৩১ comments

1. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ১ জুন ২০১৫ (১০:২৯ অপরাহ্ণ)

   2,000 classical compositions from musicologist Bhatkhande’s century-old books are now on CD

   In a staggering effort spanning six years, Indudhar Nirody has sung and recorded all the bandishes in the six-volume ‘Kramik Pustak Malika’.

   A century after pioneering Hindustani music scholar VN Bhatkhande travelled the length and breadth of the subcontinent cajoling and coaxing secretive hereditary musicians into revealing the lyrics and tunes of nearly 1,700 compositions, another musician has completed the monumental task of singing and recording all of them.

   Working almost daily for six years, the Mysore-based Indudhar Nirody, 81, sang and recorded the nearly 2,000 compositions that Bhatkhande published in his staggering six-volume Kramik Pustak Malika. The volumes include 300 of Bhatkhande’s own compositions, besides those he collected from others. In March, Nirody released his renditions on two CDs, along with a book, titled Samarpan, containing the lyrics.

   One of Nirody’s gurs, Pandit KG Ginde, had begun a similar exercise to record Bhatkhande’s compositions while he was at the ITC Sangeet Research Academy, a modern gurukul in Kolkata. But he passed away in 1994 after recording compositions in only three volumes of Kramik. Beginning afresh, Nirody is probably the first person to have completed the task, a century after Bhatkhande finished his magnum opus.

   “I am very glad that I did it,” said Nirody in April, in his brother’s flat in Mumbai, a city where he spent most of his working life before retiring to Karnataka.

   For the more than four decades that Nirody lived in Mumbai, till his retirement in 1995, he studied music with stalwarts such as SCR Bhat, Gurudutt Heblekar, Dinkar Kaikini and Chidandand Nagarkar, besides Ginde. Nirody made a career in the insurance sector, but spent all his free time on music. His father had moved from Udipi in southwest Karnataka to Mumbai when his son was 10 so that he could learn from top-notch musicians. For much of the 20th century, the western metropolis was one of the most important centres for Hindustani classical music, attracting the country’s best talent.

   Unique notation

   First published in Marathi and then translated into Hindi, Bhatkhande’s six volumes contained the lyrics and tunes of bandishes, or compositions, from a variety of different gharanas, or schools of music. Bhatkhande devised his own notation for representing in writing the melodies of the compositions, which span close to 200 ragas – the melodic modes at the centre of Indian classical music. This meant that Bhatkhande collected many compositions in each raga.

   In his time, Bhatkhande’s effort elicited mixed responses from the musician community, which was suspicious and sceptical of anything other than the oral tradition. Today, however, Bhatkhande’s work is widely admired, both by scholars and musicians, because it recorded for posterity compositions that may have vanished had they had been restricted to oral transmission and opened up to the public at large knowledge that was confined to hereditary musician families.

   At the same time, given the minute melodic subtleties in Indian classical music, no system of notation, including Bhatkhande’s, can capture what is actually sung or played on an instrument; it can serve only as a starting point for interpretation and embellishment.

   Nirody’s renditions, reflecting the weight of decades of his own training, therefore represent an important advance in making musical knowledge more accessible.

   Commendable effort

   “It is commendable,” said Pandit Ulhas Kashalkar, 60, one of India’s top khayal vocalists and a much-in-demand guru at Kolkata’s Sangeet Research Academy, of Nirody’s Samarpan. “Even performing musicians cannot learn all ragas or all compositions in a raga from their gurus. And notations have their limitations. So the recordings will be hugely beneficial both to students and musicians.”

   In the foreword to Samarpan, Pandit Ajoy Chakraborty, a colleague of Kashalkar’s at the Kolkata Academy, and Mumbai-based Pandit Sharad Sathe have also commended Nirody’s efforts, as has musicologist and mathematician Ramesh Gangolli. Nirody’s recordings assumed importance because “…Hindustani musicians are not very comfortable learning compositions from the notated written versions.” He writes, “Having been trained by ear, they are more comfortable learning new pieces in the same way…”

   Younger musicians, too, welcomed the recordings. “Learning from notation is completely different from learning from a guru,” said Rutuja Lad, 22, an upcoming vocalist in Mumbai who was a student of the late Dhondutai Kulkarni. “But an authentic recording can be a strong reference for learning new bandishes. Also, learning several bandishes in a raga can help a musician improve her understanding of the raga itself. For this too, the recordings will be very important.”

   Only so far

   Pandit Satyasheel Deshpande, 64, who splits his time between Mumbai and Pune, however, qualified his praise for Nirody’s effort by pointing out that in Indian classical music a recording could do only so much work. “It is an admirable effort,” he said of Nirody’s project. “It has become one step easier for students to interpret Bhatkhande.

   But when Bhatkhande collected these compositions, Hindustani music was practised in about two-thirds of the country in a variety of cultural settings, which means that the compositions were also rendered in a variety of styles, he said. Yet as is inevitable, Pandit Nirody has sung all the compositions in one style, which is that of Ginde, his guru, and that of Ginde’s guru, SN Ratanjankar, Deshpande said.

   For instance, Kramik contains many traditional compositions of the Gwalior gharana, the oldest khayal school. (Khayal and dhrupad are the two main genres of Hindustani, or north Indian classical, music.) These, for instance, would have been sung quite differently from the way Nirody has rendered them.

   So in one way, a recording can also become a red herring, Deshpande said. “There is some advantage of leaving the compositions in the form of notations,” he said. “It gives you room for interpretation. The very nature of our music is not to repeat annotated things. A lot is left to the imagination of the artiste.”

   In a lecture demonstration at the release function of Samarpan in Mumbai in April, Desphande presented examples of how his inimitable guru, the late Pandit Kumar Gandharva, had mined Bhatkhande’s work based on his own training from Pandit BR Deodhar. “Kumarji introduced us to many of Bhatkhande’s compositions,” said Deshpande. “But he used to tell his students: it is easy to annotate music, but it is difficult to read the annotations unless you know the socio-cultural context in which the music was produced.”

   A student should therefore be aware that compositions have a history and arose in a particular cultural setting, Deshpande said. As long as one approaches the recordings with these caveats, they are no doubt an important resource, he said. “Ustad Allaydiya Khan, the founder the Jaipur gharana, and Ustad Amir Khan, for instance, took many of Bhatkhande’s compositions and adapted it to their distinct styles,” he said. “But if Bhatkhande had not collected them in the first place, what would they have done?”

   Nirody agreed that his recordings are not meant to substitute learning from a guru and that his renditions are a starting point for further interpretation. “One cannot substitute teachers,” he said. “Compositions are for everyone. But each one has his own approach, depending on the gharana and personal style.”

   Six years of labour

   When Nirody began work on the project, he and his accompanists started by recording for an hour a day, every alternate day. Gradually, they boosted it to two hours a day, every alternate day, and finally settled into a routine of two hours every day in the evening.

   Nirody has funded the enterprise himself, through a trust, which will eventually reimburse him from proceeds from the sales ­­­­­of the book and CDs. Accompanying Nirody on the CDs are Pandit Veeabhadraiah Hiremath on the harmonium, and Pandit Ramesh Dhannur and Pandit Bhimashankar Bidnoor on the tabla.

   “Everyone involved in the project was committed,” he said. “They knew its importance. The sound recordist, a Carnatic violinist, AP Srinivas, accommodated us according to our convenience. A lot of credit goes to him.”

   Nirody said his only regret about the project was that his teaching took a backseat during its duration. Among his students in Mysore are Vaishnavi Talakad, who is Gangubai Hangal’s granddaughter, and musician Omkarnath Havaldar.

   To buy the book and CDs, send a cheque of Rs 3,000 (for addresses in India) or Rs 4,000 (for addresses abroad) to
   Swarasankula Sangeetha Sabha, #1226 3rd Cross, Gange Raste, Kuvempungar, Mysore 570023.

2. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ৮ জুন ২০১৫ (২:২৭ অপরাহ্ণ)

   Wrap-up: Turkey’s AKP loses majority, HDP passes 10 pct

   Turkey witnessed dramatic changes in its political landscape on June 7 after the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost its parliamentary majority and the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) crossed the notorious 10 percent threshold needed to enter parliament as a party.

   The blow to the AKP, as well as to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s hopes of assuming greater powers through the implementation of a presidential system, came amid the HDP’s success in become the first-ever party focusing on the Kurdish issue to win 10 percent of the vote.

   With around 12 percent of the vote, the HDP is likely to take around 80 of parliament’s 550 seats.

   Because of Turkey’s electoral system, the HDP’s failure to receive 10 percent would have handed the AKP the two-thirds parliamentary majority it needs to transform the country into a presidential system under Erdoğan.

   The AKP, however, failed in its quest. The difference that the HDP made in Turkey’s political landscape can best be seen in the southeastern Anatolian region where it has a strong grassroots. Thanks to the bizarre electoral system, in the past, the failure of Kurdish political movement to be represented as a party in parliament worked in favor of the ruling AKP, but in the June 7 vote, the HDP proved itself to be the kingmaker of the election.

   The AKP, meanwhile, preserved its votes in the capital Ankara, but lost votes in the two other biggest metropolitan cities, Istanbul and İzmir.

   As for the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), it preserved its voting numbers of around 25 percent. Although the social democratic party’s election manifesto attracted wide interest, this interest did not translate into more votes. Some observers suggested that the reason for this situation was “the entrusted votes” cast to the HDP by CHP supporters who believed that the HDP needed their support to pass the threshold and that they needed the HDP to be in parliament in order to foil Erdoğan’s presidential system ambitions.

   The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the name of which has been cited as a potential coalition partner for the AKP, did not categorically rule out such a formation. However, a deputy chair of the party said it was too early to say whether the party would consider such a formula.

   In the 2011 parliamentary elections, the MHP received 53 seats by winning 13 percent of the vote. In the June 7 vote, the MHP appeared to have won 81 seats with 17 percent of the vote.

3. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ৯ জুন ২০১৫ (৮:৩৮ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

   ভারত বলেই স্মৃতিকাতর মাশরাফি

   আঙিনায় যখন ভারত, মাশরাফি বিন মুর্তজাকে তখন মনে পড়বেই। রঙিন পোশাকে জ্বলে উঠেছেন বারবার, সাদা পোশাকেও ক্যারিয়ার সেরা সিরিজ ভারতের বিপক্ষেই। এখন তিনি টেস্ট ক্রিকেটের জগত থেকে অনেক দূরে। বিডিনিউজ টোয়েন্টিফোর ডটকমকে দেওয়া সাক্ষাৎকারে বাংলাদেশের সফলতম টেস্ট পেসার ফিরে তাকালেন তার টেস্ট ক্যারিয়ারে।

   ২০০৭ সালে ভারতের বিপক্ষে ব্যাটে-বলে দারুণ এক সিরিজ কাটিয়েছিলেন। ওই সিরিজে ফিরে তাকালে প্রথমেই কোনটি মনে পড়ে?

   মাশরাফি বিন মুর্তজা: শুরুতেই মনে পড়ে ৫ উইকেট পাওয়ার একটা সুযোগ ছিল, চট্টগ্রামে। ধোনিকে আউট করে চতুর্থ উইকেট নিলাম, সঙ্গে সঙ্গে ওরা ডিক্লেয়ার করে দিল। মেজাজটা বিগড়ে গিয়েছিল। পরে ব্যাটিংয়েও ভালো করেছিলাম। আমি আর রাজীব (শাহাদাত হোসেন) মিলে ফলোঅন বাঁচিয়ে দিয়েছিলাম। নবম উইকেটে একশ’ রানের মত (৭৭) জুটি গড়েছিলাম আমরা। আমি করেছিলাম ৭৯।

   দ্বিতীয় ইনিংসে আমরা দারুণ বোলিং করেছিলাম। ১০০ রান তুলতেই ওদের ৬ উইকেট পড়ে। পরে তো বৃষ্টিতে খেলাই হলো না। পরে ঢাকা টেস্টেও ৭০ করলাম।

   সিরিজের প্রথম বলেই ওয়াসিম জাফরকে বোল্ড করা মনে পড়ে না?

   মাশরাফি: মনে পড়বে না আবার! মজার ব্যাপার হলো, আমার শরীরটা সেদিন খুব ভালো ছিল না। অনেক দিন পর আমরা টেস্ট খেলতে নেমেছিলাম, আমার ছোটখাটো চোট ছিল। কিন্তু প্রথম বলটি করার জন্য যখন ছুটলাম, আমার মনে হচ্ছিল, প্রথম বলেই উইকেট পেয়ে যাব। কি কারণে জানি না, কিন্তু মনে হচ্ছিল। অবিশ্বাস্য মনে হতে পারে, উইকেটের ছবিটাও আমার চোখে ভাসছিল। আমি অফ স্টাস্পে বল ফেলব, কাট করে ভেতরে ঢুকবে। ব্যাটসম্যান ছেড়ে দিয়ে বোল্ড হবে। অদ্ভুত ভাবে হুবহু সেটাই হলো। ছেড়ে দিয়ে বোল্ড হলো ওয়াসিম জাফর।

   তবে ওই যে বললাম, সেদিন শরীরটা ভালো ছিল না। প্রথম বলের পর আর ভালো বোলিং করতে পারছিলাম না (৫ ওভারের প্রথম স্পেলে রান দিয়েছিলেন ৩৮)। লাঞ্চের পর আবার বোলিং ভালো হয়েছিল। ৫-৬ ওভারের একটা স্পেল করেছিলাম, রাহুল দ্রাবিড়ের মতো ব্যাটসম্যান ঠিক মতো খেলতে পারছিল না। পরে ডেভ (হোয়াটেমোর, সেই সময়ের কোচ) বলেছিল, প্রথম বলে উইকেট না পেলেই তোমার ভালো হতো…হাহাহাহা।

   ওই ভারত সিরিজটাকেই কি ক্যারিয়ারের সেরা টেস্ট সিরিজ বলবেন?

   মাশরাফি: ব্যাটিং-বোলিং মিলিয়ে বললে ওটাই সেরা সিরিজ। তবে শুধু বোলিংয়ের কথা বললে সেরা ২০০৩ সালের ইংল্যান্ড সিরিজ। ঢাকায় ২ ইনিংসে ৪ উইকেট পেয়েছিলাম, পরে চট্টগ্রামে এক ইনিংসেই চারটি। শুধু উইকেট সংখ্যার কারণে নয়, ওই সিরিজ আমার কাছে সেরা, যেভাবে বোলিং করছিলাম সেই কারণে। ইংল্যান্ডের ব্যাটিং লাইন আপে তখন ট্রেসকোথিক-ভন-বুচার-হুসেইন-থর্প। কেউ পুরো সিরিজে আমার বল ঠিকমত খেলতে পারেনি। চট্টগ্রামে ৫ উইকেট হয়েই যেত, আম্পায়ার একটা কটবিহাইন্ড দিল না।

   অভিষেক টেস্টেই ৪ উইকেট পেয়েছিলেন, পরে ৪ উইকেট পেয়েছেন আরও তিনবার। কিন্তু একবারও ৫ উইকেট নেই, আক্ষেপ হয় না?

   মাশরাফি: আক্ষেপ বলতে…হ্যাঁ, একটু তো আছেই। ৫ উইকেট তো একটা মাইলফলক। তবে নিয়মিত খেলতে পারলে অবশ্যই পেতাম ৫ উইকেট। ৮ বছর খেলেছি, তবে ইনজুরিসহ নানা কারণে নিয়মিত খেলতে পারিনি। তখন আমাদের দলও বেশি ভালো করতে পারেনি। খেলেছি ৩৬ টেস্ট, কিন্তু খুব কম টেস্টেই আমরা দুই ইনিংস বোলিং করার সুযোগ পেতাম। আবার দেখা যেত আমার উইকেট ৩ বা ৪টি হযেছে, তখনই প্রতিপক্ষ ইনিংস ডিক্লেয়ার করেছে। সব মিলিয়ে হয়নি। তারপরও ৩৬ টেস্ট খেলে ইনিংসে ৫ উইকেট পাওয়া উচিত ছিল। কিন্ত ক্যারিয়ারে যতবার আমি ফর্মের চূড়ায় উঠেছি, ততবারই কোনো না কোনো ইনজুরিতে ছিটকে পড়েছি। তখন আবার সেই রিহ্যাব, আবার ফেরা, ফর্ম খুঁজে পাওয়ার লড়াই…।

   ওই ভারত সিরিজে ব্যাটিংটা এত ভালো করেছিলেন কিভাবে?

   মাশরাফি: আত্মবিশ্বাসটা পেয়েছিলাম ওই বছর বিশ্বকাপ থেকে। বিশ্বকাপে বেশ ভালো ব্যাটিং করেছিলাম। অস্ট্রেলিয়ার সাথে ম্যাকগ্রা-টেইট-ব্র্যাকেনকে খেলে রান পেযেছিলাম (১৭ বলে ২৫)। দক্ষিণ আফ্রিকাকে হারালাম যে ম্যাচে, মাখায়া এনটিনিকে মাথার ওপর দিয়ে ছক্কা মেরেছিলাম, পোলক-নেলদেরও ভালো খেলেছিলাম (১৬ বলে ২৫)। তবে সত্যিকারের আত্মবিশ্বাস পেয়েছিলাম বারবাডোজের দুটি ম্যাচ থেকে। ওখানে উইকেট সবসময়ই বাউন্সি। ওয়েস্ট ইন্ডিজের বিপক্ষে ওখানে ২০ ওভারেই আমাদের ৬ উইকেট পড়ল। আমি নেমে অনেকক্ষণ ছিলাম ক্রিজে (৫১ বলে ৩৭)।

   তবে সবচেয়ে ভালো ব্যাটিং করেছিলাম ইংল্যান্ডের বিপক্ষে ম্যাচে। বারবাডোজের উইকেটে অ্যান্ডারসন-ফ্লিনটফদের বোলিংয়ে সেদিন ১৫ ওভারে আমাদের ৬ উইকেট পড়ার পর নেমেছিলাম আমি। রান করেছিলাম মাত্র ১৩, কিন্তু অনেক সময় ছিলাম উইকেটে। সাকিবের সঙ্গে একটা জুটি হয়েছিল। সাকিব ফিফটি করল, আমি একপাশে আগলে ছিলাম। পরে ইয়ান বেল আমাকে এসে বলেছিল, “একমাত্র তোমাকেই দেখলাম বলের লাইনে গিয়ে খেলতে। তুমি এত নিচে ব্যাটিং করো কেন, তুমি তো তোমার দলের সেরা ব্যাটসম্যান।”

   ওই ব্যাটিং থেকেই আত্মবিশ্বাস পেয়েছিলাম, ভারত সিরিজে সেটাই কাজে লেগেছিল। পরে শ্রীলঙ্কায় গিয়ে আবার ব্যাটিংয়ে খারাপ করি। কারণ স্পিন বল আমি বোলারের হাত দেখে নয়, অফ দা পিচ দেখে খেলি। এজন্য দুসরা খেলতে আমার সমস্যা হয়। শ্রীলঙ্কায় সেবার মুরালিকে ভাল খেলতে পারিনি।

   ওই সিরিজের সময়ই সেই সময়ের ভারত অধিনায়ক রাহুল দ্রাবিড় আক্ষেপ করে বলেছিলেন, ‘আমার দলে যদি মাশরাফির মতো একজন অলরাউন্ডার থাকত’

   মাশরাফি: মনে আছে। দ্রাবিড় বলেছিল, সৌরভ গাঙ্গুলিও বলেছিল। ভালো লাগে, ওসব মনে পড়লে। আবার খারাপও লাগে যে লম্বা সময় টেস্ট খেলতে পারিনি। ওই যে বললাম, যখনই ফর্মের চূড়ায় উঠেছি, তখনই আচমকা ইনজুরিতে ছিটকে পড়েছি।

   ২০০৩ সালের ইংল্যান্ড সিরিজটার কথাই ধরুন। ইংল্যান্ডের বড় বড় ব্যাটসম্যানরা আমাকে খেলতে হিমশিম খেয়েছে। ঢাকায় গ্রাহাম থর্পকে এমন একটা বাউন্সারে আউট করেছিলাম, ওই উইকেটে অমন গতির বাউন্সার সে ভাবতেই পারেনি। চট্টগ্রামে ২ বল খেলেই আমার বলে বোল্ড হয়েছিল থর্প। মার্ক বুচারও খেলতে পারেনি ঠিকমত।

   আমার মনে আছে, একটা স্পেলে নাসের হুসেইন আমার বলে ব্যাটে লাগাতে পারেনি একবারও। চট্টগ্রামে ৪ উইকেট নিলাম, যার মধ্যে ছিল ভন-হুসেইন-থর্পের উইকেট। ওই টেস্টের সময়ই রাতে হোটেলে নাসের হুসেইনের সঙ্গে দেখা। ও বললো, ‘তুমি কাউন্টি খেলবে?’ আমি একটু ভাবলাম, কারণ বাড়ি ছেড়ে থাকতে ভাল লাগে না। তবু কাউন্টি বলে কথা, বললাম খেলব। হুসেইন আমার নম্বর নিয়ে রাখল, বলল ইংল্যান্ডে গিয়ে ফোন করবে। ভাগ্য দেখুন, পরদিনই ইনজুরিতে পড়লাম। ওই সময় আমি পরিণত হতে শুরু করেছি। একজন টেস্ট ফাস্ট বোলারের যে আগ্রাসন, যে গতি, নিয়ন্ত্রণ, সুইং দরকার, সব ছিল তখন আমার। ওই সময়টা ধরে রাখতে পারলে আমার টেস্ট ক্যারিয়ার অন্য উচ্চতায় থাকত। পারলাম না ইনজুরির কারণে।

   পরে ২০০৬-২০০৭ সালেও খুব ভালো বোলিং করছিলেন…

   মাশরাফি: ২০০৬ সালে ওয়ানডেতে সব দেশ মিলিয়েই সর্বোচ্চ উইকেট নিলাম। পরের বছর বিশ্বকাপ ও বিশ্বকাপের পরও ভালো করলাম। এরপরই ইনজুরি। ২০০৮-২০০৯ সালেও দারুণ বোলিং করছিলাম। সাকিব-তামিমরা তো ২০০৩ দেখেনি, ওরা এখনও বলে যে ‘মাশরাফি ভাই, ২০০৯ সালে আপনার সেরা বোলিং ছিল।’ আসলেই ওই সময় যা করতে চাইতাম, সব হতো। নেটে বা ম্যাচে মুখে বলে বলে দুই দিকে সুইং করাতাম বা ইয়র্কার মারতাম। চম্পকার (বাংলাদেশের সেই সময়ের বোলিং কোচ, সাবেক লঙ্কান পেসার চম্পকা রমানায়েকে) সঙ্গে অনেক কাজ করেছিলাম। পুরো নিয়্ন্ত্রণ চলে এসেছিল নিজের বোলিংয়ের ওপর।

   দেশে ত্রিদেশীয় সিরিজ হলো। জয়াবর্ধনে-সাঙ্গাকারা আমার বোলিং দেখে মুগ্ধ হয়েছিল। ফেরার সময় সাঙ্গা আমাকে বলেছিল, ‘সি ইউ সুন ইন ইন্ডিয়া।’ মানে আইপিএলে দেখতে চায়। সাঙ্গাই পরে যুবরাজ সিংকে বলেছিল আমাকে কিংস ইলেভেন পাঞ্জাবে নিতে। অকশনে প্রীতি জিনতা অনেক চেষ্টাও করেছিল, কিন্তু জিতে নেয় জুহি চাওলা, কেকেআরে। যাই হোক, এত ভালো বোলিং করছিলাম তখন। অথচ ওই বছরই অধিনায়ক হয়ে ওয়েস্ট ইন্ডিজে গিয়ে ইনজু্রি হলো। মনের ভেতর তাই ভয় কাজ করে। এখনও খুব ভালো বোলিং করতে থাকলেই আমার ভয় লাগে। আবার না জানি কোন ইনজুরি আসে!

   ৬ বছর হলো টেস্ট ক্রিকেট থেকে দূরে…বাংলাদেশের হয়ে আবার সাদা পোশাকে লাল বল হাতে দেখা যাবে মাশরাফিকে?

   মাশরাফি: কতদিন খেলব আর জানি না। তবে যতদিনই খেলি, টেস্ট ক্রিকেট খেলার ইচ্ছে আমার আছে। জানি কাজটা কঠিন, কিন্তু ইচ্ছেটাও তীব্র। একটু যদি সময় পাই, একটু লম্বা সময় ধরে ইনজুরিমুক্ত থাকতে পারলে, হাঁটুর টুকটাক সমস্যাগুলো সারিয়ে উঠতে পারলে আমার বিশ্বাস টেস্ট ক্রিকেট আমি আবার খেলতে পারব। দিনে ১৫ ওভারের বেশি বোলিং তো হয়ত করতে হবে না। সেটা আমি এখনও পারব। তবে খুব ঝুঁকি হয়ে যাবে।

   ব্যাপারটা কি এমন, যে অবসরের আগে একটা টেস্ট হলেও খেলতে চান?

   মাশরাফি: নাহ। একটা খেলে অবসরে গেলাম, মনের শান্তি…ওভাবে ভাবি না আমি। ওটা তো স্বার্থপর ভাবনা হয়ে গেল। সেটা হলে এখনই বলে দিতাম। আমার ইচ্ছে আছে টেস্টে ফিরে কিছু সময় খেলে যাওয়ার। স্রেফ খেলার জন্য খেলা নয়। কিংবা হয়তো দল ভাবল, ‘ঠিক আছে, মাশরাফি চাইছে, ওকে টেস্ট খেলাই’…এভাবে নয়। যোগ্যতা-সামর্থ্য দিয়েই খেলতে চাই।

   একবারও ইনিংসে ৫ উইকেট না পেয়ে সর্বোচ্চ টেস্ট উইকেট:

4. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ১০ জুন ২০১৫ (৫:৩৫ অপরাহ্ণ)

   Why LGBT rights are racing ahead while feminism limps behind
   
   It’s great that Ireland is embracing the right of gay men and women to marry, but it still bans abortions. Why have women’s rights gotten stuck in the mud?

   Nearly 20 years ago I went on vacation in Paris with two gay male friends. One night, after an inevitable dose of cathedrals, Impressionism and cafes, I went out with them to one of the city’s well-known gay bars. They got in easily and didn’t even notice that I had been barred from entering by a burly guard who shouted at me: “Femmes, non!”

   I stood there outside, wounded to the depths of my soul. For years I had seen my gay brothers as natural allies in my feminist battles. Two years earlier, I had submitted my history department seminar paper on gays in the Weimar Republic. In it, I wrote about the inspiring figure of Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish sexologist and one of the founders of the gay rights movement, who formed an alliance with Helene Stocker, a leader of German feminism. This looked to me like an obvious linking of arms based on a clear commonality of interests, primarily the fight against patriarchal outlooks.

   All this might have been an obscure recollection from my 20s were it not for the gladdening vote by the citizens of Ireland to recognize same-sex marriages. When I first heard the news, I rejoiced in the happiness of the Irish lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual community and the way they had run rings around everyone. I adore historical ironies of this sort. Then, however, I was struck by the painful realization that the ones who remained behind are not only most of the countries of the world but also mainly women. Women and their struggle.

   The picture is becoming clearer. As the struggle for LGBT rights gains momentum, the feminist movement is looking more and more like its limping sister. From the legalization of gay identity through the fight for fair representation in the culture and the fray to find medication for AIDS to the recognition of same-sex marriages, the LGBT rights movement has been ticking off items on its list of demands for rectification. At the same time, feminism, that repetitive nudnik, is still complaining about equal pay, sexual freedom, and protection from from sexual harassment and assault – the same old tune for decades now.

   To bring this surprising gap into sharper focus, let’s take another look at Ireland. Sure, the country is embracing the right of gay men and women to marry, but it is doing so even as it rejects the right of women to have abortions, except in extreme cases in which the mother’s life is in danger.

   Had it been necessary to bet on who would lead the race to social equality, I would have put my money on women before I’d have wagered on the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. After all, even the most anachronistic conservative came out of a woman’s womb. So what happened? How did our LGBT brethren leave us behind?

   For years, the conservative justification for blocking equal rights for women as well as for LGBT people included a heart-rending call to preserve the institution of the traditional family. Give us a man who is a real man and a woman who is a real woman, we were told, and the world will stride into the sunset to the strains of violins. Naturally, it’s not that conservatives want to discriminate against women; they just fear that the subversion of the good old family structure will lead to the destruction of civilization.

   Such were the apologetics of most religious institutions as well as ordinary old-school conservatives. So it was, until recent decades, when it suddenly became clear that same-sex marriage is in fact quite nice. So much so, that even Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, has stated that if he were invited to a gay wedding he would attend it. He dragged in his wake former Texas Governor Rick Perry, another contender for the nomination. Catholic Ireland is just the icing on top of the wedding cake. It turns out that except at the very extremes, LGBT weddings are the new black. Or something. So is the traditional family structure no longer endangered? Can we put to bed the old conservative anxiety about the institution of marriage?

   The answers to this reveal the ugly scaffolding of conservative apologetics. The social shift with regard to same-sex marriage is mainly the result of indifference. Not only because the institution of marriage is not what it used to be, but primarily because the marriage of two men or of two women does not really come at anyone’s expense. If Archie Bunker’s lesbian neighbors decide to get married, he might hate it and fight with his son-in-law about it, but it won’t interfere with his workday or affect his armchair time.

   Feminist demands, by contrast, are a different story. If men are obliged to accept the equal representation of women on boards of directors, or to get paid as much as women get for the same work, or restrain themselves from making inappropriate remarks or advances, or fold the laundry and do the ironing, or be the one the teacher calls when the kid has a fever, these achievements will come at the expense of male dominance. Yes, there has been some progress on these fronts, but women’s rights are being outpaced by gay rights because the equal treatment of women could mean less pay and less status for men; it erodes the privileges they have taken such care to preserve for thousands of years.

   The reason the gay rights campaign has racked up so many victories while feminism is still struggling is that granting equal rights to women will force the men to divide up the cake that they have been accustomed to having all to themselves. Perhaps this explanation is not particularly comforting or useful, but at least it strips away the layers of justification for the “Femmes, non!” that resounds around the world and reveals it for what it really is: simple, egotistical misogyny.

5. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ১১ জুন ২০১৫ (৮:৫৮ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

   How MEA helped Army set stage for strike in Myanmar

   The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) played a critical role in setting the stage for Tuesday’s cross-border strikes deep inside Myanmar by securing permission, highly-placed diplomatic sources told The Indian Express. The raid, sources said, was the culmination of a decade-long — and deeply controversial — programme of secret diplomacy reaching out to Myanmar’s armed forces, facing international sanctions since a 1988 coup.

   Sources said New Delhi received assent from the Myanmar government on Monday for its plan to fly in special forces to attack three insurgent camps 15-20 kilometres across the border, in the dense forests of Myanmar’s western Sagaing division.

   The details of the operation were shared with Myanmar’s military by the defence attache at the Indian Embassy, Colonel Gaurav Sharma, after Ambassador Gautam Mukhopadhyay secured high-level clearance.

   Earlier this year, sources said, Myanmar’s military had also responded to requests for action against the NSCN (Khaplang) faction, sending in troops to target its main base at Taga. However, the insurgents disappeared into the forests ahead of the action by Myanmar.

   New Delhi’s request for action came amid reports that the NSCN(K) was providing training to a welter of Northeast insurgent groups, including Paresh Barua’s United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB).

   External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had raised the issue of military cooperation against insurgents during her visit to Myanmar in August 2014, and received assurances of assistance.

   “In actual fact”, a senior diplomat said, “depending on the state of relations and how willing they are to cooperate for their own reasons, Myanmar has done more at times, so long as it is well handled and they are not put in an embarrassing position”.

   Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore’s admission that India crossed the border into Myanmar, another diplomat said, “could complicate things for the government there”.

   For years, Indian diplomats have been working patiently to secure Myanmar’s cooperation against Northeast insurgents — in the face of Western calls to back the democracy movement of Aung San Suu Kyi, then imprisoned by the military Junta.

   India staged limited cross-border operations against Northeast insurgents in 1995, targeting a column that was taking arms from Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh through the Mizoram forests.

   The Army’s 57 Division, working together with the Myanmar Army, killed 38 insurgents and arrested 118 in the course of Operation Golden Bird — named after a Grimm Brothers fairytale — that summer. But Myanmar’s Army withdrew cooperation after Suu Kyi was awarded a medal by the Indian government.

   Then, in the late 1990s, India resumed cooperation with Myanmar, providing its military with badly-needed arms and equipment. In 2012, it was to emerge that India had resold 83-milimetre Carl Gustaff rocket launchers to the Myanmar military, which it used against Kachin Liberation Army insurgents. Sweden, which had sold the equipment to India, formally protested — and received an assurance that equipment would not be resold in the future.

   In the years after, though, India provided a range of equipment to Myanmar’s armed forces, including four Islander maritime patrol aircraft, naval gun-boats, 105 mm light artillery guns, mortars and rifles.

   The payoff from the support became evident in 2010, when the Home Ministry’s joint secretary S Singh and Myanmar Army commander for Chin state, U Nay Wing, signed an agreement that Indian forces could pursue insurgents across the border.

   In May last year, Ambassador Mukhopadhyay and Major General Kyaw Nyunt, Myanmar’s Deputy Defence Minister, signed a landmark agreement on security cooperation between the two countries. The agreement provided for coordinated patrolling and intelligence sharing.

   Part of the reason is that Myanmar itself has become increasingly frustrated by cross-border insurgency. In March, a Myanmar Air Force jet bombed the Chinese city of Lincang, killing four civilians.

   The raid targeted insurgent leader Phone Kya Shin, who attempted to seize Laukkai, the capital of the self-administered Kokang region. Phone Kya Shin, also known as Peng Jiasheng, allegedly played a major role in drug trafficking.
   Myanmar officials say former Chinese military officials are involved in training the insurgents.

   In @IndianExpress, I report on the secret diplomacy that enabled Tuesday’s army raid into Myanmar | http://t.co/q99MswgI24

   — Praveen Swami (@praveenswami) June 10, 2015

   মোদীর(@narendramodi – @PMOIndia) নির্দেশেই মিয়ানমারে ঢুকে অভিযান http://t.co/vwn1nA9TN0

   — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) June 11, 2015

6. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ১৫ জুন ২০১৫ (৬:৩৭ অপরাহ্ণ)

   What does the Trans-Pacific Partnership mean for BD?

   What is happening more than eight thousand miles away in the hallowed halls of the US Congress may have a more profound impact on the lives of the poor in Dhaka than any recent policy act by the government of Bangladesh.

   Currently, the US congress is considering the Trade Promotion Authority Bill, also known as “fast track” authority. If passed, this bill will give the president authority to negotiate international trade agreements with other countries under an expedited legislative procedure, which limits the power of Congress to an up or down vote without amendment. A new authorisation is required to finalise the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, as the previous fast- track authority of the president has already expired.

   The TPP is a regional trade agreement the US is currently negotiating with a heterogeneous group of eleven countries, which include four from the Americas (Canada, Mexico, Chile and Peru), five from Asia (Brunei, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam), as well as Australia and New Zealand. These countries have a combined population of nearly 800 million with an estimated gross domestic product (GDP) of $28 trillion–roughly 38% of the world’s output — and account for about one-third of the world’s trade. Conspicuously absent from this grouping are such major Asian economies as South Korea, Indonesia and China.

   The TPP is not the garden-variety trade agreement for removing trade barriers such as tariffs and quotas. It is a mega-trade compact with a package of non-trade agenda: patent protection, government procurement, labour rights, environmental laws, and geopolitics. The main thrust of the TPP, according to President Obama, is setting standards for global trade.

   The US companies have much to gain from extending and strengthening intellectual property rights as well as liberalisation of cross-border services trade. Currently, services constitute nearly 80 per cent of US GDP and a large portion of the US trade income stems from intellectual property (IP)-related trade — receipts of royalties and license fees — that comprised 43% of the global total in 2012.

   All preferential trade agreements lead to winners and losers amongst countries — creating as well as diverting trade. The TPP is no exception.

   Who will be the winners of this agreement? An obvious winner from the trade provisions would be Vietnam. Given the preferential access to the US market — along with its abundant and young workers and an ample inflow of foreign direct investments — it is likely to emerge as a veritable factory of the world and an export hub.

   Although the US maintains a low average tariff, this average masks an ugly fact — its “tariff- peaks” are on such items as apparel, textiles, footwear and leather goods, where its tariff rates are a staggering 15 per cent or above. In some of these products, Vietnam would soon overwhelmingly dominate the US market by diverting exports from other poor Asian countries such as Bangladesh, as these countries will continue to be encumbered with a heavy tariff burden. (However, this advantage of Vietnam in apparel may be somewhat eroded by the strict rules-of-origin, known as yarn-forward — meaning only apparel using yarn and fabric from TPP countries will qualify for duty-free benefits — a compact provision intended to boost the US exports of textiles.)

   This is ironic because the countries that will be seriously adversely affected are the least-developed countries (LDCs) of Asia, much poorer than Vietnam (the per capita income of Vietnam is roughly double that of Bangladesh and Cambodia, and triple that of Nepal). Thus, implementing the TPP would be tantamount to throwing these LDCs under the bus. Rather than fostering a more equitable global order, the TPP would foment greater poverty and inequality across countries.

   What is the prospect of Bangladesh gaining duty-free access to the US market? Pretty dim — for a number of reasons. First, Bangladesh has so far failed to persuade the US administration of its progress on labour rights and practices, the putative concern behind President Obama’s suspension of Bangladesh’s duty-free access to the U.S. market under the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP). Second, there is vehement political opposition from the protectionist textile interests in the US, and from the Africans and the Haitians, who are concerned about the potential for preference erosions if Bangladesh (as well as other Asian countries) were allowed entry to the market.

   The non-trade provisions of the TPP may have equally damning ramifications for poor countries like Bangladesh. The critics of the agreement contend that these non-trade provisions relating to IP protection — such as drug patents and movie copyrights — are both intrusive and excessive. They seek to replace national standards in intellectual protection by the US standard — a move that has invoked widespread resentment in the TPP countries-and go beyond those in previous US bilateral trade agreements.

   If the proposed US-standard becomes the universal template, it would give pharmaceutical companies longer-term monopolies — through drug-patent “ever-greening” and “data-exclusivity” — over brand name drugs. This would hinder generic companies from producing low-cost, life-saving drugs that are critical to people’s health in poor countries like Bangladesh. Doctors Without Borders, an international medical humanitarian organisation, contend that unless drug-patent provisions are changed in the final draft, the TPP would be “the most harmful trade pact ever for access to medicines” in the developing world.

   In today’s globalised world, the economic fortunes of poor countries can be swayed by the apparently unrelated actions of richer countries elsewhere in the world. A stark illustration is the unintended, yet devastating, consequence of the TPP on countries like Bangladesh. To avoid such collateral damage, the rich world should shun regionalism that discriminates between nations — and recommit themselves to the principles of multilateralism where all countries get a fair shake.

   what does the Trans-Pacific Partnership mean for #Bangladesh http://t.co/NIUI9vxoLs #EconomicAnalysis by #MGQuibria #FE via @febdonline

   — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) June 15, 2015

   • 

     মাসুদ করিম - ২৫ জুন ২০১৫ (৯:১০ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

     Obama poised for huge win on trade

     President Obama is poised for one of the biggest victories of his second term after the Senate voted Tuesday to advance legislation enhancing his trade powers.

     The Senate’s 60-37 vote sets the stage for passage on Wednesday of the trade-promotion authority (TPA) bill, or fast-track, which House GOP leaders ushered through the lower chamber last week. If the Senate approves the measure, as expected, it heads to the White House for Obama’s signature.

     After the vote, liberal trade opponents on and off Capitol Hill acknowledged fast-track is all but certain to become law, throwing in the towel after a months-long legislative brawl that saw Obama siding with GOP leaders against his own Democratic base.

     The opponents are instead moving the battle lines back in preparation to fight an emerging Pacific trade deal the fast-track power is designed to foster.

     As part of the strategic switch, Democrats in both chambers are lining up to vote in favor of a worker aid bill — known as Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) — which House liberals killed earlier this month as a means to block fast-track.

     Public Citizen, among the most vocal opponents of Obama’s trade agenda, also indicated Tuesday that it will reserve its firepower for the coming fight over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an accord with Japan and 10 other nations that could affect as much as 40 percent of the global economy.

     Obama had said he would not sign a fast-track bill without assurances that there is a strategy for getting TAA to his desk as well.

     That stipulation left open the question of whether liberal fast-track opponents would repeat their earlier effort to sink TAA, a program long-championed by Democrats, in a bid to stall TPA once more. But even the staunchest Democratic critics said Tuesday that there’s no such plan in the works.

     “I don’t think too many members want to go home having taken care of corporate interests with TPA and then falling short on taking care of workers,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who led the Democratic opposition to fast-track in the Senate.

     He said he would vote for TAA but that pro-union Democrats will make their next stand against the TPP. Brown and other Democrats acknowledged, however, that it will be tougher to fight the multilateral pact because of Obama’s fast-track authority.

     The TPA bill would grant Congress an up-or-down vote on Obama’s trade deals but prohibit amendments or a filibuster in the Senate. The administration has portrayed the extra authority as a necessary step in the president’s bid to finalize the TPP, which has emerged as the top economic priority of his second term.

     White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Tuesday declined to say if Obama would sign the fast-track bill before the worker aid measure reached his desk, but he did not rule out that possibility.

     “The president has made clear both of them are a priority,” Earnest told reporters. “I don’t have a time frame to lay out for you right now in terms of when the president will sign one bill or the other.”

     Such vague comments have made Democratic critics of TPA even more wary of the president’s approach. Asked if there’s a fear among Democrats that Obama would sign TPA even without concrete assurances that TAA would follow, one House Democratic aide minced no words.

     “Not a fear, a belief,” said the aide, whose boss opposes fast-track. “His whole sentiment the entire time has been ‘trust us.’ But we know what he’s saying doesn’t jibe with reality. So, no, there’s not much trust.”

     Tuesday’s Senate vote is a huge win for Obama and his unlikely ally, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has been better known as the president’s persistent foil over the past six and a half years.

     Obama’s second term has been largely devoid of legislative accomplishment after immigration reform and gun control legislation faltered in the last Congress.

     McConnell predicted earlier this year that trade legislation would be the biggest legislative achievement of the new Senate GOP majority, bolstering his argument to voters that Republicans know how to govern.

     “We have demonstrated we can work together on a bipartisan basis to achieve something that is extremely important for America,” McConnell said after the vote.

     Thirteen Democrats joined 47 Republicans in supporting the measure, while only six Republicans voted no.

     Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a 2016 presidential contender, surprised GOP leaders by announcing his last-minute opposition. The move left fellow Republicans scratching their heads because Cruz, along with House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), had penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed in April expressing support for fast-track.

     Senate aides speculated it was an effort to persuade other Republicans to join him and hand the GOP establishment an embarrassing loss.

     McConnell, meanwhile, is aiming to pass the worker aid bill later in the week as an attachment to an African trade bill.

     In the House, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is also vowing to move the remaining pieces of the trade package through the lower chamber and to Obama before week’s end.

     “Our goal is to get TPA and TAA to the president’s desk this week and deliver this win for the American people,” he said Tuesday in a statement.

     That would be a victory for Boehner and Ryan, who has led the GOP effort in the House.

     They don’t have much time. GOP leaders have canceled Friday’s scheduled votes to allow lawmakers to attend funerals in Charleston, S.C., in the wake of last week’s fatal shooting at a historic black church in the city.

     Senate Vote Gives Obama a Victory on Pacific Trade Bill http://t.co/yBYgg1wRio

     — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) June 24, 2015

7. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ১৬ জুন ২০১৫ (৮:১০ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

   Four South Asian nations sign transit deal

   Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal (BBIN) signed Monday a historic agreement opening their borders to motor vehicles of each other for both passenger and freight transit.

   Transport ministers of countries concerned inked the deal in the Bhutanese capital of Thimphu and declared that it will be effective within next six months under a work plan.

   Walid Foyez, senior communications officer of Road Transport and Bridges Ministry, told the FE over phone that the transport minister-level meeting held before the signing ceremony also decided to run a car rally across the four South Asian countries in October.

   The planned debut stands for a show of opening up broader horizons for peoples’ movement and interaction in multifarious fields, including trade and commerce, in this era of globalisation.

   Road Transport and Bridges Minister Obaidul Quader signed the deal titled ‘Motor Vehicles Agreement for the Regulation of Passenger, Personal, and Cargo Vehicular Traffic with Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal (BBIN)’ on behalf of Bangladesh.

   It is in Bangladesh that the initial accords on sub-regional connectivity were struck during Indian premier Narendra Modi’s much-hyped Dhaka mission few days back.

   Bangladesh assumes high geophysical importance in such transit arrangement for having maritime gateways through ports on the Bay of Bengal.

   Lyonpo DN Dhungyel, Minister of Information and Communications of Bhutan, Nitin Jairam Gadkari, Minister of Road Transport and Highways, and Shipping of India, and Bimalendra Nidhi, Minister of Physical Infrastructure and Transport of Nepal, signed for their respective countries.

   A joint statement was also issued on the occasion.

   The six-month work plan, according to the statement, will start in July to complete preparation of bilateral agreements/protocols for implementation of the MVA, by July 2015.

   Preparatory tasks also include formalisation of the agreement, including the protocols, by this coming August.

   The negotiation and approval for the bilateral agreements/protocols will be completed by September next while installation of prerequisites for implementing the approved agreements by December this year.

   Among the prerequisites are IT systems, infrastructure, tracking, and regulatory systems.

   The staggered implementation will be from October. Scope of trilateral/quadrilateral arrangement will also be explored during the preparation level, sources said.

   In the joint statement, the ministers of the four South Asian countries took note of the progress made in formulating and negotiating the MVA for the Regulation of Passenger, Personal and Cargo Vehicular Traffic between the SAARC Member States (known as SAARC MVA).

   They recognised the need to accelerate cross-border transport facilitation to “deepen and hasten regional integration through sub-regional measures in line with the directive of our leaders as articulated in the Declaration of the Eighteenth SAARC Summit”.

   They recalled their renewed commitment to “substantially enhance regional connectivity in a seamless manner through building and upgrading roads, railways, waterways infrastructure, energy grids, communications and air links to ensure smooth cross-border flow of goods, services, capital, technology and people”.

   After the signing, Bhutanese Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay flagged off a car rally to drive through Bhutan-Gowahati-Shilong-Sylhet-Benapole-Kolkata route to survey the road.

   Sources said survey on several other routes will also be conducted by October next. These are Thimphu-Phuentsholing-Jaigaon-Burimari-Mongla/Chittagong, Kathmandu-Kakarvita/Phulbari-Banglabandha-Mongla/Chittagong, Samdrup Jonhkar (Bhutan)-Guwahari-Shilong-Tamabil-Sylhet-Chittagong, Silchar-Sutarkandi-Paturia Ferryghat-Benapole/Petrapole-Kolkata, Silchar-Saturkandi-Chittagong Port and Agartola-Akhaura-Chittagong Port.

   The BBIN MVA was drafted in line with the SAARC MVA which, however, could not be done due to reservation of one member-Pakistan– in November.

   Asian Development Bank Vice President Wencai Zhang was also present at the signing ceremony. ADB facilitates the formulation of the motor-vehicle agreement in the light of Sub-regional Economic Cooperation Trade Facilitation Strategic Framework 2014-2018, endorsed in 2013.

   Mr Obaidul Quader in his speech was all-praise for the agreement he termed a landmark to open up enormous economic opportunities in the BBIN region.

   The minister expressed the hope that political commitment would play a vital role in this regard. Economist Dr Hossain Zillur Rahman was cautious in welcoming the deal as he said its effectiveness will be realised at the time of taking forward it in different stages.

   He expressed the hope that the deal would move forward in right direction by meeting the country’s connectivity needs with landlocked Nepal and Bhutan and removing hidden barriers like non-tariff one in trade and business.

   “Non tariff barriers like hidden barriers in inter-trade must have to be addressed rightly so that our trade potentials are better exploited,” he told the FE over phone.

   Transport expert Dr Shamsul Hoque believes the agreement will definitely bring tangible change in people-to-people movement and trade to deal with many hassles which exist with the member-countries, “mainly with India”.

   He, however, laid importance on taking the deal forward by attaining logical demand of the country, including issues of taxation and benefit of trade and business with member countries.

   The BUET professor expressed the hope that the government would take right strategy for the flourishing of the sub-regional trade by playing the card of the country’s geographical location and infrastructure facilities well.

   “Spirit of this deal is good. This will open door to the member-countries, like ASEAN countries where trade and business within member-countries are more than out of the bloc,” he said.

   Senior research fellow of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) Dr Mohammad Yunus believed that transit will bring economic benefit for Bangladesh. He, however, laid emphasis on doing homework in formalising protocols, standards and operating procedures of the MVA to get profitable economic benefit from it.

   “The BBIN deal is an umbrella deal and now we have to do lot of exercise at all levels including the government to reap the benefits during negotiations,” he told the FE over phone. Referring to the announcement of making MVA effective early next year, the BIDS economist said full gain from the deal would be available when road and border infrastructure will be ready.

   4 SouthAsian nations sign transit deal http://t.co/VvXCaBQHKG #BBIN #connectivity #FEreport – @febdonline | @ADB_HQ pic.twitter.com/ph2fmqaZe8

   — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) June 16, 2015

8. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ১৯ জুন ২০১৫ (৩:১৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

   Global Momentum Building Against Cultural Cleansing

   As one of its barbarous tactics in its war of terror, the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) threatens, loots and destroys symbols of world civilization: museums and libraries; churches, mosques and synagogues; and treasured archaeological artifacts and sites. One of ISIS’ intents is intimidation. Another: profit. ISIS takes precious antiquities from these sites – or encourages others to do so – and profits from their sale around the world. Heritage has become a pawn in their evil campaign.

   In a positive sign that the political will is building to take on this highly profitable black trade, world leaders have drawn together three times in just the last three weeks to coordinate denying ISIS the opportunity to profiteer from pillaged antiquities.

   Last month in Cairo, leaders from 10 Middle East and North African nations gathered in an emergency session hosted by the Egyptian government and UNESCO with the Antiquities Coalition and the Middle East Institute. The release by these governments of the Cairo Declaration set in motion steps to stem the sale of stolen antiquities and cut off sources of funding to extremists.

   As ISIS plots its next conquest in the historic and priceless UNESCO World Heritage site of Palmyra in Syria, the United Nations passed a resolution with unanimous condemnation of the barbaric destruction and looting of cultural heritage.

   Unanimous doesn’t happen easily or often in the 193-member UN General Assembly.

   Ambassador Mohamed Alhakim, the sophisticated and determined representative from Iraq is the force behind this new effort at the United Nations. In an impressive act of multilateral diplomacy, he shepherded a strongly worded resolution through the challenging UN system, declaring ISIS’ intentional destruction of culture a “tactic of war” and calling on all nations to join together to fight against the erasure of our common heritage.

   UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova said the resolution represents a turning point in the mobilization of the international community against the destruction of cultural heritage. The resolution recognizes, as Ms. Bokova notes, “cultural cleansing as a new phenomenon now that its emerging as a threat to the security of the people, security in the Middle East.”

   UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson said the coordinated action, improved information sharing and legal action would start to slow the tide of senseless extremism against the past, present and future of human civilization.

   Last week to further turn global resolve into global action, Italy and Jordan’s UN Ambassadors brought colleagues together with experts from the Antiquities Coalition, UNESCO, the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime, Interpol and the Carabinieri, the famed Italian police force who are world leaders in cultural law enforcement.

   The intent of the meeting was to discuss how best to combine efforts under international law to cut off sources of financing to ISIS, as well as raise awareness about the cultural cleansing happening in the cradle of civilization.

   Antiquities Coalition Chairman Deborah Lehr warned that would-be sellers and buyers that traffic in such pillaged artifacts become personal funders of terrorism and war. Buyers must be aware of this linkage, Lehr said, and urged caution in making these purchases.

   Countries as diverse as Poland, Ghana, Hungary, Mali, Russia and the United States spoke out about the importance of taking action. Ambassadors shared lessons learned from the destruction of culture in their own countries, and what might be learned from those lessons. The Polish and Hungarian Ambassadors in particular noted the destruction and looting that occurred in their countries during World War II, and how they are still recovering their stolen heritage. And the Ambassador from Mali shared the poignant story about the attacks by extremist organizations in his country, which have torched ancient manuscripts (including Islamic texts) dating back to the 13th century.

   The Turkish representative, reacting to comments that her country is the major transshipment point for illicit antiquities from Syria and Iraq, said Turkey is now strengthening protections at its borders. It is also warning museums, dealers and others purchasers that they will take strong action against those who are trafficking in looted antiquities. Shutting Turkey’s border to this pernicious trade is essential to stopping to ISIS from benefiting from this black trade.

   Clearly awareness is building in the international community about the importance of saving our shared common heritage. And creative ideas are being contemplated. The launch of Blue Hats for Culture has been proposed, as an extension of UN peacekeeping troops. And NGOs such as the Antiquities Coalition are considering the launch of Archaeocorps, an equivalent concept to Doctors without Borders for archaeology. UNESCO has also launched a campaign, #Unite4Heritage to raise global awareness.

   Yet to be successful in this fight, the momentum must translate into serious action. Countries such as Egypt, Iraq, Italy, Jordan and the United States have shown their willingness in recent weeks to take a leadership role in this fight. Let us hope that this current momentum translates into the political will necessary to stop this destructive threat to our history before it’s too late.

9. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ২০ জুন ২০১৫ (২:৪৫ অপরাহ্ণ)

   White Terrorism Is as Old as America

   My grandmother used to speak of Klansmen riding through Louisiana at night, how she could see their white robes shimmering in the dark, how black people hid in bayous to escape them. Before her time, during Reconstruction, Ku Klux Klan members believed they could scare superstitious black people out of their newly won freedom. They wore terrifying costumes but were not exactly hiding — many former slaves recognized bosses and neighbors under their white sheets. They were haunting in masks, a seen yet unseen terror. In addition to killing and beating black people, they often claimed to be the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers.

   You could argue, of course, that there are no ghosts of the Confederacy, because the Confederacy is not yet dead. The stars and bars live on, proudly emblazoned on T-shirts and license plates; the pre-eminent symbol of slavery, the flag itself, still flies above South Carolina’s Capitol. The killing has not stopped either, as shown by the deaths of nine black people in a church in Charleston this week. The suspected gunman, who is white and was charged with nine counts of murder on Friday, is said to have told their Bible-study group: “You rape our women, and you are taking over our country. And you have to go.”

   Media outlets have been reluctant to classify the Charleston shooting as terrorism, despite how eerily it echoes our country’s history of terrorism. American-bred terrorism originated in order to restrict the movement and freedom of newly liberated black Americans who, for the first time, began to gain an element of political power. The Ku Klux Klan Act, which would in part, lawmakers hoped, suppress the Klan through the use of military force, was one of America’s first pieces of antiterrorism legislation. When it became federal law in 1871, nine South Carolina counties were placed under martial law, and scores of people were arrested. The Charleston gunman’s fears — of black men raping white women, of black people taking over the country — are the same fears that were felt by Klansmen, who used violence and intimidation to control communities of freed blacks.

   Even with these parallels, we still hear endless speculation about the Charleston shooter’s motives. Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina wrote in a Facebook post that “while we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another.” Despite reports of the killer declaring his racial hatred before shooting members of the prayer group, his motives are inscrutable. Even after photos surfaced of the suspected shooter wearing a jacket decorated with the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa and leaning against a car with Confederate-flag plates, tangible proof of his alignment with violent, segregationist ideology, his actions remained supposedly indecipherable. A Seattle Times tweet (now deleted) asked if the gunman was “concentrated evil or a sweet kid,” The Wall Street Journal termed him a “loner” and Charleston’s mayor called him a “scoundrel,” yet the seemingly obvious designations — murderer, thug, terrorist, killer, racist — are nowhere to be found.

   This is the privilege of whiteness: While a terrorist may be white, his violence is never based in his whiteness. A white terrorist has unique, complicated motives that we will never comprehend. He can be a disturbed loner or a monster. He is either mentally ill or pure evil. The white terrorist exists solely as a dyad of extremes: Either he is humanized to the point of sympathy or he is so monstrous that he almost becomes mythological. Either way, he is never indicative of anything larger about whiteness, nor is he ever a garden-variety racist. He represents nothing but himself. A white terrorist is anything that frames him as an anomaly and separates him from the long, storied history of white terrorism.

   I’m always struck by this hesitance not only to name white terrorism but to name whiteness itself during acts of racial violence. In a recent New York Times article on the history of lynching, the victims are repeatedly described as black. Not once, however, are the violent actors described as they are: white. Instead, the white lynch mobs are simply described as “a group of men” or “a mob.” In an article about racial violence, this erasure of whiteness is absurd. The race of the victims is relevant, but somehow the race of the killers is incidental. If we’re willing to admit that race is a reason blacks were lynched, why are we unwilling to admit that race is a reason whites lynched them? In his remarks following the Charleston shooting, President Obama mentioned whiteness only once — in a quotation from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. intended to encourage interracial harmony. Obama vaguely acknowledged that “this is not the first time that black churches have been attacked” but declined to state who has attacked these churches. His passive language echoes this strange vagueness, a reluctance to even name white terrorism, as if black churches have been attacked by some disembodied force, not real people motivated by a racist ideology whose roots stretch past the founding of this country.

   I understand the comfort of this silence. If white violence is unspoken and unacknowledged, if white terrorists are either saints or demons, we don’t have to grapple with the much more complicated reality of racial violence. In our time, racialized terror no longer announces itself in white hoods and robes. You can be a 21-year-old who has many black Facebook friends and tells harmless racist jokes and still commit an act of horrifying racial violence. We cannot separate ourselves from the monsters because the monsters don’t exist. The monsters have been human all along.

   In America’s contemporary imagination, terrorism is foreign and brown. Those terrorists do not have complex motivations. We do not urge one another to reserve judgment until we search through their Facebook histories or interview their friends. We do not trot out psychologists to analyze their mental states. We know immediately why they kill. But a white terrorist is an enigma. A white terrorist has no history, no context, no origin. He is forever unknowable. His very existence is unspeakable. We see him, but we pretend we cannot. He is a ghost floating in the night.

10. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২১ জুন ২০১৫ (৯:৫০ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    হায় বয়কট আহা বয়কট

    Boycott the Louvre, if you love Israel

    ‘Boycott whoever boycotts us,’ proposed Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked. What better place to start than the fabled Parisian museum?

    “Louvre, other Paris sites refuse Israeli students.” When I read the headline last week I was reminded of a recent guest on Israel Channel 2 televisions’ morning show.

    The guest, a lawyer, sat next to another guest, a university lecturer who said he feared the June 2 vote by Britain’s National Union of Students to boycott Israel and affiliate with the BDS movement signaled an expansion and escalation of the boycott, divestment and sanctions trend.

    The teacher argued that if Israeli scholars were isolated from their colleagues abroad, prevented from publishing their research and refused invitations to conferences overseas, this would deal a mortal blow to Israeli academia. It would be a death sentence, he said, his face betraying his concern.

    But the lawyer was clearly made of tougher stuff. Nonsense, she reprimanded him in an authoritative tone, they need us more than we need them. The lecturer looked at her as if in disbelief, but she just nodded vigorously and continued her speech. Yes, she said, if they don’t want us we’ll publish and hold conferences here. That’ll show them. What are Oxford and Harvard worth without Israeli research?

    It could be that the Louvre’s refusal to arrange a visit for the Israeli students was the result of a misunderstanding, rather than a policy of boycotting Israeli educational institutions.

    In either case, the incident provides an opportunity to examine the theory, which is quite popular here, that the best response to a boycott is a counter-boycott. “Boycott whoever boycotts us,” proposed Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked.

    And so, why not start with the Louvre? This museum is full of exceptional art treasures. It is one of the most famous and powerful cultural institutions in the world, with the most visitors — 10 million a year. From the perspective of public relations and propaganda, there could be no better target for an Israeli counter-boycott. Imagine the media buzz that would follow Israel’s declaration of a boycott against the Louvre, in order to make an example of it. If we could break the Louvre, bring it to its knees, what foreign boy band would dare cancel a performance in Hayarkon Park?

    How long could the Louvre hold on without any Israeli visitors, and knowing that it will never again be able to show the work of Israeli artists? Without Israeli tourists — who are known as fervent art lovers, who demonstrate an exceptional knowledge of art history and remarkable skill in analyzing works of art and in placing them within their historical and cultural contexts — the museum will lose its standing in the eyes of visitors from the remainder of the world.

    The pointed absence of Israelis, who are considered the most desirable of all foreign tourists, will undoubtedly tarnish the prestige of this important institution. And what will its collection be worth without paintings and sculptures from Israel? Clearly, Israel has the Louvre by the short hairs. If we squeeze, it will beg us to stop.

    There is another reason the Louvre is a perfect target for an Israeli boycott that will teach the whole world a lesson. The famous glass pyramid at the museum’s entrance, which at night is illuminated as befits the City of Lights, is an obvious anti-Semitic symbol. The pyramid, after all, symbolizes the Children of Israel’s enslavement in Egypt. Its beauty is nothing but anti-Semitism in the guise of aesthetics. Furthermore, it expresses the ancient European idea that anti-Semitism is beautiful, or that a world without Jews is good. When the Louvre capitulates, we’ll demand that a Star of David be painted across the Louvre Pyramid.

11. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২১ জুন ২০১৫ (৯:৫২ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Growing up, growing apart

    For most people in Burma there is a sense of what is Indian, before there is any knowledge of India: the fluorescent-lit biryani restaurants along Fraser Street in Rangoon, the austere Mogul mosque and the fantastically-coloured Kali temple two blocks away, the elegant old ladies in faded saris speaking an unintelligible language, a style of men’s lungi, the distant forbears and slightly different countenance of a close friend. India is less a contemporary neighbour and more an old connection, the Indian-ness still everywhere a vestige of former times.

    The interconnected history of India and Burma is by and large untaught in schools and so not present in people’s thinking. The links of trade and ideas across the Bay of Bengal, from the Bengal, Orissa and south India to the Irrawaddy valley, go back millennia, but only a handful will associate the Pallava-inspired Burmese alphabet or the hundreds of Pali loanwords in Burmese with India itself.

    Even the shared colonial experience is largely forgotten. There is sometimes a photograph — like the one of a boyish and beaming U Nu sitting reverentially next to Mahatma Gandhi at Birla House; or a story, like the one of Pandit Nehru giving General Aung San (on a stopover in Delhi) a greatcoat to wear in London, worried that the young nationalist leader would otherwise catch cold during his talks with the Attlee government. But little else is remembered, from the exile of Bahadur Shah Zafar (his tomb is less than half a mile from where I am writing this), to the visits of Rabindranath Tagore, to the exploits of Subhas Chandra Bose and the INA.

    My great-grandfather studied at Calcutta and my grandfather grew up reading books and newspapers brought every week by steamer from Bengal. This was a hundred years ago, when parents dreamt of sending their sons to Darjeeling for school, in the hope they would then go on to Oxford or Cambridge and returns as officers in the ICS. It was a time when India represented a kind of modernity and Indian intellectuals and institutions seen as a bridge to the wider world.

    Now there are official ties and official schemes, of new highways and waterways, and government-led efforts to promote friendship and secure cooperation, or at least the promise of cooperation, along distant borders. But the personal ties have vanished. Bangkok and Singapore are far more familiar than any Indian city. And however distant in the imagination Calcutta is today, the northeast of India is even further away. Assam and Manipur are places in the schoolbooks, sites of royal conquests, not real places just next door. The idea that in northeast India there are cultures and societies so similar to Burma’s would be alien to all but a few.

    And as we this week celebrate India’s Independence and think about Partition, we might recall as well the earlier partition of 1937, that separated Burma from India and began the process of severing the many layers of contact. No one in Burma regrets separation from India and Burma’s emergence a little over a decade later as an independent nation. But as we think of the future, we should perhaps regret the foreignness that has developed.

    As Burma reopens to the outside world and takes its initial steps towards democracy there is a fresh opportunity to refashion our very ancient ties. Both countries will only benefit.

12. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৩ জুন ২০১৫ (৯:৫৫ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    UN Gaza report accuses Israel and Hamas of war crimes

    Israel’s offensive against Gaza last January was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population”, for which some Israelis should face “individual criminal responsibility”, a UN investigation has found.

    The inquiry, led by the former South African judge Richard Goldstone, concluded that both the Israeli military and Hamas committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during the three-week conflict, but singled out Israel and its policy towards the Palestinians of Gaza for the most serious condemnation. The inquiry rejected Israel’s argument that the war was a response to Palestinian rocket fire and therefore an act of self-defence.

    In a 575-page report (pdf), released tonight, the inquiry said Israel should be required to investigate the allegations raised and if it fails to do so the case should be passed to the prosecutor of the international criminal court. It accused Israel of “grave breaches” of the fourth Geneva convention and of a war crime for using Palestinians as human shields during the fighting.

    Israel refused to co-operate with the inquiry, arguing that the UN human rights council, which commissioned the study, is biased against Israel. “Both the mandate of the mission and the resolution establishing it prejudged the outcome of any investigation, gave legitimacy to the Hamas terrorist organisation and disregarded the deliberate Hamas strategy of using Palestinian civilians as cover for launching terrorist attacks,” the Israeli foreign ministry said.

    But Goldstone, who is Jewish and has strong links with Israel, defended the work of the four-person team. “There should be no impunity for international crimes that are committed,” he said. “It’s very important that justice should be done.”

    He rejected any suggestion of bias: “To accuse me of being anti-Israel is ridiculous.” He said it was in the interests of both Israel and the Palestinians for the truth to be established.

    Goldstone’s team looked in detail at 36 incidents during the war. It studied the deaths of 22 members of the Samouni family who, following instructions from Israeli soldiers, were sheltering in a house in Zeitoun, east of Gaza City. The house was then hit by Israeli fire. The killings were a grave breach of the fourth Geneva convention, the inquiry said.

    It found seven incidents in which civilians were shot while leaving their homes, waving white flags and sometimes following instructions from Israeli soldiers.

    A “direct and intentional attack” on the al-Quds hospital, in the south of Gaza City, which left the building seriously damaged and forced the evacuation of patients, may amount to a war crime.

    The report was critical of Palestinian armed groups, saying their rocket fire did not distinguish between civilian and military targets in Israel, caused terror among civilians and amounted to war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.

    It said Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier captured near Gaza more than three years ago, should be released.

    Both the Israeli military and #Hamas committed #WarCrimes: @UN #Gaza Report http://t.co/GXx5MATvGw #Israel #Palestine

    — ICSF (@icsforum) June 23, 2015

    Ban Ki-moon secretly worked with #Israel to undermine UN report into #Gaza war crimes (archive) https://t.co/A2q4aYfsz6

    — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 22, 2015

13. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৩ জুন ২০১৫ (৪:৩১ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Why Maulana Azad’s century-old defence of free thinking in Islam speaks against fundamentalism even today

    Between February and May this year, three bloggers—Avijit Roy, Washiqur Rahman and Ananta Bijoy Das—were hacked to death in Bangladesh. All of them lost their lives to Islamic fundamentalists who see no space for disagreement in Islam. On 26 March 2015, Masum Akhtar, the headmaster of a madrasa in Matiaburj near Kolkata was brutally attacked for “trying to be a Rushdie.” Akhtar identified the predicament he and several other Muslims face today, when he said, “I am not anti-Islam. But my free thinking is not accepted by fundamentalist Muslims who are doing a great harm to the religion.” Maulana Azad, the famed scholar and freedom fighter defended this free thinking in Islam more than hundred years ago. The timing of his defence is relevant to understand the historical context of the contemporary misreading of Islam.

    It is well known that Azad stood for a composite nationalism and condemned religious dogmatism—both Hindu and Muslim. Despite criticism and ridicule, he stuck to his idea of India and to his idea of Islam. His relevance in the current times, lies in his position is as an Islamic scholar who had the conviction to speak his mind without fear. A luxury that not many are able to avail today. Barring a few, most speak with a mild ambiguity while the rabid mullahs spew inanities with belligerence.

    Azad’s engagement with Islam began early on in his life. One of the most telling documents he left behind is an article on Sarmad Shaheed—an Armenian Jew who went on to become one of India’s most famous Sufi saints—written between 1909 and 1910, when Azad was a young man in his twenties. During this phase in his life, Azad had rejected the creed of his father, who followed the puritan Naqshbandi sufi order, and had found his own. Azad’s essay on Sarmad, which was written at the request of his old friend Khwaja Hasan Nizami of Dargah Nizamuddin Auliya, represents the creed he had discovered for himself.

    The essay is a celebratory account of two characters who have been frequently ignored, if not maligned, in the Islamic history of India—Sarmad and his friend, Prince Dara Shikoh. Sarmad’s eclectic and Sufi Islam had always unpalatable to the empowered mullahs, while Dara Shikoh was projected as a heretic in comparison to his brother, the puritan Aurangzeb. It is pertinent for us to revisit this essay and locate Azad’s perceptive commentary on the Islam of the early twentieth century in the times and discourse that we are surrounded by now. A hundred years after both Shaheed and Dara Shikoh were killed for reneging on their faith, we are still executing fellow Muslims and others in the name of blasphemy.

    Sarmad Shaheed and Dara Shikoh, it would not be inaccurate to claim, were the first victims of execution due to heresy or blasphemy in South Asia, tracing the origins of the prevailing blasphemy laws in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to the seventeenth century. Sarmad was born to Jewish-Armenian parents settled in Kashan, which was then a province of Iran. He studied under Mullah Sadra of Shiraz, beginning as a student of Christian and Islamic theology. He came to India as a trader and soon fell in love with a Hindu boy called Abhaichand in the Sindh region. Azad saw this temporal love as the first stage in a journey towards the ultimate Divine Beloved. Sarmad didn’t know, wrote Azad, that “he would have to trade in the market-place of beauty and love instead of silver and gold.”

    Sarmad came to Delhi in 1654 and soon became a part of the close circle of Prince Dara Shikoh, where he had the company of saints, sadhus, monks and priests. In his essay, Azad called Dara a dervish who spent most of his time in the company of philosophers and sufis. Dara was the author of books such as Majma-ul-Bahrayn (Merging of the Two Oceans) about Islam and Hinduism, and Sirr-i-Akbar, a translation of the Upanishads and Bhagwad Gita into Persian. According to Syeda Hameed—the author of Maulana Azad, Islam and the Indian National Movement—Azad ranked Dara with Sarmad due to his capacity to rise above the narrow dogma of state-oriented religion towards an appreciation of universal truth in all faiths. In both the prince and the saint, Azad saw a reflection of what he himself wanted to achieve. He also believed that Sarmad and Dara were victims of the nexus between the state and religion.

    In the essay, Azad explained that Sarmad was not a great political threat to Aurangzeb, thereby placing his execution under the reign of Aurangzeb within the broader history of Islam. Most of what Azad wrote sounds contemporaneous in the context of Islam and the global political disarray around it, “Throughout the thirteen centuries of Islam the pen of the jurists had been an unsheathed sword and the blood of thousands of truth-loving persons stains their verdicts (fatwa) … Sarmad, too was murdered by the same sword.”

    Raif Badawi, a Saudi Arabian writer and activist who was sentenced to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for setting up a website that championed free speech, is one of the many victims of a similar nexus between the state and the mullah. In a secular and democratic India, we are fortunate that frivolous fatwas do not lead to executions. However, they do succeed in making some impact on the gullible and expose Islam to avoidable ridicule.

    Azad commented on the three reasons for Sarmad’s execution. To begin with, Sarmad recited only two words la illaha—there is no deity—of the kalima, which was a negation of God. Azad believed that as a Sufi and a scholar Sarmad had reached the stage of denial and not an affirmation of God yet. In approval of Sarmad’s refusal to recite the full Kalima, Azad wrote, “Why should Sarmad have said, ‘It exists’, concerning something he was not sure about yet.” Azad then went on to add: “Sarmad’s crime was that he drank the cup in public, while others did in private.” The second reason for Sarmad’s execution was that he moved around naked, which was socially unacceptable, and the third reason was the questions he raised around the accepted interpretation of meraj (the prophet ascending to heaven). The two lines of his rubai—a form of poetry—which were interpreted as heresy by the clerics, are worth sharing:

    Mullah says that Mohammad ascended the Heavens

    Sarmad says that the Heavens descended to Mohammad

    Azad found no evidence of this couplet being heretical. On the contrary, he found the ulema deeply seeped in literalism and suffering from a lack of imagination for failing to realise that Sarmad’s state was elevated in the eyes of Allah. Making this observation, Azad said “… they [the ulema] climbed on the pulpits of their mosques and madarsas and dreamt about the heights to which they could still rise. But Sarmad had reached the pinnacle of love from where the walls of the mosque and the temple are seen standing face to face.”

    More than hundred years ago, Azad was able to appreciate and applaud Dara Shikoh’s eclecticism and Sarmad Shaheed’s free thinking and humanitarianism. Unfortunately, such possibilities of dissent and critical engagement within Islam have now been closed. To make matters worse, other religions appear to be appropriating this intolerance, morphing into the mirror image of a religion they love to hate. Azad also provided a befitting description of this disheartening scenario when he declared in a letter he wrote: “… the ulema are a hopeless lot. To believe that the traditional mind can still give way to regeneration is to believe against the laws of nature. We have no alternative but to ignore the rigid thinking altogether, focussing on the creation of a new mind which requires a radically different variety of literature and apprenticeship.”

    My piece today on why Maulana Azad's defence of free thinking In Islam is still so relevant @husainhaqqani @fispahani http://t.co/LbBVJhqisQ

    — S l Habib (@irfhabib) June 23, 2015

14. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৩ জুন ২০১৫ (৪:৩৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Our fossil fuel addiction harms us as well as the planet

    Driving cars and eating too much red meat damage more than your carbon footprint. Curbing our carbon habit wouldn’t just help us ward off the worst of climate change – it would also make us healthier, according to a panel of health researchers.

    The Climate Health Commission was appointed by The Lancet journal to assess the potential health benefits of tackling climate change, as well as the penalties of failing to do so.

    The resulting report, published on 23 June, cites huge health advantages as a reason for switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power.

    Doubling the proportion of renewable energy from its 2010 level of 18 per cent to 36 per cent could save US$230 billion in healthcare costs worldwide annually by 2030, according to the report – a saving of about 3 per cent.

    This is because a large amount of ill health is directly or indirectly caused by burning coal, oil and gas. According to the World Health Organization, air pollution kills an estimated 7 million people every year, while 88 per cent of the world’s population breathes air that falls short of its quality guidelines.

    Can we fix it? Yes we can

    The result is an epidemic of heart and respiratory disease. Changes such as switching to public transport, cycling or walking to work would also boost health through lowering pollution and increasing physical exercise. Similarly, eating fewer fatty foods and less red meat, whose production contributes to climate change by generating methane gas, could help reverse obesity and some cancers. “There are many win-win situations here,” said Georgina Mace of University College London, a member of the commission.

    The report also suggests adopting strategies that would bring carbon dioxide emissions down to lower than current levels by 2070 – a scenario known as RCP 4.5 that would be likely to see mean temperature rises of more than 1.5 °C by 2100 – would save human lives soon. Planning for RCP 4.5 could avoid 500,000 premature deaths annually by 2030, rising to 2.2 million by the end of the century, it says.

    “All the things we want do to combat climate change will also protect us against ill health,” said Anthony Costello, also of UCL, and co-chair of the commission.”We’ve tried to turn this debate on its head and say that there are really positive things we can do for our health,” he said at the launch of the commission’s report in The Lancet. “We want to shift the balance from talk of catastrophes to a ‘we-can-fix-this’ mentality.”

    The commission is calling on governments to collectively inject an extra $1 trillion into renewable technologies and investments to combat climate change by improving the uptake of renewable energy, as well as preparing cities and citizens for measures that blunt the impact of global warming. It’s a large sum, but much smaller than the $5.3 trillion in subsidies that were given to the fossil fuel industry in 2015.

    “The usual excuse for not investing in renewables is that it’s too expensive, but we think it represents prudent future expenditure,” said Paul Ekins of UCL, the team’s economist.

    Climate change threatens global health – but there is real opportunity, too http://t.co/XjuIrbtjyO

    — New Scientist (@newscientist) June 23, 2015

15. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৩ জুন ২০১৫ (৫:১৫ অপরাহ্ণ)

    “Tsundoku,” the Japanese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the English Language

    There are some words out there that are brilliantly evocative and at the same time impossible to fully translate. Yiddish has the word shlimazl, which basically means a perpetually unlucky person. German has the word Backpfeifengesicht, which roughly means a face that is badly in need of a fist. And then there’s the Japanese word tsundoku, which perfectly describes the state of my apartment. It means buying books and letting them pile up unread.

    The word dates back to the very beginning of modern Japan, the Meiji era (1868-1912) and has its origins in a pun. Tsundoku, which literally means reading pile, is written in Japanese as 積ん読. Tsunde oku means to let something pile up and is written 積んでおく. Some wag around the turn of the century swapped out that oku (おく) in tsunde oku for doku (読) – meaning to read. Then since tsunde doku is hard to say, the word got mushed together to form tsundoku.

    As with other Japanese words like karaoke, tsunami, and otaku, I think it’s high time that tsundoku enter the English language. Now if only we can figure out a word to describe unread ebooks that languish on your Kindle. E-tsundoku? Tsunkindle?

    “Tsundoku,” the Great Japanese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves http://t.co/huJ6v48OW1 pic.twitter.com/guZxteSM2k

    — Open Culture (@openculture) June 23, 2015

16. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৪ জুন ২০১৫ (১০:২৩ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    At Least 18 Dead in Ramadan Attack on Police Checkpoint in Xinjiang

    At least 18 people are dead following a knife and bomb attack by a group of ethnic Uyghurs on a police traffic checkpoint in northwestern China’s troubled Xinjiang region, sources said Tuesday, amid harsh restrictions on observance of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

    One source said the incident, which occurred Monday in the Tahtakoruk district of southwestern Xinjiang’s Kashgar (in Chinese, Kashi) city, left as many as 28 people dead, several of whom were bystanders.

    The attack began when a car sped through a traffic checkpoint without stopping, Turghun Memet, an officer with the nearby Heyhag district police station told RFA’s Uyghur Service.

    “When one of the policemen at the checkpoint ran out of the booth, the car backed up, hitting him and breaking his leg,” Memet said.

    “Two other suspects then rushed out of the car, using knives to attack and kill two police officers who had come to rescue their comrade,” he said.

    The remaining traffic police, who do not carry guns, called for backup from Memet’s department and the People’s Armed Police (PAP).

    “By the time armed police reached the scene, three more suspects had arrived by sidecar motorcycle and attacked the checkpoint and police cars with explosives, killing one regular police officer, another traffic policeman and one auxiliary officer,” Memet said.

    “They also injured four other officers and damaged a police vehicle,” he said.

    “At that point, our [armed officers] arrived and killed 15 suspects we designated as terrorists.”

    Memet said the car used by the attackers had displayed a license plate from Kizilsu Kirghiz Autonomous Prefecture’s Atush (in Chinese, Atushi) city, but he was told they were residents of Kashgar prefecture’s Yengisheher (Shule) and Peyziwat (Jiashi) counties.

    “The security is tight in [downtown Kashgar], so they chose to attack an area on the outskirts of the city,” he said.

    “They were in possession of simple weapons, so they targeted [an unarmed] traffic police checkpoint.”

    Information ‘tightly controlled’

    A police officer from Kashgar’s Ostengboyi station, near the site of the attack, confirmed the incident to RFA, but said it was unclear how many people had died.

    “The number of the dead varies even among the police—especially when it comes to the number of female suspects,” the officer said on condition of anonymity, adding that he had heard either three or eight women were involved in the attack.

    “Some are saying that all of the suspects were killed, while others say some were injured and taken to the hospital for treatment,” he said.

    “Information about this kind of incident is always tightly controlled—not even the police are given the details. But people are saying that the dead numbered around 20.”

    The officer noted that the attack occurred during the sensitive month of Ramadan and had “a massive effect” on the inhabitants of the city.

    “Even the police are panicked and the situation is still very tense right now.”

    An officer from the Qoghan police station, which has jurisdiction over the site of the incident, also said the attackers were from Yengisheher and Peyziwat counties, but decided to target Kashgar because the city is more populated.

    “I assume that they intended to do more damage in a bigger crowd in Kashgar city,” he said, adding that an investigation into the attack was ongoing.

    ‘Running for their lives’

    A food vendor who works near where the attack occurred said the sound of explosions and prolonged gunfire prompted him to open his shop door a crack so he could see what was happening.

    “I saw people running for their lives in all directions when the police fired, including a lot of women who were crying and screaming,” he said, adding that if the women had been among the attackers “they would not have run and cried.”

    “We weren’t given any information about the suspects’ identities. The government usually refers to them as ‘terrorists’ in this kind of situation and they may do so this time as well.”

    A retired government worker, who also declined to give his name, said he had heard from a police officer that “28 people were killed in the incident, including six attackers and three police, while the others were all bystanders.”

    “It seems the police who arrived at the spot were either panicked or encouraged by the ‘strike hard’ policy, because they opened fire indiscriminately and many people who were not linked to the attackers got killed,” he said.

    Authorities have launched a “strike hard” campaign in Xinjiang in the name of fighting separatism, religious extremism, and terrorism, following a string of violent incidents that have left hundreds dead in recent years.

    The government worker said he believed the incident was prompted by the restrictions put in place by authorities during the month of Ramadan, which he called “very extreme.”

    “I think this is the first reaction to this year’s Ramadan restrictions,” he said.

    “If such restrictions were implemented in other parts of the [Muslim] world, they would have led to bloody incidents on a mass scale, but we Uyghurs are a defenseless and helpless people and this is the reaction.”

    Ramadan restrictions
    
    The attack comes a week after millions of Uyghurs began observance of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan under increasing official pressure not to fast.

    Uyghur officials and other state employees like teachers have been banned from fasting, and it is against the law for children under 18 to take part in religious activities.

    Restaurants in the region are typically required to stay open all day, even if the owners are Muslim, and Uyghur children and young people are often required to attend free lunches in the region’s schools and universities to avoid the dawn-to-dusk fast traditionally observed during Ramadan.

    Turkic-speaking minority Uyghurs have complained about pervasive ethnic discrimination, religious repression, and cultural suppression by Chinese authorities.

    Last October, authorities tightened rules forbidding anyone under the age of 18 from following a religion, targeting families whose children studied the Quran or fasted during Ramadan with hefty fines.

    Authorities in the Hotan, Kashgar, and Aksu prefectures of Xinjiang have forced Uyghur parents to sign pledges promising not to allow their children to participate in religious activities, the Germany-based World Uyghur Congress exile group has said.

17. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৫ জুন ২০১৫ (১০:০৪ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Heatwave death toll in Sindh tops 1,000

    While the punishing heatwave gripping Karachi since Saturday showed signs of subsiding, the death toll across Sindh rose to 1,011, with at least 229 fatalities reported on Wednesday by government and private hospitals.

    Wednesday’s figures included the five-day tally of 23 deaths reported by a private hospital which had not released it earlier.

    Officials said that about 40,000 people had suffered heatstroke and as many as 7,500 of them were treated in Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC), where 311 people died.

    “More than 1,000 of the 40,000 heatstroke victims have died since Saturday evening, of which 950 deaths were reported in Karachi alone,” said a senior official.

    According to the figures collected from various hospitals, of the 950 deaths in Karachi, 729 were recorded in government-run health facilities and 221 in private hospitals.

    The officials said the number of patients arriving in hospitals had ‘significantly’ dropped with the weather getting better, yet there were thousands of patients being treated in different health facilities.

    The gravity of the situation could be gauged from the fact that only Abbasi Shaheed Hospital and other hospitals run by the Karachi Metro­po­litan Corporation treated 17,382 patients till Wednes­day evening. Of them, 207 died since Saturday.

    The officials said 15 people died in Hyderabad, two in Naushahro Feroze and five in Badin, bringing the five-day tally to 61 recorded in other districts of Sindh.

    Meanwhile, moving scenes were witnessed in hospitals across the city where relatives were seen crying with ambulances arriving one after another.

    People, youths in particular, continued to donate medicines, juices and bottled water to patients as well as hospitals.

    WEATHER: The hot and humid weather got milder and a change of wind pattern brought some respite from the suffocating heat. After almost a week, the maximum temperature dropped to 37 degrees Celsius on Wednes­day. The minimum temperature was 30.5 degrees Cels­ius, with humidity — a measure of the amount of moisture in the air — 63 per cent.

    The Met Office said the maximum temperature was expected to remain between 38 and 40 degrees Celsius on Thursday.

    Hyderabad was the hottest place in the province on Wednesday as the maximum temperature was recorded at 42 degrees Celsius there.

    heatwave death toll in #Sindh tops 1,000 http://t.co/rfxUdJEh7U #Pakistan #PakistanHeatWave

    — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) June 25, 2015

18. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৭ জুন ২০১৫ (২:০২ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Green tea in feed can be better than antibiotics

    Avoiding antibiotics use in broiler production, quality poultry could be produced in the country through using green tea, which will be safer for human consumption, according to a new study, reports UNB.

    The study reveals that 0.25 per cent of green tea (250 grams in every 100 kilograms of feed) as feed additive could bring better results than the use of antibiotics in poultry production.

    The poultry, which take green tea, are safe for human consumption as the long-term use of antibiotics adversely affects the human health.

    Dr Md Elias Hossain, associate professor of the Department of Poultry Science at Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU), conducted the experimental study titled, “Supplementation of green tea in broiler diet for the production of antibiotic free broiler meat.”

    The experiment was carried out recently at BAU Poultry Farm in Mymensingh. A total of 280 day-old broiler chicks were reared for 35 days in five dietary treatment groups, which includes control (basal diet), antibiotics and three levels of green tea powder (0.25, 0.5 and one per cent).

    The result suggests that green tea at a level of 0.25 per cent may be used as potential feed additives in broiler diet.

    Broiler production is one of the most important and promising industrial sector in Bangladesh. But, poultry farmers are extensively using antibiotics with broiler feed to improve growth and feed efficiency.

    Although it is known that antibiotics have short-term impacts on human microbiome, evidence demonstrates that the impacts of some antibiotics remain for extended periods of time, says a research article published in the science journal – Microbiology – in 2010.

    Using green tea as feed additive is a new phenomenon in Bangladesh. In addition to human consumption, lower-grade green tea and green tea by-products have been used as feed additive in animal feed all over world.

    It contains more than 200 bioactive components such as flavonoids (powerful antioxidants), amino acids, xanthine alkaloids, vitamin and minerals, which are safe for human. So, the biological, physiological and pharmaceutical effects of green tea have been increasing in this decade.

    Researcher Hossain said the use of antibiotics is almost common in broiler production although there is no law or regulation in this regard in the country. It is, therefore, necessary to find alternative sources of antibiotics to prevent the possible pathogens and to maintain the growth.

    He said medical plants like green tea have already been used as an alternative source of antibiotics because it has no residual effects like antibiotics.

    “If we extensively use green tea in our country as alternative feed additive in poultry production, we can make antibiotics meat and eggs, which will be safe food for human beings and can play an important role for the improvement of national health status and the country’s socioeconomic condition,” Hossain said, citing the findings of his study.

    The researcher says the use of green tea in poultry production may be a little costlier than antibiotic use, but there will be more body weight gain of broiler-fed green tea. “So, farmers may make a balance in production cost. These days, consumers think less about price but surely look for safe food.”

19. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৮ জুন ২০১৫ (১০:৩৪ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Deep Void To The Left

    The death of journalist and activist Praful Bidwai is a profound personal loss for me. But Praful himself would always have placed the political ahead of the personal. He was to my mind India’s finest political commentator and analyst from a Left perspective. Public life is poorer with Praful gone.

    In the last few years of his life, Praful had been unhappy at being squeezed out of mainstream spaces, but he carried on writing his weekly column syndicated to several newspapers. Each column was methodically researched. Indeed, Praful was arguably the most methodical journalist I knew. He once told me that every morning he would cut clippings from newspapers and file them. I had joked with him if I could please inherit the clipping files. It was after the hours of reading and making clippings that Praful would start calling his friends, usually around 11 am, to discuss what is happening in the country. In the last few months, I remember many conversations about the Aam Aadmi Party. He described their victory as ‘Stalingrad’ but was also disappointed about the direction they were taking on some policy issues. The environ­ment was big on his list of concerns and just last month at a book event in Delhi he lectured the AAP’s Ashish Khetan about how the Kejriwal government needs to put a cap on the numbers of cars people are allowed to own. He had worked out the numbers and the logic as to why this should be done.

    Just before he died, Praful was putting the finishing touches to a major book on the Indian Left. Although a journalist, Praful also had the rigour of an academic. He has conducted several interviews and looked at old documents to work on a book he described as a life’s work. He had been happy about finding a mainstream publisher for it as opposed to an academic one. The title he sounded me out on was Indian Left: the Phoenix Moment. Would everyone understand the word phoenix, Praful had wondered. It is important for his many friends to ensure that the book comes out, as it will be a significant contribution to understanding the Left in India.

    Praful was also a pioneer of the anti-nuclear movement, having been among the first journalists to research and critique the Indian nuclear programme and its various flaws, including the issue of safety, diversion of the peaceful programme towards nuclear weapons and runaway costs. Before travelling to Japan in 2012 for a fellowship, I went to Praful for a ‘crash course’ on understanding the nuclear issue. (I would eventually even travel to Fukushima, the site of the 2011 nuclear disaster, and take courage to write an article on it). Thank you, Praful.

    Actually, the truth is that Praful was an expert on so many things. He was a ceaseless champion of Indo-Pakistan friendship, with numerous friends across the border whose writings strove to bring sense and humanity to a fraught relationship between the two countries. He was also a tireless campaigner for communal harmony in India, bearing the brunt of hatred directed against him by Hindu extremists for decades. Less known perhaps is the fact that he was also a very fine commentator on science and technology, given his own background as an engineering graduate from IIT Bombay in the ’70s. He wrote on numerous issues, from antibiotic resistance to climate change, authoring an entire book on the latter theme.

    More than anything else, Praful was a humanist, backing his moral and ethical concerns with meticulous research and writing based on evidence. At the heart of all his writings and concerns was a tremendous compassion for the poor, the dispossessed and those who would end up so because of the public policies pursued by our governments that Praful consistently opposed.

    Praful the friend could be difficult, demanding and picky. He would make a plan and insist we all work our time around his convenience. But he was the senior whom all of us admired tremendously for his integrity to ideas. I had always intended to look out for Praful as he got older but now the opportunity is gone. He never believed in God, so I’m not going to say he is up there smiling at all of us.

    In one of the last conversations we had, Praful pointed out a grammatical error in something I had written. I valued his criticism and realised he was right and I had made a mistake. If there is a place for us to go to after our passing, for Praful I would hope there are some comrades there, good scotch, brilliant conversation, a genuine exchange of ideas and information. He would be happy in such moments.

    Veteran Journalist Praful Bidwai Is No More http://t.co/MnA1OFMaaf via @thewire_in

    — Siddharth (@svaradarajan) June 24, 2015

    Why I opposed #India's nuclear tests: journalist Praful Bidwai interviewed by @GhoshAmitav. http://t.co/zGdgu9s58C pic.twitter.com/qioTHdiApI

    — scroll.in (@scroll_in) June 24, 2015

    Sad to hear of Praful Bidwai passing. Friend&journalist who was always happy to be argued http://t.co/PvdjSDrBpW #journalismthatwillbemissed

    — Suhasini Haidar (@suhasinih) June 24, 2015

    Praful Bidwaiএর লেখা।

20. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৮ জুন ২০১৫ (৫:৪০ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Lunch with the FT: Thomas Piketty

    In the back room of a Paris deli, France’s ‘rock-star’ economist talks about his fears of eurozone ‘catastrophe’, what spurred his interest in inequality and how much tax he pays

    A picnic in the sun on the lawn of the Paris School of Economics would have been better, but it’s too late. We are at Les Jardins de Paul Ha, a bakery turned deli in the 14th arrondissement, and Thomas Piketty is already biting into a hard-boiled egg.

    It’s a five-minute walk from the office of the man the media refer to as a “rock-star economist” but it’s hard to find much glamour here or in his life these days. The success of Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), a surprise 700-page bestseller, threw him into a year-long media whirlwind. But now its author longs for normality. And so here we are in a deserted backroom eating our meal from plastic containers on dark-blue trays, a faded, peeling poster of a beach in the Seychelles on the wall beside us.

    “I have had phases of promotion and conferences, which I enjoy very much, but I need to get back to normal life,” Piketty explains, crossing his legs and leaning on the empty chair next to him. “Normal life is sitting at my desk from 9am to 7pm, with no one bothering me. People don’t realise that research requires time and quiet. So a two-hour break for lunch . . . ” he sighs, rolling his eyes.

    I had caught a glimpse of Piketty’s natural habitat when I picked the 44-year-old scholar up from his 12 sq m office, a stuffy room located in a grey postwar building that is home to the research institution he helped set up in 2006.

    With its claim that capitalism, by its nature, worsens inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (first published in French in 2013 and then in English eight months later) caused a transatlantic furore, pitting proponents of state intervention against believers in the free market. While the book’s extensive compilation of data on income and wealth distribution has been widely praised, Piketty’s theories and conclusions — that the proportion of income and wealth going to the richest 1 per cent has reached a historic high; that return on capital usually exceeds economic growth, resulting in an automatic increase in inequality — have also been attacked. With his calls for higher taxes and more regulation, he has become the darling of the left and the enemy of the right.

    While I wait for my microwaved pasta bolognese to cool down, I ask him how it feels to be a celebrity. Piketty, wearing a close-fitting light-blue shirt with the top two buttons undone, says he welcomes it as long as it translates into selling more books. Two million copies have been bought so far, he says with pleasure.

    “The success of my book shows there are a lot of people who are not economists but are tired of being told that those questions are too complicated for them,” he says, picking at a mayonnaise-soaked slice of cucumber. He speaks fast and with plenty of hand gestures. He is curious about my age — “Oh, you’re younger than my sister” — and inquires about my career. He exudes self-confidence.

    “Too often, economists build very complex mathematical models to look scientific and impress people. I have nothing against mathematics — I initially trained as a mathematician — but it’s usually to hide a lack of ideas. What pleases me is that this book reaches ‘normal’ people, a rather wide public. My mother is one example,” he says, adding that she rarely reads big academic books yet understood everything in his.

    . . .

    When I ask if Piketty’s left-leaning family background has anything to do with his initial interest in inequality, he dismisses the link. Politics were not discussed at home, he says. In their youth his parents were Trotskyist militants with the Lutte Ouvrière but they quit the far-left party before he was born. Like many young radicals living in post-May 1968 France, they were lured by life in the countryside and moved out of the capital in the mid-1970s. For three years, they raised goats and sold cheese on markets in Castelnau-d’Aude, a village near Narbonne in southern France. Though neither parent has the baccalaureate, the national high school degree, Piketty’s mother later took night classes to train as a primary school teacher, and his father became a research technician at Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique.

    Both cheered when Socialist leader François Mitterrand was elected president in 1981. “They had long been waiting for the left to come to power,” says Piketty. But his grandfather on his father’s side, “from a bourgeois background,” voted for the centre-right candidate Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, he says. “Like in any other family, some vote for the left, some vote for the right. I love them all!”

    His parents were the opposite of pushy, he says. They had little to do with his getting into the École Normale Supérieure, one of France’s most competitive “grandes écoles”, when he was 18, or his teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after earning a PhD at just 22. But they taught him “autonomy, to trust myself” — an approach he says that he replicates with his three daughters, Juliette, 18, Deborah, 15, and Hélène, 12.

    I am determined to give the bolognese a chance but the floppy, overcooked fusilli brings back bad memories of my school canteen. Given the history of controversy between the French scholar and the Financial Times, I wonder if our lunch destination may be retaliation. After all, Piketty referred to the contentious article that highlighted discrepancies in his research as soon as we stepped in to the deli, joking that he didn’t want to cost the FT too much money given all the “free publicity” it has granted him.

    The FT analysis notably questioned Piketty’s conclusion that wealth inequality had widened in the UK. He responded to the allegations in detail and defended his methodology, arguing that, even if the criticisms were real, the inconsistencies would not change his findings.

    “The FT? I never really read it. Sorry I shouldn’t have said that!” he says mischievously. “I find it a bit predictable. You know, when I read the first two sentences, I feel I know the rest of the story. OK, not always. And then there was the prize. It all looked a bit confused,” he says, referring to the fact that Capital in the Twenty-First Century won the FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2014.

    It would be a mistake, he continues, clearly warming to his theme, for the FT to deny the widening of inequalities in the UK “to defend the interest of your readers”. As I object, it dawns on me that Piketty thinks I am here simply to represent the interests of the top 1 per cent. When we agreed to meet, he said we would walk “to a simple salad and sandwich bar,” emphasising how much “the bill will interest the FT readers.”

    Piketty says his interest in inequality crystallised after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the first Gulf war. He recalls visiting Moscow in 1991 and being struck by “the lines in front of shops”. He came back vaccinated against communism — “I believe in capitalism, private property, the market” — but also with a question central to his work: “How come those people had been so afraid of inequality and capitalism in the 19th and 20th century that they created such a monstrosity? How can we tackle inequality without repeating
    this disaster?”

    The first Gulf war, he believed, demonstrated the cynicism of the west: “We are told constantly that states can’t do anything, that it’s impossible to regulate the Cayman Islands and the other tax havens because they are too powerful, and all of a sudden we send a million soldiers 10,000km from home to allow the emir of Kuwait to keep his oil.”

    I am halfway through the now tepid bolognese when I ask him why his work had such an impact in the US without causing anything like such a stir in France at the time of its original publication. Piketty says he caught American attention in 2003 when, together with Emmanuel Saez, a fellow French economist who teaches at the University of California, he first compiled historical data on the US’s wealthiest people. In 2009, newly elected President Obama used the French economists’ graph that showed inequality was back to its 1929 peak. “We became the target of Republican think-tanks,” he recalls. The French version of the book acted as a teaser to those critics, he believes, helping propel it to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list for three weeks when it was released in English.

    “The rise of the top 1 per cent is an American thing. It’s not by chance that Occupy Wall Street happened in Wall Street, and not in Brussels, Paris or Tokyo,” he says. “It’s different in Europe. Here, inequality takes the form of unemployment and public debt.”

    Though Piketty concedes that the global wealth tax he recommends is a “utopian” dream, he also says a confiscatory tax rate of more than 80 per cent on earnings exceeding $1m would work. In fact, he continues, such a rate was in place for five decades before the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and would curb exuberant executive pay without hurting productivity. “It did not kill US capitalism then — productivity grew the fastest during that time,” he notes. “This idea, according to which no one will accept to work hard for less than $10m per year . . .  It’s OK to pay someone 10, 20 times the average worker’s salary but do you really need to pay them 100 or 200 times to get their arses in gear?”

    So did he applaud François Hollande when the Socialist president introduced a 75 per cent levy on earnings exceeding €1m? “He was just showing off,” Piketty says, nibbling baguette crumbs. “First, because there aren’t that many people making that amount of money in France. And because, as I am sure you will have noticed, France is a smaller country than the US. Headquarters can easily move to Amsterdam. You’ve got to be careful.”

    . . .

    Aware that the topic of personal wealth is tricky territory, I nonetheless decide to test Piketty’s newly acquired status as a millionaire. He must have been subjected to the 75 per cent rate then? To my surprise, he gladly answers with detail: the state will levy between 60 and 70 per cent of his earnings this year. “A 90 per cent tax rate would not bother me,” he says. “There would still be a lot left, since we’re talking about several millions. I benefited from an education system, public infrastructure. I got lucky, too . . . This idea that Bill Gates invented the computer alone, it’s a joke. Without computer sciences researchers who did not patent their work, who would have invented it?”

    Piketty, who separated from the mother of his daughters some years ago and recently married Julia Cagé, a 31-year-old French economist whom he met at the Paris School of Economics, is not in thrall to money. “I am lucky to have a fabulous job, live in the world’s most beautiful city, have three wonderful daughters, a wonderful wife,” he says.

    We stick plastic forks into our pineapples, already cut in small squares, and they turn out to be the culinary apex of this lunch, ripe and soothing. Hollande is “hopeless,” says Piketty, who in January rejected the Légion d’Honneur award because, he said then, the state had “no right to decide who is honourable”. The French president has failed on his campaign promise to change the austerity stance prevailing in Europe, he continues. This makes him as responsible as German chancellor Angela Merkel for the eurozone’s woes.

    “We replaced Merkozy with Merkollande,” he sneers. “Europe is choosing the wrong path, the path of eternal penitence . . .  It would be a catastrophe to force Greece out of the eurozone.”

    It is ironic, he says, that austerity is imposed on debt-laden Greece by two countries, Germany and France, that benefited from debt cancellations after the second world war: a move that allowed 30 years of growth on the continent. “There’s some sort of collective amnesia,” he says, getting more animated. “It is this cancellation that allowed them to invest in education, innovation and public infrastructure. And now, those same countries tell Greece that it will have to pay 4 per cent of its GDP for 30 years. Who can believe this?” The role of the International Monetary Fund in the Greek talks is a “catastrophe,” he sighs.

    The eurozone crisis, according to Piketty, reflects a deeply flawed governance, where only two leaders decide who calls for “a democratic overhaul of European institutions . . .  It’s purely because we are unable to organise ourselves politically that we’re in deep shit,” he says. “From a macroeconomic point of view, Greece is insignificant.”

    The eurozone is following the example of the UK, he says, which spent the 19th century paying down its huge debt pile inherited from the Napoleonic wars with budget surpluses. It worked — but, he continues, it took 100 years, during which the UK neglected its education system.

    He says that he hopes the UK will stay within the EU, and not choose to “become just a tax haven with a big financial centre”. He warns, however, that London needs to realise that Europe is “not about profiting from the free circulation of goods of your neighbours while siphoning off their fiscal base”.

    “I would have preferred Tony Blair join the eurozone rather than send troops to Iraq but I can understand why the eurozone is not attractive these days,” says Piketty. “Maybe in 2040, who knows?”

    We are told that coffee and crêpes are on their way but Piketty is anxious to return to his office. As I nibble a rubbery crêpe au sucre with my fingers in the absence of cutlery, I negotiate a few more minutes to talk about Piketty’s plans. “Research continues,” he says. He is working to extend his wealth database to Latin America and Africa. He has also agreed to teach four days a year at the London School of Economics — he can hop on a Eurostar easily as he lives near Gare du Nord, an up-and-coming, ethnically diverse neighbourhood in northern Paris. But first he is taking “the girls” on a trip to Morocco in August.

    Before we leave, I ask Piketty if he will sign his autograph on the bill. He is a rock star, of course, and he accepts happily. “I am very young,” he says, as we step into the sunshine. “I have got more books to write.”

    Europe on 'a path to eternal penitence’: Thomas Piketty on #inequality in #LunchwiththeFT http://t.co/xDILa2bbva pic.twitter.com/KqgQVbJKQB

    — Financial Times (@FT) June 29, 2015

21. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৯ জুন ২০১৫ (৯:৫০ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    সোনারগাঁয়ের নৌকার হাট

    নদীমাতৃক বাংলাদেশে নৌকা এখনও একটি অপরিহার্য বাহন। দেশের গ্রামগঞ্জে যোগাযোগ ব্যবস্থার উন্নতি হলেও অনেক জায়গা রয়েছে যেখানে এই বাহনটি না হলে চলে না। তাই আজও বসছে নৌকার হাট। এমনই একটি হাটের দেখা মিলবে নারায়ণগঞ্জের সোনারগাঁ উপজেলার মোগড়াপাড়া ইউনিয়নের কাইকারটেক এলাকায়। প্রতি রোববার এখানে বসে কোষা নৌকার হাট। এটি কাইকারটেক হাট নামেই পরিচিত। স্থানীয়দের মতে, এই হাটটি দু’শ’ থেকে আড়াইশ’ বছরের পুরনো।
    নৌকা ব্যবসায়ীদের মতে, বাংলা সনের আষাঢ়, শ্রাবণ, ভাদ্র ও আশ্বিন-এই চার মাস খাল-বিল ও নদ-নদীতে পানি ভরপুর থাকে বিধায় এ সময়টাতেই নৌকার হাটে ক্রেতাদের ভিড় থাকে।
    সরেজমিন গতকাল কাইকারটেক নৌকার হাটে গিয়ে দেখা গেছে, ব্যবসায়ীরা কাঠের নৌকার পসরা সাজিয়ে বসেছেন। নারায়ণগঞ্জসহ আশপাশ জেলার বিভিন্ন এলাকা থেকে ক্রেতারাও ভিড় করছেন তাদের পছন্দের নৌকাটি কিনতে। ব্যবসায়ীরা নৌকার ধরন ও কাঠের মানের ওপর নির্ভর করে ক্রেতাদের কাছে দাম হাঁকছেন। ক্রেতারাও একটু সাশ্রয়ে কেনার জন্য দরকষাকষি করছেন। এ সময় কয়েকজনকে ক্রেতা-বিক্রেতার মধ্যে মধ্যস্থতা করতেও দেখা গেছে। মধ্যস্থতা করে নৌকা বিক্রি করলেই মিলছে সম্মানী।
    এরই মধ্যে কথা হয় নৌকা ব্যবসায়ী শুক্কুর আলী (৬৫), আবদুস সালাম (৬৬), শাহজুদ্দিন বেপারিসহ (৭০) কয়েকজনের সঙ্গে। এদের অনেকে বংশপরম্পরায় এ পেশার সঙ্গে জড়িত। তবে সরাসরি নৌকা তৈরির সঙ্গে জড়িত নয় বলে তারা জানান। মুন্সীগঞ্জের গজারিয়া থানার ফুলতলা, বিক্রমপুর, আড়াইহাজার ফুলদী, বন্দরের লাঙ্গলবন্দ, সোনারগাঁয়ের কলতাপাড়াসহ বিভিন্ন জেলার ময়ালদের কাছ থেকে (নৌকা তৈরির মিস্ত্রি ও পাইকারি বিক্রেতা) তারা এ নৌকা কিরে থাকেন। এরপর এই হাটে সেগুলো বিক্রি করেন।
    হাটের ব্যবসায়ীরা জানান, চাম্বল, কড়ই, তুলা, কৃষ্ণচূড়া ও লোহা কাঠের নৌকা হয়ে থাকে। কাঠের ব্যবহার ও নৌকার আকারের ওপর প্রতিটির দাম পড়ে আড়াই হাজার থেকে ৮ হাজার টাকা পর্যন্ত। প্রতিটি নৌকায় তাদের গড়ে ২শ’ থেকে ৫শ’ টাকা পর্যন্ত লাভ হয়।
    মুন্সীগঞ্জ জেলার গজারিয়া ফুলদী গ্রামের ব্যবসায়ী আবদুস সালাম জানান, তিনি ৪০ বছর ধরে হাটে নৌকা বিক্রি করে আসছেন। তার বাবা খোরশেদ আলীও এ পেশায় জড়িত ছিলেন। একটি নৌকা হাটে আনতে খরচ পড়ে ৬০-৭০ টাকা। অবিক্রীত নৌকা ফেরত নিলে তাদেরকে লোকসান গুনতে হয়। তাই তারা অনেক সময় নামমাত্র মূল্যে নৌকা বিক্রি করে থাকেন।
    নৌকা কিনতে আসা মুন্সীগঞ্জের যুগনীঘাট গ্রামের কৃষক মো. বাদশা মিয়া (৫০) জানান, নিজের জমির পাশাপাশি অন্যের ফসলি জমি নাডি রেখে (টাকায় এক বছরের জন্য বন্ধক নিয়ে) গৃহস্থালি কাজে ও গরু-বাছুর লালন-পালনের জন্য তার নৌকার প্রয়োজন হয়। তাই তিনি ৪ হাজার ৪শ’ টাকায় একটি নৌকা ক্রয় করেছেন। সোনারগাঁয়ের কলতাপাড়া গ্রামের মাছ ব্যবসায়ী আবদুস সাত্তারও (৬০) এসেছেন নৌ কিনতে। সাধ্যের দামে পছন্দের নৌকাটি ক্রয় করার জন্য হাটের এক প্রান্ত থেকে অন্য প্রান্তে ছুটছেন তিনি। তার মতে, আগের মতো খাল-বিলে মাছ পাওয়া যায় না। তাই উচ্চ মূল্যে নৌকা কিনে লাভ নেই।
    তবে নৌকা ব্যবসায়ীরা ক্রমেই এ পেশা থেকে মুখ ফিরিয়ে নিচ্ছেন। তাদের দাবি যোগাযোগ ব্যবস্থার উন্নয়ন, খাল-বিল ভরাট হয়ে যাওয়া, পানি নষ্ট হয়ে নদীতে মাছ না থাকা ও কৃষিজমি ক্রমেই কমে আসার কারণে নৌকার ব্যবহারও কমে এসেছে। আগে হাটে কয়েক হাজার নৌকা বিক্রি হতো। বর্তমানে সব ব্যবসায়ী মিলে ১শ’ নৌকা বিক্রি করা কঠিন হয়ে যায়। এ পেশাকে পুঁজি করে এখন আর জীবিকা নির্বাহ করা সম্ভব হচ্ছে না। তাই তারা তাদের পরবর্তী প্রজন্মকে এ পেশায় আসতে নিরুত্সাহী করছেন বলে জানান তারা।

    সোনারগাঁয়ের নৌকার হাট http://t.co/twYegVYF66 #Sonargaon #Narayanganj #BoatMarket #সোনারগাঁ #নৌকারহাট #Bangladesh pic.twitter.com/Hervrfn2dm

    — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) June 29, 2015

22. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৯ জুন ২০১৫ (৯:৫৪ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Pakistan bristles at India’s 1965 war ‘commemorative carnival’

    The government’s plans to hold a “commemorative carnival” to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1965 India-Pakistan war are being viewed across the border as a “muscular” assertion by the Narendra Modi government that could vitiate further the atmosphere between the two countries and reduce space for dialogue.

    India has never celebrated any of its wars on such a grand scale, not even the 1971 war that ended in the surrender of 80,000 Pakistani troops in the erstwhile East Pakistan. After the Nawaz Sharif government took office in 2013, Pakistan’s commemoration of what it calls Youm-e-Difa or Defence of Pakistan Day on September 6 has been scaled down, and the national holiday that day called off.

    India’s commemorative events of the 1965 war will run from August 28 to September 26 in Delhi. While the Pakistan government hasn’t reacted officially, a senior Pakistani official told The Indian Express that his country, which sees the war as a victorious defence of its territory by its armed forces, has no plans for similar celebrations.

    The official said India’s commemoration plans, like his statements in Bangladesh, were not in keeping with the signals of reconciliation that Prime Minister Modi had sent out right after his election. “Going by the statements he made in Dhaka on the 1971 tragedy, and statements by the defence minister, such an event can only have a negative impact. We sitting in Pakistan don’t get the feeling that PM Modi is as yet ready to move from confrontation to cooperation despite the initial overtures,” he said.

    “Muscular articulations such as these will do very little in the way of resuming dialogue, which the BJP leader has stated his government’s interest in,” Pakistan People’s Party vice-president Sherry Rehman said in a statement earlier this month. Rehman said any agenda for peace “requires an appetite for it, not an investment in valourising memories of conflict”.

    There is also civil society concern that the commemoration would create more anti-India feelings in Pakistan, and give a fillip to pro-military lobbies. Also, historians are divided about India’s “victory” in the war.

    Former Director-General of Inter-Services Public Relations Lt Gen (retd) Athar Abbas said such a commemoration could only reduce the space for dialogue. India and Pakistan see the 1965 war differently, Abbas said. “We see the 1965 war as a substantial victory. A big country, a big army was stopped and failed to achieve its objective. It was a formidable defence we put up, stopped the juggernaut,” said Abbas, now an active participant in the Track-2 peace processes. Abbas feels the BJP government has become a victim of its own rhetoric against Pakistan. “In an atmosphere where there is no space for dialogue and reconciliation, it is difficult to say how Pakistan will react, but the whole situation is not improving,” he said.

    1965 ‘stalemate’

    India and Pakistan fought the 1965 war from September 6 to 22, after the conflict had started with the skirmishes in the Rann of Kutch in April that year. Emboldened by its relative success in the Rann, and buoyed by India’s defeat to the Chinese in 1962, Pakistan attempted to create an uprising in Kashmir Valley and followed it with a military attack in August. India, under Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, responded with opening the front in Punjab on September 6.

    The 17-day war ended with a ceasefire and the subsequent Tashkent Declaration between the two countries.

    Both India and Pakistan claim victory in 1965 although India captured 1920 sq km of Pakistani territory while Pakistan had 550 sq km Indian territory in its possession at the time of the ceasefire. Official Indian history of the war says that India’s “faulty strategy led to stalemate on all fronts”. Most scholars, however, credit India with having had the upper hand. Stanley Wolpert notes India “was in a position to inflict grave damage to, if not capture, Pakistan’s capital of the Punjab when the ceasefire was called, and controlled Kashmir’s strategic Uri-Poonch bulge, much to Ayub’s [Khan] chagrin”.

    India had then captured the strategically important Hajipir pass, which links Uri and Poonch. Prime Minister Shastri had announced in Delhi that he would not return the Hajipir pass at any cost. India however agreed to return Hajipir in one of the last actions by Shastri as prime minister before he suffered a fatal heart attack in Tashkent on January 4, 1966.

    The event

    The day India captured Hajipir, August 28, will see the start of the commemorative events with the laying of a wreath by President Pranab Mukherjee at Amar Jawan Jyoti, followed by a month-long celebration of which the highlight will be a “carnival” on Rajpath with mock displays of the operations during the war.

    “I hope remembering the 1965 war spurs us as a nation to urgently initiate the process of dialogue with Pakistan to bring peace and stability to our region. Anything other than that could be counterproductive,” said Sushobha Barve of the Centre for Dialogue and Reconciliation, which organises a regular India-Pakistan Track Two dialogue. All armies of the world like to remember important events of the wars they have fought but, Barve said, she was unable to understand the phrase “carnival and celebrations”.

    Lt General (retired) B S Nagal, director of Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS) in Delhi, which is bringing out a book on the heroes of the 1965 war during the commemoration, had a different view. “It will be wrong to say these are celebrations of the 1965 war. It is more like a commemoration which will remind the younger generation of what happened 50 year ago,” he said.

    Historian Srinath Raghavan contends that if the government is really interested in promoting awareness and knowledge about the 1965 war, “it should declassify and make all the records of the 1965 war publicly available”.

    India has so far marked Vijay Diwas on December 16, the day Pakistani forces surrendered to India in East Pakistan, when the three service chiefs and the defence minister pay homage at Amar Jawan Jyoti. During the previous NDA government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, July 26 was celebrated as Kargil Vijay Diwas. A three-day military exhibition was organised at the India Gate lawns on Kargil Vijay Diwas in 2000 but the celebrations went low-key thereafter.

    #Pakistan bristles at #India’s 1965 war ‘commemorative carnival’ – See more at: http://t.co/33Wrr9MgDa #Bangladesh pic.twitter.com/trzsSO45sq

    — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) June 29, 2015

    India's large-scale 1965 war celebrations and Pakistani reactions. @tallstories and I report @IndianExpress. http://t.co/k7KBYXIZUQ

    — Sushant Singh (@SushantSin) June 29, 2015

23. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৯ জুন ২০১৫ (৪:২২ অপরাহ্ণ)

    ‘Russian Kissinger’ Yevgeny Primakov Dies at 85
    
    Revered statesman Yevgeny Primakov, a former Russian prime minister and foreign minister who steered the country toward stability after its worst economic collapse in 1998, died at the age of 85 in Moscow on Friday after a long illness.

    Politicians, analysts and the general public reacted to the news with praise for Primakov’s contributions to the Russian state, and mourned his departure as a great loss to the nation.

    Primakov had acquired the status within Russia of an indisputable authority on the country’s internal and foreign policies, prompting pundits to dub him “Russia’s Henry Kissinger.”
    РЕКЛАМА

    President Vladimir Putin expressed his condolences to Primakov’s family.

    “This is a sad, grievous loss for our society. … Yevgeny’s authority was respected both in our country and abroad,” Putin said in a statement published on the Kremlin website.

    The president said Primakov had made a “colossal contribution to the formation of modern Russia.”

    In a separate decree, Putin ordered a state funeral for Primakov, who will be buried Monday at Moscow’s Novodevichye cemetery, where many other illustrious Russians are buried.

    Born in Kiev, Primakov was a student of Arabic and economics by education, and went on to forge a spectacular career in public service. In the 1980s, together with a group of prominent experts, he prepared analytical reports for the leadership of the Communist Party and quickly rose to become one of the closest allies of reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

    In the early 1990s, Primakov was one of the first major Russian statesmen to speak against the country’s new pro-Western policies. In 1993, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service — headed by Primakov — produced a report claiming that NATO’s expansion toward Eastern Europe was a threat to Russia’s interests.

    After being promoted to foreign minister in 1996, Primakov continued to argue that Russia should pursue an independent foreign policy, signaling the imminent reversal of the country’s orientation toward the West.

    In a physical expression of this reversal, upon learning that NATO was about to start bombing Yugoslavia in 1999, Primakov ordered his Washington-bound plane to make a U-turn over the Atlantic Ocean and go back to Moscow. The incident became known as “Primakov’s loop” in popular Russian culture.

    At that time, Primakov was considered one of the most likely successors to President Boris Yeltsin. Together with then-Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, he launched a bid for the Kremlin, but withdrew his plan to run for the presidency in 2000 when influential power brokers around Yeltsin threw their backing behind Putin instead.

    Putin last saw Primakov about a month ago to commemorate the publication of the latter’s most recent book, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

    Tatyana Yumasheva, Yeltsin’s daughter, wrote in her blog in 2010 that during his tenure as the country’s prime minister, Primakov disliked Putin, who was then head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), a successor agency to the KGB.

    According to Yumasheva, Primakov went as far as to ask Yeltsin to fire Putin after the latter’s request to tap the phone calls of Grigory Yavlinsky, the leader of an oppositional party in the State Duma at the time, was rejected. Yeltsin declined to fire Putin, and the president and Primakov apparently maintained good relations in the 2000s.

    Peskov refused to comment on Yumasheva’s story, Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported.

    Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday that Primakov had laid the foundations of Russia’s current foreign policy.

    “On the one hand it is an independent foreign policy, on the other it is open to wide and close cooperation with everybody who is ready to interact with our country on an equal, mutually beneficial basis,” Lavrov said in a statement on the ministry’s website.

    In 2001-2011, Primakov was head of Russia’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, during which time he continued to offer his insight into the country’s internal and foreign policies.

    In a recent speech delivered at a high-profile conference in January, Primakov argued that regardless of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, Russia cannot afford to become isolated and must keep the door open to both Europe and the United States. He also said that Russia should use the current economic downturn to diversify and decentralize its economy.

    Alexei Makarkin of the Center for Political Technologies think tank in Moscow praised Primakov on Friday for his ability to pursue a shrewd and balanced policy.

    “He was a proponent of realpolitik that was far from both idealism and saber rattling,” Makarkin wrote on Facebook.

    Dmitry Trenin, head of the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, said Primakov’s death was a particularly grave loss at this time, when Russia needs a level-headed authority who would advise the government on policy-making.

    “In Russian politics — both internal and foreign — Primakov was an example of serving the national interest and a proponent of building level and equal relations with other countries,” he wrote in a comment on the Carnegie Moscow Center’s website on Friday.

    “It will be more difficult for us without him,” Trenin wrote.

    Lavrov on Evgeny Primakov: The passing of a great Russian diplomat https://t.co/w55Ing3hX6 https://t.co/Dsw6DYTthH

    — RT (@RT_com) June 27, 2015

    Deeply saddened by Yevgeny Primakov's death. He was a committed leader, talented diplomat & good friend. https://t.co/1O15N7JRKY

    — Madeleine Albright (@madeleine) June 26, 2015

    Yevgeny Primakov obituary
    Outstanding Russian foreign secretary and PM who served under Yeltsin and Gorbachev

    Yevgeny Primakov, who has died aged 85, was an outstanding foreign minister and prime minister of the Russian Federation in the 1990s. He was a bold critic of the oligarchs and their neoliberal capitalism, a staunch defender of Russian national interests after the pro-western foreign policy of the early post-Soviet years, and a man whom many Russians considered the best president their country never had.

    His popularity peaked towards the end of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, when he supported inquiries into allegations of corrupt practice by Yeltsin and his entourage. They responded by unleashing a torrent of smears against him on state television and selecting Vladimir Putin, then head of the Federal Security Bureau, the KGB’s successor, to take over from Yeltsin.

    Among national leaders Primakov was unusually well-educated and experienced on international issues. He spoke Arabic, had served as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East and then headed his country’s top academic thinktanks, the Institute of Oriental Studies and the Institute of World Economy and International Relations.

    He was first brought into active politics by Mikhail Gorbachev, who valued his diplomatic skills and careful analysis. In 1989 Primakov was elected chairman of one chamber of the Supreme Soviet and a year later Gorbachev appointed him to the Presidential Council, which was struggling to contain demands from republics in the Baltics and the Caucasus, as well as Ukraine, for autonomy within a reformed Soviet federation or outright independence. During the abortive counter-revolutionary coup by security chiefs and Communist party conservatives in August 1991, Primakov stayed loyal to Gorbachev. Under Yeltsin he served as head of the Foreign Intelligence Service until 1996.

    In the early post-Soviet years the Russian elite was divided into liberal westernisers and pragmatic nationalists. Both camps hoped the US and other western countries would join in creating a new European security architecture for a reunited continent, but they differed on tactics. The nationalists claimed too soft a line from Moscow and too much eagerness for western loans would make the west see Russia as a weak, even defeated player. Primakov argued within the elite against the expansion of Nato into central Europe. Unwilling to accept Washington’s view of a globe characterised by a “single super-power”, he supported the neo-Gaullist idea of a multipolar world. He advocated a new strategic triangle between Russia, China and India, a concept that later led to the establishment of the Brics group – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

    Primakov also urged Yeltsin to spend more effort on building good relations with the former Soviet states, a policy that western hawks claimed was a return to Soviet expansionism, but which Primakov saw as the natural responsibility of a metropolitan power towards areas where large numbers of its former citizens still lived. It was no surprise when, in March 1996, Yeltsin appointed him foreign minister to replace Andrei Kozyrev, who was seen as excessively submissive to the west.

    Primakov himself was an example of Soviet multiculturalism. Born to a Jewish mother and Russian father in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, he was brought up in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. After graduating from the Institute of Oriental Studies, in Moscow, in 1953, he worked for state radio and as Pravda’s Middle East correspondent until 1970, before taking up jobs in the thinktanks he was later to head.

    After three years of service in domestic politics between 1989 and 1991, he returned to the field in 1998 after the bank defaults and rouble collapse in August. Parliamentary opposition to the neoliberal western-backed policies of the oligarchs and their friends – dubbed by some analysts as market Bolsheviks – had rumbled with greater or lesser intensity throughout the Yeltsin years. It reached a new peak after the default.

    Moves were made to impeach Yeltsin, who tried to appease the opposition by reappointing a former prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, but the Duma rejected him. In desperation the president turned to Primakov. Here was a man of the centre-left, who, unlike the neoliberals, advocated a greater role for the state in regulating the economy and directing investment. He was also a natural conciliator. Chosen as prime minister, Primakov appointed communists as well as reformers to his cabinet and started a policy of quantitative easing, pumping money to enterprises to pay wages which had been stopped, hire more staff, and revive investment. The economy revived, helped by a surge in the price of Russia’s main export, oil.

    He soon began to trouble Yeltsin by accusing Boris Berezovsky, a key oligarch and the main Kremlin fixer, of corruption and by backing an investigation by the prosecutor general into corruption allegations against Yeltsin and his family. This added to Primakov’s popularity, which was further enhanced during the crisis over Nato plans to attack Moscow’s ally, the Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević, because of his ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo. Primakov tried to persuade the US not to use force.

    Flying to Washington for talks on a new American loan, he was rung by the vice-president, Al Gore, and told that Nato bombing had begun. A furious Primakov ordered his plane to turn round halfway across the Atlantic. The decision was hailed in the Russian media as a dramatic sign that Russia had restored its independence and would not condone US violations of international law for the sake of cash.

    Yeltsin was worried that Primakov was becoming the most popular politician in Russia, with a real chance of winning the presidential election the next year. In May 1999 Yeltsin sacked him as PM. Primakov responded by forming an electoral alliance with Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, called Fatherland-All Russia, which swept into the lead in opinion polls before the Duma elections that December. This could have been a springboard for a successful campaign for the presidency a few months later.

    Berezovsky’s TV station, ORT, launched a furious demonisation of Primakov, claiming he was a puppet of the communists and too old at 70 to be a proper president. At the same time the Kremlin launched a new war in Chechnya, allowing Putin, freshly installed as PM, to argue that the country needed someone young and strong to take charge. Primakov’s star faded and in February 2000 he withdrew from the presidential race, which Putin won easily.

    In 2001 the new president gave Primakov a soft job as chairman of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, a position he held until 2011. He was allowed one final political assignment of importance in March 2003, when Putin, using Primakov’s Arab experience, sent him to Baghdad to try to persuade Saddam Hussein to make enough concessions to stop the impending US invasion. Primakov had been entrusted by Gorbachev with a similar mission before the first Gulf war in 1991. Neither succeeded. They were rare failures for a man who managed to maintain a reputation for integrity, realism and consistency during some of Russia’s most turbulent and ideologically divisive years.

    Primakov’s first wife, Laura, died in 1987. He is survived by their daughter, Nana, and by his second wife, Irina. His son Alexander died of a heart attack in 1981.

    • Yevgeny Maksimovich Primakov, politician, born 29 October 1929; died 26 June 2015

    In Memory of Yevgeny Primakov

    Resume: In many respects, Yevgeny Primakov shaped the political philosophy of modern Russia’s foreign policy, a country which is both the successor of multi-century history and a new state born in the breach of the old model.

    Throughout the long years of his diverse career, Yevgeny Maksimovich Primakov did so much that listing all his deeds alone would take pages. For those engaged in international relations in Russia, Yevgeny Primakov had always been setting the benchmark, a professional standard. The figure is unique in many aspects, but one of the most important features is the combination of enormous practical experience, deep academic knowledge and theory-based understanding of patterns in the development of the world system. Orientalists have fair reasons to consider Primakov to be an outstanding member of their scientific school. However, it is more important that he had a complex vision of the global picture, anticipated the trends in the development of the world as a whole and assessed prospects and opportunities of his own country.

    In many respects, Primakov shaped the political philosophy of modern Russia’s foreign policy, a country which is both the successor of multi-century history and a new state born in the breach of the old model. He understood that in such complicated data dogmatism was out of the question, requiring a flexible approach. One that would combine tradition and innovations, the ability to stay firm on the national footing formed by generations, and change together with the rapidly developing world. Yevgeny Primakov had to actively engage in nation-building at the most complicated times: from the beginning of the swift fall of the USSR to the equally grave crisis of Russia in the late 1990s. Besides the applied contribution he made to smoothing the critical situations and then overcoming them, Primakov’s conduct and style were always reassuring that the calamities were temporary, that Russia had always been, is and will be a great state with its own interests and principles.

    Primakov was an embodiment of statesmanship in the best sense of the word, active patriotism without exaltation and bombastic rhetoric, and national dignity on the world arena. He made a significant contribution to the development of the academic school of foreign political realism, which had always been the basis of the Russian outlook on the world. Primakov was the one who served as a living illustration for the term “healthy conservatism”, which has nothing in common with the bellicose obscurantism, cynicism, dogmatic dedication to truths perorated once and for all. Common sense and understanding of the importance of morale in everyday life and politics were the underpinning of Primakov’s approach to state affairs, science and personal relations. As any experienced politician, Primakov realized the inevitability of maneuvering and compromise. His views were not always appealing to everyone, but he could not be blamed for inconsistency – the integrity of his outlook and approach did not change.

    Those lucky to communicate and work with Yevgeny Primakov understand that his death is a grievous loss. But the heritage he left will retain its value for long, especially in the age of uncertainty and doubt that the whole world and Russia are entering.

24. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৯ জুন ২০১৫ (৫:০৮ অপরাহ্ণ)

    সোনারখনি নিয়ে প্রতীক্ষায় বঙ্কিম-ভিটে

    সমীরকুমার ঘোষ

    সাহিত্যসম্রাট, ঋষি ইত্যাদি বিশেষণ তাঁর নামের আগে সশ্রদ্ধা আমরাই বসিয়েছি৷‌ সেই বঙ্কিমচন্দ্র চট্টোপাধ্যায় জন্মেছিলেন কলকাতা থেকে খুব বেশি দূরে নয় ৩০-৩২ কিলোমিটার দূরে, নৈহাটির কাঁঠালপাড়ায়৷‌ বাঙালির অনেক ঐতিহ্য পীঠস্হান হারিয়ে গেলেও এটি সযত্ন রক্ষিত আছে৷‌ বেশ কয়েকজন ঐতিহ্যসচেতন ও বঙ্কিম-নিবেদিতপ্রাণ মানুষ আগলে রেখেছেন৷‌ তবে তারও আগে কৃতিত্ব দিতে হয় ভাইসরয় লর্ড কার্জনকে৷‌ যত দুর্নামই তাঁর নামে দিই না কেন, ১৮৮৭ সালে সম্প্রসারণের নামে রেল যখন এই ভিটে গ্রাস করতে চেয়েছিল, তিনিই বাঁচিয়েছিলেন৷‌ বঙ্কিমের সেই বসতবাড়িকে ঘিরে গড়ে উঠেছে বঙ্কিম-ভবন গবেষণা কেন্দ্র ও জাদুঘর৷‌ ট্রেনে এক কাপ চায়ের যা দাম, সেই খরচেই কলকাতা থেকে যাওয়া যায় নৈহাটি স্টেশন৷‌ সেখান থেকে মিনিট পাঁচেক হাঁটা পথ৷‌ যেখানে তিনি জন্মেছেন, বড় হয়েছেন, বঙ্গদর্শন প্রকাশ করেছেন, বন্দে মাতরম সঙ্গীত রচনা করেছেন৷‌ তাঁর স্মৃতিবিজড়িত অসংখ্য জিনিস চাক্ষুষ করা যায়, ছোঁয়া যায় ইতিহাসকে৷‌ অতিব্যস্ত আমাদের শুধু যাওয়ারই যা অপেক্ষা!

    বঙ্কিমের পিতা যাদবচন্দ্র সম্পন্ন মানুষ ছিলেন৷‌ তাঁর তৈরি আদি বাড়িটি নেই৷‌ পরে যে বাড়িটি তৈরি করেন, যেখানে সাহিত্যসম্রাটের জন্ম, সেটি আছে৷‌ আর আছে বঙ্কিমের নিজের তৈরি বৈঠকখানা৷‌ যেখানে গড়ে উঠেছে মিউজিয়াম৷‌ ১৯৫২ সালে পশ্চিমবঙ্গ সরকার অধিগ্রহণ করে৷‌ মূল বাড়িটিতে ঢুকলে সামনেই চোখে পড়বে আঁতুড়ঘরটি৷‌ ২০০৫-এর মে মাসে বৈজ্ঞানিক পদ্ধতিতে খনন চালিয়ে চাটুজ্জে পরিবারের সূতিকা গৃহের ভিত্তিস্হলটি আবিষ্কৃত হয়৷‌ ২০০৬-এ সেখানেই টোরাকোটা শিল্পকাজে চারচালা শৈলির সুরম্য স্হাপত্য নির্মিত হয়েছে৷‌ দোতলা বাড়ির সিঁড়ি দিয়ে উঠে গেলে এখনও দেখতে পাওয়া যায় বঙ্কিমের শোওয়ার ঘরটিকে৷‌ যেখানে রয়েছে তাঁর ব্যবহূত খাট, আলমারি, সেই পেন্ডুলামওয়ালা ঘড়ি, চাদর, তাঁর বিখ্যাত পাগড়ি৷‌ বাড়িটির নিচে গড়ে উঠেছে ঋষি বঙ্কিম গ্রম্হাগার ও সংগ্রহশালা৷‌ যেখানে বহু দুষ্প্রাপ্য বইপত্র রয়েছে৷‌ রয়েছে বঙ্কিমের নিজস্ব সংগ্রহের বইপত্রও৷‌ সর্বত্র যত্ন আর ভালোবাসার ছাপ৷‌ এখনও সব ঘরগুলো দর্শকদের জন্য খুলে দেওয়া হয়নি৷‌ তবু এটুকুও কম প্রাপ্তি নয়৷‌

    বঙ্কিম মিউজিয়াম গড়ে উঠেছে যে লাগোয়া বাড়িটিতে সেটি ছিল বঙ্কিমের বৈঠকখানা৷‌ সামনেই বড় একটি ঘর, যেখানে এখন প্রচুর ছবি৷‌ তার মধ্যে যাদবচন্দ্র, তাঁর চারপুত্র ও কন্যার ছবি যেমন আছে, আছে বঙ্কিম, তাঁর স্ত্রী-কন্যার ছবি, সেই সঙ্গে হরপ্রসাদ শাস্ত্রী, দীনবন্ধু মিত্রের মতো সেই সময়ে বাংলার নবযুগের অগ্রণী ব্যক্তিত্বরা৷‌ রয়েছে বঙ্কিমের ব্যবহূত সেজবাতি, দাবার ঘুঁটি, তাঁর লেখা চিঠিপত্র, সেই সময়ের বহু নথি৷‌ বঙ্গদর্শনের হিসাব রাখতেন বৃদ্ধ যাদবচন্দ্র৷‌ সেই ক্যাশবা‘টিও রয়েছে৷‌

    বঙ্কিম-ভবন গবেষণা কেন্দ্রের কিউরেটর গৌতম সরকার অক্লান্ত চেষ্টা করছেন বাড়িটির ঐতিহ্য সাধারণের সামনে তুলে ধরার৷‌ তিনি একটি পুস্তিকা লিখেছেন, একটি মোটা গবেষণাগ্রম্হও প্রকাশ করেছেন৷‌ তাঁকে সবরকমের সাহায্য করে চলেছেন অধ্যক্ষ পিনাকেশচন্দ্র সরকার, পরিচালকমণ্ডলীর সদস্য রতনকুমার নন্দী প্রমুখ৷‌ গৌতমবাবুর কাছ থেকে জানা গেল, রাধাবল্লভতলা রোডের ডানদিকে বঙ্কিমচন্দ্রদের বাড়িটি তৈরি করেছিলেন যাদবচন্দ্র ১৮৪০-৫০ সাল নাগাদ৷‌ পিছনে এজমালি ইমারত ভগ্নপ্রায়৷‌ দুই বাড়ির মাঝখানে সূতিকাগারে জন্ম বঙ্কিমের৷‌ বসতবাড়ির দক্ষিণে যাদবেশ্বর শিবমন্দির সংলগ্ন পিতৃদত্ত জমিতে ১৮৬৬-৬৭ সাল নাগাদ বঙ্কিম একতলা চার কামরার বৈঠকখানা বাড়িটি তৈরি করেন৷‌ বাড়িতে ঢুকেই একটি বড় হলঘর৷‌ তার লাগোয়া দক্ষিণে দুটি ছোটো ঘর ও পশ্চিমে একটি ঘর৷‌ বড় হলঘরটিতে বসত সাহিত্যের আড্ডা৷‌ ছুটির দিনে বসত বঙ্গদর্শন-এর মজলিস৷‌ সেখানে মেঝের ওপর পাতা ফরাসে তাকিয়ায় ঠেস দিয়ে বসতেন মহামহোপাধ্যায় হরপ্রসাদ শাস্ত্রী, বঙ্কিমের মেজদা সঞ্জীবচন্দ্র চট্টোপাধ্যায়, নবীনচন্দ্র সেন, চন্দ্রনাথ বসু, দীনবন্ধু মিত্র, রাজকৃষ্ণ মুখোপাধ্যায়, অক্ষয়চন্দ্র সরকার, দামোদর মুখোপাধ্যায়, জগদীশনাথ রায়, মহামহোপাধ্যায় রাখালদাস ন্যায়রত্নের মতো বাংলা সাহিত্যের মহারথরা৷‌ ঘরে দু-চারখানা কৌচ ও কুশনওয়ালা চেয়ারও থাকত৷‌ আর থাকত হারমোনিয়াম ও অন্য বাদ্যযন্ত্র৷‌ অনেক রাত অবধি চলত মজলিস৷‌ হাসি-গানে মুখর হয়ে উঠত চারিদিক৷‌ কিংবদন্তী সঙ্গীতশিল্পী যদু ভট্ট এই বাড়িতেই আসতেন বঙ্কিমকে গান শেখাতে৷‌ এখানেই বঙ্কিম সৃষ্টি করেছিলেন পরাধীন ভারতবর্ষের বীজমন্ত্র ‘বন্দে মাতরম’, যা এখন ভারতের জাতীয় সঙ্গীত৷‌ বঙ্গদর্শন-এর সম্পাদনা পর্বে মাঝে মাঝেই চাকরি থেকে ছুটি নিয়ে এই ঘরে সাহিত্য সাধনা করতেন বঙ্কিম৷‌ পশ্চিমের ঘরটি ছিল বিশ্রামকক্ষ৷‌ আদর করে বলতেন ‘তোশাখানা’৷‌ সেখানে তামাকু সেবনের আয়োজনও ছিল৷‌ বঙ্কিমের ছিল বদলির চাকরি৷‌ বাবা মারা যাওয়ার পর কলকাতা ও হাওড়ায় চাকরির সূত্রে যাতায়াতের সুবিধার জন্য কাঁঠালপাড়া ছেড়ে চলে আসেন কলকাতায়৷‌ দু-এক জায়গায় ভাড়াবাড়িতে থাকার পর প্রতাপ চাটুজ্জের গলিতে একটি দোতলা বাড়ি কিনে পাকাপাকিভাবে বাস করতে শুরু করেন৷‌ তবে দুর্গাপুজো, রথযাত্রা বা অন্য কোনও অনুষ্ঠানে অবশ্যই হাজির হতেন৷‌ ২১ ফেব্রুয়ারি ১৮৮৭ উইল করে বৈঠকখানা বাড়িটি স্ত্রী রাজলক্ষ্মীকে দান করেন৷‌ রাজলক্ষ্মী দেন বড়মেয়ে শরৎকুমারীকে৷‌ তারপরে উত্তরাধিকারীদের কাছ থেকে দান হিসাবে পেয়ে এবং কিছুটা কিনে বঙ্গীয় সাহিত্য পরিষৎ এটির রক্ষণাবেক্ষণ ও বঙ্কিম-স্মরণের উদ‍্যোগ নেয়৷‌ শেষে অর্থাভাবে বাধ্য হয়েই তারা সরকারকে অধিগ্রহণের অনুরোধ করে৷‌ উল্লেখ্য কাঁঠালপাড়ার বাড়িটি অনেকের চেষ্টায় রক্ষা পেলেও প্রতাপ চ্যাটার্জি স্ট্রিটের বাড়িটিকে আত্মঘাতী বাঙালি বিলীয়মান বিভিন্ন ঐতিহ্য ইমারতের দলে ফেলে, মুছে ফেলেছে৷‌

    সুখের কথা কলেজ বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ের পাঠ্যক্রমে এখনও বঙ্কিমচন্দ্রের সৃষ্টি ঠাঁই পাচ্ছে৷‌ সেই সূত্রেই বিভিন্ন কলেজের সাহিত্যের ছাত্রছাত্রীরা ক্বচিৎ-কদাচ গিয়ে থাকে৷‌ বিশেষত শীতকালে৷‌ তবে বঙ্কিমকে আমাদের থেকেও বেশি মনে রেখেছে ভিন রাজ্য৷‌ সুদূর মহারাষ্ট্র থেকে প্রচুর লোক আসেন৷‌ পুনেতে ‘বন্দে মাতরম সঙঘ’ নামে একটি সংস্হা আছে৷‌ তাদের সদস্যরা এখানে ‘বন্দে মাতরম’ রচিত হয়েছিল বলে জাতীয়তাবাদের আঁতুড়ঘর হিসাবে পুজো করেন৷‌ তীর্থস্হানের মতো শ্রদ্ধায় স্পর্শ করে ধন্য হতে চান৷‌ বঙ্কিমের টানে লোক আসেন বাংলাদেশ থেকেও৷‌ জার্মানিতে থেকে এসেছেন হান্স হাটার৷‌ তবে নৈহাটির স্কুল-কলেজের ছেলেমেয়েরা এদিক মাড়ায় না৷‌ গেঁয়ো যোগী ভিখ পায় না!

    বঙ্কিম-ভবন গবেষণা কেন্দ্রে শুধু বঙ্কিমচন্দ্রেরই নয় নৈহাটির বহু কৃতী সন্তানের নানা স্মারক রয়েছে৷‌ তাঁদেরই অন্যতম মহামহোপাধ্যায় হরপ্রসাদ শাস্ত্রী৷‌ ৬ ডিসেম্বর তাঁর জন্মদিনটিও পালিত হয় শ্রদ্ধায়৷‌ এখানে রয়েছে ওঁর আবিষ্কৃত পুঁথি, ওঁকে লেখা বিশ্বখ্যাত ভারততত্ত্ববিদদের চিঠ্বি ব্যবহূত দক্ষিণাবর্ত শঙ্খ্ব মোষের সিং, হাতির দাঁত, আখরোটের খোল, পাথর ইত্যাদি দিয়ে তৈরি ৯টি নস্যির ডিব্বে নেপালের খুকর্বি বিষ্ণুপুরী দশাবতার তাসের সেট ইত্যাদ্বি নবদ্বীপের বিখ্যাত পণ্ডিত শ্রীজীব ন্যায়রত্নের পুঁথি, জনাব সাহেদল করিম সাহেবের হাতে লেখা কোরান শরিফ্ব বঙ্গদর্শন-এর গ্রাহক-পাঠকদের চিঠ্বি সঞ্জীবচন্দ্রের হাতে সংশোধিত রজনীকান্ত গুপ্তের লেখা ‘সিপাহীযুদ্ধের ইতিহাস’ বইয়ের প্রুফশিট্ব নীলদর্পণের আখ্যাপত্র, আনন্দমঠ-এর প্রথম সংস্করণ ইত্যাদি৷‌

    আধুনিক পদ্ধতি কাজে লাগিয়ে বাড়িকে যেমন সংরক্ষণ করা হয়েছে, সেইভাবে পুঁথি, চিঠিপত্র, পোশাক ইত্যাদিকেও সংরক্ষণ করা হয়েছে৷‌ গৌতম জানালেন, সেই সঙ্গে নথিগুলো ডিজিটাল পদ্ধতিতেও সংরক্ষিত হচ্ছে৷‌ বৈঠকখানাটি ঐতিহ্যবাড়ি অথচ ওখানেই অফিসঘর ইত্যাদি চালাতে হচ্ছে৷‌ তাই অফিসঘর, গ্রম্হাগার ইত্যাদিগুলো সরিয়ে নিয়ে যাওয়ার জন্য পাশেই গড়ে তোলা হচ্ছে অ্যানে‘ বিল্ডিং৷‌ তাহলে জিনিসগুলো আরও ছড়িয়ে সুন্দরভাবে দেখানোর ব্যবস্হা করা যাবে, জানালেন গৌতম৷‌

    এমন সোনার খনিতে প্রবেশের দক্ষিণা মাত্র দু টাকা৷‌ শনিবার ও সোমবার ছাড়া প্রতিদিনই খোলা থাকে বেলা ১১টা থেকে বিকেল ৫টা৷‌ ইংরেজি মতে ২৬ জুন বঙ্কিমের জন্মদিন হলেও এখানে তা পালিত হয় বাংলা তারিখ অনুসারে৷‌ তাই ১৩ আষাঢ় (২৯ জুন) পালিত হবে ১৭৭তম জন্মজয়ন্তী৷‌ সকাল সাড়ে আটটায় বঙ্কিমের আবক্ষমূর্তিতে মালা দিয়ে শুরু হবে শ্রদ্ধাজ্ঞাপন অনুষ্ঠানের৷‌ বিকেলে থাকছে আলোচনা৷‌ অংশ নেবেন সুমিতা চক্রবর্তী, আবদুল কাফি প্রমুখ৷‌ সবাইকেও ওঁরা সাদর আমন্ত্রণ জানিয়েছেন৷‌

25. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৯ জুন ২০১৫ (৫:১৮ অপরাহ্ণ)

    কলকাতা যে উত্তরাধিকার হারিয়ে ফেলছে
    শিক্ষিত মধ্যবিত্ত বাঙালি কলকাতা শহরে বসতবাড়ির জন্য সৃষ্টি করেছিলেন এক নিজস্ব শৈলী। পৃথিবীর কোথাও ঠিক এই ধারাটি খুঁজে পাওয়া যাবে না। নিছক জমি-বাড়ির কারবারিদের দাপটে সেই বাড়িগুলি শেষ হয়ে যাচ্ছে। শিক্ষিত মধ্যবিত্ত বাঙালি উদাসীন।
    অমিত চৌধুরী

    আমার জন্ম কলকাতায়, কিন্তু আমার যখন বছর দেড়েক বয়েস, সেই সময় আমরা বম্বে চলে গিয়েছিলাম। সেটা সম্ভবত ১৯৬৪ সালের গোড়ার দিক। যে কোম্পানিতে আমার বাবা কাজ করতেন, সেটির সদর দফতর শ্রমিক সংক্রান্ত অশান্তির ফলে কলকাতা থেকে বম্বেয় সরে যায়। এ-রকম আরও অনেক শিল্পসংস্থাই তখন এই কারণে কলকাতা ছেড়েছিল। এর পরেও বছরে এক বার অন্তত আমরা কলকাতায় আসতাম, কখনও দু’বারও। আমার মামা থাকতেন ভবানীপুর অঞ্চলে, ঐতিহাসিক তাৎপর্যমণ্ডিত প্রতাপাদিত্য রোডে। তিনি ছিলেন ইঞ্জিনিয়ার— যাদবপুর বিশ্ববিদ্যালয় এবং পরে জার্মানি। আমি যখন একটু বড় হয়েছি, তত দিনে তিনি চাকরি ছেড়ে দিয়ে কয়েক জন বন্ধুর সঙ্গে হাওড়ায় একটি যন্ত্রপাতি নির্মাণের কারখানা তৈরি করেছেন। রাজনৈতিক ডামাডোলের সেই যুগে কারখানাটি কিছুতেই দাঁড় করানো যায়নি। আমার মামা অবশ্য কোনও দিন বামপন্থায় তাঁর বিশ্বাস হারাননি।

    কলকাতায়, বিশেষ করে মামার বাড়িতে যাওয়া-আসার ফলে আমি দুটো জিনিস শিখেছিলাম। এক, বম্বের যে কর্পোরেট জগৎ দেখে আমি অভ্যস্ত, তার থেকে অন্য রকম পৃথিবীও আছে, ইংরেজিয়ানা ছাড়াও একটা উচ্চ মানের এবং আকর্ষণীয় সংস্কৃতি থাকতে পারে। বস্তুত, তখন মনে হত, ইংরেজিয়ানার বলয়ের বাইরে যে ভারত, সাংস্কৃতিক ভাবে সেটাই বরং সচরাচর বেশি উন্নত এবং আকর্ষণীয়। দুই, সে দিন আমাদের এই ধারণাও হয়েছিল যে, শিক্ষা ও সংস্কৃতি কেবল সম্পন্ন, সুবিধাভোগী এবং আর্থিক ভাবে সুস্থিত হওয়ার উপর নির্ভর করে না। বস্তুত, আমার মামার বাড়িতে উল্টোটাই সত্য বলে মনে হত।

    মামার সম্পত্তি বলতে ছিল শ্বশুরের দেওয়া ওই বাড়িটি। আমাদের পরিবার সিলেট থেকে এ পারে আসেন, যেটুকু যা ছিল সবই তাঁরা দেশভাগের সময় খুইয়েছিলেন। তাই মামা যে ধরনের বাড়িতে থাকতেন, আমার সেটিকে বিশেষ কোনও সুবিধাভোগের ব্যাপার বলে মনে হয়নি। তা ছাড়া, ষাটের দশকে পৌঁছে প্রতাপাদিত্য রোডের সেই আগের গরিমা আর ছিল না, কিছুটা অভাবগ্রস্ত এবং বেশ অস্থির একটা এলাকা হয়ে পড়েছিল সেটি। কিন্তু ওই বাড়িতে যে পরিসর এবং জীবন ছিল, তার অন্দরমহলে যে সমাজের ইতিবৃত্ত বয়ে চলত, আমি পরবর্তী জীবনে পৃথিবীর অন্য নানা জায়গায় তার প্রতিধ্বনি খুঁজে পেলেও ঠিক সেই জিনিসটা আর কোথাও পাইনি। উদাহরণ হিসেবে বাড়িটির কয়েকটা বৈশিষ্ট্যের কথা বলতে পারি: একতলায় দেউড়ি; লালপাথরের মেঝে; সবুজ রঙের কাঠের খড়খড়িওয়ালা ভেনিশিয়ান বা ফ্রেঞ্চ উইন্ডো; দরজায় দরজায় গোল কড়া; কাঠের খিল; খোলা ছাদ; নকশা-কাটা লোহার রেলিং দেওয়া দোতলার লম্বা বারান্দা; সূক্ষ্ম কারুকাজ করা কার্নিশ; দেওয়ালে চমৎকার নকশা করা ছিদ্র সংবলিত ভেন্টিলেটর, যার মাপ খোলা হাতের তালুর সমান। (চল্লিশের দশকের কিছু কিছু বাড়িতে খুব চনমনে আর্ট-ডেকো নকশা দেখা যেত: অর্ধবৃত্তাকার ব্যালকনি; সিঁড়ির গহ্বরে উপর থেকে নীচ পর্যন্ত একটা খাড়া কাচের দেওয়াল; গ্রিল এবং গেটে প্রসিদ্ধ সূর্যোদয়ের মোটিফ।)

    বাড়িটা এখন আর নেই। ১৯৯০-এর দশকে— পশ্চিমবঙ্গে শিল্প নিয়ে আসার জন্য বামফ্রন্টের তৎপরতা শুরু হয়নি, কিন্তু বাতাসে তার পূর্বাভাস মিলছে— সেই সময় কলকাতায় জমি-বাড়ির বাজারে স্ফীতি দেখা গিয়েছিল, এবং তার অভিঘাতেই প্রতাপাদিত্য রোডের বাড়িটি ভাঙা পড়ল। এখানে বলা দরকার যে, শহরের অর্থনীতিতে তখন ভাটার টান, গৃহস্বামীদের অনেকের পক্ষেই বাড়ির রক্ষণাবেক্ষণ করা সাধ্যাতীত হয়ে পড়ছিল এবং নতুন প্রোমোটার-ডেভেলপাররা সেই সুযোগে পুরনো বাড়িগুলি কিনে ফেলছিলেন। শিল্প আসেনি— জমি অধিগ্রহণের জটিল সমস্যা আর পশ্চিমবঙ্গের দুর্মর পপুলিস্ট রাজনীতি শিল্পায়নের পথে দুস্তর বাধা হয়ে দাঁড়িয়েছে। কিন্তু ‘ডেভেলপার’দের দাপটে বাড়ির পর বাড়ি, পাড়ার পর পাড়া ধূলিসাৎ হতে থাকল। এদের মধ্যে অনেকে আসলে এক নতুন প্রজাতির জমি-লুঠেরা, এদের নীতি হল: ভাল জায়গায় বাড়ি পেলেই কিনে নাও এবং তা ভেঙে ফেলে বহুতল ইমারত তৈরি করো। এরা পুরনো বাড়িগুলো কিনেছিল কার্যত জমির দামে, কখনওই বাড়ির সত্যিকারের দাম যাচাইয়ের কোনও চেষ্টাই হয়নি। আর বাড়িগুলোর কাঠামো বজায় রেখে নতুন নির্মাণের তো কোনও কথাই ওঠেনি। পুরনো বাড়ি কেনা, তা ভাঙা এবং নতুন বাড়ি তৈরি, সবটাই চলেছে একেবারে কালক্ষেপ না করে।

    জমি-বাড়ির বাজারে সেই স্ফীতি অনেক দিন শেষ হয়েছে। এখন ফাটকা কারবারের খেলায় নতুন সম্পত্তির দাম বাড়ে। তার মানে, বসবাসের চাহিদার টানে নয়, লগ্নির উপায় হিসেবে এখন নতুন বাড়ি তৈরি হচ্ছে— আগে যে টাকা লোকে শেয়ার কিনে বা অন্য ভাবে বিনিয়োগ করত, আজকাল সেটা বাড়ি কিনে করছে। ইদানীং অন্য জিনিসের তুলনায় সম্পত্তিতে টাকা রাখা বেশি নিরাপদ মনে হয়েছিল। কিন্তু কলকাতায় সম্পত্তির দাম এখন একটা স্থিতাবস্থায় পৌঁছেছে, প্রোমোটার এবং দালালরা ছাড়া এই বাজারে কারও বিশেষ লাভ হচ্ছে বলে মনে হয় না। মাস দুয়েক আগে সংবাদপত্রে একটা খবর দেখেছি যে, কলকাতায় মাল্টিমিলিয়নেয়ারের সংখ্যা আশ্চর্য ভাবে বেড়েছে, অর্থনীতির স্বাভাবিক গতিপ্রকৃতি দিয়ে যে বৃদ্ধির অঙ্ক মেলানো যায় না। মনে রাখতে হবে, এঁরা ডলারের অঙ্কে মাল্টিমিলিয়নেয়ার, টাকার অঙ্কে নয়। ওই রিপোর্টে এ কথাটাও ছিল যে, এঁদের অধিকাংশেরই রিয়েল এস্টেটের ব্যবসা।

    গত কুড়ি বছরে ইউরোপে ভ্রমণের অভিজ্ঞতা থেকে আমি একটি কথা উপলব্ধি করেছি। সেখানে বিভিন্ন শহরে আমরা কেবল তাদের ইতিহাসকেই খুঁজে পাই না, জানতে পারি, সেই ইতিহাস মুছে দেওয়ার চেষ্টা কী ভাবে প্রতিহত করা হয়েছিল এবং ইতিহাস রক্ষার সেই উদ্যোগে স্থানীয় সমাজ কী ভাবে শামিল হয়েছিল। এই উদ্যোগ না হলে দুনিয়ায়— ইউরোপে, অস্ট্রেলিয়ায়, মার্কিন যুক্তরাষ্ট্রে, এমনকী ল্যাটিন আমেরিকায়— গত দুই শতাব্দীর নগরায়ণের ইতিহাস আজ আর বিশেষ অবশিষ্ট থাকত না। কলকাতা ছিল এই নগরায়ণের বিশ্ব-ইতিহাসের অত্যন্ত গুরুত্বপূর্ণ এবং অনন্য শরিক। ‘অনন্য’ বলছি, কারণ আমি যে ধরনের বাড়ির বর্ণনা দিলাম, ভারতে বা ভারতের বাইরে তার প্রতিচ্ছবি পাওয়া যেতে পারে, কিন্তু ঠিক সেই ধরনটা আর কোথাও মিলবে না। কলকাতার স্থাপত্যের কথা উঠলেই আমরা সচরাচর দু’ধরনের ইমারতের কথা ভাবি: এক, ব্রিটিশদের তৈরি ঔপনিবেশিক প্রতিষ্ঠান এবং দুই, উত্তর কলকাতার অভিজাত পরিবারের নিজেদের তৈরি বসতবাড়ি। কিন্তু আমি যে বাড়িগুলির কথা বলছি, সেগুলি মধ্যবিত্ত বৃত্তিজীবী বাঙালির বাড়ি: উকিল, ডাক্তার, আমলা, অধ্যাপক, এই ধরনের মানুষের থাকার জন্য এই সব বাড়ি তৈরি হয়েছিল, যাঁরা তৈরি করেছিলেন তাঁদের নাম হারিয়ে গেছে। অনেক বিষয়ে বাড়িগুলির মধ্যে মিল আছে, যেমন ফ্রেঞ্চ উইন্ডো, কার্নিশ, লাল মেঝে, যেগুলির কথা আমি বলেছি। কিন্তু কোনও দুটি বাড়ি হুবহু এক রকম নয়। এর ফলে একটা অভূতপূর্ব ব্যাপার ঘটেছিল: একই পাড়ায়, একই রাস্তার ওপর একই ঘরানার, অথচ খুবই বৈচিত্রপূর্ণ অনেক বাড়ির সমাবেশ দেখা গিয়েছিল। এবং তাদের শৈলীকে বড়জোর বঙ্গীয়-ইউরোপীয় বলা যেতে পারে, সেটা রেনেসাঁস ধারার নয়, মুম্বইয়ের ঔপনিবেশিক ইমারতগুলির মতো নিয়ো-গথিক নয়, ইন্দো-সারাসেনিক তো নয়ই। অমর্ত্য সেনের ভাষায় বললে, শৈলীটি ‘খ্যাপাটে’ এবং সুন্দর, আর তা পুরোপুরি বাঙালি মধ্যবিত্তের নিজের। এই বাড়িগুলিকে ‘পুরনো’ বললে মস্ত ভুল হবে, সেগুলি ‘নতুন’ কলকাতার অবদান, আধুনিকতা এবং আধুনিকবাদের যে কলকাতা উনিশ শতকে উঠে এসেছিল, যা ছিল একই সঙ্গে ব্রিটিশ কলকাতা এবং দেশজ ‘ব্ল্যাক টাউন’-এর থেকে আলাদা এবং তাদের বিপরীত, তাদের থেকে সাংস্কৃতিক রসদ সংগ্রহ করলেও তাদের অতিক্রম করে যেতে পেরেছিল এই নতুন কলকাতা।

    এই কলকাতারই বাড়িগুলি ধ্বংস হতে বসেছে। তাদের বাঁচিয়ে রাখার জন্য আমরা কেউ কেউ সওয়াল করছি। (মুখ্যমন্ত্রীর কাছে দুটি চিঠি প্রেরিত হয়েছে: একটিতে স্বাক্ষর করেছেন বিভিন্ন ক্ষেত্রের পনেরো জন নাগরিক, কোনও বিশেষ দলমতের সীমায় যাঁদের বেঁধে ফেলা যায় না, অন্য চিঠিটি আমাকে অমর্ত্য সেনের লেখা, যেখানে তিনি আমাদের উদ্যোগকে সমর্থন জানিয়েছেন।) সরকারের কাছে পেশ করা একটি প্রস্তাব হল নির্মাণের অধিকার হস্তান্তর (ট্রান্সফার অব ডেভেলপমেন্ট রাইটস)। ব্যাপারটা এই রকম: বাড়ির মালিক সেই বাড়ির জমির দামের বিনিময়ে নির্মাণের ‘অধিকার’ বিক্রি করবেন, সেই অধিকারের জোরে অন্য জায়গায় সমমূল্যের নির্মাণকাজ করা যাবে, ফলে মূল বাড়িটি রক্ষা পাবে। এই মডেল বাস্তবে কতটা কার্যকর হবে, সেটা আগে থেকে বলা কঠিন, চেষ্টা করে দখতে হবে।

    এই উদ্যোগ নিয়ে এগোনো সহজ হয়নি। সেটা শুধু সরকারি অনাগ্রহের কারণে নয়। পশ্চিমবঙ্গ হেরিটেজ কমিশন এবং কলকাতা পুরসভার হেরিটেজ কমিটির হাতে কোনও কার্যকর ক্ষমতা নেই, কিন্তু সেটা একমাত্র বাধা নয়। যেটা বুঝে ওঠা আরও কঠিন, তা হল, এক শতাব্দীর বেশি সময় কলকাতার নাগরিকরা স্থাপত্যের যে ঐতিহ্য স্বাভাবিক উত্তরাধিকার হিসেবে জেনে এসেছেন, তার মর্ম তাঁরা উপলব্ধি করেন না এবং যে ইতিহাস এই ঐতিহ্য ও তার পরিমণ্ডল সৃষ্টি করেছিল তা থেকেও তাঁরা আশ্চর্য ভাবে বিচ্ছিন্ন। এই কারণেই আমি এই লেখার শুরুতে কিছুটা ব্যক্তিগত কথা বলেছি, যাতে আমার বাইরে-থেকে-দেখার চোখটাকে বোঝা যায়। এই ঐতিহ্য নিয়ে বাঙালির একটা বিশেষ স্মৃতিমেদুরতা আছে, বাংলা ব্যান্ডের নানা গানে বা সাম্প্রতিক নানা বাংলা চলচ্চিত্রে যার প্রকাশ ঘটেছে। এ সব সৃষ্টিতে অনেক সময়েই উত্তর কলকাতা এবং তার কোনও না কোনও পুরনো জীর্ণ বাড়িকে শহরের ‘প্রকৃত উত্তরাধিকার’ হিসেবে দেখানো হয়েছে। আমি এই ধরনের কোনও অনুভূতির শরিক নই বলেই হয়তো বাড়িগুলিকে আমার মতো করে দেখতে পারি। আমি এমন অনেককে জানি, যাঁরা এই স্থাপত্যগুলিকে বিশেষ গুরুত্বপূর্ণ বলে মনে করেন না, তাঁদের মতে কোনও বুদ্ধিমান লোকের এ-সব নিয়ে মাথা ঘামানোর কোনও কারণ নেই। কিন্তু তাঁদের চেয়েও ওই স্মৃতি-বিলাসীদের আমার আরও দূরবর্তী মনে হয়, তাঁরা যেন একটা নিরুত্তাপ অনাগ্রহে যা হচ্ছে তাকে মেনে নিয়েছেন।

    শহরের পুনরুজ্জীবনের প্রশ্নটা মূল্যবান। অর্থনৈতিক পুনরুজ্জীবনের সঙ্গে তার সংযোগ আছে, কিন্তু তার একটা স্বাতন্ত্রও আছে। যে কোনও শহরের নতুন করে সজীব হয়ে ওঠার একটা শর্ত হল এই যে, তার পরিসর, ইমারত এবং ইতিহাসকে নাগরিকরা অস্বীকার বা অগ্রাহ্য করবেন না, সেগুলি নিয়ে ভাবিত হবেন, এবং সেগুলিকে বুঝবেন, তাদের পুনর্ব্যবহার করবেন। গত দু’দশকে কলকাতা এই কাজটিতে মোটের উপর ব্যর্থ হয়েছে। কিন্তু সমস্ত বড় শহরের ইতিহাসেই এমন ব্যর্থতার নজির আছে, যে ব্যর্থতা বুঝতে পেরে তারা আবার নিজেকে নতুন করে দেখতে শেখে।

    An Open Letter On Saving Calcutta

    Author Amit Chaudhuri writes to West Bengal chief minister for saving Calcutta’s cultural ethos.

    To
    The Chief Minister,
    Government of West Bengal

    Cc: The Mayor, Kolkata
    The Commissioner, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation
    The Chief Secretary, West Bengal
    The Secretary, Information and Cultural Affairs

    Calcutta is one of the great cities of modernity, and Asia’s first cosmopolitan metropolis. Like other great modern cities, its cultural inheritance is contained not only in its literature, cinema, art, and music, or in its political and intellectual history, but palpably in its lived spaces and its architectural ethos. This ethos is remarkably distinctive, and unique to Calcutta; it includes not only the rajbari mansions of north Calcutta and the grand colonial institutional buildings of central Calcutta, but the houses in which people have lived, and still live, in various neighbourhoods in the city – Bakulbagan, Hindustan Park, Kidderpore, Paddapukur Road, Bhowanipore,Sarat Bose Road, and GangulyBagan, to name just a few. These and others areas should really be declared heritage precincts. As Esther Duflo, Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology has said, Calcutta neighbourhoods should be showcased to the world in the same way that Prague and other great cities showcase their architecture. The first reason for this is the vivid way in which the history of a unique Bengali modernity is represented by Calcutta’s buildings from the last century to the 1950s. The second reason is that, as Prof Duflo points, these buildings and precincts are the very things that will attract the international visitor to the city.

    But these houses are being torn down today at such an incredibly rapid pace and so indiscriminately – principally for the land on which they stand – that there is an urgent need to introduce measures preventing such destruction. Such measures would not be unique to Calcutta; all major cities worldwide, whether in Europe (Berlin, London, Paris), Latin America, or North America, have laws that forbid the destruction of existing buildings. Nor would they necessarily oppose new developments; such developments can and will take place in areas that can accommodate them, as Calcutta expands. Moreover, a home owner has a fundamental right to sell their property; but neither buyer nor seller should, ideally, have the right to demolish existing buildings, since these add up to a city’s collective inheritance and history. While there is a process in place to do with changing the name of a street, which acknowledges the right that people have to object to the name-change, there are no real guidelines to, and hardly any accountability regarding, demolition, and it appears that the character of the neighbourhood or para can be destroyed with impunity. Measures protecting not just heritage but both the cultural individuality and the multifariousness of the city as represented by its architecture are now long overdue in Calcutta; their introduction would show an unprecedented commitment to re-engage with this great city’s identity and history. We believe that such an act of commitment is now unavoidable. There are some immediate measures that the government should adopt without delay.

    The West Bengal Heritage Commission and the KMC Heritage Committee unfortunately lack teeth. They should be empowered so that they can make urgent, tangible contributions, and also encouraged to work in consonance with each other.
    The list of heritage buildings should be urgently and substantially extended.
    Various neighbourhoods should be declared heritage zones or precincts, and criteria should be swiftly established for doing so.

    In this context, one of the most practical solutions towards protection would be the one suggested by the architect Partha Ranjan Das: to introduce Transfer of Development Rights, whereby owners of buildings are allowed to sell the equivalent of land value to ‘developers’, who can then use those rights to extend new properties being built elsewhere. In this way, the great buildings and neighbourhoods will continue to survive. Moreover, Transfer of Development Rights costs the government nothing, and, in fact, will earn it considerable revenue. We urge the government to see this not as a marginal issue, but as one that’s central to the city’s history and to its future, and to act without delay.

    Yours sincerely,

    Amit Chaudhuri, novelist and Professor of Contemporary Literature, University of East Anglia
    and, in alphabetical order,

    Pranab Bardhan, Professor of Graduate School, Department of Economics, University of California at Berkeley
    Kaushik Basu, Chief Economist, World Bank, and Professor of Economics and C Marks Professor, Cornell University
    Sugata Bose MP, Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs, Harvard University
    Jogen Chowdhury, MP, artist
    Partha Ranjan Das, architect
    Esther Duflo, Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    Bonani Kakkar, President, People United for Better Living in Calcutta (PUBLIC)
    G.M.Kapur, State Convenor, The Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH)
    Anuradha Lohia, Professor of Biochemistry, Bose Institute, and Vice Chancellor, Presidency University
    Chittrovanu Majumdar, artist
    Aparna Sen, film director
    Sujata Sen, member, West Bengal Heritage Commission
    Dayanita Singh, photographer
    Jawhar Sircar, Director, Prasar Bharati

    Letter of support from Prof. Amartya Sen:

    Letter to Amit Chaudhuri

    'অমর্ত্য সেনের ভাষায় বললে, শৈলীটি ‘খ্যাপাটে’ এবং সুন্দর, আর তা পুরোপুরি বাঙালি মধ্যবিত্তের নিজের' – @AmitChaudhuri pic.twitter.com/g5yOjvjpKi

    — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) June 29, 2015

26. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৯ জুন ২০১৫ (৬:১১ অপরাহ্ণ)

    ‘I Will Dare to Criticize Anyone for Anything That is Against the Law’

    Kyaw Zwa Moe: Welcome to our weekly Dateline Irrawaddy program. This week, I have invited U Tin Aye, chairman of the Union Election Commission (UEC). He will discuss whether the forthcoming election will be credible and whether or not he will take sides as his former party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), seeks his favor. I am editor of The Irrawaddy’s English edition, Kyaw Zwa Moe.

    Mr Chairman, looking at the elections after 1988, it’s fair to say that most of them were not trusted. For example, the results of the 1990 election were not recognized. The 2010 election were deemed to be flawed by voting irregularities. But then, the 2012 by-election you organized was given a certain degree of credit from voters at home and abroad, although the number of constituencies was small. What will you do to make sure the forthcoming 2015 election receives the same degree of credit and recognition that the 2012 by-election was given? And what are your challenges as chairman?

    Tin Aye: Myanmar has a very limited knowledge and experience of election. There were only four elections—in 1952, 1956, 1960 and 1990—before the 2010 election. The 2010 election is the fifth election and took place 20 years after the fourth one. To judge the previous elections with my personal norms for an ideal election, they are not ones that elected outstanding and morally good people to represent the people. The first three elections took place in periods of anarchism. In the 1990 election, people cast their votes for a party because they did not like the other. And in the 2010 election, there was essentially only one party. It was backed by the previous government and therefore it has lots of handicaps. To put an example using golf terms, while those people [minor opposition parties] have zero handicap; the ruling party’s handicap was even more than 24—it is 36. But, I was also a member of the ruling party then. I will tell you about this later. You asked me how I as the chairman better organized the 2012 by-election based on past experiences. To answer your question, I reviewed the mistakes—there were both right and wrong things—I will correct the mistakes and keep, doing more to make sure the right things are better and more relevant.

    KZM: So, Mr Chairman, do you hope the forthcoming 2015 election will as credible or even more credible than the 2012 by-election?

    TA: Sure, it must be. Where the 2012 by-election was different from 2010 election was widespread advanced voting [in 2010]. Some did not know what it was. Some knew it was against the law, but even so they did it to win the election. I have records in my hands about how many individuals from which parties won the election with how many advance votes there were. Some won the election because they got more than 10,000 advance votes. They would not have won if they only got several thousands of advance votes. I have the records in my hands.

    KZM: The [2010] election got a bad reputation for advance votes at home and abroad.

    TA: Yes, it did.

    KZM: How will you prevent such things in 2015?

    TA: I have prevented it since the 2012 by-election. Speaking of advance votes, I should really thank my seniors. I would say they are far-sighted because advance voting makes sure voters do not lose their rights. There are two kinds of advance votes. One is for constituents in a constituency. It can be given by those who will be traveling on voting day and the elderly and ill persons who cannot go to polling stations to cast vote. The ward-level chapters of UEC go to their places, even if they are behind bars or in hospitals, and take their ballots in envelopes. This is how advance votes are cast in constituencies. They use advance voting.

    When we get those advance votes in our hands, we have to make a list of those who cast advance votes. We have a form to record those who cast advance votes. Then we have to hand over the boxes of advance ballots before 6 am when polling stations are opened. Advance votes that are handed in after 6 am are invalid. I have instructed that when the polling stations are closed in the evening, the advance votes must be counted first and the list must be hung in the wall of the polling station because I fear that there will be voting irregularities taking advantage of advance votes. For example, there are 100 advance votes and the list of how many votes go to who is hung in the wall and therefore there can’t be cheating.

    KZM: You said they manipulated advance voting. You mean the Union Solidarity and Development Party manipulated advance voting.

    TA: Mostly.

    KZM: Mr Chairman, you were elected to the parliament for the USDP. Is the party happy with your actions at this time?

    TA: It is a matter for them. Allow me to blow my own trumpet a little bit. If those in power complain me on such cases [regarding advance voting], I will call them and discuss it in line with the truth and the law. I won’t make any compromises with anyone over anything that is supposed to discourage a free and fair election. I will dare to criticize anyone for anything that is against the law. If I did something wrong, I would not be hesitant to apologize and I would not be hesitant to be punished. If I did something wrong, just box my ears. I don’t mind. So they don’t like me. They do want me to favor them. They don’t like me as I’m not biased. You would ask me what I would do if somebody in power put pressure on returning officers. I have issued an instruction. I have told them that advance votes that arrive at polling stations later than 6 am are invalid and I would imprison them if they accept the advance votes that arrive after 6 am. So, I have issued a notice that they would be put behind bars if they accept such advance votes.

    KZM: So, this relationship is one of the challenges?

    TA: In the past, they might have had some pressure. But now they do not need to fear anything. I have given them books on election law and bylaws and asked them to read them. I will conduct training soon and there I will carefully teach them about the must knows, dos and don’ts. I will tell them they must do what they have to do and if they don’t, they will be imprisoned.

    KZM: But then, people remain doubtful that the election will be free and fair. Frankly speaking, you are an ex-army man and you have a military background. And there are errors on voter lists [which have been made public for the coming election]. There are doubts as to whether the election will be held in unstable ethnic regions. Generally speaking, the majority of voters and people doubt that the election will be free and fair. This doubt is considerable. Through this interview, what guarantee would you like to give to dispel their doubts?

    TA: I served as a Lt-Gen in the military. I was also a member of Union Solidarity and Development Party. I served as a patron of Union Solidarity and Development Association (former USDP). It was established in 1993 and I was not a member then because I was just a tactical commander with the military at that time. After two years I became a division commander, and I became a patron of USDA when I became a commander in 1997. As a patron, I did not need to engage actively in its activities. Those activities were organized by the central executive committee of the association and we had to help those activities be successful. Then, the association transformed itself into a [political] party. I became a member after August 2010 after the election was announced. I joined the party [on my superiors’ orders] for election as I was due to retire from the military. Then I had to quit from the party [to chair the UEC] in March 2011, so I was in the party for just eight months. Ok, just leave it. People may doubt the credibility of coming election because I am an ex-army man. I don’t want to say they should or should not doubt me. The winner will say the election is fair and the loser will say it is not. So, taking this into consideration, I invited civil society organizations, thinking that it would be better if there are witnesses.
    CSOs understand election laws as they have given voter education and I asked them to check if or not my proceedings are in line with law. And I also invited international observers. There are two types of observers. Short-term observers come three or four days before voting day and go back two or three days after voting day. Long-term observers come on announcement of the date for voting day. Now, the Carter Center has been here for around one month and a half or two months and made a physical survey. As soon as I announce the election day, the center will send its team of observers who will monitor different areas. Observers will monitor nomination of candidates, their validity, election campaign, what our commissions do, how we count votes, how we will investigate allegations of fraud and how candidates enter the parliament. We have signed a memorandum of understanding with them. I allow them to stay in the country from the day they arrive in the country until the elected candidates sworn in and become parliamentarians. I assure you I will do the best. I know that people don’t believe the election will be free and fair. I will organize the election with witnesses. And if you still don’t believe me, I have no idea. I will do my best. Everyone is keeping an eye on me. How can I cheat?

    KZM: Mr Chairman, you know better than me that globally, it can’t be said an election is free and fair just because it is free on election day alone. In our country, we have to take rules and regulations, laws and even the constitution into account. Looking at the constitution, certain provisions do not meet democratic norms. Can the election be fair under such a constitution even if it is free on election day?

    TA: You are right if you measure it with true democratic norms. I share your view. I entered a fierce war of words with [the late founder of the National League of Democracy] U Win Tin on publications regarding instructions on the election campaign which I issued in 2014. He said the rules and regulations of electoral campaigning are too restrictive. I denied it, citing specific provisions in existing laws and constitutions. You may think the UEC is too restrictive. So opposition parties are not happy. But then, I did this in line with the law, I would say.

    ‘I Want the USDP to Win, but to Win Fairly’
    
    Kyaw Zwa Moe: Welcome to our weekly Dateline Irrawaddy program. In this week’s edition, we will continue our discussion with U Tin Aye chairman of the Union Election Commission (UEC). We will ask if he intended to be threatening or had other intentions by saying that the military may seize power, what measures he has taken to guarantee the transfer of power to the opposition party if it wins the coming election, and if he wants his former party to win the election after admitting he still has an attachment to the party. I am Kyaw Zwa Moe, editor of The Irrawaddy’s English edition.

    Mr Chairman, as everyone knows you have been criticized for your military background. But then, I am more interested in and inclined to pay more attention to what you say and do as the chairman of the UEC. Last year, you said that the military may seize power if there was instability in the country. Perhaps, you said it because you were worried. But then, at the same time, some viewed it as a threat.

    Tin Aye: Yes, they did.

    KZM: So, as the chairman of the UEC, don’t you think words that reflect military could damage the credibility of the chairman of the UEC?

    TA: Every man has his own agenda. As you said, what I said is viewed as a threat and I am looked down upon [because of my military background]. I don’t blame those who criticize me. I did not mean to threaten; I said so because I do not wish it to happen. I joined the military in 1963 and passed the time under the socialism of the Revolutionary Council, and then the State Law and Order Restoration Council and State Peace and Development Council, and the country has lagged behind in its development.

    The country has practiced self-imposed isolation since the socialist period. There are five strengths [according to Myanmar customs] and one of the strengths is having friends. You know that Bangladesh, Laos, and Cambodia were lagged behind us [in the past]. But now, they are developed. How have they become developed? With the help of grants, aid and loans. I am full of bitter experiences in my mind and in my heart. This makes me afraid that the military might need to seize power again. The military intervenes when there is disorder and instability. It needs not to intervene when the country is stable and peaceful.

    The military seizes power because the country is in chaos. It never seizes power when the country is peaceful. You may point out the 1962 coup. That was because of the weakness of 1947 constitution. The military seized power, giving the excuse that [ethnic regions] could cede from the country [according to constitution]. History will decide whether their reasons were right or wrong. If there is a certain weak point, for example in the constitution or if the country is unstable, the military may seize power for fear that the Union may break up. The military may seize power when there is instability, like if the country is in chaos or a state of anarchy and faced with rampant killings, or foreign fleets enter Myanmar’s territorial waters.
    But then, the country has suffered a lot from coups. There were sanctions. The country lagged behind in all aspects. It lagged behind very seriously. People say it is all because the military staged the coup. Because of the coup. Because of the coup. Because of the coup. Because of the coup. Yes, they are right, it is a consequence of the coup. Why wasn’t action taken to make sure the military did not stage a coup?

    I did not mean to threaten. Based on my 47 years of experience [in the military], the military did not seize power because it wanted to, but because there was instability. I have said this time and again. We were blamed for 1988 coup. There was no rule of law, there were cases of beheadings, the administrative mechanisms had fallen apart, and there were fights at border posts that time and the US naval fleets [entered Myanmar’s territorial waters]. Under such circumstances, what would have happened had the military not seized power and just stood by?

    Think about it. Should the military be blamed? Even if you don’t blame the military, foreign countries may blame it. The international community does not like it. I know that. It was not that the military seized power because it wanted to, but because it was inevitable. But then, as a result, the country suffered.

    KZM: People suffered the brunt of it.

    TA: People suffered. That’s why I say [don’t try to create instability] because I do not want to go through this experience again.

    KZM: Apart from the instability factor, in a recent interview, you said that if an opposition party won in the coming election, power may not be transferred to it or it may eventually lead to a coup.

    TA: If that’s what you thought, you misunderstood. I said power must be transferred, it is a must. It must be transferred.

    KZM: It was reported as such. But anyway, is there the potential for a coup? Because we see now that the military, government and election commission are working in harmony. I think the military must have given a guarantee.

    TA: As the military has provided a guarantee, so has the government, I think. This is my personal view. I don’t know if they are craftily playing tricks. But then, I believe we are on the same boat. If they do so, there will be a big impact and the country will be in trouble. I dare to persuade them and I would urge them [to not stage a coup] and to listen to my decision. What I want is—today, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) is the ruling party and it must be the best opposition party if it lost the election.

    KZM: Critics would point to the 1990 elections [whose results were nullified by the then government]—

    TA: No. No. I want to deny that comparison. I want to deny it. The national convention was convened for 1992, 1993. The National League for Democracy (NLD) should have acted shrewdly and attended the convention and gone along with the constitution no matter what was written in it. In fact, the constitution was the step for the transfer of power. If the government at the time said the election would be held only after the constitution is drafted, so it should have been. The NLD could have contested again. No other party would have been able to win that election. If they said they would change the constitution again after it won that election, no one would have been able to stop it. It was not clever.

    KZM: So, the party that won in 1990 was not shrewd?

    TA: That’s right. That is how I assess it. You can blame the government of the time if it did not transfer power while the constitution was in place. But, don’t blame them if there was no constitution. The government was to transfer power after the constitution was drafted. [Aung San Suu Kyi] was arrested. The previous government met and held talks with her, and released and chaperoned her around the country [to view development projects] as a VIP. We had to discuss with her a lot of things and finally decided we could do no more and left it. We drafted the constitution and released her just after the emergence of the constitution. This is how we passed those days. These are my views. The other side may have their own views. I have no comment about their views. In my view, the previous government had reasons for the things it did in those days.

    KZM: What legal action will the UEC take under the election law against electoral campaigning or encouraging people to vote for a particular party? Recently, some religious organizations spoke indirectly of doing so.

    TA: That case is very delicate. I don’t want to talk about it. It is a complicated issue. I asked them not to do it. They can do it according to the law. They can’t do what the law does not allow. But if they do and complaint is sent against them, I will check if it is against the law. I will take action if it is against the law. But then, it is best if they don’t.

    KZM: I hear that you will retire when your current term expires. Is that true? If you will retire, what legacy would you like to leave for the commission? The difference between the 1990 election commission and your commission is that the former was made of personalities like U Ba Htay, Saya Che, and U Saw Kyar Doe, while ex-military officials are the current incarnation. What legacy would you like to leave for your country [through the election commission]?

    TA: I will surely retire. I very much cherish my job. This is a very good job for the country. I think a courageous man who dares to speak out is needed for this position. I would like to take the lead role. If I can’t, I would like to be a follower. I don’t like armchair critics at all. I am different from others. Highlighting too many follies is harming oneself. If those who criticize me said they could replace me, I would quit. I am that fed up. But then, groups that are working in cooperation with me say that I can’t quit.

    I will quit when my term expires after the election. But I don’t say this because I want to postpone my retirement, I have to take care of the election results and report to the parliament. And, I want to amend some laws. Some people, when they come to parliament, ask me if I don’t want to amend any law as laws are being amended now. And I said no. A law should be exercised for a term so that it can be assessed and I will introduce changes to it for the next term. So, I will hand over my amendments when I retire. I will retire from UEC chairmanship after I transfer the duty.

    As to your question of what legacy I would like to leave, I want to talk about the essence of elections. Elections are crucially important. They need to turn out outstanding and virtuous people. It is important that outstanding and virtuous people get into the parliament and serve the country. I will discuss this with people so that they understand its importance. Secondly, political parties are very important. They have to constantly improve their capacity. They have to serve the country when they come into power. The opposition party should not disturb but cooperate. I want to instill this concept. I want my commission to be a strong, firm institution. This is my wish. I don’t know how much it can be achieved, but I am working toward that end.

    KZM: Are you ready to take any bigger role assigned by the government or have you thought of re-engaging with politics after you retire?

    TA: I won’t unless the situation requires. I would not leave irresponsibly, but anyway I would retire. Bogyoke Aung San said that he would stand by and laugh at his comrades’ arguments after the country gained its independence. I would not laugh, but I would stand by and watch. I will copy Bogyoke Aung San’s words because I like them. After the coming election, I will stand by and watch. But then, I may have to take a part if the situation requires. Unless the situation requires, I would not take any role.

    KZM: My final question is, you were a member of the USDP and elected to the parliament to represent it before you became the chairman. Do you wish for the USDP to win in the coming election?

    TA: As a chairman, I am not supposed to have attachment to the party. It would not be wise. I have and attachment, but I don’t put it at the forefront of my mind. The decision of the people is most important. Anyway, attachment is the origin of a patriotic spirit. If you say you don’t love your organization, I would say you don’t have patriotic spirit. I am speaking the truth. I love it. I love the country. I love my organization. I love the military. I am willing to sacrifice my life for them.

    I love my organization. But I don’t accept wrongdoing. I want the USDP to win, but to win fairly, not by cheating. As a chairman, I would say that you should never ever think I would help you to win. You ask me if I want it to win, it will win if it deserves it. What can we do? But I will make sure they do not win by cheating. I have said again and again that it is better to lose fairly than to win by cheating. I don’t want that at all. I have an attachment to the party. They are my friends, my colleagues who I have known for 20 or 30 years. They are my close friends. I love them. I am willing to help them anytime for personal matters. But if they ask me help them to win the election, I would say ‘sorry.’

27. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ৩০ জুন ২০১৫ (৮:০২ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    ১৭ বছরে বস্তিবাসী বেড়েছে ৮ লাখ

    বাংলাদেশে নগরে থেকেও নাগরিক সুবিধাবঞ্চিত হয়ে বসবাসরত মানুষের সংখ্যা ১৭ বছরে আট লাখ বেড়েছে।

    বস্তিবাসী ও ভাসমান লোক গণনায় ২০১৪ সালে বাংলাদেশ পরিসংখ্যান ব্যুরোর (বিবিএস) চালানো শুমারির ফলাফলে এই চিত্র দেখা গেছে।

    সোমবার এই জরিপের ফল প্রকাশ করা হয়েছে। এটি ছিল তৃতীয় ‘বস্তি শুমারি ও ভাসমান লোক গণনা’ জরিপ। এর আগে ১৯৯৭ সালে একই ধরনের জরিপ চালানো হয়েছিল।

    সোমবার প্রকাশিত শুমারির ফলাফলে দেখা যায়, সারাদেশে ২২ লাখ ৩২ হাজার লোক বস্তিতে বাস করেন। এর মধ্যে প্রায় ১১ লাখ ৪৪ হাজার পুরুষ, ১০ লাখ ৮৬ হাজার নারী এবং ১ হাজার ৮৫২ জন হিজড়া।

    ১৯৯৭ সালে দ্বিতীয় বস্তি শুমারিতে বস্তিবাসীর সংখ্যা পাওয়া গিয়েছিল ১৩ লাখ ৯১ হাজার ৪৫৮ জন। সে হিসাবে ১৭ বছরে দেশে বস্তিতে বসবাসকারী মানুষের সংখ্যা বেড়েছে ৮ লাখ ৪০ হাজার ৬৫৬ জন।

    নদী ভাঙনসহ নানা কারণে জীবিকার সন্ধানে সারাদেশ থেকে মানুষ ছুটে আসে নগরে, যাদের বড় একটি অংশ বস্তিতে আশ্রয় নেয়। বস্তিতে গাদাগাদি করে অস্বাস্থ্যকর পরিবেশে বাস করতে হয়।

    এই জরিপের প্রকল্প পরিচালক মোহাম্মদ জাফর আহাম্মদ খান বস্তির বৈশিষ্ট্য সম্পর্কে বলেন, জনসংখ্যার ঘনত্ব বেশি, এক রুমে খানার ৫ বা ততধিক লোক একসঙ্গে বাস করে, সরকারি বা আধা সরকারি জমিতে অস্বাস্থ্যকর পরিবেশে ছোট ঘর, টং, ছই, টিনের ঘর, আধাপাকা ভবন বা জরাজীর্ণ দালানে বসবাসকারী মানুষকেই বস্তিবাসী হিসেবে গণনা করা হয়েছে।

    শুমারি থেকে প্রাপ্ত ফলাফল তুলে ধরার সময় জাফরের সঙ্গে বিবিএস সচিব কানিজ ফাতেমা ও বিবিএস মহা-পরিচালক মোহাম্মদ আব্দুল ওয়াজেদসহ কর্মকর্তারা উপস্থিত ছিলেন।

    ২০১৪ সালের ২৫ এপ্রিল থেকে ২ মে এক সপ্তাহ ধরে বস্তিতে শুমারি পরিচালনা করে বিবিএস। ১৯৯৭ সালের আগে ১৯৮৫ সালে বাংলাদেশে প্রথম বস্তি শুমারি হয়েছিল।

    প্রতিবেদনে বলা হয়, ঢাকা বিভাগে সবচেয়ে বেশি ১০ লাখ ৬২ হাজার ২৮৪ জন লোক বস্তিতে বাস করেন। দ্বিতীয় অবস্থানে রয়েছে চট্টগ্রাম, এ বিভাগে আছে ৬ লাখ ৩৫ হাজার ৯১৬ জন।

    খুলনায় ১ লাখ ৭২ হাজার ২১৯ জন, রাজশাহীতে ১ লাখ ২০ হাজার ৩৬ জন, রংপুরে ১ লাখ ১৮ হাজার ৬২৮ জন, সিলেট বিভাগে ৯১ হাজার ৬৩০ জন এবং বরিশাল বিভাগে ৪৯ হাজার ৪০১ জন লোক বস্তিতে বাস করেন।

    বস্তিবাসীদের মধ্যে ৬৪ দশমিক ৮৭ ভাগ ভাড়া দিয়ে থাকেন। ২৭ দশমিক ২৫ ভাগ মালিক এবং ৬ দশমিক ৯৯ ভাগ থাকেন ভাড়া ছাড়া।

    বস্তিবাসীর মধ্যে ৮৯ দশমিক ৬৫ শতাংশ বিদ্যুতের সুবিধা পান বলে বিবিএসের শুমারিতে উঠে এসেছে। কেরোসিন দিয়ে আলো ব্যবহার করেন ৯ দশমিক ৭০ শতাংশ এবং শূন্য দশমিক ৩৩ শতাংশ সৌর বিদ্যুৎ ব্যবহার করেন।

    বস্তিতে বসবাসকারীদের মধ্যে ৫২ দশমিক ৪৮ শতাংশ টিউবওয়েলের এবং ৪৫ দশমিক ২১ শতাংশ কলের পানি পান করেন।

    মোট বস্তিবাসীর ৪২ দশমিক ১৯ ভাগ অস্বাস্থ্যকর টয়লেট ব্যবহার করেন বলে শুমারিতে উঠে এসেছে। ২৬ দশমিক ২৫ শতাংশ স্যানিটারি টয়লেট ব্যবহার করেন। ২১ দশমিক ১০ ভাগ টিনের টয়লেট এবং ৮ দশমিক ৬৩ ভাগ ঝুলন্ত ও কাঁচা টয়লেট ব্যবহার করেন।

    প্রতিবেদনে বলা হয়, বস্তিবাসীদের ৫০ দশমিক ৯৬ ভাগ নগরে আসেন চাকরির সন্ধানে। দারিদ্র্যের কারণে আসেন ২৮ দশমিক ৭৬ ভাগ। নদী ভাঙনের কবলে পড়ে আসার হার ৭ দশমিক শূন্য ৪ শতাংশ।

    প্রকল্প পরিচালক জাফর আহাম্মদ বলেন, সারাদেশের বস্তিবাসীর মধ্যে গড়ে ৩৩ দশমিক ২৬ শতাংশ লোকের স্বাক্ষরজ্ঞান রয়েছে।

    এর মধ্যে সবচেয়ে স্বাক্ষরজ্ঞান সম্পন্ন লোক রয়েছে বরিশালে। ওই বিভাগের ৪৯ শতাংশ বস্তিবাসীর স্বাক্ষরজ্ঞান রয়েছে। এর পর রয়েছে রংপুরে ৪৩ শতাংশ। খুলনা বিভাগের বস্তিবাসীর মধ্যে স্বাক্ষর জ্ঞান রয়েছে ৩৮ দশমিক ৫৪ শতাংশের। চট্টগ্রাম বিভাগের ৩৪ দশমিক ৮১ শতাংশ, ঢাকা বিভাগের ৩০ দশমিক ১৩ শতাংশ এবং সিলেট বিভাগের ২৬ দশমিক ১১ শতাংশ বস্তিবাসী স্বাক্ষরজ্ঞান সম্পন্ন।

    সারাদেশের বস্তিবাসীর মধ্যে ৮৪ দশমিক শূন্য ৭ ভাগ ভূমিহীন, ১৫ দশমিক ৯৩ শতাংশ জমির মালিক।

    বস্তিবাসীর মধ্যে ৯২ দশমিক ৬৬ শতাংশ মুসলিম, ৬ দশমিক ৭৩ ভাগ হিন্দু রয়েছে।

    বস্তিতে বসবাসকারীদের মধ্যে সবচেয় বেশি ১৭ দশমিক ৮৮ শতাংশ গৃহবধূ। ১৩ দশমিক ৩৩ ভাগ ছাত্র, গার্মেন্টসকর্মী ১৩ দশমিক ১৮ ভাগ, ব্যবসায়ী ৭ দশমিক ৫৮ ভাগ, রিকশাচালক ৬ দশমিক ৯২ ভাগ, চাকরীজীবী ৬ দশমিক ৭১ ভাগ এবং ৬ দশমিক ৪১ ভাগ গৃহকর্মী।

    ২৯ শতাংশ ধূমপায়ী

    বাংলাদেশের ২৯ দশমিক ৫৮ ভাগ মানুষ ধূমপান করেন। এর মধ্যে ৩৮ দশমিক ৬৫ ভাগ পুরুষ এবং ২০ দশমিক ৪৪ ভাগ নারী।

    সোমবার বিবিএসের ‘হেলথ এন্ড মরবিডিক স্ট্যাটাস সার্ভে ২০১৪’ শীর্ষক জরিপের ফলাফলে এ তথ্য জানানো হয়। ‘বস্তি শুমারি ও ভাসমান লোক গণনা’ শুমারির পাশাপাশি এই জরিপ চালানো হয়।

    প্রকল্প পরিচালক জাফর আহাম্মদ বলেন, দেশের ১১ দশমিক ৮৬ শতাংশ লোক মদ পান করে। গাঁজা সেবন করে শূন্য দশমিক ৩১ ভাগ মানুষ। শূন্য দশমিক শূন্য ২ শতাংশ লোক ফেনসিডিল পান করে। হেরোইন ও ইয়াবা সেবী শূন্য দশমিক ১ শতাংশ।

28. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ৩০ জুন ২০১৫ (১০:২২ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    ‘গ্রিক্সিট’ শঙ্কা থেকে ধস শেয়ারে, উদ্বেগ বিশ্ব জুড়ে

    ‘গ্রিক্সিট’ বা ইউরোপিয়ান ইউনিয়নের ইউরো ভিত্তিক মুদ্রা ব্যবস্হা থেকে গ্রিস বেরিয়ে যেতে পারে, এই আশঙ্কা থেকে সোমবার ধস নামল ইউরোপ, এশিয়ার শেয়ার বাজারে৷‌ সেনসে‘ও এক ধাক্কায় নেমে গিয়েছিল প্রায় ৬০০ পয়েন্ট৷‌ যদিও পরে তা কিছুটা ঘুরে দাঁড়ায়৷‌ গ্রিসের ক্রমবর্ধমান দেনা, ঋণ শোধের অক্ষমতা থেকে তৈরি হওয়া আর্থিক সঙ্কট এসে দাঁড়িয়েছে বিস্ফোরণের আগের মুহূর্তে৷‌ মঙ্গলবার গ্রিসের জন্য আই এম এফ এবং ইউরোপিয়ান সেন্ট্রাল ব্যাঙ্ক থেকে নেওয়া ১৬০ কোটি ইউরো শোধ করার শেষ দিন৷‌ কিন্তু ধার মেটানো দূরস্হান, স্বাভাবিক কাজকর্ম চালিয়ে যেতে আরও ঋণের আবেদন করেছে গ্রিসের আলেক্সি সিপ্রাসের সরকার৷‌ ঋণদাতা আই এম এফ এবং ইউরোপিয়ান ইউনিয়নের অর্থমন্ত্রীরা পুরোপুরি বেঁকে না বসলেও আরোপ করতে চাইছেন কড়া শর্ত৷‌ কিন্তু মানতে নারাজ সিপ্রাস৷‌ এই শর্ত মানা হবে কীনা ঠিক করার জন্য আগামী রবিবার, ৫ জুলাই তিনি গণভোটের ডাক দিয়েছেন৷‌ ১৯৭৪ সালে গণভোটের মাধ্যমে রাজতন্ত্রের অবসানের পর প্রথম৷‌ বামপম্হী সিপ্রাসের চালে অসন্তুষ্ট ঋণদাতারা৷‌ গ্রিসে আর্থিক ব্যবস্হা চালু রাখতে যে পরিমাণ অর্থ দিচ্ছিলেন তা এক ধাক্কায় কমিয়ে দিয়েছেন তাঁরা৷‌ সঙ্কট আঁচ করে গ্রিসের বাসিন্দারা গত কয়েকদিন ধরেই ব্যাঙ্ক থেকে জমানো অর্থ তুলে নিচ্ছিলেন৷‌ অবস্হা আরও খারাপ হতে পারে আঁচ করে সিপ্রাস এক ডিক্রি জারি করে আগামী সোমবার পর্যন্ত ব্যাঙ্ক বন্ধ রাখার নির্দেশ দিয়েছেন৷‌ এ টি এম থেকেও কার্ডপিছু দিনে ৬০ ইউরোর বেশি তোলা যাবে না বলে জানানো হয়েছে৷‌ যেটুকু অর্থ তোলা যায় তার জন্য তৈরি হয়েছে লম্বা লাইন৷‌ ‘টাকা নেই, আশা নেই! কী করে আমরা এই অবস্হায় এলাম? এ তো কালো সোমবার!’ বেকার ক্রিস বাকাস বলছিলেন সাংবাদিকদের৷‌

    শুধু গ্রিসের বাসিন্দাদের জন্য নয়, কালো সোমবার বিশ্ব আর্থিক ব্যবস্হার পক্ষেও৷‌ আগামী রবিবার গণভোটে গ্রিস যদি ঋণদাতাদের শর্ত না মানার পক্ষে রায় দেয় তাহলে সেটা হবে ইউরোজোন থেকে গ্রিসের কার্যত বেরিয়ে যাওয়ার সমান৷‌ আর তা বিরাট ধাক্কা দেবে ইউরোপিয়ান ইউনিয়নের এক মুদ্রা ভিত্তিক আর্থিক ব্যবস্হাকে, ধুঁকতে থাকা বিশ্ব অর্থনীতিকে৷‌ এই আশঙ্কা থেকেই এদিন লন্ডনে শেয়ার বাজারের প্রায় ২শতাংশ পতন হয়৷‌ ৪শতাংশ পড়ে যায় ফ্রান্স এবং জার্মানির বাজার৷‌ ইউরোপে ব্যাঙ্কিং শেয়ারগুলির পতনই সবচেয়ে বেশি হয়, প্রায় ১০শতাংশ৷‌ এছাড়া টোকিওর নিক্কেই সূচক ৩শতাংশ এবং হংকংয়ের শেয়ার বাজার ২.৫শতাংশ পড়ে যায়৷‌ মুম্বইয়ের সেনসে‘ প্রথমে প্রায় ৬০০ পয়েন্ট পড়ে গেলেও পরে দেশি বিনিয়োগকারীদের দৌলতে কিছুটা মাথা তুলে দাঁড়ায়৷‌ দিনের শেষে সেনসে‘ কমেছে প্রায় ১৬৭ পয়েন্ট৷‌ ইউরোপে এই সঙ্কটের ফলে দেশ থেকে বেরিয়ে যেতে পারে প্রচুর বিদেশি মুদ্রা৷‌ কেন্দ্র রিজার্ভ ব্যাঙ্ককে এ ব্যাপারে বিশেষ নজর রাখতে বলেছে৷‌ এছাড়া আমাদের ইঞ্জিনিয়ারিং রপ্তানির একটা বড় অংশের ক্রেতা ইউরোপ৷‌ তাই ধাক্কা খেতে পারে ইঞ্জিনিয়ারিং, সফটওয়্যার রপ্তানিও৷‌

    সোমবার শেয়ার বাজারে প্রভাব পড়লেও এই গ্রিক ট্রাজেডির সূচনা কিন্তু দেড় দশক আগে৷‌ ইউরোপীয় ইউনিয়নের অর্থনৈতিক নির্দেশিকা মানতে না পারায় ১৯৯৯ সালে ইউরোজোনে ঢুকতে পারেনি গ্রিস৷‌ ২০০১ সালে এথেন্স যোগ দেয় সেখানে৷‌ তারপর থেকেই শুরু হয় জার্মানি, ফ্রান্সের মতো দেশ এবং সংস্কারপম্হী অর্থনীতিবিদদের মাতব্বরি৷‌ ২০১০ সালে চালু হয় কড়া ব্যয়সঙ্কোচ ব্যবস্হা৷‌ সরকারি ক্ষেত্রে বেতনবৃদ্ধি বন্ধ করে দেওয়া হয়্ব সিগারেট, জ্বালানির ওপর চড়া হারে কর চাপে৷‌ প্রতিবাদে গ্রিসে শুরু হয়ে যায় দাঙ্গা৷‌ রাজনৈতিক ডামাডোলের মধ্যে দিয়েই চলতে চলতে ২০১৫ সালের জানুয়ারিতে ক্ষমতায় আসে বামপম্হী দল সাইরিজা৷‌ প্রধানমন্ত্রী হন সিপ্রাস৷‌ সংস্কারপম্হী পণ্ডিতমশাইরা তখনই আশঙ্কা করেছিলেন, এবার গ্রিস আমাদের দাওয়াই মানবে তো? বাস্তবে সেটাই হতে চলেছে এবার৷‌ এর আগে ৪ জুন ঋণের কিস্তি শোধ করতে ব্যর্থ হয় গ্রিস৷‌ বলে, ৩০ জুন সব একেবারে মিটিয়ে দেব৷‌ কিন্তু তা নিয়েই সমস্যা৷‌ আরও ঋণ দেওয়ার শর্ত হিসেবে সরকারি খরচে বিরাট কাটছাঁটের শর্ত চাপানো হয়েছিল গ্রিসের ওপর৷‌ এমনকী পেনশন ব্যবস্হা তুলে দেওয়ার সুপারিশ করা হয়েছিল৷‌ বিভিন্ন পণ্যে করের হারও অনেক বাড়ানোর কথা বলা হয়েছিল৷‌ এই নিয়ে দীর্ঘ আলোচনা চলেছে৷‌ সিপ্রাস প্রথম থেকেই এমন শর্তের বিরোধী ছিলেন৷‌ বলেছিলেন, এমনিতেই তীব্র আর্থিক সঙ্কটে ভুগছে দেশ, এক-চতুর্থাংশ বেকার৷‌ এরপরে এমন শর্ত চাপালে তা মরার ওপর খাঁড়ার ঘা হয়ে যাবে৷‌ এ তো আমাদের ব্ল্যাকমেল করার সমান৷‌ কিন্তু মানতে চাননি ঋণদাতারা৷‌ পাল্টা চাল হিসেবে আলোচনা বন্ধ করে দিয়ে গণভোট ডেকে দিয়েছেন প্রধানমন্ত্রী৷‌ তাঁর এই চালে ঢিঢি পড়েছে বিশ্ব জুড়ে৷‌ প্রেসিডেন্ট বারাক ওবামা জার্মানির চ্যান্সেলর অ্যাঙ্গোলা মর্কেলেকে ফোন করছেন তো, মার্কিন অর্থ সচিব জ্যাক লিউ ফোন করছেন সিপ্রাসকে৷‌ আতান্তরে পড়েছেন ফ্রান্সের সোশ্যালিস্ট প্রেসিডেন্ট ফ্রাসোয়া ওঁলাদ৷‌ তাঁর হয়েছে সাপের ছুচো গেলার সমস্যা৷‌ বিপদ দেখে ওঁলাদ আর মর্কেল দুজনেই বলছেন, গ্রিস ফিরে আসুক আলোচনার টেবিলে৷‌ এদিকে সিপ্রাসের সাইরিজা পার্টি গণভোটে ‘না’ বলার জন্য জোর প্রচার শুরু করে দিয়েছে৷‌ দলের নেতা জর্জ কাট্রউগালোস বলেছেন, হ্যাঁ বললে ওরা আমাদের পেনশন বন্ধ করে দেবে৷‌ সরকারি হাসপাতালে চিকিৎসা নিতে গেলেও খরচা দিতে হবে৷‌ সন্তানদের স্কুলে পাঠানোর জন্যও ঘাড়ে চাপবে বিপুল খরচ৷‌ প্রতিবাদ করলে বলবে, এ তো তোমাদেরই কর্মফল৷‌ আর যদি না বলি, তাহলে হয়ত সমস্যা মাথাচাড়া দেবে৷‌ কিন্তু একটা ভাল ভবিষ্যতের জন্য লড়াই করার ক্ষমতা তো হাতে থাকবে৷‌

    Democracy deserved a boost in euro-related matters. We just delivered it. Let the people decide. (Funny how radical this concept sounds!)

    — Yanis Varoufakis (@yanisvaroufakis) June 26, 2015

    Capital controls within a monetary union are a contradiction in terms. The Greek government opposes the very concept.

    — Yanis Varoufakis (@yanisvaroufakis) June 28, 2015

    The Endgame in Greece – by Jeff Sachs http://t.co/744BTpex8D

    — Yanis Varoufakis (@yanisvaroufakis) June 20, 2015

    Premier Li Keqiang: China would like to see Greece stay in the eurozone as #GreekDebt crisis reaches a critical stage pic.twitter.com/JPvrx4wR59

    — CCTVNEWS (@cctvnews) June 30, 2015

    The people of Europe stand by us-marching in solidarity w/Greek flags. #Democracy will prevail. @ErtSocial #Greece pic.twitter.com/WtpBfroeDO

    — Alexis Tsipras (@tsipras_eu) June 29, 2015

    The big downside of Grexit is nations will learn what no one now knows: how to create a new currency after breaking from a currency union.

    — Kaushik Basu (@kaushikcbasu) June 28, 2015

    "The ATMs were dry so I was thinking of flying back home." http://t.co/n0XAzYeng8

    — Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) June 29, 2015

    Greek artists have turned anger about bailouts into gorgeous street art. http://t.co/A9WNy5YR7I pic.twitter.com/fMi7vlhW5b

    — Mashable (@mashable) June 29, 2015

    When actually is the deadline for Greece's debt bailout? http://t.co/5jGm1dTstx pic.twitter.com/59nUxMOGlb

    — The Independent (@Independent) June 29, 2015

    See how other EU countries are dealing with debt compared to Greece http://t.co/PLfh3DfWe2 pic.twitter.com/3S3I9rTeX1

    — The Telegraph (@Telegraph) June 29, 2015

    Steve Bell on the Greece and EU standoff – cartoon http://t.co/yiSGVniDR2

    — The Guardian (@guardian) June 29, 2015

    graffiti in Athens, Greece, depicts the euro with the word "No" in German | @NeinQuarterly pic.twitter.com/iuCRdXoM19

    — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) June 30, 2015

    If we ever did a Yes/No referendum in an Arab country, most people would reply 'inshallah'.

    — Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) June 30, 2015

    After Amit Shah says Hinduism has all solutions, Greek PM seeks help for financial crisis http://t.co/WOlikLkZNo

    — Faking News (@fakingnews) June 30, 2015

    Joseph Stiglitz: how I would vote in the Greek referendum

    The rising crescendo of bickering and acrimony within Europe might seem to outsiders to be the inevitable result of the bitter endgame playing out between Greece and its creditors. In fact, European leaders are finally beginning to reveal the true nature of the ongoing debt dispute, and the answer is not pleasant: it is about power and democracy much more than money and economics.

    Of course, the economics behind the programme that the “troika” (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) foisted on Greece five years ago has been abysmal, resulting in a 25% decline in the country’s GDP. I can think of no depression, ever, that has been so deliberate and had such catastrophic consequences: Greece’s rate of youth unemployment, for example, now exceeds 60%.

    It is startling that the troika has refused to accept responsibility for any of this or admit how bad its forecasts and models have been. But what is even more surprising is that Europe’s leaders have not even learned. The troika is still demanding that Greece achieve a primary budget surplus (excluding interest payments) of 3.5% of GDP by 2018.

    Economists around the world have condemned that target as punitive, because aiming for it will inevitably result in a deeper downturn. Indeed, even if Greece’s debt is restructured beyond anything imaginable, the country will remain in depression if voters there commit to the troika’s target in the snap referendum to be held this weekend.

    In terms of transforming a large primary deficit into a surplus, few countries have accomplished anything like what the Greeks have achieved in the last five years. And, though the cost in terms of human suffering has been extremely high, the Greek government’s recent proposals went a long way toward meeting its creditors’ demands.

    We should be clear: almost none of the huge amount of money loaned to Greece has actually gone there. It has gone to pay out private-sector creditors – including German and French banks. Greece has gotten but a pittance, but it has paid a high price to preserve these countries’ banking systems. The IMF and the other “official” creditors do not need the money that is being demanded. Under a business-as-usual scenario, the money received would most likely just be lent out again to Greece.

    But, again, it’s not about the money. It’s about using “deadlines” to force Greece to knuckle under, and to accept the unacceptable – not only austerity measures, but other regressive and punitive policies.

    But why would Europe do this? Why are European Union leaders resisting the referendum and refusing even to extend by a few days the June 30 deadline for Greece’s next payment to the IMF? Isn’t Europe all about democracy?

    In January, Greece’s citizens voted for a government committed to ending austerity. If the government were simply fulfilling its campaign promises, it would already have rejected the proposal. But it wanted to give Greeks a chance to weigh in on this issue, so critical for their country’s future wellbeing.

    That concern for popular legitimacy is incompatible with the politics of the eurozone, which was never a very democratic project. Most of its members’ governments did not seek their people’s approval to turn over their monetary sovereignty to the ECB. When Sweden’s did, Swedes said no. They understood that unemployment would rise if the country’s monetary policy were set by a central bank that focused single-mindedly on inflation (and also that there would be insufficient attention to financial stability). The economy would suffer, because the economic model underlying the eurozone was predicated on power relationships that disadvantaged workers.

    And, sure enough, what we are seeing now, 16 years after the eurozone institutionalised those relationships, is the antithesis of democracy: many European leaders want to see the end of prime minister Alexis Tsipras’ leftist government. After all, it is extremely inconvenient to have in Greece a government that is so opposed to the types of policies that have done so much to increase inequality in so many advanced countries, and that is so committed to curbing the unbridled power of wealth. They seem to believe that they can eventually bring down the Greek government by bullying it into accepting an agreement that contravenes its mandate.

    It is hard to advise Greeks how to vote on 5 July. Neither alternative – approval or rejection of the troika’s terms – will be easy, and both carry huge risks. A yes vote would mean depression almost without end. Perhaps a depleted country – one that has sold off all of its assets, and whose bright young people have emigrated – might finally get debt forgiveness; perhaps, having shrivelled into a middle-income economy, Greece might finally be able to get assistance from the World Bank. All of this might happen in the next decade, or perhaps in the decade after that.

    By contrast, a no vote would at least open the possibility that Greece, with its strong democratic tradition, might grasp its destiny in its own hands. Greeks might gain the opportunity to shape a future that, though perhaps not as prosperous as the past, is far more hopeful than the unconscionable torture of the present.

    I know how I would vote.

29. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ৩০ জুন ২০১৫ (৪:৩৪ অপরাহ্ণ)

    মধ্যরাতে বাড়তি এক সেকেন্ড

    লিপ ইয়ার না হয় বোঝা গেল, কিন্তু লিপ সেকেন্ড? সারা পৃথিবীর সময়ের হিসাব নতুন করে লিখতে ৩০ জুন ঘড়িতে যুক্ত হতে চলেছে এক সেকেন্ড৷‌ কেন এই সময়ের রদবদল? বিজ্ঞানীদের হিসেবে একটি সম্পূর্ন দিনে মোট ৮৬,৪০০ সেকেন্ড থাকলেও বাড়তি এই এক সেকেন্ড ২০১২ সালের পর আবার যুক্ত করতে হচ্ছে৷‌ ফলে আজ রাত বারোটার বদলে পয়লা জুলাই শুরু হবে এক সেকেন্ড পরে৷‌ লিপ সেকেন্ডকে হিসেবে ধরার শুরু হয়েছিল ১৯৭২ সালে৷‌ সেই থেকে এ পর্যন্ত মোট পঁচিশ বার এই ঝক্কি পোয়াতে হয়েছে সময়ের হিসাবরক্ষকদের৷‌ পৃথিবীর গতিতে ক্রমশ কমে আসার কারণেই এই বদল৷‌ কিন্তু বসুন্ধরার এহেন খামেখেয়ালিপনার কারণ কী? ভুমিকম্প বা অন্য নানা দুর্যোগের পাশাপাশি প্রাকৃতিক ভারসাম্যের সমস্যার হাত রয়েছে এই বদলের পিছনে৷‌ ফলে ৩০ জুন রাত বারোটায় সারা পৃথিবীতেই ঘড়ির কাঁটাকে এক মুহুর্তের জন্য আটকে রাখবেন সকলেই৷‌ আপনিও বাড়ির ঘড়ির দিকে খেয়াল রাখুন৷‌ পিছিয়ে পড়তে কেই বা চায়?

30. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ৩০ জুন ২০১৫ (৫:১২ অপরাহ্ণ)

    The Writer and the Valet
    Frances Stonor Saunders on the ‘Zhivago’ Story

    Isaiah Berlin was on his honeymoon – he married late – when he first read Dr Zhivago. It was the evening of Saturday, 18 August 1956, and he had just made the short journey back to Moscow from the village of Peredelkino, where he had spent the day with Boris Pasternak. Pasternak’s dacha was part of a complex set up on Stalin’s orders in 1934 to reward the Soviet Union’s most prominent writers. One of them, Korney Chukovsky, described the scheme as ‘entrapping writers within a cocoon of comforts, surrounding them with a network of spies’. Periodically, and usually at night, the NKVD would turn over a dacha and bundle its resident into a waiting car. Pasternak’s immediate neighbour and friend, Boris Pilnyak, was arrested in October 1937, removed to the Lubyanka, and killed with a single bullet to the back of the head. The same fate awaited Isaac Babel, who was taken from Peredelkino in May 1939. There were others, less well known, but equals in the manner of their death.

    How Pasternak survived the necropolitics of the Stalin era was a mystery. ‘It is surprising that I remained whole during the Purges,’ he wrote in 1954. ‘You cannot imagine the liberties I allowed myself. My future was shaped in precisely the way I myself shaped it.’ Nadezhda Mandelstam (whose husband, Osip, became ‘camp dust’ in 1938) put it down to a combination of sheer luck and Pasternak’s ‘incredible charm’. Others wondered whether Stalin had personally ordered him to be spared – ‘Leave him alone, he’s a cloud dweller’ – after gifting him what were called, in the political slang of the day, ‘madman’s papers’. True, Pasternak had written some boilerplate patriotic verse during the Second World War, ‘civic poetry’ that encouraged some party hacks in the belief that he had finally found ‘the correct path’. And the translations of Georgian poets were known to have pleased the Boss. But in the main, where others, fatally, confronted argument with argument, he replied with the reveries of a yurodivy, a holy fool, marking his distance from the idiom and events of his era to the point almost of vegetal insouciance (‘What century is it outside?’ he asks in one poem).

    In his youth Pasternak looked, Marina Tsvetaeva said, ‘like an Arab and his horse’. In older age, he looked the same. Sinewy and tanned from long walks and tending his orchard, at 66 he was still an intensely physical presence. This was the woodsman-poet who was waiting by the garden gate to greet his friend Isaiah Berlin, 19 years younger, bespectacled and pudgy, his indoor skin betraying the rigours of the Senior Common Room and the international diplomatic circuit.

    ‘The Foreigner Visiting Pasternak at His Dacha’ is its own subgenre of intellectual history. Its principal theme is the excitement of discovering a lost generation who, like ‘the victims of shipwreck on a desert island’, have been ‘cut off for decades from civilisation’ (Berlin). The foreigner, moved by his role as witness to an impossible reality, records every detail of the encounter: the welcome (Pasternak’s handshake is ‘firm’, his smile ‘exuberant’); the walk (oh, that ‘cool’ pine forest, and look, some dusty peasants); the conversation, with Pasternak holding forth ‘as if Goethe and Shakespeare were his contemporaries’; the meal, at which his wife, ‘dark, plump and inconspicuous’ (and often unnamed), makes a sour appearance; the arrival of other members of the Peredelkino colony, the dead undead; the toasts, invoking spiritual companions – Tolstoy, Chekhov, Scriabin, Rachmaninov. And finally the farewell at the gate, at which Pasternak disappears back into the dacha and re-emerges with sheaves of typescript. These are given to the visitor (‘the guest from the future’, as Anna Akhmatova put it), who is now tasked with the sacred and thrillingly immortalising responsibility of carrying Pasternak’s writings out of this place where the clock has stopped and into the world beyond.

    Berlin’s reports of his meetings with Pasternak, which cover two periods spanning a decade, conform to the conventions of the genre (not surprising, as he largely invented it) but his published account of his visit of 18 August 1956 is curiously short on colour, and there is no mention of his bride, Aline, who accompanied him, or of Pasternak’s wife, Zinaida. We learn only that the two men convened in a lengthy conversation, which must have vibrated amid the pine trees like some strange antiphon. Pasternak, Berlin once observed, ‘spoke slowly in a low tenor monotone, with a continuous even sound, something between a humming and a drone’; Berlin’s voice was variously described as ‘a low, rapid rumble’, ‘a melting Russian river’, the ‘bubble and rattle’ of a ‘samovar on the boil’. At some point, Pasternak took Berlin into his study, where he thrust a thick envelope into Berlin’s hands and said: ‘My book, it is all there. It is my last word. Please read it.’

    Berlin and Aline returned that evening to the British Embassy on Sofiyskaya Embankment, where they were guests of the ambassador. Berlin sat up all night reading the typescript. He was ‘deeply shaken’. He wept. Dr Zhivago was a ‘magnificent poetical masterpiece in the central tradition of Russian literature’, ‘a personal avowal of overwhelming directness, nobility and depth’. It was a ‘unitary vision’ that fused the broken vertebrae of Russian literature, a miraculous retrieval of the past in an age that had outlawed history.

    And so Isaiah wept by the bank of the Moskva River. (Forgive the over-reach, but the river did run in front of the embassy, and what we’re talking about here is not so much Dr Zhivago, as the novel of the novel.) Directly opposite (truly), behind the walls of the Kremlin, the Soviet response to Dr Zhivago was being prepared. In an ‘important memo’, the foreign minister, Dmitry Shepilov, was working himself up to an ulcer. Pasternak’s concoction, he wrote, was ‘a spiteful lampoon against the USSR’, and measures had to be taken ‘to prevent the publication of this anti-Soviet book abroad’. The memo, with attachments supplied by the KGB and the director of the Central Committee’s Culture Department (who emphasised his revulsion at Pasternak’s ‘malicious libel against our revolution and our entire life’), was to be circulated to the highest party officials, including the Politburo and First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev.

    The last Russian to publish a novel abroad without official sanction was Boris Pilnyak, and in so doing he had assigned himself his own bullet. In 1948, Pasternak warned his sisters in Oxford against printing some early chapters of Dr Zhivago, which he had sent them via an (unidentified) intermediary. ‘Publication abroad would expose me to the most catastrophic, not to mention fatal, dangers,’ he wrote. Since then, the Thaw (taken from the title of a novel by Ilya Ehrenburg) had ushered in a less chilling repertoire of punishments for writers who wandered from ‘the correct path’. Pasternak was nonetheless taking an enormous risk in offering his novel for publication outside the Soviet Union. But this was his resolve. He hadn’t given the typescript to Berlin to enliven a few hours in his Moscow bivouac, but in order that it should ‘travel over the entire world’ and, quoting Pushkin, ‘lay waste with fire the heart of man’.

    As he tells it, Berlin tussled with his conscience before reluctantly accepting the mission of smuggling Dr Zhivago out of Russia. Indeed, a few days after his stirring all-nighter, he returned to Peredelkino, determined to rescue the author from his own intentions – Pasternak, he believed, was flirting with martyrdom and ‘probably did need to be physically saved from himself’. At this second meeting, Zinaida begged Berlin to dissuade her husband from damaging himself and his family. ‘Moved by this plea’, Berlin ventured an alternative solution to Pasternak: ‘I promised to have microfilms of his novel made, to bury them in the four quarters of the globe … so that copies might survive even if a nuclear war broke out.’ Pasternak, who was in no mood to be buried alive mid-sentence, rebuked his friend. He had spoken to his sons and they were prepared to suffer, just as he was (Zinaida’s suffering is not mentioned). At which point Berlin’s bubbling samovar came off the boil. He was, he claims, ‘shamed into silence’.

    And so Berlin left the forest, his conscience quieted by Pasternak’s determination to break a lance for a greater prize than his own well-being. ‘I may not deserve to be remembered as a poet,’ he had said, ‘but surely as a soldier in the battle for human freedom.’ Furthermore, he told Berlin that he had already given a typescript to an agent of the Italian communist publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, and this copy was now in Milan (a fact that had been duly noted by the KGB, which was trying to get it back). Dr Zhivago had already crossed the line.

    The question for Berlin now was not whether but how to smuggle the manuscript out. He could no longer avail himself of diplomatic privilege, as he had done a decade earlier when he served as first secretary in the Moscow embassy. Then, shortly after meeting Pasternak for the first time, he had used the pouch to exfiltrate an early draft section of Dr Zhivago, sending it to his parents in London in October 1945 with instructions to keep it somewhere safe until his return (perhaps this was the ‘somewhat underground route’ alluded to by Maurice Bowra, Berlin’s key ally in establishing Pasternak’s reputation in the West). Berlin’s interest in Pasternak and other members of the lost tribe had not gone undetected – throughout his posting he had been aware of being followed – and he was ever after burdened with the accusation of having endangered them. ‘I saw quite a lot of very remarkable people,’ he later told an interviewer. ‘It didn’t do them any good.’ This was something of an understatement. His meeting with Akhmatova at her apartment in Leningrad in November 1945 had prompted Stalin’s famous remark, ‘So our nun now receives visits from foreign spies.’ Though Berlin always insisted he’d never been a spy, he was sufficiently versed in Soviet sensibilities to know that all diplomats were suspected of intelligence-gathering, and that everybody they made contact with was, ipso facto, an intelligence source. The consequences for Akhmatova were dire: her apartment was bugged, she was denounced by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers, and her son Lev was arrested for a third time.

    Berlin’s 1956 visit to Russia was a further tutorial in the Soviet character. Moving among the members of the Politburo at an embassy reception – the ‘spy’ hiding prominently in plain sight – he found them ‘at once smooth and brutal, class-conscious and corrupt’. Here were the thieves of the Revolution, the same men who had supported Stalin in his massacres. The visit reinforced his suspicion that the Thaw was overestimated in Western liberal circles. The Soviet Union, he concluded, was still expansionist and repressive at heart. In this climate, it’s highly improbable that Berlin ever considered carrying Pasternak’s manuscript out of Russia himself. The only secure option would be to ask his host and friend, the British ambassador William Hayter, to send Dr Zhivago to London in the bag. This might explain how the Foreign Office was able to copy the typescript onto two rolls of microfilm and hand it over to MI6, which in turn delivered it to the CIA, with dreadful consequences for Pasternak.

    The story of Dr Zhivago’s publication is, like the novel itself, a cat’s cradle, an eternal zigzag of plotlines, coincidences, inconsistencies and maddening disappearances. The book was always destined to become a ‘succès de scandale’, in Berlin’s words, but the machinations and competing energies that went into seeing it into print, on the one hand, and trying to stop it going to print, on the other, make it the perfect synecdoche for that feint, counterfeint round of pugilism we call the Cold War. Some punches were landed, of course, reminding the contestants that this was a real fight and not just a protracted argument about washing machines. But the Cold War was also a great engine of false realities, and the Zhivago Affair (as it immediately became known) is the story of how its protagonists became embroiled in these inventions and, more controversially, enlarged them.

    *

    ‘I am content to observe, not interfere and have all my life been afraid above all of being involved,’ Berlin once told a friend. Impatient with this legend of self-effacement, Pasternak’s sister Lydia (who lived in Oxford) moaned: ‘His present power over literature, in fact over everything in every field, is at times almost disastrous, I do not know how he contrives to hold everybody in such constant awe and fear of his casual judgment.’ Her view is supported by Berlin’s own papers at the Bodleian, which show him to have been energetically meddlesome in the Dr Zhivago business from the moment he returned from his Moscow honeymoon. ‘I think I could probably procure the manuscript somewhere, some time,’ he writes airily to an editor at Hamish Hamilton who has inquired about the novel. ‘But I cannot guarantee this of course. Do not tell anyone else about it at the moment, except Mark [Bonham Carter], of course.’ He adds that he hasn’t read the manuscript, so is unable to say whether it’s a work of genius. On the same day, he offers the same tease to Bonham Carter, of Collins Harvill: ‘It is possible that I myself may have a text in England, but it is none too certain, and we had better speak about this orally.’ Again, he claims not to have read it.

    Publishers can rarely be relied on for their discretion, but why such subterfuge, and why the trim denial of having read the novel? Why didn’t Berlin simply say: I got the manuscript out, I know exactly where it is, I have read it and it’s a masterpiece and it must be published both on its own merits and as a strike against the Soviets, who refuse to allow their greatest living writer to be heard in his own country? There are several possible explanations for Berlin’s coyness. One is that the ‘first’ smuggled typescript – 433 closely typed pages held together by twine and wrapped in newspaper – was in the hands of Feltrinelli in Italy. Berlin feared that Feltrinelli might tamper with the text or even be dissuaded from publishing it (neither happened, though the Soviets did put their wayward comrade under huge pressure to return the manuscript to Moscow). Worse, Pasternak had granted all foreign rights to Feltrinelli, so legally the Oxford text couldn’t be published without his permission.

    Pasternak’s game of hide and seek with the Soviet authorities was creating endless confusion and delay among his foreign proxies. He seemed to be havering between outright provocation – telling one visitor that publishing the book abroad might be a ‘means to bring pressure on the Soviets to publish the book in Russia for fear of looking tyrannous if they don’t’ – and a strategy of shaming the Soviets into publishing it first. He had submitted the novel to the state literary publisher Goslitizdat, and to the journal Novy Mir, in the sincere belief that it might be published (once the censor had taken his pound of flesh). An encouraging sign came just as Berlin visited in August 1956, with Novy Mir’s publication of the first instalment of Vladimir Dudintsev’s novel Not by Bread Alone, whose picaresque depiction of ‘the invisible empire’ of Soviet bureaucracy made it wildly popular with Russian readers. But Novy Mir was less receptive to Pasternak’s novel, and within weeks of Berlin’s departure its editors sent a rejection letter explaining that no amount of cutting or revising would solve the problem of ‘the spirit of the novel’ and its ‘non-acceptance of the socialist revolution’. Goslitizdat turned it down too.

    ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’ was a favoured slogan in the vade-mecum of Bolshevism. By the end of 1957 there were at least six original, non-identical typescripts of Dr Zhivago in foreign hands, and chasing them down is like trying to make an egg from an omelette. The most conscientious attempt so far is Paolo Mancosu’s Inside the Zhivago Storm: The Editorial Adventures of Pasternak’s Masterpiece, which includes in an appendix all the relevant correspondence from the Feltrinelli archive.​1 This scholarly, scrupulously even-handed work, published last year, has been unfairly eclipsed by The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book, in which the journalists Peter Finn and Petra Couvée pick through a cache of documents, released to them by the CIA, that confirms the long extant rumour of the agency’s role in publishing the text in Russian.​2 This rumour had already been investigated (it took him twenty years) by Ivan Tolstoy, whose research was published in Russian in 2009 as The Laundered Novel: ‘Dr Zhivago’, between the KGB and the CIA. Tolstoy’s monograph, untranslated and lacking the prima facie evidence procured by Finn and Couvée, went largely unreported in the West. Long forgotten is Robert Conquest’s The Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair, published in 1961, as impartial an account as you could expect from someone who had been employed in the Foreign Office’s propaganda shop for more than a decade. Add to these Evgeny Pasternak’s Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years, 1930-60 (1990), Sergio D’Angelo’s The Pasternak Affair: Memoirs of a Witness (2006), and the ensuing, sulphurous arguments between these two, and you end up with a big almost-egg and a sinking feeling in your stomach (this is, literally, an unwholesome business).

    In all of these thousands of pages devoted to the Zhivago affair, Berlin’s testimony is reprised without question. He is treated as an impeccable witness, the humble valet to Pasternak’s will, into whose hands fell one of the greatest books of the century as if by accident. Yet an exchange of letters in Berlin’s papers, to date overlooked, suggests a rather different scenario. In April 1956, Berlin received from Martin Malia a detailed report of two separate meetings with Pasternak at Peredelkino. Malia was a Harvard academic on assignment in Russia for the Library of Congress, ostensibly to negotiate book exchanges. (He may have been doing more than that. In 1967 he was accused by the Russian government of working for the CIA and told to leave the country.) On arriving in Moscow, he had immediately sought out Pasternak, who had confided that he had ‘sent out the first five parts’ of Dr Zhivago ‘via a friend at the New Zealand Embassy’, and was planning to give the later parts, which he was currently revising, ‘to some French students now at the University of Moscow for shipment out through the pouch’. Berlin’s reply is not in the file, but a later letter from Malia contains its echo: Berlin wanted more exact details, in particular to know how he might make contact with the French students.

    *

    Why would Berlin the observer – ‘I have no personal interest in this’ – press for this information if not to become involved? Most likely, on learning that the novel was being dispatched hither and thither through diplomatic bags, and knowing that a historic literary event loomed, he was eager to obtain a copy himself, and made arrangements to this end. A letter from Pasternak to his sisters in Oxford, dated four days before the visit of 18 August 1956, confirms that Berlin’s mission had already been agreed. ‘I’ll give B one copy,’ it reads. ‘He promised me that the typescript would be transcribed in multiple copies in England … He will look after this himself, you don’t need to worry about it.’

    Why go to such lengths if Pasternak had already found ways to get the text out of Russia? If, as Berlin was to claim, Pasternak wanted ‘to speak across the heads of his jailers to the free world’, then surely a megaphone in New Zealand or France would do as well as anywhere? A speculative answer, covering the gnomic angle of Berlin’s letters to the British publishers, is that he wanted to be at the centre of an intrigue. Indeed, he was a ganglion of secrets. ‘I know all about the situation – & perhaps a little more than all,’ he murmured side-of-mouth to Edmund Wilson late in 1957. ‘There is a (secret) Russian text in Oxford, in the keeping of the sisters of the poet: they guard it like Cerberi … I have (secretly) got a microfilm of the Russian text to the Widener Library for safe-keeping, but they are not supposed to tell anyone.’

    Berlin had made a significant intellectual and emotional investment in Dr Zhivago, and he too was guarding it like Cerberus. Like many Russians forced to emigrate in the wake of the Revolution (whose excesses he had witnessed as a boy in Petrograd), he couldn’t accept that Pushkin was gone and the light coming from Tolstoy’s country estate extinguished. In the USSR, there was no place for such metaphysical antiquities, or for their heirs who, like Nabokov’s ‘gaunt ladies with lorgnettes’, sighed for a world that had been swept away. St Paul’s, Oxford and the Foreign Office couldn’t dispel in Berlin the psychological vulnerability of the diaspora, of ‘Russia Abroad’, that strange in-between place where, as Semyon Frank said, one had to ‘live and breathe in a vacuum’.

    ‘Zhivago’, in the pre-revolutionary genitive case, means ‘the living one’. On the novel’s first page a hearse is being followed to the grave. ‘Whom are you burying?’ the mourners are asked. ‘Zhivago’ is the reply, punningly suggesting ‘him who is living’. After his first reading of the draft early chapters, at the British Embassy in Moscow in 1945, Berlin felt that he had seen a flare sent up from the survivor of a cataclysm. Swept away by the novel’s defiant personal claim for the indomitable Russian soul, he was sure that Bolshevism’s systematic programme of turning Russia away from Western civilisation couldn’t be completed as long as such writing existed. Before leaving his diplomatic post, he turned in a long memorandum – what he called, misleadingly, a ‘rambling discourse on the Russian writers’ – containing extended resumés of his meetings with Pasternak, Akhmatova, Chukovsky and others. It was a founding text of the Kulturkampf, as important in its way as George Kennan’s Long Telegram (also written in 1946) was to the shaping of the political Cold War. In a letter accompanying the report, Berlin requested that it be treated as ‘confidential’ because of ‘the well-known consequences to the possible sources of the information contained in it, should its existence ever become known to “them”’.

    We’ll call this next chapter in the novel of the novel ‘The Alphabet Men’. It’s the bit where the CIA, MI6 and their little helpers at the FO, IRD, BBC, IOD, SRD, CCF, RFE, RL, VOA and BVD process the purloined microfilm of the Russian text into ‘combat material’ for the Cold War.​3 It’s 1958, Dr Zhivago has finally been issued in Italian by Feltrinelli, and other translations are edging their way off the press in Britain, Germany and France. But Feltrinelli is refusing the rights to a Russian edition until Pasternak gives him the go-ahead. Pasternak hesitates, gambling on ever poorer odds that the novel might yet appear in Russia. Should this not be the case, and fearing a provocation too far, he explicitly requests that no eventual Russian language edition appear in the West under the auspices of any Russian émigré group or American entity. No matter, the CIA has already embarked on Operation Dinosaur, whose aim is to exploit Pasternak’s ‘heretical literary work’ for ‘maximum free world discussion and acclaim and consideration for such honour as the Nobel Prize’. According to a declassified memo quoted by Finn and Couvée in The Zhivago Affair, MI6 are ‘in favour and have offered to provide whatever assistance they can’.

    Since the prize can’t be awarded for a work not published in its original language, the CIA prints an edition through a cut-out, or front, in Holland. This, the first ever appearance in Russian of the original text, deals with the Nobel Prize requirement. Encouraged by the success of this covert action, Operation Dinosaur – authorised at the highest levels, which includes the White House – produces another, pocket-sized edition (‘more easily concealed’) for distribution behind the Iron Curtain. Attributed to ‘an innocuous, fictitious publisher’, Société d’Edition et d’Impression Mondiale, and printed at CIA headquarters on thin bible stock, this miniature Dr Zhivago is shipped to Europe and handed out to anyone who might carry it into the Soviet bloc (among the various ‘pass throughs’ enlisted to this act of piracy we find the Holy See, that well-known upholder of the right of individuals to read whatever they please). By this means, Dr Zhivago crosses the line back into Russia.

    These editions were both thefts. As explained by the CIA, the operation was ‘intended to be legal but turned out to be illegal’ (you don’t make apologies when you hold the moral high ground). Internal inquiries were made about international copyright law, but legality proving inconvenient, the decision was taken to ‘do it black’. However, an escrow account was set up in Pasternak’s name for his share of the royalties, ‘if he is ever in a position to use them’. What, one wonders, did the CIA do with its share?

    No amount of money – not even the Nobel Prize, which was announced on 23 October 1958 – could compensate for the shitstorm into which Pasternak was now thrown. As a CIA analysis quoted by Finn and Couvée reads, ‘so long as his impact was contained within the Soviet Union, it could be tolerated; when it came to appear as a chosen vessel of Free World cold war, it had to be crushed.’ For the spooks, this was hardly an unexpected outcome. It was only after Not by Bread Alone was published in English in 1957, and trumpeted as an anti-Soviet novel by the Western media, that Dudintsev earned the full wrath of the regime. His disavowal of the propaganda value of his book – he said it made him feel as though ‘a peaceable ship in foreign waters had been seized by pirates and was flying the skull and crossbones’ – didn’t placate the authorities. He was shunned, banned and harried into poverty. So, too, Pasternak was vilified as a traitor, denigrated in a massive official campaign as a ‘literary weed’, a ‘superfluous man’, a ‘mangy sheep’, a ‘pig’ who ‘has soiled the place where he has eaten’.

    Driven nearly to suicide, on 29 October Pasternak declined the Nobel Prize. ‘I couldn’t recognise my father when I saw him that evening,’ his son Evgeny recalled. ‘Pale, lifeless face, tired painful eyes, and only speaking about the same thing: “Now it all doesn’t matter, I declined the Prize.”’ Two days later, he was hounded out of the Union of Soviet Writers, whose members petitioned the Politburo to strip him of his Soviet citizenship and exile him to ‘his capitalist paradise’. The American Catholic writer and monk Thomas Merton pleaded with the union’s chief, Aleksey Surkov, to reverse the decision, arguing in a letter that Dr Zhivago was far less critical of communism than Khrushchev had been two years earlier in his speech denouncing Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress. This startlingly obvious point was missed by everyone who jostled for a berth on the ship of fools.​4

    To Pasternak, Merton wrote: ‘For a long time I have been holding my breath in the midst of the turmoil of incomparable nonsense that has surrounded your name in every part of the world … You, like Job, have been surrounded not by three or four misguided comforters, but by a whole world of madmen … and seemingly very few of them have understood one word of what you have written. For what could be more blind and absurd than to make a political weapon, for one side or the other, out of a book that declares clearly the futility and malignity of tendencies on every side which seek to destroy man in his spiritual substance?’ Before this letter reached Pasternak, it was intercepted, photocopied and resealed, first by the CIA then by the KGB.

    While the drama of Pasternak’s excommunication was in progress, Oxford was a very tense place. It was from here that Berlin, since returning from Moscow in 1946, had worked to create a reputation – a vital ‘little corner’ of recognition – for Pasternak in the West. He operated largely behind the scenes (he once told George Kennan that he had refused to let the press quote a lecture ‘because I thought if I did, poor Pasternak etc would finally be shot’), while front of house was his colleague Maurice Bowra – Pasternak called them the ‘University B’s’ – and left and right of stage were Pasternak’s sisters, Josephine and Lydia, with a small cast of exiled Russian scholars. Inevitably, everyone fell out with everyone else and then made up again. But as the horror was unleashed on Pasternak, there were tears of anguish and bitter recriminations in his Oxford court.

    ‘If something awful happens to Pasternak, I do not want to feel that anything I did could have even remotely contributed to it,’ Berlin wrote to a friend in late October. Having long positioned himself as a guardian of Pasternak’s interests, a role that increased the voltage of his own reputation and influence, he was now faced with the realisation that he might have made a serious miscalculation. All along, he had worried about ‘them’ – the KGB, the Politburo, the hatchet men of Soviet culture – but he had failed to factor in the danger from his own side: the Foreign Office, MI6 and all those cultural freedom experts stationed behind their typewriters, ready to serve up Dr Zhivago as a political pamphlet.

    Berlin made frantic efforts to stem the flow of ‘vulgar propaganda’, much of which was being churned out by the fronts and ‘assets’ of MI6 and the CIA. He tried, unsuccessfully, to dissuade the BBC from broadcasting instalments of the novel over the Russian Service (another theft, as the corporation hadn’t secured the rights), warning that ‘the danger to the poet was great and the advantage, even from the most extreme Cold War point of view, not very great, and that playing about with lives in this way was a hideous immorality.’ The broadcasts, Berlin later stated, were ‘perhaps the worst of all the acts of persecution on our part’. His attempt to convince Time magazine to abandon a cover story on Pasternak was also unsuccessful. The freedom army was marching under the banner of Dr Zhivago, and nothing could break its step. ‘Just because someone is prepared for a martyr’s crown, that doesn’t give one the right to press it on his brow,’ he wrote angrily. ‘The whole thing really is revolting.’ Reflecting on the scandal years later, Czesław Miłosz said that Pasternak ‘found himself entangled in the kind of ambiguity that ought to be the nightmare of every author. While he always stressed the unity of his work, that unity was broken by circumstances. Abuse was heaped on him in Russia for a novel nobody had read. Praise was lavished on him in the West for a novel isolated from his lifelong labours … In the last years of his life Pasternak lost, so to speak, the right to his personality, and his name served to designate a cause.’

    Dr Zhivago may be a great novel, but in the battlefield of the Cold War it had to be great in order to be a powerful weapon. Any victory in a war of this kind is bound to be pyrrhic, and nobody emerges from it with much glory, not even Pasternak. We mustn’t lick all the paint off our gods, but his reputation is not, ultimately, enhanced by the thick layer of piety applied to him by his eager publicists in the West. As early as 1927, Nadezhda Mandelstam had warned him: ‘Watch out, or they’ll adopt you.’ She was referring to the Soviets, but she never had any truck with the ‘professional humanists’ of the West either, and the warning could equally have applied to their blandishments. If Pasternak became a permanent protégé of the West – giving away ‘the wealth of his soul’ in the process, according to his son Evgeny – it was not only because he was deceived (and he was). It was also down to his stubborn insistence on making a grand gesture, on putting himself forward as the charismatic bearer of Russia’s tragic soul.

    ‘You are invited to my execution,’ Pasternak announced when he handed the typescript to Feltrinelli’s agent in May 1956 (other visitors at the time report similar declarations). For his friends Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam, who had both lost husbands to the executioners, this self-dramatisation was rather distasteful. According to Hugh Trevor-Roper, writing in late 1958, ‘everyone who knows Pasternak agrees that he positively wanted trouble. Apparently he had a feeling of guilt and a desire for martyrdom. He was personally liked and protected by Stalin, and so survived when many of his friends perished, and is now ashamed of this. So at least Isaiah [says].’ ‘He thinks that he might gain from it the halo of a victim,’ an Italian insider told the young literary editor Italo Calvino. It’s not that Pasternak hadn’t been courageous – there are numerous acts of selfless, indeed reckless concern for others – and he surely didn’t deserve to be saddled with a bad conscience. But in his ‘yielding himself up’ there was, as Nadezhda Mandelstam sensed, a ‘secret desire’ to promote himself. He wanted, in his own words, ‘to suffer as all the true Russian poets have always suffered’. There were many people, friends as well as enemies, who were willing to help him.

    ‘It is easier to save a manuscript than a man,’ Nadezhda Mandelstam said. It’s an uncomfortable thought, but perhaps Pasternak didn’t want to be saved. The holy fool in his dacha, ‘cocooned in comfort’, singing paeans to the ‘joy’ of being alive in nature’s bosom while his neighbours were taken away, liquidated and replaced – all this rapture, this élan vital, left him no exit for his moral indignation at the break-up of the world around him. Life, he believed, was superior to any cause. He could never have been a journeyman in the Soviet interpretation of reality, but he became uncomfortable with the exemptions his self-alienation had granted him. With Dr Zhivago, privately for many years and then very publicly, he found the means to ‘touch the sores of the era with his own hands’ (Nadezhda Mandelstam again). And it was this, his family believed, that sent him to an early grave.

    Pasternak died on 30 May 1960. His last words were ‘Don’t forget to open the window tomorrow.’ His funeral was attended by thousands, many of whom defied the secret police to linger long after his coffin was lowered into the ground. A few months later, Berlin received from Pasternak’s French translator, Jacqueline de Proyart, a magazine spread with photographs of the obsequies. ‘They were meant to move me,’ Berlin confided to a friend, ‘but in fact produced a ghastly effect. I sent them back to her. The corpse, the coffin, the wife, the mistress, the whole thing has a nightmarish quality for me.’ If he did send it back, he must have received another copy because the article is still there in his papers.