom Alo office. Fifty people were injured in the ensuing clashes with the police. The mayhem could well continue this week. According to today’s Ittefaq the Sarbadaliyo Sangram Parishad (Hizbul Tahrir is an oft-mentioned component, the rest is amorphous) is planning processions and agitation in various parts of Dhaka today and tomorrow as well as mosque based agitation countrywide after Friday prayers. At this point it is a moot question as to why these people are resorting to violence during Ramadan. Arif will not be getting out any time soon. He is probably safer in prison than out.
The title of Arif’s cartoon got me thinking about names and naming, especially of animals. On the plane back to Dhaka this time I read Rory Stewarts’ The Places in Between, a flawless chronicle of the author’s journey across Afghanistan from Herat to Kabul during the icy winter of 2002. Stewart, a Scotsman and an ex-British diplomat, walked the entire way from village to village and lived by the kindness of wary strangers. The writing is unassuming, thoughtful, simple, and at times beautiful. At one point during the arduous journey a group of villagers gave Stewart the charge of a huge toothless warrior mastiff. Apparently the strength and valor of this particular breed of dogs from Ghor has been recorded since medieval times. He named this hardened creature: Babur, after the emperor whose journey he was retracing (and I thought, aren’t you getting a bit carried away?).
For the next few weeks Stewart literally drags the dog through feet upon feet of snow and sleet, protects him fiercely from all sorts of assault, shares with him discoveries great and small, and coaxes him out of his grizzly shell. The bond is beautiful more so because it is built slowly. It has the makings of a love story because you don’t realize it’s happening until it already has and hits you in the gut, with great force. By the end of the tale, perhaps transfigured by Stewart’s love, the dog seemed to me more than worthy of the grand name. As for Arif’s cartoon, my cat-loving friend told me that the Prophet (PBUH) actually adored cats and had a few around his household (I’m taking her word for it). So there you go, faced with the cartoon, maybe the Prophet (PBUH), a model of gentleness and humility by all recorded accounts, would just stroke the nearest feline and clarify the whole prefix question with a hadith.
An interesting case competion at Vanderbilt that my brother is organizing. Please do spread the word among friends at various business schools.
Below is the press release.
————————————————————————
New Project Pyramid Case Competition Brings B-Schools To Bear Against Global Poverty Winning Team To Be Named at the November Net Impact Conference at Vanderbilt’s Owen School
NASHVILLE (September 14, 2007) – As interest continues to grow among today’s MBA students about the role of business in the fight against global poverty, now for the first time graduate business student teams from around the world can participate in a case competition designed to produce tangible solutions to poverty-related conditions in society.
The Project Pyramid Case Competition, sponsored and hosted by the Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management, is believed to be the only contest of its kind and is the product of Vanderbilt’s Project Pyramid, a student-driven initiative to arm future leaders at all of Vanderbilt University’s schools with the business tools to produce sustainable solutions that alleviate poverty. The winning team will be announced at the upcoming Net Impact Conference, the world’s largest gathering of socially responsible graduate business students and young professionals, November 1-3 on the Vanderbilt campus.
In a week where New York and Columbia are in uproar over Ahmedinejad’s visit, Peter Galbraith has an interesting piece in the NY Review of Books (available now online, coming out in print on October 11) that argues that America’s Iran policy is in shambles. The piece reviews Trita Parsi’s book, Treacherous Alliance, which promises to be an interesting read.
Two snapshots that makes one think a little about command-and-control in complex systems.
The first - what seems to be the beginnings of a successful turnaround:
The Power Development Board (PDB) has made a significant improvement in power supply in the last two months mainly by improving day-to-day management where officials and technical experts are encouraged to take independent decisions, sources said.
…
Now the margin of load shedding has dropped from 1,200MW to a mere 100-200MW.
The country experienced load shedding by a massive margin of maximum 2,000MW a day last year.
Against an official maximum demand of 4,240MW, the PDB is now supplying more than 4,100MW of power from 100 different power units of 27 power plants by improving plant efficiency.
But there is still cause for concern in the approach that underscores the need for accountability, both at the top and at the decentralized decision-making nodes.
While the official power demand is shown at 4,250MW, unofficially this demand stands at maximum 5,200MW. But this additional demand is underplayed by not accommodating the full power demand of the Rural Electrification Board (REB) that doubled its distribution network during 2001-06 period.
But credit, where credit’s due. This is largely good news.
We don’t seem to be learning from our mistakes. And we also don’t seem to be learning from our successes. In a week where violence has broken out over the cartoon non-issue, there are ominous signs of what may be the beginnings of yet another period of rioting and street violence. BBC reports:
Thousands of garment workers in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, have defied a ban on public protests to demand better pay and conditions.
The dispute had been brewing for days, but became more serious and violent when the workers discovered that they had been locked out of their factory.
The tendency is to think about “controlling” such unrest through centralized decision-making. The centralized decision maker, in this model, decides what emotions are worth conceding to and what emotions deserve to be crushed. May be it’ll work, for a while, who knows? But surely, when your system is composed of 150 million individuals living in 147570 sq km, it has to be conceded that no centralized decision-maker has or ever will have enough information for effective decision-making over a sustained period of time. The only workable alternative is a value-infused decentralized system with accountable nodes of decision-making. And to be able to perform the necessary work of information-gathering and processing effectively, the system has to be a participatory one.
Let’s lay aside the question of whether it makes sense to have a law that makes it punishable to offend the vaguely defined sensitivities of a particular religious group. The justifiability of such a law is irrelevant when we debate Arifur Rahman’s fate. For anyone who has seen Arif’s Prothom Alo cartoon (see it on shadakalo; read the translation at 3rd World View, along with reactions and updates from the Bangladeshi blogosphere), it is clear that the cartoon is not at all about the Prophet (S) or about the beliefs and practices of Islam and Muslims. Rather it is about the ignorance of those who think that there is some kind of religious requirement to have the name of the blessed Prophet (S) somewhere in one’s name. Of course, there is no such requirement - in anything that the Prophet (S) said or did, or in the Book. Pointing out the folly of believing that it is some kind of religious requirement cannot, in any stretch of the imagination, be viewed as abuse of the name of the Prophet (S) or of his religion.
And yet, Arifur Rahman is headed to a month of detention, for something he manifestly did not do. We are told he insulted the Prophet. When? We are told he hurt the sensibilities of Muslims. How? Arif is being thrown into prison on what is clearly a lie.
I am reminded as I sit up this night shivering as I contemplate Arif’s fate - and ours - of the story of Yusuf and Zulaykha, of the shirt rent in the back, of the snares of the wicked and the unjust. Today Arif is our Yusuf - he who was thrown into the dungeons because of passionate, unreasoning, unreasonable lies and the cold, unprincipled calculations of cynical men. I can only pray that Arif is granted some of the perseverence and protection, and ultimately, blessings showered on Yusuf.
Justice in our Land of Gold is in hiding. Reason has escaped us. Truth has fled. The City of Mosques lies in the Republic of Fear. None of us is safe here when things we say can mean what they manifestly are not, and where the compass points the qibla at the direction and discretion of the angriest, ugliest shouts. Let us bear witness.
I was going to give this post by Fugstar a free pass to avoid controversy in the middle of Ramadan. But I feel that Fugstar’s post is just beyond the pale. Fugstar suggests that the blame for the recent abduction and killing of BRAC workers in Afghanistan is due to the microlending (or I guess as Fugstar would have it, the usurious) activities of BRAC.
There’s some creative thinking going on here.
Consider the case of the abducted worke. Reports on the abduction (see for example, the Washington Post) suggest that this was an armed robbery. $600 was stolen from BRAC’s office at the time of the abduction. It’s also possible that there was some politics involved, as the Taliban have been targetting aid workers for some time . On the other hand, these very well could have been common criminals who had access to police uniforms.
Similarly, in the case of the aid worker who was shot, reports suggest that this was either a robbery, or politically motivated.
But one would never know this from Fugstar’s post. He’s assumed that this is about “public revulsion” of BRAC’s activities in Afghanistan - that the poor are “answer[ing] back.” There’s no support anywhere in reports on this.
This is highly irresponsible. Sure, microfinance does have its issues. And the activities of our NGO’s do have their issues. But one should not have to resort to factually incorrect, unsupported readings (if I were in a harsher mood, I would call it them “lies”) to make one’s point. Truth should not be the victim of one’s advocacy.
I find Fugstar’s post particularly troubling because it’s reasoning of this nature that’s often the first step towards justifying the morally indefensible.
I am not a big American football fan, but I do follow the Pats from the corner of my eye. They just crushed the San Diego Chargers at the end of a week where their coach was fined $500K, the team $250K and two draft picks, for illegally video-taping opposition team’s signals. (This of course pales in comparison to the $100 million (yes, that DOLLAR ONE HUNDRED MILLION) fine that Formula 1 is making McLaren pay, on top of stripping them of their constructors’ championship points…)
In response to the claim that the Pats owed the victory to their recent travails, to
all manner of chortling and gloating about how the team had managed to overcome the stigma of the media’s pointing out that its head coach had gotten caught behaving like an arrogant jackass. A team this good, this dominant, got to cast itself in its own mind as outraged innocents battling to stick it to The Man.
Charles Pierce at Slate.com writes:
It was like watching conservatives talk about how Michael Moore was picking on them while they were running the entire government.
So well put, in so many different levels…
Wishing our readers a blessed and productive Ramadan…
From my Admin law reading this evening:
“The importance of a fixed constitutional framework and stable institutional arrangements is necessarily lost once the framework that was designed to place a limit upon politics becomes the central subject ofthe politics it was designed to limit.” - Richard Epstein
This is useful to keep in mind as we think about what we’ve witnessed in the last 15 years in Bangladesh.
While we are on the subject of constitutional frameworks and institutional arrangements, it looks like The Terror Presidency by Jack Goldsmith (who headed the Office of Legal Counsel in 2003-4) will be a fascinating read, if I can get to it some time… Excerpts daily at Slate.com. My favorite passage so far:
The Bush administration’s go-it-alone approach to many terrorism-related legal policy issues is the antithesis of Roosevelt’s approach in 1940–41. It is a truism among political scientists and historians who study the American presidency that a president’s authority is not measured primarily by his hard power found in the Constitution, statutes, and precedents, but rather by his softer powers to convince the other institutions of our society to come around to his point of view. “The power to manage the vast, whirring machinery of government derives from individual skills as persuader, bargainer, and leader,” Schlesinger said, echoing the famous thesis of presidential scholar Richard Neustadt. The Bush administration has operated on an entirely different concept of power that relies on minimal deliberation, unilateral action, and legalistic defense. This approach largely eschews politics: the need to explain, to justify, to convince, to get people on board, to compromise.
Whereas Roosevelt was famous for consulting widely (though not always transparently) within and without his administration before making momentous wartime decisions, the Bush administration is famously secretive and close-looped in its deliberations.
110 Stories, by the late John M. Ford. Captures that day better than anything I’ve seen… Watch this reading of the poem on youtube.
A very specific and informative set of predictions by J at shadakalo blog for the next hundred days of the SOE government. Check them out!
I don’t know what to think of them, but the Shadakalo duo have always been careful about basing their observations on facts…
I’m back as well in NY, though my return is accompanied by less romance and mystique than Sajid’s. Nothing to speculate about here!
Been meaning to write since I got back on Wednesday, but I’ve been jetlagged and deeply busy with beginning-of-the-semester meetings and classes. But I do mean to write extensively about the Khaleda Zia arrest, the BNP split and the hullabaloo over news channel licenses as soon as I am up to speed with the news.
In the mean time, to get my blogging juices flowing again - my favorite sentence from the last week, via Slate.com
For the cynical observer, the spectacle—five outsize personalities putting aside their egos to share the stage—might have brought to mind a variation on the old light-bulb joke: How many rap icons does it take to light up Madison Square Garden?
A pretty good article really about the state of popular hip-hop.
Also, if you, like me, are dragged along to see this new indy film called “The Inner Life of Martin Frost“, just say no, stand your ground, and fight with your fists if you have to. Life is too short for watching a movie that one reviewer accurately describes as:
Paul Auster’s suffocating romance makes you feel as if you’re helplessly stuck inside the head of the most pretentious person you know.
I’ve never read anything by Paul Auster. I don’t think I am going to, after this.
Worst movie ever? Probably not. Bjork’s Dancer in the Dark still takes the cake, methinks (which makes the critical acclaim it received all the more grating. Lars von Trier also directed the awful Dogville, which I was wise enough to avoid…)
Recent Comments