৩১ comments

1. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ১ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (৫:৪১ অপরাহ্ণ)

   Russian Airstrikes Destroy ISIL HQ in Syria

   The Russian Air Force overnight destroyed a terrorist headquarters and arms depot in Syria’s northwestern Idlib region during airstrikes aimed at Islamic State militants, the press service of the Russian Defense Ministry said Thursday.

   “A headquarters of terrorist groups and an arms depot were destroyed in the region of Ildib, as well as a militant three-level fortified command point in the region of Hama [in west-central Syria],” the press service said.

   Russia launched an aerial campaign on Wednesday, at the request of Syrian President Bashar Assad, targeting eight IS military hardware, arms and fuel depots. To that end, Moscow recently established a joint Baghdad Information Center with Iran, Iraq and Syria to coordinate efforts in combating the terrorist group.

   The Russian Defense Ministry has confirmed that it has already carried out some 20 combat missions in Syria since the campaign started, striking at least eight ISIL targets.

   • 

     মাসুদ করিম - ১ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (৬:০৬ অপরাহ্ণ)

     Hundreds of Iranian troops arrive in Syria

     Hundreds of Iranian troops arrived in Syria 10 days ago with weapons to take part in ground operations in rebel-held areas of northern Syria, and Lebanon’s ally Hezbollah is preparing to join the operation, Lebanese sources told Reuters on Thursday.

     The ground operation together with the Syrian army would accompany air strikes mounted by the Russian air force, the sources who were briefed on the matter said. “The (Russian) air strikes will in the near future be accompanied by ground advance by the Syrian army and its allies,” one of the sources said.

     The sources said the operation is aimed at recapturing territory lost by President Bashar al-Assad to rebels.

     • 

       মাসুদ করিম - ৫ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (২:৪৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

       Obama prepared to work with Putin to broker Syria transition

       Lavrov: “There must be political change in Syria”

       Although Russia’s airstrikes in support of the Syrian military provoked widespread condemnation from the United States and its coalition allies, there may also be traction for a new phase of UN-brokered talks on a political transition in Syria.

       US President Barack Obama warned Oct. 2 that Russia’s actions could lead Moscow into a “quagmire” in Syria, and that indiscriminate attacks on “moderate” armed groups opposed to both the Islamic State (IS) and the Syrian government is a “recipe for disaster.”

       But Obama also offered to work with Russian President Vladimir Putin on a political transition in Syria that does not seem to precondition Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s imminent departure.

       “In my discussions with President Putin, I was very clear that the only way to solve the problem in Syria is to have a political transition that is inclusive — that keeps the state intact, that keeps the military intact, that maintains cohesion, but that is inclusive — and the only way to accomplish that is for Mr. Assad to transition, because you cannot rehabilitate him in the eyes of Syrians. … I said to Mr. Putin that I’d be prepared to work with him if he is willing to broker with his partners, Mr. Assad and Iran, a political transition — we can bring the rest of the world community to a brokered solution — but that a military solution alone, an attempt by Russia and Iran to prop up Assad and try to pacify the population is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire. And it won’t work,” Obama said.

       US Secretary of State John Kerry said Sept. 30, after meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, that while “we don’t have yet a resolution with respect to some critical choices in that political solution, we think we have some very specific steps that may be able to help lead in the right direction. That needs to be properly explored.”

       While making clear that fighting terrorism is his country’s top priority and “we cannot condition fighting [IS] by changing the political system in Syria,” Lavrov also offered hints at how the US and Russian positions on Assad might be bridged. The Washington Post’s Edith Lederer reports that Lavrov acknowledged that “Yes, there must be political change in Syria,” and that “parallel with this [fighting IS and terrorism] — not after — but parallel with this, many things could be done on the political front.” The Russian foreign minister, Lederer reports, went on to say that “the entire spectrum of Syrian society must agree on the key outlines of a secular state with democratic elections and the rights of all ethnic groups and religious minorities, and a constitution. He said the opposition Free Syrian Army and other ‘Syrian patriotic opposition individuals’ must be part of the political process. If a deal is reached and endorsed by the UN Security Council, and Syrians can see that the constitution protects their rights, ‘I think that the problems of one or another personality would be much easier to resolve,’ Lavrov said. He said that is what he discussed with US Secretary of State John Kerry and Gulf ministers on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly’s annual ministerial meeting.”

       Syrian Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign and Expatriates Minister Walid Moallem said in his speech to the UN General Assembly on Oct. 2 that while his government gives urgent priority to battling terrorists, it is also committed to the “political track” and will participate in the “brainstorming” committees to be organized by UN special envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura in order to “mainly exchange ideas and conduct unbinding preliminary consultations whose agreed-upon outputs can be used to prepare for the launching of Geneva 3,” as reported by the Syrian Arab News Agency.

       Laura Rozen reports that there may be an emerging consensus to apply the P5+1 (the permanent five members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) negotiating model to engage Iran and other countries to address the conflict in Syria: “’We have had some discussion on Syria … especially on the fact that we managed to achieve something … so important for the world through dialogue and diplomacy in this format,’ [European Union foreign policy chief Federica] Mogherini told journalists at the UN in New York following the P5+1 Iran ministerial meeting. ‘This could be also a useful format for other things,’ Mogherini said. ‘And obviously we will explore [this more] in the next days.’”

       Iranian President Hassan Rouhani mentioned several times during his brief stay at the UN General Assembly in New York that the P5+1 format could be a useful model to address Syria and other regional crises, as Barbara Slavin reports.

       Perhaps most significantly, Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir hinted at a possible shift in the kingdom’s position on a transition in Syria. Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meetings, Jubeir on the one hand conveyed a hard line, openly discussing a “military solution” that would lead to the overthrow of Assad, and that support for the Free Syrian Army and other “moderate” Syrian armed groups opposed to Assad “would be intensified.”

       Nonetheless, Jubeir did not rule out talks with Iran, which he described as an “occupying force in Syria,” including in the context of a meeting among the United States, Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps most telling was that Jubeir appeared to inch closer to the emerging US and Turkish positions that while Assad must eventually leave power, the Syrian president’s departure could take place in the context of a yet to be defined transitional period.

       “Sometime between the formation of this council and elections [as per the 2012 Geneva agreement outlining a political transition in Syria], the theory of this is that — whether it’s a day or a week or a month, I don’t know — Assad would sail into the sunset, Jubeir said. If Assad accepts the political process where he transitions out of the country, I think we can get somewhere,” as reported by Lederer for Stars and Stripes.

       Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt

       The perhaps thin reed of an opening on Syria comes as Saudi-Iranian relations otherwise went from bad to worse last week. Ali Hashem writes about how the tragedy of the estimated 464 Iranian pilgrims killed in the stampede during the hajj on Sept. 24 may have been a lost opportunity for progress in Saudi-Iran relations. Rouhani cut short his trip to New York for the UN General Assembly to return to Iran to address the crisis over the Iranian deaths at the hajj. The Saudi government has reported that 769 pilgrims died and 934 were injured during this year’s hajj, although the overall death toll may actually exceed 900.

       While Saudi-Iran relations have soured over Syria and Yemen, Saeid Jafari examines how the Syria war has resulted in a modest reset in Iran-Egypt ties, as both Tehran and Cairo are wary of the expansion of radical Salafist groups that threaten the region.

       Al-Monitor on Iran-Iraq-Syria axis

       The Russian airstrikes in Syria were preceded by news that Moscow had brokered an intelligence-sharing alliance among Russia, Iran, Iraq and Syria. This column has, since January 2014, backed a US-led regional initiative for a more assertive regional counterterrorism alliance. One year ago, in September 2014, we wrote that the United States should leverage the emerging Iran-Syria-Iraq counterterrorism axis in the battle against IS, acknowledging that while “the United States and Iran cannot formally link arms in Syria … the trend to watch is the tentative emergence of what may be a truly regional counterterrorism coalition, with potential for a transformation in regional security, if managed carefully.”

       US, Iraq need reset

       Mustafa al-Kadhimi reports that US-Iraq relations are in crisis, requiring a reset by both Baghdad and Washington in order to address the fight against IS: “Iraq would have to move toward making independent and muscular decisions as a US partner to further both countries’ common interests, especially the fight against terrorism. The United States would have to adapt a new approach to Iraq and no longer treat it as a weak partner that can be neglected or abandoned as in the past. Iraq’s geopolitical importance requires that its international partners, foremost among them Washington, not ignore it or deal with it based on the political wills of influential regional powers.”

       Int'l Coordination committee has started its work. Everybody who is interested in fighting #ISIL have been invited | http://t.co/wK8nilYEXg

       — Russian Embassy, UAE (@RusEmbassyUAE) October 4, 2015

2. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ১ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (৬:৩০ অপরাহ্ণ)

   India And The Universe Through 18 Beautiful Maps Across Centuries

   Temples, pilgrimages and landscapes from Kolkata to Chennai.

   There’s a lot that maps can tell you – not only about a place, but also about our perceptions, experiences and dreams. Take the 18 stunning maps below from the ongoing exhibition Cosmology to Cartography: A Cultural Journey of Indian Maps at the National Museum, New Delhi. Culled from the museum’s collection and Hyderabad’s Kalakriti Archives, these beautiful images illustrate everything from Hindu cosmological beliefs to colonial maps of the subcontinent and blueprints for our early cityscapes. The exhibition is on until October 11, 2015. Get a glimpse of its cartographical wonder below. The maps are displayed under the various sections of the exhibition, with descriptions from the catalogue.

   Hindu Universe

   “Amongst the earliest portable maps in the Indian subcontinent are those based on Hindu, Buddhist and Jain religious texts and related tracts. These were in active circulation from the early medieval period, usually painted on cloth, and are abstract representations of the various aspects of the Hindu cosmos. The purpose of these cosmological maps is to demarcate the religious and phenomenal world, the world of the gods, humans and demons, space-time and, above all, the attributes of an ordered universe.”

   Pilgrimage

   This pilgrimage route map depicts “the river Ganga and one of its chief headwaters, the Alaknanda, as seen by the devout pilgrim making a pilgrimage from Haridwar where the Ganga debouches into the plain, as far as the shrine at Badrinath in the Garhwal Himalayas. It is read from left to right.”

   “Variable in size and rich in detail, these painted maps depict the pilgrimage circuit at the sacred Jain site of Shatrunjaya (modern town of Palitana in Gujarat). Such compositions are therefore generally referred to as “Shatrunjaya pata”. The key purpose of these paintings is to provide a panoramic view of the key shrines, the pilgrimage route and details of significant features and episodes along the devotee’s path.”

   Temples and Towns

   “This pichhvai simhasan (or throne cloth) depicts the Shrinathji temple complex at Nathdwara, Rajasthan. Composed from a series of courtyards (including various shrines, palaces and service rooms) within a bastioned boundary wall and with one main gate at the heart of the town, the complex follows the architectural tradition of a large Rajasthani mansion or haveli, rather than a traditional North Indian Hindu temple. It is hence often referred to as the Nathdwara Haveli by devotees. The haveli plan was a popular subject for both paintings and pichhvais, particularly in demand by visiting pilgrims to take back as mementos of their visit and did not otherwise serve any particular religious purpose. This plan, like most such plans, depicts the occurrence of the Annakuta Festival, the day after Diwali, which is the most important festival for the Vallabha sect.”

   This is an example of “symbolic representations of the ritual topography of city-temples. Presented here are rare and early examples of pilgrimage souvenirs painted by the hereditary chitrakars or painters associated with the great temple of Jagannath at Puri in Orissa.”

   Early Encounters

   This section showcases “maps that represent Europeans’ attempts to comprehend the geography of India. While all of these works were drafted by non-Indians and printed in Europe, the picture is more nuanced than it may initially appear, as much of the information they present was gained from Indian sources.”

   “An exquisitely engraved sea chart depicting Southern India, printed in Florence by the English exile Sir Robert Dudley. This highly elegant sea chart embraces the southern part of the Indian Peninsula, Sri Lanka, the Lakshadweep Islands and Maldives and extends eastward to embrace the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, as well as the extremities of both Burma and Sumatra. True to the nature of sea charts, the coastal areas are rich in detail, while the interior regions are left almost entirely blank. Dudley showed a keen awareness of the importance of the Monsoons in navigating the coasts of India. Off the Malabar Coast, he includes the annotations ‘Venti buoni sono monsoni’ (Good monsoon winds) and ‘Lungo la costa non si puo navicare massimo Giunio luglio è Agosto’ (Along the coast you can’t navigate principally between June and August). Located in the waters between what is today Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, he includes the annotation ‘Venti Aquiloni sono gui pericolosi in Aprile’ (The winds here make it dangerous to navigate during the month of April).”

   “The first basically accurate map of northern India, by the English adventurer William Baffin, based on geographic intelligence obtained at the court of Emperor Jahangir. This revolutionary map embraces the entire Mughal Empire and extends from Afghanistan and Kashmir in the north, down south to the middle of the Deccan, and from the mouths of the Indus in the west, to Burma in the east. While far from scientific, and featuring some obvious inaccuracies (notably, areas in the upper part of the map are placed way too far to the north), it is the first map of northern India to evince a basic level of planimetric accuracy.”

   Clash Of Empires

   “Linschoten’s beautiful map of India and the Middle East was at the heart of history’s most consequential case of corporate espionage, which saw the fall of Portuguese hegemony in India and the arrival of other European powers on the subcontinent. This magnificent map embraces all of India, the Middle East and the northern Indian Ocean. Its coverage extends from Cyprus in the west, over to Burma in the east, and from the Caspian Sea in the north, down to the Maldives in the south. Based on secret Portuguese charts acquired by the Dutch adventurer and spy Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, it presents by far the most accurate overall mapping of these regions published to date.”

   “The earliest detailed printed English map of Bengal, dedicated to the English East India Company by its official hydrographer John Thornton. This elegant chart depicts Bengal and adjacent regions as the English conceived of it around 1680. It is centred on the Ganges Delta of Bengal and extends from Patna, Bihar in the west, to Arakan, Burma in the east, and reaches southwards to embrace much of the Bay of Bengal and northern Orissa. Importantly, Thornton’s map of Bengal was the first detailed English map of the region and the authoritative map used by the EIC for several decades following its initial publication in 1685.”

   “A beautifully executed contemporary manuscript map depicting the Fall of Madras (1746), a great French victory over the British East India Company (EIC), accompanied by a printed edition of the same scene. The exquisite, yet unfinished, manuscript map was prepared by a French officer to illustrate the Fall of Madras, which represented the worst defeat that the British would endure on the subcontinent during the period. During the First Carnatic War (1746-48), the first widespread conflict pitting France against Britain for colonial dominance over India, French forces managed to besiege and quickly conquer Madras, one of the EIC’s three most important bases in India.”

   Rise Of The Raj

   This is a “rare map depicting the projected route of the East Indian Railway, which was to run from Calcutta to Delhi and which helped to hail the rise of Modern India. The construction of the railway system across India during the second half of the 19th Century utterly transformed the subcontinent’s society, communications and economy.”

   This is a “fascinating topographical map of Jaipur State, featuring text entirely in Hindi, published by the Surveyor General’s Office of India.”

   Cities/Urbanism

   This is a “most accurate and detailed early printed map of Bangalore, depicting a major Indian city prior to the influences of European urban planning. This fascinating map of Bangalore grants a magnificent impression of a sizable Indian city before it was altered by European (in this case British) modifications. The large ‘Pettah’ (town) in the upper centre is encircled by an elaborate system of walls and takes on an ovoid shape common to many Indian cities. Within are dense and uneven built-up blocks divided by warrens of narrow streets, a labyrinth which was, in theory, ideal for confusing invaders who might dare to storm the city. A connecting ovoid palace-fort complex projects off the town to the south.”

   “A magnificent large-scale manuscript plan of Pondicherry, the capital of French India, drafted during the city’s historical apogee. This exquisitely drafted, and exceptionally large, military engineer’s plan depicts Pondicherry, founded as the capital of French India in 1674, which developed into the finest European-planned city in India of its era. Here the city is depicted as it appeared in 1741, during the height of its prosperity. Focusing tightly in on the city proper, this exactingly-drafted and finely-coloured plan is adorned, in the lower right quadrant, by an elegant rococo cartouche. The map’s grand appearance suggests that it was intended as a presentation piece for a senior French official, although curiously it is unsigned.”

   “J.B. Tassin’s spectacular map of Calcutta is among the finest early urban plans lithographed in India. Issued by Jean-Baptiste Tassin’s Oriental Lithographic Press in Calcutta, it features exceptionally fine original hand colouring by Bengali colourists employing Indian pigments, resulting in an extraordinary appearance distinct from maps produced in Europe. It is predicated on the important survey of the city and its environs conducted by Major John Augustus Schalch and completed by Captain Thomas Prinsep, from 1820 to 1828. This endeavour was instigated by the need to provide the city with an integrated drainage system, although it ended up having much broader applications.”

   “A magnificent manuscript map of Bombay Fort, then the epicenter of government and military affairs in Western India, one of the few surviving highly detailed maps of the complex. This fascinating original manuscript map depicts the massive complex of the Fort of Bombay, as it appeared around 1840. It housed the nucleus of the East India Company’s Presidency of Bombay, including the headquarters of the civil government, military and the financial establishments, making it the densest concentration of power on the subcontinent. The Fort also played a major role in the life of what was becoming one of the world’s most important commercial ports.”

   “This map is an early version of Edwin Lutyens’ master plan for the construction of New Delhi, dating from 1912, just before the mega-project was commenced in earnest. On first impression, one is confronted with the map’s powerful symbolism, as Lutyens’ design literally projects British imperial power over the existing Indian landscape, just to the south and southwest of Old Delhi. The bold orange lines, representing the proposed network of broad boulevards which run between planned monumental edifices, literally overwhelm all aspects of the countryside, which is subordinated in soft blue tones underneath. It is implicit in the design, that the British Raj intended to not only to co-opt the imperial legacy of the Mughals and the ‘Seven Cities of Delhi’, but also ventured to go beyond that towards creating the grandest capital of them all, and one which would signify the permanence of their regime.”

   India And The Universe Through 18 Beautiful Maps Across Centuries (via @NGTIndia). http://t.co/wVnIvjzK4e pic.twitter.com/5yxTDf9q5p

   — scroll.in (@scroll_in) September 30, 2015

3. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ৩ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (৯:১৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

   উৎপলকুমার বসু প্রয়াত

   বাংলা কবিতার নতুন ধারার পুরোধা কবি উৎপলকুমার বসু শনিবার দুপুরে প্রয়াত হয়েছেন। পাঁচের দশকে কৃত্তিবাস পত্রিকা ঘিরে যে তরুন কবিদের উত্থান তাঁদের ভিতর উৎপলকুমার চিহ্নিত হয়েছিলেন ব‍্যতিক্রমী কবি হিসেবে তাঁর প্রথম কাব‍্য গ্রন্থ ‘চৈত্রে রচিত কবিতা (১৯৫৬)’ ও ’পুরী সিরিজ(১৯৬৪)’–এর জন‍্য। জন্ম ১৯৩৯–এ কলকাতার ভবানীপুরে। স্কুল শিক্ষা বহরমপুর ও দিনহাটায়। কলেজ, বিশ্ববিদ‍্যালয়ে পড়েন কলকাতায়। ভুগোলে স্নাতকোত্তর উৎপুলকুমার ৬০–এর দশকে হাংরি জেনারেশন সাহিত‍্য আন্দোলনে যোগ দেন। সাহিত‍্যে অশ্লীলতার দায়ে পুলিসি মামলায় হাংরি কয়েকজন লেখক–কবির সঙ্গে উৎপলকুমার বসু জড়িয়ে যাওয়ায় কলকাতায় কলেজ অধ‍্যাপকের চাকরি থেকে তাঁকে পদত‍্যাগ করতে হয়। ৬–এর দশকে মধ‍্যভাগে ওই সময়ে উৎপল বিলেত চলে যান। ফিরে আসেন ৭–এর দশকের মাঝামাঝি। স্বল্প ও ঋজুবাক উৎপল তরুন কবিতা প্রয়াসী মহলে জনপ্রিয় ছিলেন উভয় বাংলায়। তাঁর অন‍্যান‍্য কাব‍্যগ্রন্থ গুলি হল, ‘লোচনদাস কারিগর (১৯৮২)’ ‘খণ্ড বৈচিত্রের দিন (১৯৮৬)’ ‘সলমা জরির কাজ (১৯৯৫)’ ‘কহবতীর নাচ (১৯৯৬)’ ‘তুসু আমার চিন্তামনি’ ‘বক্সিগঞ্জে পদ্মাপাড়ে’ ‘সুখদুঃখের সাথী’ ‘পিয়া মন ভাবে’ ইত‍্যাদি। অনুবাদ করেছেন সাফোর কবিতা। গল্পগ্রন্থ ‘নরখাদক (১৯৭০)’ ‘ধুসর আতা গাছ (১৯৯৪)’। রেখে গেছেন স্ত্রী ও ছেলে ফিরোজকে।

   পুরভোটের সল্টলেক–ঝঞ্ঝা পেরিয়ে অফিসে আসছি, মোবাইলে মেসেজ ভেসে উঠল: উৎপলকুমার বসু আর নেই। তখনই কেমন মেঘলা হয়ে গেল চারদিক। ফোন আসতে থাকল। দক্ষিণ কলকাতার নার্সিংহোমে শনিবার দুপুরে মারা গেছেন। গত এক বছরে ছিলেন খুবই অসুস্থ, বারবার এই নার্সিংহোমে আসতে হয়েছে। গত বছর সাহিত‍্য অাকাদেমি পুরস্কৃত হলেন যখন, প্রতিক্রিয়া জানাতে অস্পষ্টভাবে একটি দুটি শব্দের বেশি বলতে পারলেন না।

   ১৯৬৯, ৭০। আমরা যখন সবে কৈশোরোত্তীর্ণ তরুণ, উৎপলকুমার তখন ছিলেন কিংবদন্তির কবি। তাঁর ‘পুরী সিরিজ’ কাব‍্যগ্রন্থটি সে সময় কোহিনুর রত্নটির মতো এ ভারত–ভূম থেকে উধাও হয়ে বোধ করি উৎপলকুমারের সঙ্গে বিলেতেই অধিষ্ঠিত ছিল। কত খোঁজাখুঁজি করেছি সে বই। আশ্চর্যের ব‍্যাপার, আলিপুরে জাতীয় গ্রন্থাগারের রিডিং রুমে গিয়ে ওই বইয়ের নাম লিখে স্লিপ জমা দিতেই এক কর্মচারী টেবিলে দিয়ে গেলেন সবুজ রেক্সিনে বঁাধানো পুরী সিরিজ। হায়, সেকালে ছিল না জেরক্স মেশিন। হাতে লিখে কয়েকটি কবিতা নিয়ে আমরা কয়েকজন ‘গহ্বর প্রস্তুত সীতা, গহ্বর প্রস্তুত’ বলতে বলতে নকশালপন্থী ঠাসা আলিপুর জেলখানা পেরিয়ে চলে গেলেম। ওই সময় একবার তারাপদ রায়ের বাড়িতে গিয়েও তঁার বইয়ের তাক ঘঁাটতে চরম পুলকে পেয়ে যাই ওই বই, থুড়ি হীরকখণ্ডটি। গায়েব করে দেব–দেব ভাবছি, কিন্তু তারাপদদার ছোটভাইটি ছিলেন ঈষৎ অস্বাভাবিক, একটু হিংস্র ধরনের। তিনি হাত থেকে ছিনিয়ে দাদার বইয়ের তাকে যথাস্থানে রেখে হাসি হাসি হিংসুটে মুখে ঠায় বসে রইলেন। সে সময় উৎপলের প্রথম কাব‍্যগ্রন্থ ‘চৈত্রে রচিত কবিতা’ (১৯৫৬) ফের ছাপিয়েছিল কোনও একটি লিটল ম‍্যাগাজিন। কলেজ স্ট্রিটের পাতিরাম থেকে সেই পত্রিকাটি দৃশ‍্যত লুট হয়ে গেল।

   পঞ্চাশ দশকের কৃত্তিবাস পত্রিকা ঘিরে যে তরুণ কবিদের উত্থান, তঁাদের তরুণতমটি, উৎপলকুমার ব‍্যতিক্রমী কাব‍্যভাষায় তির্যক, অথচ মাধুর্যে পরিপূর্ণ নাগরিকতায় সবুজ–ধূসর উভয় প্রান্তরে সূর্যাস্তের রঙ মিশিয়ে নিজেকে আলাদা চিহ্নিত করেছিলেন তাঁর সূচনা পর্বেই। শক্তি–সুনীল–অলোকরঞ্জন–বিনয়, ৫০ দশকের বিবিধ বর্ণ বিচ্ছুরিত হীরকস্রোতোধারাটিকে এক কথায় উৎপল একটু ঘুরিয়ে দিয়েছিলেন। আমাদের বাংলা কাব‍্য ভাষায় আধুনিকতার পর্বে যুক্তি–শৃঙ্খল ছিন্ন করার ওই সূচনা। নচেৎ ‘তুমি জানু, তুমিই জানালা’ অর্থহীন এই কাব‍্যপঙ্‌ক্তিও কেন এত মোহময় হবে? অনেক কাল ধরেই আমার মনে হয়েছে, উত্তর আধুনিকতার সূত্রপাতও ঘটিয়েছেন উৎপল।

   কৃত্তিবাসীদের দলটি থেকে শক্তি, উৎপল, কিছুটা বিনয়ও হাংরিদের সঙ্গে জড়িয়ে ছিলেন। ষাটের দশকের সেই হাংরি জেনারেশন সাহিত‍্য আন্দোলনে, আপনারা জানেন, ধরপাকড়ও হয়েছিল। অশ্লীল সাহিত‍্য প্রয়াসের দায়ে উৎপল তঁার অধ‍্যাপনার চাকরি খোয়ান। সন্দীপনের ভাষায় ‘এরোপ্লেনের বিচ্ছিরি ছায়া বুলিয়ে বিলেতে চলে’ যান।

   বিলেতে বসে একটাও কবিতা লেখেননি। কেন তিনি লেখেন না?— আমার ভাবনা হত সে সময়। অলোকরঞ্জন তো জার্মানিতে বসেও লেখেন। প্রশ্নটা সুনীল গঙ্গোপাধ‍্যায়কে একবার করে ফেলি। সুনীল বলেছিলেন, ‘বিলেতে বাংলা ভাষাটা ও তো চারপাশে শুনতে পায় না। বাংলা ভাষার আবহের মধে‍্য নেই। মনে হয় তাই ও লেখে না।’

   সে সময় শম্ভু রক্ষিত সম্পাদিত ‘ব্লুজ’ পত্রিকায় উৎপলকুমার বসুর একটি ছোট্ট গদ‍্য প্রকাশিত হয়। ওই লেখায় তরুণ কবিদের প্রতি তিনি বৈপ্লবিক আহ্বান জানান ভাষাশৃঙ্খলা ভাঙার। ওই লেখায় ব্রিটিশ কবিদের এক সভার বিবরণ দিয়েছিলেন তিনি। এক সাহেব কবিতা পড়ছেন, তার বেল্টের দুদিকে দুটি পিস্তল!

   আমরা অনেকেই ভেবেছিলাম, উৎপলকুমার বুঝি ওইরকম। মাঝ ৭০ দশকে যখন বরাবরের জন‍্য ফের কলকাতায় ফিরে এলেন, কফি হাউসে আসবেন জেনে আমরা সেজেগুজে সদলে হাজির হলাম। উৎপল এসে বসে পড়লেন আমাদের মাঝখানটিতে। কিন্তু কোথায় সাহেবি পোশাক–আশাক! গোড়ালি দেখা যায় এমন পাজামায় ঘিয়ে রঙের হাফ পাঞ্জাবিতে একেবারে ভূগোলের মাস্টারমশাই লাগল তঁাকে। শুধু একটু পাইপ খান তামাক ভরে— এই যা। নিয়মিত কফি হাউসে আসতেন। আমাদের সখে‍্য মেতে উঠলেন তিনি। স্বল্পবাক কিন্তু গল্পগাছায় সাবলীল। রসিক, তীর্যক মোচড় দিয়ে মাতিয়ে দিতেন। আর কত গল্প দেশ বিদেশের। কত বিষয়ে তঁার অনুসন্ধান। বিদেশে রুদ্ধ, কিন্তু বাংলায় ফিরে তঁার কবিতা পেল তুমুল স্রোতোধারা। ১৯৭৮–এ বের হল আবার পুরী সিরিজ, ১৯৮২–তে লোচনদাস কারিগর, ১৯৮৬–তে খণ্ডবৈচিত্রের দিন, ১৯৯৫–এ সলমা জরির কাজ, ১৯৯৬–এ কহবতীর নাচ, এর পর তুসু আমার চিন্তামণি, মীনযুদ্ধ, অন্নদাতা যোশেফ, সুখদুঃখের সাথী, গত বছর সাহিত‍্য অকাদেমি পেলেন ‘পিয়া মন ভাবে’ বইটির জন‍্য। গত বইমেলায় প্রকাশিত হয়েছে তঁার শেষ বই হঁাস চলার পথ। তঁার গদে‍্যর বই ‘ধূসর আতাগাছ’। বাংলা কবিতার কয়েকটি ধর্মগ্রন্থের প্রণেতা উৎপল। আর, ধর্মগ্রন্থের কোনও সমালোচনা হয় না।

   মন মানে না বৃষ্টি হল এত/ সমস্ত রাত ডুবো নদীর পাড়ে/ আমি তোমার স্বপ্নে পাওয়া আঙুল/স্পর্শ করি জলের অধিকারে। লিরিকেও তিনি মিশিয়েছেন মায়া। কবিতার ইতিহাস, টেকনিকের ইতিহাস— বলতেন তিনি।

   কলকাতার ভবানীপুরে ১৯৩৯ সালে জন্মেছিলেন উৎপল। ছোটবেলা কেটেছে বহরমপুর আর বালুরঘাটে। স্কুলে পড়েছেন এই দুই শহরে। কলেজ, বিশ্ববিদ‍্যালয় কলকাতায়। ভূগোলে স্নাতকোত্তর। স্ত্রী আর ছেলেকে রেখে গেছেন। তঁার স্ত্রীর নাম সান্ত্বনা, ছেলে ফিরোজ। বাহারউদ্দিনের সল্টলেকের বাড়ি থেকে একদিন নিজে গাড়ি চালিয়ে উৎপলকুমার আমাকে পৌঁছে দিয়েছিলেন আমহার্স্ট স্ট্রিটে আজকাল অফিসে, আমার প্রাপ্তিগুলির সর্বোত্তম এটি একটি ঘটনা।

   আমাদের ‘আজকাল’ পত্রিকার ঘনিষ্ঠ সুহৃদজনের একজন ছিলেন উৎপলকুমার বসু। নিয়মিত লিখতেন, আসতেন। লোকমাতা দেবী নামে সমকালীন বিষয়, রাজনৈতিক ঘটনাবলি নিয়ে তঁার তীর্যক রচনাগুলি বড়ই জনপ্রিয় হয়েছিল।

   ফঁাকা ফঁাকা লাগছে খুব।

   উৎপলকুমার বসু প্রয়াত http://t.co/RtW1BpRMcj via #আজকাল #উৎপলকুমারবসু #কবিতা

   — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) October 4, 2015

   #মনেএকবাংলা – শূন্য বোতলের কাছে চুপ ক'রে বসে থাকি : #উৎপলকুমারবসু #কবিতা #বাংলাকবিতা

   — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) October 4, 2015

   #উৎপলকুমারবসু #সুখদুঃখেরসাথী #কবিতা | #মনেএকবাংলা pic.twitter.com/VAlEXwWvgu

   — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) October 6, 2015

4. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ৪ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (৯:৫৩ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

   Islamic State claims responsibility for killing Japanese man in Bangladesh

   The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for shooting dead a Japanese national Saturday in Bangladesh — the second killing of a foreigner there in less than a week — and promised more attacks.

   The militant group issued a statement on Twitter saying it was behind the attack, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadi networks. The Islamic State group had earlier claimed responsibility for the murder of an Italian citizen shot dead in Bangladesh on Tuesday. Both accounts could not be independently confirmed.

   Kunio Hoshi, believed to be in his 60s, was gunned down by masked attackers on a motorcycle as he made his way to an agricultural project he was working on in the northern district of Rangpur, local media reported.

   Hoshi was reportedly shot in the head, chest and leg and died on the way to a hospital.

   Later Saturday, the Islamic State group warned of further attacks.

   “There will continue to be a series of ongoing security operations against nationals of crusader coalition countries, they will not have safety or a livelihood in Muslim lands,” the group tweeted.

   On Saturday, the Japanese Embassy in Bangladesh issued a warning on its website for citizens in the country, urging them to exercise caution and avoid unnecessary trips outside.

   Hoshi had traveled to Bangladesh from Nepal on Aug. 28, and had been staying with a friend in Munshipara, Rangpur district, Kyodo News reported. He had previously visited Bangladesh in February, when he involved himself with an agricultural project, growing and developing Napier grass on leased land.

   His killing came less than a month after Tokyo ordered all diplomatic offices abroad to beef up security after the Islamic State militant group called on its supporters to attack Japanese missions in Indonesia, Malaysia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the latest edition of Dabiq, its English-language Internet magazine.

   Earlier this year, the extremist group killed two Japanese hostages, Haruna Yukawa, 42, and Kenji Goto, 47.

   The magazine said the group executed the two to “humiliate the arrogance of this Japanese government,” and accused Japan of having been a player in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

   The killing of Hoshi came just days after Italian aid worker Cesare Tavella was shot dead in similar fashion in the diplomatic zone of the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka.

   The Bangladesh government had sought to allay fears after Tavella’s shooting, dismissing the Islamic State links and calling the killing an “isolated incident.”

   Attacks of foreigners in Muslim-majority Bangladesh are rare, but the country has seen a surge in violence by hard-line Islamic groups recently, including the killings of four secular bloggers who had criticized extremists and religious fundamentalism.

   Last week, Cricket Australia announced that two matches scheduled to be played in the country would be canceled due to concerns for players’ safety.

   now Japanese #HoshiKunio shot dead http://t.co/VRES2cm8SL … #cesaretavella #Bangladesh #FEcountry #ForeignerMurder pic.twitter.com/QfKQKk60tD

   — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) October 4, 2015

5. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ৫ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (৬:৪৮ অপরাহ্ণ)

   The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2015

   The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2015 was divided, one half jointly to William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura “for their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites” and the other half to Youyou Tu “for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against Malaria”.

   BREAKING NEWS The 2015 #NobelPrize #Medicine to William C. Campbell @DrewUniversity, Satoshi Ōmura and Youyou Tu pic.twitter.com/qvH9XFZV7I

   — The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 5, 2015

   • 

     মাসুদ করিম - ৬ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (৬:৪৪ অপরাহ্ণ)

     The Nobel Prize in Physics 2015

     The Nobel Prize in Physics 2015 was awarded jointly to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald “for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass”

     BREAKING NEWS The 2015 #NobelPrize in Physics to Takaaki Kajita @UTokyo_news_en and Arthur B. McDonald @queensu pic.twitter.com/ipvzm0EEFN

     — The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 6, 2015

     • 

       মাসুদ করিম - ৮ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (৯:৫১ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

       The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015

       The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015 was awarded jointly to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar “for mechanistic studies of DNA repair”.

       BREAKING NEWS The 2015 #NobelPrize in Chemistry is awarded to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar: pic.twitter.com/mlgE5R2ZFc

       — The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 7, 2015

       • 

         মাসুদ করিম - ৮ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (৫:০৭ অপরাহ্ণ)

         The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015

         The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2015 is awarded to the Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich

         “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

         BREAKING NEWS The 2015 #NobelPrize in Literature is awarded to the Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich pic.twitter.com/MABhwFJ8Lu

         — The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 8, 2015

         #NobelPrize Literature: Svetlana Alexievich. #সাংবাদিকসাহিত্য-ই কি উচ্চকিত হল এবারের নোবেল সাহিত্য পুরস্কারে? #SvetlanaAlexievich

         — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) October 8, 2015

         Who's the newly crowned #NobelPrize literature winner Svetlana Alexievich? http://t.co/0KOF8nNc8X pic.twitter.com/JZJGMF7MQX

         — The Straits Times (@STcom) October 8, 2015

         Nobel literature winner Svetlana Alexievich: Chronicler of war, Chernobyl horrors

         Belarussian author Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel prize for literature on Thursday (Oct 08), has drawn international acclaim with her emotional accounts of the Chernobyl disaster and World War II based on witness accounts.

         Chronicling such horrors in the first person through the words of witnesses, Alexievich has seen her works translated into numerous languages and scooped international awards.

         But her books, controversially written in Russian, are not published in her home country, long ruled by authoritarian president Alexander Lukashenko, amid what the author has described as “a creeping censorship”.

         Alexievich, 67, began tape-recording accounts of female soldiers who took part in World War II while she was working as a local newspaper reporter in the 1970s.

         The resulting book, “War’s Unwomanly Face”, was long barred from publication because it focused on personal tragedies and did not emphasise the role of the Communist Party. It was finally published in 1985 under the perestroika reforms.

         Alexievich later used the same technique of first-person testimonies to document the despair of mothers who lost their sons in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan – in “Zinky Boys”.

         ‘Ear to the ground’

         “I need to catch a person at a moment when they have been shaken up,” Alexievich told Russia’s Ogonyok weekly magazine.

         “It’s very important to listen when someone is speaking up. I always keep my ear to the ground.” In 1998, she published “Voices From Chernobyl”, a collection of horrifying accounts from people who had worked on the nuclear clean-up of the 1986 disaster. The fall-out affected Belarus more than any other country.

         Her most recent book “Second-Hand Time” – a non-fiction work examining the legacy of the Soviet mentality over 20 years after the collapse of Communism – was awarded France’s prestigious Prix Medicis essai in 2013.

         Since Lukashenko came to power in 1994, Alexievich’s books have not been published in Belarus and she has lived most of her life on writers’ scholarships in Italy, Germany, France and Sweden.

         Alexievich has openly criticised Lukashenko’s tight control of Belarus under a Soviet-style economic system and the country’s continued use of the death penalty.

         “We see who is leading us – this is the time of a triumph of mediocrity,” she said in a 2013 interview with the newspaper Belorusskaya Delovaya Gazeta.

         Angered the elite

         She has also weighed into the debate over the crisis in Ukraine by praising protestors who ousted Kremlin-backed leader Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 for trying to shatter the links with the country’s Soviet history.

         “Ukraine is an example for all. The desire to break completely with the past is worthy of respect,” she said in an interview.

         The author has though angered the literary and intellectual elite in Belarus by writing in Russian, not in the Belarussian language, amid a strong drive to revive national culture and language.

         “Alexievich isn’t interested in the problem of Belarussian identity. So I can see why Svetlana with her ‘Russian-ness’ interests Russians, Japanese, Germans and Swedes, but not Belarussians,” Belarussian novelist Natalka Babina told AFP.

         In an interview with Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily, Alexievich was quoted as saying: “I write only in Russian and see myself as a part of Russian culture. The Belarussian language is very rural and immature as literature.” Alexievich later said that she had been misquoted in the interview, which came out after she won the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2013.

         The outspoken writer has also condemned the growing domination of socially conservative and Orthodox Christian beliefs in Russia.

         “This wailing about a ‘great national idea’ or a desire to make Russia an Orthodox Iran… is a path going backwards,” she told Ogonyok.

         Voices from Chernobyl

         Svetlana Alexievich

         On April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58 a. m., a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe at Chernobyl became the largest technical disaster of the twentieth century. . . . For tiny Belarus (population: ten million), it was a national disaster. . . . Today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom seven hundred thousand are children. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birthrates by twenty percent.

         —Belaruskaya entsiklopedia, 1996, s.v. “Chernobyl,” pg. 24

         On April 29, 1986, instruments recorded high levels of radiation in Poland, Germany, Austria, and Romania. On April 30, in Switzerland and northern Italy. On May 1 and second, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and northern Greece. On May 3, in Israel, Kuwait, and Turkey. . . . Gaseous airborne particles traveled around the globe: on May 2 they were registered in Japan, on May 5 in India, on May 5 and sixth in the U.S. and Canada.

         —“The Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident in Belarus”

         The Sakharov International College on Radioecology, Minsk, 1992
         Lyudmilla Ignatenko Wife of deceased Fireman Vasily Ignatenko

         We were newlyweds. We still walked around holding hands, even if we were just going to the store. I would say to him, “I love you.” But I didn’t know then how much. I had no idea . . . We lived in the dormitory of the fire station where he worked. I always knew what was happening—where he was, how he was.

         One night I heard a noise. I looked out the window. He saw me. “Close the window and go back to sleep. There’s a fire at the reactor. I’ll be back soon.”

         I didn’t see the explosion itself. Just the flames. Everything was radiant. The whole sky. A tall flame. And smoke. The heat was awful. And he still hadn’t come back.

         They went off just as they were, in their shirtsleeves. No one told them. They had been called for a fire, that was it.

         Seven o’clock in the morning. At seven I was told he was in the hospital. I ran over there‚ but the police had already encircled it, and they weren’t letting anyone through. Only ambulances. The policemen shouted: “The ambulances are radioactive‚ stay away!” I started looking for a friend, she was a doctor at that hospital. I grabbed her white coat when she came out of an ambulance. “Get me inside!” “I can’t. He’s bad. They all are.” I held onto her. “Just to see him!” “All right‚” she said. “Come with me. Just for fifteen or twenty minutes.”

         I saw him. He was all swollen and puffed up. You could barely see his eyes.

         “He needs milk. Lots of milk‚” my friend said. “They should drink at least three liters each.”

         “But he doesn’t like milk.”

         “He’ll drink it now.”

         Many of the doctors and nurses in that hospital‚ and especially the orderlies‚ would get sick themselves and die. But we didn’t know that then.

         At ten‚ the cameraman Shishenok died. He was the first.

         I said to my husband, “Vasenka, what should I do?” “Get out of here! Go! You have our child.” I was pregnant. But how could I leave him? He was saying to me: “Go! Leave! Save the baby.” “First I need to bring you some milk, then we’ll decide what to do.” My friend Tanya Kibenok came running in—her husband was in the same room. Her father was with her, he had a car. We got in and drove to the nearest village. We bought a bunch of three-liter bottles, six, so there was enough for everyone. But they started throwing up terribly from the milk.

         They kept passing out, they got put on iv. The doctors kept telling them they’d been poisoned by gas, for some reason. No one said anything about radiation.

         I couldn’t get into the hospital that evening. There was a sea of people. I stood under his window, he came over and yelled something to me. It was so desperate! Someone in the crowd heard him—they were being taken to Moscow that night. All the wives got together in one group. We decided we’d go with them. “Let us go with our husbands! You have no right!” We punched and we clawed. The soldiers—there were already soldiers—they pushed us back. Then the doctor came out and said they were flying to Moscow, but we needed to bring them their clothing. The clothes they’d worn at the station had been burned. The buses had stopped running already and we ran across the city. We came running back with the bags, but the plane was already gone. They tricked us. So that we wouldn’t be there yelling and crying.

         Later in the day I started throwing up. I was six months pregnant, but I had to get to Moscow.

         In Moscow we asked the first police officer we saw, Where did they put the Chernobyl firemen? And he told us, which was a surprise; everyone had scared us into thinking it was top secret. “Hospital number 6. At the Shchukinskaya stop.”

         It was a special hospital, for radiology, and you couldn’t get in without a pass. I gave some money to the woman at the door, and she said: “Go ahead.” Then I had to ask someone else, beg. Finally I was sitting in the office of the head radiologist, Angelina Vasilyevna Guskova. Right away she asked: “Do you have kids?”

         What should I tell her? I can see already I need to hide that I’m pregnant. They won’t let me see him! It’s good I’m thin, you can’t really tell anything.

         “Yes,” I say.

         “How many?”

         I’m thinking, I need to tell her two. If it’s just one, she won’t let me in.

         “A boy and a girl.”

         “So you don’t need to have any more. All right, listen: His central nervous system is completely compromised, his skull is completely compromised.”

         Okay, I’m thinking, so he’ll be a little fidgety.

         “And listen: If you start crying, I’ll kick you out right away. No hugging or kissing. Don’t even get near him. You have half an hour.”

         But I knew already that I wasn’t leaving. If I leave, then it’ll be with him. I swore to myself!

         I come in, they’re sitting on the bed, playing cards and laughing. “Vasya!” they call out. He turns around: “Oh, well, now it’s over! She’s found me even here!” He looks so funny, he’s got pajamas on for a size 48, and he’s a size 52. The sleeves are too short, the pants are too short. But his face isn’t swollen anymore. They were given some sort of fluid.

         I say: “Where’d you run off to?” He wants to hug me. The doctor won’t let him. “Sit, sit,” she says. “No hugging in here.”

         We turned it into a joke somehow. And then everyone came over, from the other rooms too, everyone from Pripyat. There were twenty-eight of them on the plane.

         I wanted to be with him alone, if only for a minute. The guys felt it, and each of them thought of some excuse, and they all went out into the hall. Then I hugged him and I kissed him. He moved away.

         “Don’t sit near me. Take a chair.”

         “That’s just silliness,” I said, waving it away.

         The next day when I came, they were lying by themselves, each in his own room. They were banned from going in the hallway, from talking to each other. They knocked on the walls with their knuckles. Dash-dot, dash-dot. The doctors explained that everyone’s body reacts differently to radiation, and what one person can handle, another can’t. They even measured the radiation of the walls where they had them. To the right, the left, and the floor beneath. They moved out all the sick people from the floor below and the floor above. There was no one left in the place.

         He started to change—every day I met a brand-new person. The burns started to come to the surface. In his mouth, on his tongue, his cheeks—at first there were little lesions, and then they grew. It came off in layers—as white film . . . the color of his face . . . his body . . . blue . . . red . . . gray-brown. And it’s all so very mine! It’s impossible to describe! It’s impossible to write down! Or even to get over. The only thing that saved me was that it happened so fast; there wasn’t any time to think, there wasn’t any time to cry.

         Fourteen days. In fourteen days a person dies.

         It was the ninth of May. He always used to say to me: “You have no idea how beautiful Moscow is! Especially on V-Day, when they set off the fireworks. I want you to see it.”

         I was sitting with him in the room, he opened his eyes.

         “Is it day or night?”

         “It’s nine at night.”

         “Open the window! They’re going to set off the fireworks!”

         I opened the window. We were on the eighth floor, and the whole city was there before us! There was a bouquet of fire exploding in the air.

         “Look at that!” I said.

         “I told you I’d show you Moscow. And I told you I’d always give you flowers on holidays…”

         I looked over, and he was getting three carnations from under his pillow. He had given the nurse money, and she had bought them.

         I ran over and kissed him.

         “My love! My only one!”

         He started growling. “What did the doctors tell you? No hugging me. And no kissing!”

         He got so bad that I couldn’t leave him even for a second. He was calling me constantly: “Lusya, where are you? Lusenka!” He called and called. The other biochambers, where our boys were, were being tended to by soldiers because the orderlies on staff refused, they demanded protective clothing. The soldiers carried the sanitary vessels. They wiped the floors down, changed the bedding. They did everything. Where did they get those soldiers? We didn’t ask. But he—he—every day I would hear: Dead. Dead. Tischura is dead. Titenok is dead. Dead.

         He was producing stool twenty-five to thirty times a day. With blood and mucus. His skin started cracking on his arms and legs. He became covered with boils. When he turned his head, there’d be a clump of hair left on the pillow. I tried joking: “It’s convenient, you don’t need a comb.” Soon they cut all their hair. I did it for him myself. I wanted to do everything for him myself. If it had been physically possible I would have stayed with him twenty-four hours a day. I couldn’t spare a minute. [Long silence.]

         There’s a fragment of some conversation, I’m remembering it. Someone saying: “You have to understand: This is not your husband anymore, not a beloved person, but a radioactive object with a strong density of poisoning. You’re not suicidal. Get a hold of yourself.” And I was like someone who’d lost her mind: “But I love him! I love him!” He’s sleeping, and I’m whispering: “I love you!” Walking in the hospital courtyard, “I love you.” Carrying his sanitary tray, “I love you.”

         One night, everything was quiet. We were all alone. He looked at me very, very carefully and suddenly he said:

         “I want to see our child so much. How is he?”

         “What are we going to name him?”

         “You’ll decide that yourself.”

         “Why myself, when there’s two of us?”

         “In that case, if it’s a boy, he should be Vasya, and if it’s a girl, Natasha.”

         I was like a blind person. I couldn’t even feel the little pounding underneath my heart. Even though I was six months in. I thought that my little one was inside me, that he was protected.

         And then—the last thing. I remember it in flashes, all broken up. I was sitting on my little chair next to him at night. At eight I said: “Vasenka, I’m going to go for a little walk.” He opened his eyes and closed them, letting me go. I had just walked to the hotel, gone up to my room, lain down on the floor—I couldn’t lie on the bed; everything hurt too much—when the cleaning lady started knocking on the door. “Go! Run to him! He’s calling for you like mad!”

         Right away I called the nurse’s post. “How is he?” “He died fifteen minutes ago.” What? I was there all night. I was gone for three hours! I ran down the stairs. He was still in his biochamber, they hadn’t taken him away yet. I didn’t leave him anymore after that. I escorted him all the way to the cemetery. Although the thing I remember isn’t the grave, it’s the plastic bag. That bag.

         At the morgue they said, “Want to see what we’ll dress him in?” I did! They dressed him up in formal wear, with his service cap. They couldn’t get shoes on him because his feet had swelled up. They had to cut up the formal wear, too, because they couldn’t get it on him, there wasn’t a whole body to put it on. The last two days in the hospital—pieces of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth. He was choking on his internal organs. I’d wrap my hand in a bandage and put it in his mouth, take out all that stuff. It’s impossible to talk about. It’s impossible to write about. And even to live through. They couldn’t get a single pair of shoes to fit him. They buried him barefoot.

         Everyone came—his parents, my parents. They bought black handkerchiefs in Moscow. The Emergency Commission met with us. They told everyone the same thing: It’s impossible for us to give you the bodies of your husbands, your sons, they are very radioactive and will be buried in a Moscow cemetery in a special way. In sealed zinc caskets, under cement tiles. And you need to sign this document here.

         If anyone got indignant and wanted to take the coffin back home, they were told that the dead were now, you know, heroes, and that they no longer belonged to their families. They were heroes of the state. They belonged to the state.

         Right away they bought us plane tickets back home. For the next day. At home I fell asleep. I walked into the place and just fell onto the bed. I slept for three days. An ambulance came. “No,” said the doctor, “she’ll wake up. It’s just a terrible sleep.”

         I was twenty-three. Two months later I went back to Moscow. From the train station straight to the cemetery. To him! And at the cemetery I started going into labor. Just as I started talking to him—they called the ambulance. It was two weeks before I was due.

         They showed her to me—a girl. “Natashenka,” I called out. “Your father named you Natashenka.” She looked healthy. Arms, legs. But she had cirrhosis of the liver. Her liver had twenty-eight roentgens. Congenital heart disease. Four hours later they told me she was dead. And again: “We won’t give her to you.” “What do you mean you won’t give her to me? It’s me who won’t give her to you!”

         [She is silent for a long time.]

         In Kiev they gave me an apartment. It was in a large building where they put everyone from the atomic station. It’s a big apartment, with two rooms, the kind Vasya and I had dreamed of.

         [She stands up, goes over to the window.]

         There are many of us here. A whole street. That’s what it’s called—Chernobylskaya. These people worked at the station their whole lives. A lot of them still go there to work on a provisional basis, that’s how they work there now, no one lives there anymore. They have bad diseases, they’re invalids, but they don’t leave their jobs, they’re scared to even think of the reactor closing down. Who needs them now anywhere else? Often they die. In a minute. They just drop—someone will be walking, he falls, goes to sleep. He was carrying flowers for his nurse and his heart stopped. They die, but no one’s really asked us. No one’s asked what we’ve been through. What we saw. No one wants to hear about death. About what scares them.

         But I was telling you about love. About my love . . .
         Settlers’ Chorus: Those Who Returned

         Oh, I don’t even want to remember it. It was scary. They chased us out, the soldiers chased us. The big military machines rolled in. The all-terrain ones. One old man—he was already on the ground. Dying. Where was he going to go? “I’ll just get up,” he was crying, “and walk to the cemetery. I’ll do it myself.”

         §

         We were leaving—I took some earth from my mother’s grave, put it in a little sack. Got down on my knees: “Forgive us for leaving you.” I went there at night and I wasn’t scared. People were writing their names on the houses. On the wood. On the fences. On the asphalt.

         §

         The nights are very long here in the winter. We’ll sit, sometimes, and count: Who’s died?

         §

         My man was in bed for two months. He didn’t say anything, didn’t answer me. He was mad. I’d walk around the yard, come back: “Old man, how are you?” When a person’s dying, you can’t cry. You’ll interrupt his dying, he’ll have to keep struggling. I didn’t cry. I asked for just one thing: “Say hello to our daughter and to my dear mother.” I prayed that we’d go together. Some gods would have done it, but He didn’t let me die. I’m alive . . .

         §

         I washed the house, bleached the stove. You needed to leave some bread on the table and some salt, a little plate and three spoons. As many spoons as there are souls in the house. All so we could come back.

         §

         The chickens had black coxcombs, not red ones, because of the radiation. And you couldn’t make cheese. We lived a month without cheese and cottage cheese. The milk didn’t go sour—it curdled into powder, white powder. Because of the radiation.

         §

         I had that radiation in my garden. The whole garden went white, white as white can be, like it was covered with something. Chunks of something. I thought maybe someone brought it from the forest.

         §

         We didn’t want to leave. The men were all drunk, they were throwing themselves under cars. The big Party bosses were walking to all the houses and begging people to go. Orders: “Don’t take your belongings!”

         §

         No one’s going to fool us anymore, we’re not moving anywhere. There’s no store, no hospital. No electricity. We sit next to a kerosene lamp and under the moonlight. And we like it! Because we’re home.

         §

         The police were yelling. They’d come in cars, and we’d run into the forest. Like from the Germans. One time they came with the prosecutor, he huffed and puffed, they were going to put us up on Article 10. I said: “Let them give me a year in jail. I’ll serve it and come back here.” Their job is to yell, ours is to stay quiet. I have a medal—I was the best harvester on the kolkhoz. And he’s scaring me with Article 10.

         §

         This one reporter said we didn’t just return home, we went back a hundred years. We use a hammer for reaping, and a sickle for mowing. We flail wheat right on the asphalt.

         §

         We turned off the radio right away. We don’t know any of the news, but life is peaceful. We don’t get upset. People come, they tell us the stories—there’s war everywhere. And like that, socialism is finished and we live under capitalism. And the czar is coming back. Is that true?

         §

         Everyone’s rearing to get back for the harvest. That’s it. Everyone wants to have his own back. The police have lists of people they’ll let back, but kids under eighteen can’t come. People will come and they’re so glad just to stand next to their house. In their own yard next to the apple tree. At first they’ll go cry at the cemetery, then they go to their yards. And they cry there, too, and pray. They leave candles. They hang them on their fences. Or on the little fences at the cemetery. Sometimes they’ll even leave a wreath at the house. A white towel on the gate. An old woman reads a prayer: “Brothers and sisters! Have patience!”

         §

         People take eggs, and rolls, and whatever else, to the cemetery. Everyone sits with their families. They call them: “Sis, I’ve come to see you. Come have lunch.” Or: “Mom, dear Mom. Dad, dear Dad.” They call the souls down from heaven. Those who had people die this year cry, and those whose people died earlier, don’t. They talk, they remember. Everyone prays. And those who don’t know how to pray, also pray.

         §

         We have everything here—graves. Graves everywhere. The dump trucks are working, and the bulldozers. The houses are falling. The grave diggers are toiling away. They buried the school, the headquarters, the baths. It’s the same world, but the people are different. One thing I don’t know is, do people have souls? What kind? And how do they all fit in the next world? My grandpa died for two days. I was hiding behind the stove and waiting: How’s it going to fly out of his body? I went to milk the cow—I came back in, called him, he was lying there with his eyes open. His soul fled already. Or did nothing happen? And then how will we meet?

         §

         Soldiers’ Chorus

         Our regiment was given the alarm. It was only when we got to the Belorusskaya train station in Moscow that they told us where we were going. One guy, I think he was from Leningrad, began to protest. They told him they’d drag him before a military tribunal. The commander said exactly that before the troops: “You’ll go to jail or be shot.” I had other feelings, the complete opposite of that guy. I wanted to do something heroic. Maybe it was kid’s stuff. But there were others like me. It was scary but also fun, for some reason.

         Well, so they brought us in, and they took us right to the power station. They gave us white robes and white caps. And gauze surgical masks. We cleaned the territory. The robots couldn’t do it, their systems got all crazy. But we worked. And we were proud of it.

         §

         We rode in—there was a sign that said: Zone Off Limits. We met these crazed dogs and cats on the road. They acted strange: They didn’t recognize us as people, they ran away. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with them until they told us to start shooting them . . . The houses were all sealed up, the farm machinery was abandoned. It was interesting to see. There was no one, just us and the police on their patrols. You’d walk into a house—there were photographs on the wall, but no people. There’d be documents lying around: people’s komsomol IDs, other forms of identification, awards.

         People drove to the block, the actual reactor. They wanted to photograph themselves there, to show the people at home. They were scared, but also so curious: What was this thing? I didn’t go, myself, I have a young wife, I didn’t want to risk it, but the boys took a few shots and went over. So . . .

         §

         There’s this abandoned house. It’s closed. There’s a cat on the windowsill. I think: Must be a clay cat. I come over, and it’s a real cat. He ate all the flowers in the house. Geraniums. How’d he get in? Or did they leave him there?

         There’s a note on the door: Dear kind person, please don’t look for valuables here. We never had any. Use whatever you want, but don’t trash the place. We’ll be back. I saw signs on other houses in different colors—Dear house, forgive us! People said goodbye to their homes like they were people. Or they’d written: We’re leaving in the morning, or, We’re leaving at night, and they’d put the date and even the time. There were notes written on school notebook paper: Don’t beat the cat. Otherwise the rats will eat everything. And then in a child’s handwriting: Don’t kill our Zhulka. She’s a good cat.

         §

         I went. I didn’t have to go. I volunteered. I was after a medal? I wanted benefits? Bullshit! I didn’t need anything for myself. An apartment, a car—what else? Right, a dacha. I had all those things. But it exerted a sort of masculine charm. Manly men were going off to do this important thing. And everyone else? They can hide under women’s skirts, if they want. There were guys with pregnant wives, others had little babies, a third had burns. They all cursed to themselves and came anyway.

         We came home. I took off all the clothes that I’d worn there and threw them down the trash chute. I gave my cap to my little son. He really wanted it. And he wore it all the time. Two years later they gave him a diagnosis: a tumor in his brain . . . You can write the rest of this yourself. I don’t want to talk anymore.

         §

         On May 9, V-Day, a general came. They lined us up, congratulated us on the holiday. One of the guys got up the courage and asked: “Why aren’t they telling us the radiation levels? What kind of doses are we getting?” Just one guy. Well, after the general left, the brigadier called him in and gave him hell. “That’s a provocation! You’re an alarmist!” A few days later they handed out gas masks, but no one used them. They showed us Geiger counters a couple of times, but they never actually gave them to us.

         Before we went home we were called in to speak to a KGB guy. He was very convincing in telling us we shouldn’t talk to anyone, anywhere, about what we’d seen. When I made it back from Afghanistan, I knew that I’d live. Here it was the opposite: It’d kill you only after you got home.

         §

         We got to the place. Got our equipment. “Just an accident,” the captain tells us. “Happened a long time ago. Three months. It’s not dangerous anymore.” “It’s fine,” says the sergeant. “Just wash your hands before you eat.”

         I got home, I’d go dancing. I’d meet a girl I like and say, “Let’s get to know one another.”

         “What for? You’re a Chernobylite now. I’d be scared to have your kids.”

         §

         Every April 26, we get together, the guys who were there. We remember how it was. You were a soldier, at war, you were necessary. We forget the bad parts and remember that. We remember that they couldn’t have made it without us. Our system, it’s a military system, essentially, and it works great in emergencies. You’re finally free there, and necessary. Freedom! And in those moments the Russian shows how great he is. How unique. We’ll never be Dutch or German. And we’ll never have proper asphalt and manicured lawns. But there’ll always be plenty of heroes.

         They made the call, and I went. I had to! I was a member of the Party. Communists, march! That’s how it was. I was a police officer —senior lieutenant. They promised me another “star.” This was June of 1987. The looters had already been there. We boarded up windows and doors. The stores were all looted, the grates on the windows broken in, flour and sugar on the floor, candy. Cans everywhere. One village got evacuated, and then five, ten kilometers over, the next village didn’t. They brought all the stuff over from the evacuated village. That’s how it was. We’re guarding the place, and the former head of the kolkhoz arrives with some of the local people, they’ve already been resettled, they have new homes, but they’ve come back to collect the crops and sow new ones. They drove the straw out in bales. We found sowing machines and motorcycles in the bales. There was a barter system—they give you a bottle of homemade vodka,* you give them permission to transport the television. We were selling and trading tractors and sowing machines. One bottle, or ten bottles. No one was interested in money. [Laughs.] It was like Communism. There was a tax for everything: a canister of gas—that’s half a liter of vodka; an astrakhan fur coat—two liters; and motorcycles—variable. They transported the zone back here. You can find it on the markets, the pawnshops, at people’s dachas. The only thing that remained behind the wire was the land. And the graves. And our health. And our faith. Or my faith.

         They gave me a medal and one thousand rubles.

         §

         I remember the empty villages where the pigs had gone crazy and were running around. The kolkhoz offices and clubs, these faded posters: We’ll give the motherland bread! Glory to the Soviet worker-peoples! The achievements of the people are immortal.

         §

         My wife took the kid and left. That bitch! But I’m not going to hang myself. And I’m not going to throw myself out a seventh-floor window. When I first came back from there with a suitcase full of money, that was fine. She wasn’t afraid. [Starts singing.]

         Even one thousand gamma rays

         Can’t keep the Russian cock from having its days.

         That bitch! She’s afraid of me. She took the kid. [Suddenly serious.] The soldiers worked next to the reactor. I’d drive them there for their shifts and then back. I had a total-radiation meter around my neck, just like everyone else. After their shifts, I’d pick them up and we’d go to the First Department—that was a classified department. They’d take our readings there, write something down on our cards, but the number of roentgens we got, that was a military secret. Those fuckers! Some time goes by and suddenly they say: “Stop. You can’t take any more.” That’s all the medical information they give you. Even when I was leaving they didn’t tell me how much I got. Fuckers! Now they’re fighting for power. For cabinet portfolios. They have elections. You want another joke? After Chernobyl you can eat anything you want, but you have to bury your own shit in lead.

         §

         My friend died. He got huge, fat, like a barrel. And my neighbor—he was also there, he worked a crane. He got black, like coal, and shrunk, so that he was wearing kid’s clothes. I don’t know how I’m going to die. I do know this: You don’t last long with my diagnosis. But I’d like to feel it when it happens. Like a bullet to the head. I was in Afghanistan, too. It was easier there. They just shot you.
         Arkady Filin Liquidator

         I was thinking about something else, then. You’ll find this strange, but I was splitting up with my wife.

         They came suddenly, gave me a notice, and said, “There’s a car waiting downstairs.” It was like 1937. They came at night to take you out of your warm bed. Then that stopped working: People’s wives would refuse to answer the door, or they’d lie, say their husbands were away on business, or vacation, or at the dacha with their parents. The soldiers would try to give them the notice, the wives would refuse to take it. So they started grabbing people at work, on the street, during a lunch break at the factory cafeteria.

         But I was almost crazy by then. My wife had cheated on me, everything else didn’t matter. I got in their car. The guys who came for me were in street clothes, but they had a military bearing, and they walked on both sides of me, clearly worried I’d run off. But my wife had left me, and I could only think about that. I tried to kill myself a few times. We went to the same kindergarten, the same school, the same college. [Silent. Smokes.]

         I told you. There’s nothing heroic here, nothing for the writer’s pen. I had thoughts like, It’s not wartime, why should I have to risk myself while someone else is sleeping with my wife? Why me again, and not him? To be honest, I didn’t see any heroes there. I saw nutcases, who didn’t care about their own lives, and I had enough craziness myself, but it wasn’t necessary. I also have medals and awards—but that’s because I wasn’t afraid of dying. I didn’t care! It was even something of an out. They’d have buried me with honors. And the government would have paid for it.

         You immediately found yourself in this fantastic land, where the apocalypse met the Stone Age. We lived in the forest, in tents, twenty kilometers from the reactor. We were between twenty-five and forty, some of us had university degrees, or vocational-technical degrees. For example, I am a history teacher. Instead of machine guns they gave us shovels. We buried trash heaps and gardens. We had gloves, respirators, and surgical robes. The sun beat down on us. We showed up in their yards like demons. They didn’t understand why we had to bury their gardens, rip up their garlic and cabbage when it looked like ordinary garlic and ordinary cabbage. The old women would cross themselves and say: “Boys, what is this—is it the end of the world?”

         Maybe that’s enough? I know you’re curious, people who weren’t there are always curious. But it was still a world of people, the same one. It’s impossible to live constantly in fear, a person can’t do it, so a little time goes by and normal human life resumes . . .

         The men drank vodka. They played cards, tried to get girls, had kids. They talked a lot about money. But we didn’t go there for money. Or most people didn’t. Men worked because you have to work. They told us to work. You don’t ask questions. Some hoped for better careers out of it. Some robbed and stole. People hoped for the privileges that had been promised: an apartment without waiting and moving out of the barracks, getting their kid into a kindergarten, a car. One guy got scared, refused to leave the tent, slept in his plastic suit. Coward! He got kicked out of the Party. He’d yell: “I want to live!”

         There were all kinds of people. They were told, No, we need chauffeurs, plumbers, firemen, but they came anyway. Thousands of volunteers guarding the storehouses at night. There were student units, and wire transfers to the fund for victims. Hundreds of people who donated blood and bone marrow.

         Every day they brought the paper. I’d just read the headlines: Chernobyl—A Place of Achievement; The Reactor Has Been Defeated; Life Goes On. We had political officers, they’d hold political discussions with us. We were told that we had to win. Against whom? The atom? Physics? The universe? Victory is not an event for us, but a process. Life is a struggle. An overcoming. That’s why we have this love of floods and fires and other catastrophes. We need an opportunity to demonstrate our “courage and heroism.”

         Our political officer read notices in the paper about our “high political consciousness and meticulous organization,” about the fact that just four days after the catastrophe the red flag was already flying over the fourth reactor. It blazed forth. In a month the radiation had devoured it. So they put up another flag. And in another month they put up another one. I tried to imagine how the soldiers felt going up on the roof to replace that flag. These were suicide missions. What would you call this? Soviet paganism? Live sacrifice? But the thing is, if they’d given me the flag then, and told me to climb up there, I would have. Why? I can’t say. I wasn’t afraid to die, then. My wife didn’t even send a letter. In six months, not a single letter. [Stops.] Want to hear a joke? This prisoner escapes from jail, and runs to the thirty-kilometer zone at Chernobyl. They catch him, bring him to the Geiger counters. He’s “glowing” so much, they can’t possibly put him back in prison, can’t take him to the hospital, can’t put him around people.

         Why aren’t you laughing?
         Nadezhda Petrovna Vygovskaya Evacuee from the town of Pripyat

         It happened late Friday night. That morning no one suspected anything. I sent my son to school, my husband went to the barber’s. I was preparing lunch when my husband came back. “There’s some sort of fire at the atomic station. They’re saying we are not to turn off the radio.” This wasn’t any ordinary fire, it was some kind of shining. It was pretty. I’d never seen anything like it in the movies. That evening everyone spilled out onto their balconies, and those who didn’t have balconies went to friends’ houses. We were on the ninth floor, we had a great view. People brought their kids out, picked them up, said: “Look! Remember!” And these were people who worked at the reactor—engineers, laborers, physics instructors. They stood in the black dust, talking, breathing, wondering at it. People came from all around in their cars and on their bikes to have a look. We didn’t know that death could be so beautiful.

         I didn’t sleep all night. At eight that morning there were already military people on the streets in gas masks. When we saw them on the streets, with all the military vehicles, we didn’t grow frightened—to the contrary, it calmed us down. Since the army has come to our aid, everything will be fine. We didn’t understand then that the peaceful atom could kill, that man is helpless before the laws of physics.

         All day on the radio they were telling people to prepare for an evacuation: They’d take us away for three days, wash everything, check it over. The kids were told that they must take their schoolbooks. Still, my husband put our documents and our wedding photos into his briefcase. The only thing I took was a gauze kerchief in case the weather turned bad.
         Marat Filippovich Kokhanov Former Chief Engineer of the Institute for Nuclear Energy of the Belarussian Academy of Sciences

         Already by the end of May, about a month after the accident, we began receiving, for testing, products from the thirty-kilometer zone. They brought us the insides of domestic and undomesticated animals. After the first tests it became clear that what we were getting wasn’t meat, but radioactive by-products. We checked the milk. It wasn’t milk, it was a radioactive by-product.

         High doses were everywhere. In a few villages we measured the thyroid activity for adults and children. It was one hundred, sometimes two and three hundred times the allowable dosage. The tractors were running, the farmers were digging on their plots. Children were sitting in a sandbox and playing. We’d see a woman on a bench near her house, breast-feeding her child—her milk has cesium in it—she’s the Chernobyl Madonna.

         We asked our bosses: “What do we do? How should we act?” They said: “Take your measurements. Watch television.” On television Gorbachev was calming people: “We’ve taken immediate measures.” I believed it. I’d worked as an engineer for twenty years, I was well acquainted with the laws of physics. I knew that everything living should leave that place, if only for a while. But we conscientiously took our measurements and watched the television. We were used to believing.
         Zoya Danilovna Bruk Environmental Inspector

         I worked at the inspection center for environmental protection. We were awaiting some kind of instructions, but we never received any. They only started making noise after our Belarussian writer Aleksei Adamovich spoke out in Moscow, raising the alarm. How they hated him! Their children live here, and their grandchildren, but instead of them it’s a writer calling to the world: Save us! You’d think some sort of self-preservation mechanism would kick in. Instead, at all the Party meetings, and during smoke breaks, all you heard about was “those writers.” “Why are they sticking their noses where they don’t belong? We have instructions! We need to follow orders! What does he know? He’s not a physicist!”

         There was something else I was afraid of leaving out . . . oh, right! Chernobyl happened, and suddenly you got this new feeling, we weren’t used to it, that everyone has their separate life. Until then no one needed this life. But now you had to think: What are you eating, what are you feeding your kids? What’s dangerous, what isn’t? Should you move to another place, or should you stay? Everyone had to make their own decisions. And we were used to living—how? As an entire village, as a collective—a factory, a kolkhoz. We were Soviet people, we were collectivized. Then we changed. Everything changed. It takes a lot of work to understand this.

         They had protocols written up for burying radioactive earth. We buried earth in earth—such a strange human activity. According to the instructions, we were supposed to conduct a geological survey before burying anything to determine that there was no groundwater within four to six meters of the burial site. We also had to ensure that the depth of the pit wasn’t very great, and that the walls and bottom of the pit were lined with polyethylene film. That’s what the instructions said. In real life it was, of course, different. As always. There was no geological survey. They’d point their fingers and say, “Dig here.” The excavator digs. “How deep did you go?” “Who the hell knows? I stopped when I hit water.” They were digging right into the water.

         They’re always saying: The people are holy, it’s the government that’s criminal. Well, I’ll tell you a bit later what I think about that, about our people, and about myself.

         My longest assignment was in the Krasnopolsk region, which was just the worst. In order to keep the radionuclides from washing off the fields into the rivers, we needed to follow the instructions again. You had to plow double furrows, leave a gap, put in more double furrows, and so on. You had to drive along all the small rivers and check. Obviously I needed a car. So I go to the chairman of the regional executive. He’s sitting in his office with his head in his hands: No one changed the plan, no one changed the harvesting operations; just as they’d planted the peas, so they were harvesting them, even though everyone knows that peas take in radiation the most, as do all beans. And there are places out there with forty curies or more. So he has no time for me at all. All the cooks and nurses have run off from the kindergartens. The kids are hungry. In order to take someone’s appendix out, you need to drive them in an ambulance to the next region, sixty kilometers on a road that’s as bumpy as a washboard—all the surgeons have taken off. What car? What double furrows? He has no time for me.

         So then I went to the military people. They were young guys, spending six months there. Now they’re all awfully sick. They gave me an armored personnel carrier with a crew—no, wait, it was even better, it was an armored exploratory vehicle with a machine gun mounted on it. It’s too bad I didn’t get any photos of myself in it, on the armor. Like I said, it was romantic. The ensign, who commanded the vehicle, was constantly radioing the base: “Eagle! Eagle! We’re continuing our work.” We’re riding along, and these are our forests, our roads, but we’re in an armored vehicle. The women are standing at their fences and crying—they haven’t seen vehicles like this since the war. They’re afraid another war has started.

         We run into an old lady.

         “Children, tell me, can I drink milk from my cow?”

         We look down at the ground, we have our orders—collect data, but don’t interact with the local population.

         Finally the driver speaks up. “Grandma, how old are you?”

         “Oh, more than eighty. Maybe more than that, my documents got burned during the war.”

         “Then drink all you want.”

         I understood, not right away, but after a few years, that we all took part in that crime, in that conspiracy. [She is silent.]

         People turned out to be worse than I thought they were. And me, too. I’m also worse. Now I know this about myself. [Stops.] Of course, I admit this, and for me that’s already important. But, again, an example. In one kolkhoz there are, say, five villages. Three are “clean,” two are “dirty.” Between them there are maybe two or three kilometers. Two of them get “graveyard” money, the other three don’t. Now, the “clean” village is building a livestock complex, and they need to get some clean feed. Where do they get it? The wind blows the dust from one field to the next, it’s all one land. In order to build the complex, though, they need some papers signed, and the commission that signs them, I’m on the commission. Everyone knows we can’t sign those papers. It’s a crime. But in the end I found a justification for myself, just like everyone else. I thought, The problem of clean feed is not a problem for an environmental inspector.
         Viktor Latun Photographer

         Not long ago we buried a friend of mine who’d been there. He died from cancer of the blood. We had a wake, and in the Slavic tradition we drank. And then the conversations began, until midnight. First about him, the deceased. But after that? It was once more about the fate of the country and the design of the Universe. Will Russian troops leave Chechnya or not? Will there be a second Caucasian war, or has it already started? About the English royal family and Princess Diana. About the Russian monarchy. About Chernobyl, the different theories. Some say that aliens knew about the catastrophe and helped us out. Others that it was an experiment, and soon kids with incredible talents will start to be born. Or maybe the Belarussians will disappear, like the Scythians, Sarmats, Kimmeriys, Huasteks. We’re metaphysicians. We don’t live on this earth, but in our dreams, in our conversations. Because you need to add something to this ordinary life, in order to understand it. Even when you’re near death.
         Vladimir Matveevich Ivanov Former First Secretary of the Stavgorod Regional Party Committee

         I’m a product of my time. I’m a believing Communist. Now it’s safe to curse at us. It’s fashionable. All the Communists are criminals. Now we answer for everything, even the laws of physics.

         I was the First Secretary of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party. In the papers they write that it was, you know, the Communists who were at fault: They built poor, cheap nuclear power plants, they tried to save money and didn’t care about people’s lives. People for them were just sand, the fertilizer of history. Well, the hell with them! The hell! It’s the cursed questions: What to do and whom to blame? These are questions that don’t go away. Everyone is impatient, they want revenge, they want blood.

         Others keep quiet, but I’ll tell you. The papers write that the Communists fooled the people, hid the truth from them. But we had to. We got telegrams from the Central Committee, from the Regional Committee, telling us: You have to prevent a panic. And it’s true, a panic is a frightening thing. There was fear, and there were rumors. People weren’t killed by the radiation, but by the events. We had to prevent a panic.

         What if I’d declared then that people shouldn’t go outside? They would have said: “You want to disrupt May Day?” It was a political matter. They’d have asked for my Party ticket. [Calms down a little.] They didn’t understand that there really is such a thing as physics. There is a chain reaction. And no orders or government resolutions can change that chain reaction. The world is built on physics, not on the ideas of Marx. But if I’d said that then? Tried to call off the May Day parade? [Gets upset again.] In the papers they write that the people were out in the street and we were in underground bunkers. I stood on the tribune for two hours in that sun, without a hat, without a raincoat! And on May 9, the Day of Victory, I walked with the veterans. They played the harmonica, people danced, drank. We were all part of that system. We believed! We believed in the high ideals, in victory! We’ll defeat Chernobyl! We read about the heroic battle to put down the reactor that had gone out of control. A Russian without a high ideal? Without a great dream? That’s also scary.

         But that’s what’s happening now. Everything’s falling apart. No government. Stalin. Gulag archipelago. They pronounced a verdict on the past, on our whole life. But think of the great films! The happy songs! Explain those to me! Why don’t we have such films anymore? Or such songs?

         In the papers—on the radio and television they were yelling, Truth! Truth! At all the meetings they demanded: Truth! Well, it’s bad, it’s very bad. We’re all going to die! But who needs that kind of truth? When the mob tore into the convent and demanded the execution of Robespierre, were they right? You can’t listen to the mob, you can’t become the mob. Look around. What’s happening now? [Silent.] If I’m a criminal, why is my granddaughter, my little child, also sick? My daughter had her that spring, she brought her to us in Stavgorod in diapers. It was just a few weeks after the explosion at the plant. There were helicopters flying, military vehicles on the roads. My wife said: “They should stay with our relatives. They need to get out of here.” I was the First Secretary of the Regional Committee of the Party! I said absolutely not. “What will people think if I take my daughter with her baby out of here? Their children have to stay.” Those who tried to leave, to save their own skins, I’d call them into the regional committee. “Are you a Communist or not?” It was a test for people. If I’m a criminal, then why was I killing my own child? [Goes on for some time but it becomes impossible to understand what he’s saying.]
         Vasily Borisovich Nesterenko Former Director of the Institute for Nuclear Energy at the Belarussian Academy of Sciences

         On that day, April 26, I was in Moscow on business. That’s where I learned about the accident.

         I called Slyunkov, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Belarussian Communist Party, in Minsk. I called once, twice, three times, but they wouldn’t connect me. I reached his assistant, he knew me well.

         “I’m calling from Moscow. Get me Slyunkov, I have information he needs to hear right away. Emergency information.”

         It took me about two hours to finally reach Slyunkov.

         “I’ve already received reports,” says Slyunkov. “There was a fire, but they’ve put it out.”

         I couldn’t hold it in. “That’s a lie! It’s an obvious lie!!”

         On April 29—I remember everything exactly, by the dates—at 8 a.m., I was already sitting in Slyunkov’s reception area. They wouldn’t let me in. I sat there like that until half past five. At half past five, a famous poet walked out of Slyunkov’s office. I knew him. He said to me, “Comrade Slyunkov and I discussed Belarussian culture.”

         “There won’t be any Belarussian culture,” I exploded, “or anyone to read your books, if we don’t evacuate everyone from Chernobyl right away! If we don’t save them!”

         “What do you mean? They’ve already put it out.”

         I finally got in to see Slyunkov.

         “Why are your men [from the institute] running around town with their Geiger counters, scaring everyone? I’ve already consulted with Moscow, with Academic Ilyin. He says everything’s normal. And there’s a government commission at the station, and the prosecutor’s office is there. We’ve thrown the army, all our military equipment, into the breach.”

         They weren’t a gang of criminals. It was more like a conspiracy of ignorance and obedience. The principle of their lives, the one thing the Party machine had taught them, was never to stick their necks out. Better to keep everyone happy. Slyunkov was just then being called to Moscow for a promotion. He was so close! I’d bet there’d been a call from the Kremlin, right from Gorbachev, saying, you know, I hope you Belarussians can keep from starting a panic, the West is already making all kinds of noises. And of course if you didn’t please your higher-ups, you didn’t get that promotion, that trip abroad, that dacha. People feared their superiors more than they feared the atom.

         I carried a Geiger counter in my briefcase. Why? Because they’d stopped letting me in to see the important people, they were sick of me. So I’d take my Geiger counter along and put it up to the thyroids of the secretaries or the personal chauffeurs sitting in the reception rooms. They’d get scared, and sometimes that would help, they’d let me through. And then people would say to me: “Professor, why are you going around scaring everyone? Do you think you’re the only one worried about the Belarussian people? And anyway, people have to die of something, whether it’s smoking, or an auto accident, or suicide.”
         Natalya Arsenyevna Roslova Head of the Mogilev Women’s Committee for the Children of Chernobyl

         That great empire crumbled and fell apart. First Afghanistan, then Chernobyl. When it fell apart, we found ourselves all alone. I’m afraid to say it, but we love Chernobyl. It’s become the meaning of our lives. The meaning of our suffering. Like a war. The world found out about our existence after Chernobyl. We’re its victims, but also its priests. I’m afraid to say it, but there it is.

         And it’s like a game, like a show. I’m with a caravan of humanitarian aid and some foreigners who’ve brought it, whether in the name of Christ or something else. And outside, in the puddles and the mud in their coats and mittens, is my tribe. In their cheap boots. And suddenly I have this outrageous, disgusting wish. “I’ll show you something!” I say. “You’ll never see this in Africa! You won’t see it anywhere. Two hundred curies, three hundred curies.” I’ve noticed how the old ladies have changed, too—some of them are real movie stars now. They have their monologues by heart, and they cry in all the right spots. When the first foreigners came, the grandmas wouldn’t say anything, they’d just stand there crying. Now they know how to talk. Maybe they’ll get some extra gum for the kids, or a box of clothes. And this is side by side with a profound philosophy—their relationship with death, with time. It’s not for some gum and German chocolate that they refuse to leave these peasant huts they’ve been living in their whole lives.

         —translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen

         I hear the news of Nobel and think of Svetalana Alexievich's essay on the Afghan war in Granta ages back.. http://t.co/xpfdLPGtak

         — Basharat Peer (@basharat_peer) October 8, 2015

         • 

           মাসুদ করিম - ৮ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (৬:০১ অপরাহ্ণ)

           Boys in Zinc
           Svetlana Alexievich

           Translated from the Russian by Arch Tait

           In 1986 I had decided not to write about war again. For a long time after I finished my book War’s Unwomanly Face I couldn’t bear to see a child with a bleeding nose. I suppose each of us has a measure of protection against pain; mine had been exhausted.

           Two events changed my mind.

           I was driving out to a village and I gave a lift to a schoolgirl. She had been shopping in Minsk, and carried a bag with chickens’ heads sticking out. In the village we were met by her mother, who was standing crying at the garden gate. The girl ran to her.

           The mother had received a letter from her son Andrey. The letter was sent from Afghanistan. They’ll bring him back like they brought Fyodorina’s Ivan,’ she said, ‘and dig a grave to put him in. Look what he writes. “Mum, isn’t it great! I’m a paratrooper… ”’

           And then there was another incident. An army officer with a suitcase was sitting in the half-empty waiting-room of the bus station in town. Next to him a thin boy with a crew-cut was digging in the pot of a rubber plant with a table fork. Two country women sat down beside the men and asked who they were. The officer said he was escorting home a private soldier who had gone mad. ‘He’s been digging all the way from Kabul with whatever he can get his hands on, a spade, a fork, a stick, a fountain pen.’ The boy looked up. His pupils were so dilated they seemed to take up the whole of his eyes.

           And at that time people continued to talk and write about our internationalist duty, the interests of state, our southern borders. The censors saw to it that reports of the war did not mention our fatalities. There were only rumours of notifications of death arriving at rural huts and of regulation zinc coffins delivered to prefabricated flats. I had not meant to write about war again, but I found myself in the middle of one.

           For the next three years I spoke to many people at home and in Afghanistan. Every confession was like a portrait. They are not documents; they are images. I was trying to present a history of feelings, not the history of the war itself. What were people thinking? What made them happy? What were their fears? What stayed in their memory?

           The war in Afghanistan lasted twice as long as the Second World War, but we know only so much as it is safe for us to know. It is no longer a secret that every year for ten years, 100,000 Soviet troops went to fight in Afghanistan. Officially, 50,000 men were killed or wounded. You can believe that figure if you will. Everybody knows what we are like at sums. We haven’t yet finished counting and burying all those who died in the Second World War.

           In what follows, I haven’t given people’s real names. Some asked for the confidentiality of the confessional, others I don’t feel I can expose to a witch-hunt. We are still so close to the war that there is nowhere for anyone to hide.

           One night I was asleep when my telephone rang.

           ‘Listen,’ he began, without identifying himself, ‘I’ve read your garbage. If you so much as print another word… ’

           ‘Who are you?’

           ‘One of the guys you’re writing about. God, I hate pacifists! Have you ever been up a mountain in full marching kit? Been in an armoured personnel carrier when the temperature’s seventy centigrade? Like hell you have. Fuck off! It’s ours! It’s got sod all to do with you.’

           I asked him again who he was.

           ‘Leave it out, will you! My best friend–like a brother he was–and I brought him back from a raid in a cellophane bag. He’d been flayed, his head had been severed, his arms, his legs, his dick all cut off … He could have written about it, but you can’t. The truth was in that cellophane sack. Fuck the lot of you!’ He hung up; the sound in the receiver was like an explosion.

           He might have been my most important witness.
           A Wife

           ‘Don’t worry if you don’t get any letters,’ he wrote. ‘Carry on writing to the old address.’ Then nothing for two months. I never dreamed he was in Afghanistan. I was getting suitcases ready to go to see him at his new posting.

           He didn’t write about being in a war. Said he was getting a sun-tan and going fishing. He sent a photo of himself sitting on a donkey with his knees on the sand. It wasn’t until he came home on leave that I knew he was in a war. He never used to spoil our daughter, never showed any fatherly feelings, perhaps because she was small. Now he came back and sat for hours looking at her, and his eyes were so sad it was frightening. In the mornings he’d get up and take her to the kindergarten; he liked carrying her on his shoulders. He’d collect her in the evening. Occasionally we went to the theatre or the cinema, but all he really wanted to do was to stay at home.

           He couldn’t get enough loving. I’d be getting ready to go to work or getting his dinner in the kitchen, and he even grudged that time. ‘Sit over here with me. Forget cutlets today. Ask for a holiday while I’m home.’ When it was time for him to get the plane he missed it deliberately so we would have an extra two days. The last night he was so good I was in tears. I was crying, and he was saying nothing, just looking and looking at me. Then he said, ‘Tamara, if you ever have another man, don’t forget this.’

           I said, ‘Don’t talk soft! They’ll never kill you. I love you too much for them to be able to.’

           He laughed. ‘Forget it. I’m a big lad.’

           We talked of having more children, but he said he didn’t want any more now. ‘When I come back you can have another. How would you manage with them on your own?’

           When he was away I got used to the waiting, but if I saw a funeral car in town I’d feel ill, I’d want to scream and cry. I’d run home, the icon would be hanging there, and I’d get down on my knees and pray, ‘Save him for me, God! Don’t let him die.’

           I went to the cinema the day it happened. I sat there looking at the screen and seeing nothing. I was really jumpy. It was as if I was keeping someone waiting or there was somewhere I had to go. I barely stuck it out to the end of the programme. Looking back, I think that it must have been during the battle.

           It was a week before I heard anything. All of that week I’d start reading a book and put it down. I even got two letters from him. Usually I’d have been really pleased–I’d have kissed them–but this time they just made me wonder how much longer I was going to have to wait for him.

           The ninth day after he was killed a telegram arrived at five in the morning. They just shoved it under the door. It was from his parents: ‘Come over. Petya dead.’ I screamed so much that it woke the baby. I had no idea what I should do or where I should go. I hadn’t got any money. I wrapped our daughter in a red blanket and went out to the road. It was too early for the buses, but a taxi stopped.

           ‘I need to go to the airport,’ I told the taxi-driver.

           He told me he was going off duty and shut the car door.

           ‘My husband has been killed in Afghanistan.’

           He got out without saying anything, and helped me in. We drove to the house of a friend of mine and she lent me some money. At the airport they said there were no tickets for Moscow, and I was scared to take the telegram out of my bag to show them. Perhaps it was all a mistake. I kept telling myself if I could just carry on thinking he was alive, he would be. I was crying and everybody was looking at me. They put me on a freight plane taking a cargo of sweetcorn to Moscow, from there I got a connection to Minsk. I was still 150 kilometres from Starye Dorogi where Petya’s parents lived. None of the taxi drivers wanted to drive there even though I begged and begged. I finally got to Starye Dorogi at two o’clock in the morning.

           ‘Perhaps it isn’t true?’

           ‘It’s true, Tamara, it’s true.’

           In the morning we went to the Military Commissariat. They were very formal. ‘You will be notified when it arrives.’ We waited for two more days before we rang the Provincial Military Commissariat at Minsk. They told us that it would be best if we came to collect my husband’s body ourselves. When we got to Minsk, the official told us that the coffin had been sent on to Baranovichi by mistake. Baranovichi was another 100 kilometres and when we got to the airport there it was after working hours and there was nobody about, except for a night watchman in his hut.

           ‘We’ve come to collect… ’

           ‘Over there,’ he pointed over to a far corner. ‘See if that box is yours. If it is, you can take it.’

           There was a filthy box standing outside with ‘Senior Lieutenant Dovnar’ scrawled on it in chalk. I tore a board away from where the window should be in a coffin. His face was in one piece, but he was lying in there unshaven, and nobody had washed him. The coffin was too small and there was a bad smell. I couldn’t lean down to kiss him. That’s how they gave my husband back to me. I got down on my knees before what had once been the dearest thing in the world to me.

           His was the first coffin to come back to my home town, Yazyl. I still remember the horror in people’s eyes. When we buried him, before they could draw up the bands with which they had been lowering him, there was a terrible crash of thunder. I remember the hail crunching under foot like white gravel.

           I didn’t talk much to his father and mother. I thought his mother hated me because I was alive, and he was dead. She thought I would remarry. Now, she says, ‘Tamara, you ought to get married again,’ but then I was afraid to meet her eye. Petya’s father almost went out of his mind. ‘The bastards! To put a boy like that in his grave! They murdered him!’ My mother-in-law and I tried to tell him they’d given Petya a medal, that we needed Afghanistan to defend our southern borders, but he didn’t want to hear. The bastards! They murdered him!’

           The worst part was later, when I had to get used to the thought that there was nothing, no one for me to wait for any more. I would wake up terrified, drenched with sweat, thinking Petya would come back, and not know where his wife and child live now. All I had left were memories of good times.

           The day we met, we danced together. The second day we went for a stroll in the park, and the next day he proposed. I was already engaged and I told him the application was lying in the registry office. He went away and wrote to me in huge letters which took up the whole page: ‘Aaaaargh!’

           We got married in the winter, in my village. It was funny and rushed. At Epiphany, when people guess their fortunes, I’d had a dream which I told my mother about in the morning. ‘Mum, I saw this really good-looking boy. He was standing on a bridge, calling me. He was wearing a soldier’s uniform, but when I came towards him he began to go away until he disappeared completely.’

           ‘Don’t marry a soldier. You’ll be left on your own,’ my mother told me.

           Petya had two days’ leave. ‘Let’s go to the Registry Office,’ he said, even before he’d come in the door.

           They took one look at us in the Village Soviet and said, ‘Why wait two months. Go and get the brandy. We’ll do the paperwork.’ An hour later we were husband and wife. There was a snowstorm raging outside.

           ‘Where’s the taxi for your new wife, bridegroom?’

           ‘Hang on!’ He went out and stopped a Belarus tractor for me.

           For years I dreamed of us getting on that tractor, driving along in the snow.

           The last time Petya came home on leave the flat was locked. He hadn’t sent a telegram to warn me that he was coming, and I had gone to my friend’s flat to celebrate her birthday. When he arrived at the door and heard the music and saw everyone happy and laughing, he sat down on a stool and cried. Every day of his leave he came to work to meet me. He told me, ‘When I’m coming to see you at work my knees shake as if we had a date.’ I remember we went swimming together one day. We sat on the bank and built a fire. He looked at me and said, ‘You can’t imagine how much I don’t want to die for someone else’s country.’

           I was twenty-four when he died. In those first months I would have married any man who wanted me. I didn’t know what to do. Life was going on all around me the same as before. One person was building a dacha, one was buying a car; someone had got a new flat and needed a carpet or a hotplate for the kitchen. In the last war everybody was grief stricken, the whole country. Everybody had lost someone, and they knew what they had lost them for. All the women cried together. There are a hundred people in the catering college where I work and I am the only one who lost her husband in a war the rest of them have only read about in the newspapers. When I first heard them saying on television that the war in Afghanistan had been a national disgrace, I wanted to break the screen. I lost my husband for a second time that day.
           A Private Soldier

           The only training we got before we took the oath was that twice they took us down the firing-range. The first time we went there they issued us with nine rounds; the second time we all got to throw a grenade.

           They lined us up on the square and read out the order: ‘You’re going to the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan to do your internationalist duty. Anyone who doesn’t want to go, take two paces forward.’ Three lads did. The unit commander shoved them back in line with a knee up the backside. ‘Just checking morale.’ They gave us two days’ rations and a leather belt, and we were off. Nobody said a word. The flight seemed to take an age. I saw mountains through the plane window. Beautiful! They were the first mountains any of us had ever seen, we were all from round Pskov, where there are only woodlands and clearings. We got out in Shin Dand. I remembered the date: 19 December 1980.

           They took a look at me. ‘One metre eighty: reconnaissance company. They can use lads your size.’

           We went to Herat to build a firing-range. We were digging, hauling stones for a foundation. I tiled a roof and did some joinery. Some of us hadn’t fired a single shot before the first battle. We were hungry the whole time. There were two fifty-litre vats in the kitchen: one for soup, the other for mash or barley porridge. We had one can of mackerel between four, and the label said, ‘Date of manufacture, 1956; shelf-life eighteen months.’ In a year and a half, the only time I wasn’t hungry was when I was wounded. Otherwise you were always thinking of ways to get something to eat. We were so desperate for fruit that we’d slip over into the Afghans’ orchards knowing that they’d shoot at us. We asked our parents to send citric acid in their letters so that we could dissolve it in water and drink it. It was so sour that it burned your stomach.

           Before our first battle they played the Soviet national anthem. The deputy political commander gave us a talk. I remember he said we’d only beaten the Americans here by one hour, and everybody was waiting to welcome us back home as heroes.

           I had no idea how to kill. Before the army I was a racing cyclist. I’d never so much as seen a real knife fight, and here I was, driving along on the back of an armoured personnel carrier. I hadn’t felt like this before: powerful, strong and secure. The hills suddenly looked low, the irrigation ditches small, the trees few and far between. After half an hour I was so relaxed I felt like a tourist, taking a look at a foreign country.

           We drove over a ditch on a little clay bridge: I remember being amazed it could take the weight of several tons of metal. Suddenly there was an explosion and the APC in front had got a direct hit from a grenade launcher. Men I knew were already being carried away, like stuffed animals with their arms dangling. I couldn’t make sense of this new, frightening world. We sent all our mortars into where the firing had come from, several mortars to every homestead. After the battle we scraped our own guys off the armour plate with spoons. There weren’t any identification discs for fatalities; I suppose they thought they might fall into the wrong hands. It was like in the song: We don’t live in a house on a street, Our address is the USSR. So we just spread a tarpaulin over the bodies, a ‘communal grave’. War hadn’t even been declared; we were fighting a war that did not exist.
           A Mother

           I sat by Sasha’s coffin saying, ‘Who is it? Is that you, son?’ I just kept repeating over and over, ‘Is that you?’ They decided I was out of my mind. Later on, I wanted to know how my son had died. I went to the Military Commissariat and the commissar started shouting at me, telling me it was a state secret that my son had died, that I shouldn’t run around telling everyone.

           My son was in the Vitebsk parachute division. When I went to see him take his oath of allegiance, I didn’t recognize him; he stood so tall.

           ‘Hey, how come I’ve got such a small mum?’

           ‘Because I miss you and I’ve stopped growing.’

           He bent down and kissed me, and somebody took a photograph. It’s the only photograph of him as a soldier that I’ve got.

           After the oath he had a few hours free time. We went to the park and sat down on the grass. He took his boots off because his feet were all blistered and bleeding. The previous day his unit had been on a fifty kilometre forced march and there hadn’t been any size forty-six boots, so they had given him forty-fours.

           ‘We had to run with rucksacks filled with sand. What do you reckon? Where did I come?’

           ‘Last, probably, with those boots.’

           ‘Wrong, mum. I was first. I took the boots off and ran. And I didn’t tip sand out like some of the others.’

           That night, they let the parents sleep inside the unit on mats laid out in the sports hall, but we didn’t lie down until far into the night, instead we wandered round the barracks where our sons were asleep. I hoped I would get to see him when they went to do their morning gymnastics but they were all running in identical striped vests and I missed him, didn’t catch a last glimpse of him. They all went to the toilet in a line, in a line to do their gymnastics, in a line to the canteen. They didn’t let them do anything on their own because, when the boys had heard they were being sent to Afghanistan, one hanged himself in the toilet and two others slashed their wrists. They were under guard.

           His second letter began, ‘Greetings from Kabul… ‘ I screamed so loudly that the neighbours ran in. It was the first time since Sasha was born that I was sorry I had not got married and had no one to look after me.

           Sasha used to tease me. ‘Why don’t you get married, Mum?’

           ‘Because you’d be jealous.’

           He’d laugh and say nothing. We were going to live together for a long, long time to come.

           I got a few more letters and then there was silence, such a long silence I wrote to the commander of his unit. Straight away Sasha wrote back to me, ‘Mum, please don’t write to the commander again. I couldn’t write to you. I got my hand stung by a wasp. I didn’t want to ask someone else to write, because you’d have been worried by the different handwriting.’ I knew immediately that he had been wounded, and now if even a day went by without a letter from him my legs would give way under me. One of his letters was very cheerful. ‘Hurray, hurray! We escorted a column back to the Union. We went with them as far as the frontier. They wouldn’t let us go any further, but at least we got a distant look at our homeland. It’s the best country in the world.’ In his last letter he wrote, ‘If I last the summer, I’ll be back.’

           On 29 August I decided summer was over. I bought Sasha a new suit and a pair of shoes, which are still in the wardrobe now. The next day, before I went to work I took off my ear-rings and my ring. For some reason I couldn’t bear to wear them. That was the day on which he was killed.

           When they brought the zinc coffin into the room, I lay on top of it and measured it again and again. One metre, two metres. He was two metres tall. I measured with my hands to make sure the coffin was the right size for him. The coffin was sealed, so I couldn’t kiss him one last time, or touch him, I didn’t even know what he was wearing, I just talked to the coffin like a madwoman.

           I said I wanted to choose the place in the cemetery for him myself. They gave me two injections, and I went there with my brother. There were ‘Afghan’ graves on the main avenue.

           ‘Lay my son here too. He’ll be happier among his friends.’

           I can’t remember who was there with us. Some official. He shook his head. ‘We are not permitted to bury them together. They have to be dispersed throughout the cemetery.’

           They say there was a case where they brought a coffin back to a mother, and she buried it, and a year later her son came back alive. He’d only been wounded. I never saw my son’s body, or kissed him goodbye. I’m still waiting.
           A Nurse

           Every day I was there I told myself I was a fool to come. Especially at night, when I had no work to do. All I thought during the day was ‘How can I help them all?’ I couldn’t believe anybody would make the bullets they were using. Whose idea were they? The point of entry was small, but inside, their intestines, their liver, their spleen were all ripped and torn apart. As if it wasn’t enough to kill or wound them, they had to be put through that kind of agony as well. They always cried for their mothers when they were in pain, or frightened. I never heard them call for anyone else.

           They told us it was a just war. We were helping the Afghan people to put an end to feudalism and build a socialist society. Somehow they didn’t get round to mentioning that our men were being killed. For the whole of the first month I was there they just dumped the amputated arms and legs of our soldiers and officers, even their bodies, right next to the tents. It was something I would hardly have believed if I had seen it in films about the Civil War. There were no zinc coffins then: they hadn’t got round to manufacturing them.

           Twice a week we had political indoctrination. They went on about our sacred duty, and how the border must be inviolable. Our superior ordered us to inform on every wounded soldier, every patient. It was called monitoring the state of morale: the army must be healthy! We weren’t to feel compassion. But we did feel compassion: it was the only thing that held everything together.
           A Regimental Press Officer

           I will begin at the point where everything fell apart.

           We were advancing on Jalalabad and a little girl of about seven years old was standing by the roadside. Her arm had been smashed and was held on only by a thread, as if she were a torn rag doll. She had dark eyes like olives, and they were fixed on me. I jumped down from the vehicle to take her in my arms and carry her to our nurses, but she sprang back terrified and screaming like a small animal. Still screaming she ran away, her little arm dangling and looking as though it would come off completely. I ran after her shouting, caught up with her and pressed her to me, stroking her. She was biting and scratching, trembling all over, as if some wild animal had seized her. It was only then that the thought struck me like a thunderbolt: she didn’t believe I wanted to help her; she thought I wanted to kill her. The way she ran away, the way she shuddered, how afraid she was of me are things I’ll never forget.

           I had set out for Afghanistan with idealism blazing in my eyes. I had been told that the Afghans needed me, and I believed it. While I was there I never dreamed about the war, but now every night I am back running after that little girl with her olive eyes, and her little arm dangling as if it’s going to fall off any moment.

           Out there you felt quite differently about your country. ‘The Union’, we called it. It seemed there was something great and powerful behind us, something which would always stand up for us. I remember, though, the evening after one battle–there had been losses, men killed and men seriously injured–we plugged in the television to forget about it, to see what was going on in the Union. A mammoth new factory had been built in Siberia; the Queen of England had given a banquet in honour of some VIP; youths in Voronezh had raped two schoolgirls for the hell of it; a prince had been killed in Africa. The country was going about its business and we felt completely useless. Someone had to turn the television off, before we shot it to pieces.

           It was a mothers’ war. They were in the thick of it. The people at large didn’t suffer, they didn’t know what was going on. They were told we were fighting bandits. In nine years a regular army of 100,000 troops couldn’t beat some ragged bandits? An army with the latest technology. (God help anyone who got in the way of an artillery bombardment with our Hail or Hurricane rocket launchers: the telegraph poles flew like matchsticks.) The ‘bandits’ had only old Maxim machine-guns we had seen in films, the Stingers and Japanese machine guns came later. We’d bring in prisoners, emaciated people with big, peasant hands. They were no bandits. They were the people of Afghanistan.

           The war had its own ghastly rules: if you were photographed or if you shaved before a battle, you were dead. It was always the blue-eyed heroes who were the first to be killed: you’d meet one of those types and before you knew it, he was dead. People mostly got killed either in their first months when they were too curious, or towards the end when they’d lost their sense of caution and become stupid. At night you’d forget where you were, who you were, what you were doing there. No one could sleep during the last six or eight weeks before they went home.

           Here in the Union we are like brothers. A young guy going down the street on crutches with a shiny medal can only be one of us. You might only sit down on a bench and smoke a cigarette together, but you feel as if you’ve been talking to each other the whole day.

           The authorities want to use us to clamp down on organized crime. If there is any trouble to be broken up, the police send for ‘the Afghans’. As far as they are concerned we are guys with big fists and small brains who nobody likes. But surely if your hand hurts you don’t put it in the fire, you look after it until it gets better.
           A Mother

           I skip along to the cemetery as if I’m on my way to meet someone. I feel I’m going to visit my son. Those first days I stayed there all night. It wasn’t frightening. I’m waiting for the spring, for a little flower to burst through to me out of the ground. I planted snowdrops, so I would have a greeting from my son as early as possible. They come to me from down there, from him.

           I’ll sit with him until evening and far on into the night. Sometimes I don’t realize I’ve started wailing until I scare the birds, a whole squall of crows, circling and flapping above me until I come to my senses and stop. I’ve gone there every day for four years, in the evening if not in the morning. I missed eleven days when I was in hospital, then I ran away in the hospital gown to see my son.

           He called me ‘Mother mine’, and ‘Angel mother mine’.

           ‘Well, angel mother mine, your son has been accepted by the Smolensk Military Academy. I trust you are pleased.’

           He sat down at the piano and sang.

           Gentlemen officers, princes indeed!
           If I’m not first among them,
           I’m one of their breed.

           My father was a regular officer who died in the defence of Leningrad. My grandfather was an officer too. My son was made to be a military man–he had the bearing, so tall and strong. He should have been a hussar with white gloves, playing cards.

           Everybody wanted to be like him. Even I, his own mother, would imitate him. I would sit down at the piano the way he did, and sometimes start walking the way he did, especially after he was killed. I so much want him always to be present in me.

           When he first went to Afghanistan, he didn’t write for ages. I waited and waited for him to come home on leave. Then one day the telephone rang at work.

           ‘Angel mother mine, I am home.’

           I went to meet him off the bus. His hair had gone grey. He didn’t admit he wasn’t on leave, that he’d asked to be let out of hospital for a couple of days to see his mother. He’d got hepatitis, malaria and everything else rolled into one but he warned his sister not to tell me. I went into his room again before I went off to work, to see him sleeping. He opened his eyes. I asked him why he was not asleep, it was so early. He said he’d had a bad dream.

           We went with him as far as Moscow. It was lovely, sunny May weather, and the trees were in bloom. I asked him what it was like over there.

           ‘Mother mine, Afghanistan is something we have no business to be doing.’ He looked only at me, not at anyone else. ‘I don’t want to go back into that hole. I really do not.’ He walked away, but turned round, ‘It’s as simple as that, Mum.’ He never said ‘Mum’. The woman at the airport desk was in tears watching us.

           When I woke up on 7 July I hadn’t been crying. I stared glassily at the ceiling. He had woken me, as if he had come to say goodbye. It was eight o’clock. I had to get ready to go to work. I was wandering with my dress from the bathroom to the sitting-room, from one room to another. For some reason I couldn’t bear to put that light-coloured dress on. I felt dizzy, and couldn’t see people properly. Everything was blurred. I grew calmer towards lunch-time, towards midday.

           The seventh day of July. He had seven cigarettes in his pocket, seven matches. He had taken seven pictures with his camera. He had written seven letters to me, and seven to his girlfriend. The book on his bedside table was open at page seven. It was Kobo Abe’s Containers of Death.

           He had three or four seconds in which he could have saved himself. They were hurtling over a precipice in a vehicle. He couldn’t be the first to jump out. He never could.

           From Deputy Regimental Commander for Political Affairs, Major S. R. Sinelnikov. In fulfilment of my duty as a soldier, I have to inform you that Senior Lieutenant Valerii Gennadievich Volovich was killed today at 1045 hours.

           The whole city already knew all about it. In the Officers’ Club they’d put up black crêpe and his photograph. The plane bringing his coffin was due at any minute, but nobody had told me a thing. They couldn’t bring themselves to speak. At work everybody’s faces were tear-stained. I asked, ‘What has happened?’

           They tried to distract me in various ways. A friend came round, then finally a doctor in a white coat arrived. I told him he was crazy, that boys like my son did not get killed. I started hammering the table. I ran over to the window and started beating the glass. They gave me an injection. I kept on shouting. They gave me another injection, but that had no effect, either; I was screaming, ‘I want to see him, take me to my son.’ Eventually they had to take me.

           There was a long coffin. The wood was unplaned, and written on it in large letters in yellow paint was ‘Volovich’. I had to find him a place in the cemetery, somewhere dry, somewhere nice and dry. If that meant a fifty rouble bribe, fine. Here, take it, only make sure it’s a good place, nice and dry. Inside I knew how disgusting that was, but I just wanted a nice dry place for him. Those first nights I didn’t leave him. I stayed there. They would take me off home, but I would come back.

           When I go to see him I bow, and when I leave I bow again. I never get cold even in freezing temperatures; I write my letters there; I am only ever at home when I have visitors. When I walk back to my house at night the streetlamps are lit, the cars have their headlamps on. I feel so strong that I am not afraid of anything.

           Only now am I waking from my sorrow which is like waking from sleep. I want to know whose fault this was. Why doesn’t anybody say anything? Why aren’t we being told who did it? Why aren’t they being put on trial?

           I greet every flower on his grave, every little root and stem. ‘Have you come from there? Do you come from him? You have come from my son.’

           সাহিত্যে নোবেলজয়ী শ্বেতলানা অ্যালেক্সিভিজ

           ২০১৫ সালের সাহিত্যে নোবেলজয়ী বেলারুশের শ্বেতলানা অ্যা লেক্সিভিজকে নিয়ে বেজায় মুশকিলে পড়েছেন সমালোচকরা। কী বলবেন তাঁর লেখাগুলিকে, উপন্যাাস, রিপোর্টাজ, না অন্যব কিছু ? সোবিয়েত ইউনিয়নের পতন পৃথিবী জুড়ে মন ভেঙেছিল অনেকের। শোনা যায় আত্মহত্যায করেছিলেন অনেকে। বামপন্থাশূন্য্ পৃথিবী ভাবতে পারেননি তাঁরা। শ্বেতলানা অ্যা লেক্সিভিচ তাই নিয়ে লিখে ফেললেন আস্ত একটা বই। তাঁর এই সেরা সাহিত্যরকর্ম ‘এনচ্যাবন্টেড উইথ ডেথ’–এ বিশ্ব–সহিত্যেের ক্ষেত্রেও একটা ইতিহাস! তবে সবটা মনগড়া কাহিনী নয়, আবার সবটা বাস্তব এমনটাও নয়। নোবেল কমিটির মত, এই সময়ের আশা–নিরাশার ছবি এক পাল্লায় বিচার করেছেন শ্বেতলানা। অদ্ভুত দক্ষতায় এই সাংবাদিক–সাহিত্যি কের লেখায় উঠে এসেছে নানা পক্ষের যুক্তিতর্ক। তাই নোবেলের যোগ্যলতম শ্বেতলানাই। ১৯৪৮ সালে ইউক্রেনের ইভানো ফ্রাঙ্কোভক্স শহরে শ্বেতলানার জন্ম হয়। তাঁর মা ছিলেন ইউক্রেনের মানুষ, বাবা বেলারুশের। সোবিয়েত সেনাবাহিনী থেকে অবসর নেওয়ার পরে শ্বেতলানার পরিবার স্থায়ীভাবে চলে আসে বেলারুশে, তাঁদের পৈতৃক ঠিকানায়। তাঁর বাবা–মা শিক্ষক হিসেবে যোগ দেন বাড়ির কাছের একটি স্কুলে। পড়াশোনা শেষ করার পরেই সাংবাদিক হিসেবে শ্বেতলানা যোগ দেন স্থানীয় একটি সংবাদপত্রে। কিছুদিনের মধ্যেলই সাহিত্যা পত্রিকা ‘মিনস্ক’–এর কর্মী হিসেবে কাজ করতে শুরু করেন। সাহিত্যেপ্রেমী শ্বেতলানাকে বেলারুশের সাহিতি‍্যক অ্যা লেস আদামোভিচের ‘কালেকটিভ নভেল’–এর ধারণা প্রভাবিত করে। যেখানে সাহিতি‍্যকের কাজটা অনেকটা সাংবাদিকের মতো । ইতিহাস বা বর্তমানের নানা ঘটনাকে কেন্দ্র করে সাহিত্যে–রচনার সময় এঁরা ব্যকবহার করেন সাধারণ মানুষের বয়ান, অভিজ্ঞতা। সংগ্রহ করেন মানুষের মনে থেকে যাওয়া নানা কাহিনী। শ্বেতলানা খুব ছোটবেলায় শুনেছিলেন দ্বিতীয় বিশ্বযুদ্ধের কথা। সোবিয়েত রাশিয়ার পতন হয়ে যাওয়া পর্যন্ত সামনে থেকে দেখেছেন একাধিক যুদ্ধ। সাহিত্যে ও সেই ভাঙাগড়ার ইতিহাস বারবার কথাবস্তু হয়েছে। তাঁর প্রথম উপন্যাশস ‘ওয়ার্স আননোনলি ফেস’ প্রকাশিত হয় ১৯৮৫ সালে। দ্বিতীয় বিশ্বযুদ্ধের অদ্ভুত সব অভিজ্ঞতা, একক কথকের মতো বলে চলেন যুদ্ধবিদ্ধস্ত এক মহিলা। গল্প বলেন সবপক্ষের মহিলাদের, যুদ্ধ যাদের জীবন আমূল বদলে দিয়েছে।সেই শুরু, আজও ইতিহাসের নানা পর্যায়কে এক ভিন্ন দৃষ্টিকোণ থেকে বোঝানোর চেষ্টা করে চলেছেন শ্বেতলানা। চেরনোবিলে পরমাণু–কেন্দ্রের দুর্ঘটনাকে কেন্দ্র করে ছড়িয়ে পড়া নানা লোককাহিনীকে সংগ্রহ করে তিনি লিখেছিলেন ‘ভয়েসেস অফ চেরনোবিল’। একটি উপন্যািস লিখতে ৫ বছরের বেশি সময় নিতে পছন্দ করেন তিনি। সেই জন্য‘ই সাহিত্যধ–জীবনে প্রকাশ পেয়েছে মাত্র সাতটি বই। ১৯৮৫ সালে প্রকাশিত প্রথম বইটি ১১ বার প্রকাশিত হয়েও নিমেষে শেষ হয়ে গেছে বইয়ের বাজার থেকে। তবে অভ্যাড়স বদলালনি ৬৭ বছরের বেলারুশের সাহিতি‍্যক। সুখবর শুনে তিনি নাকি শান্ত কন্ঠে বলেছেন, ধন্য।বাদ! আর জানিয়েছেন নতুন দুটি বইয়ের কথা তাঁর মাথায় ঘুরছে। পুরস্কারের অর্থে লিখে ফেলতে পারবেন সেই দুটি।

           সাহিত্যে নোবেলজয়ী শ্বেতলানা অ্যালেক্সিভিজ http://t.co/x94baZQdLy via #আজকাল #SvetlanaAlexievich #সাংবাদিকসাহিত্য pic.twitter.com/RN5QrhXg5p

           — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) October 9, 2015

         • 

           মাসুদ করিম - ৯ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (৪:৪৯ অপরাহ্ণ)

           The Nobel Peace Prize 2015

           National Dialogue Quartet

           Prize share: 1/1

           The Nobel Peace Prize 2015 was awarded to National Dialogue Quartet “for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011”.

           BREAKING NEWS The 2015 Peace #NobelPrize is awarded to the National Dialogue Quartet in Tunisia pic.twitter.com/3O9jzwBK08

           — The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2015

           ”We did it together, the four of us” Ouided Bouchamaoui on The National Dialogue Quartet in Tunisia #NobelPrize https://t.co/60xbt7Wkjs

           — The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2015

           Article providing background material on the Quartet, How a Leftist Labor Union Helped Force Tunisia’s… http://t.co/VI1Gneoi4J #NobelPrize

           — The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2015

     • 

       মাসুদ করিম - ১৩ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (৯:৫৮ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

       The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2015

       The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2015 was awarded to Angus Deaton “for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare”.

       BREAKING NEWS The 2015 Prize in Economic Sciences is awarded to 69 years old Angus Deaton @Princeton #NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/1XJL8JsHem

       — The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 12, 2015

6. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ৬ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (৬:২৭ অপরাহ্ণ)

   দু্র্গাপূজার আগে চুরি যাওয়া দুর্গামূর্তি ফিরিয়ে দিল জার্মানি | @GermanyinIndia @GermanyDiplo @narendramodi pic.twitter.com/Na0iDQ63lC

   — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) October 6, 2015

7. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ৭ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (১০:২০ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

   The unmaking of India: Why writer Nayantara Sahgal is returning her Sahitya Akademi Award

   Her action is a mark of respect to Indians who have been murdered defending the right to dissent, the literateur said.

   On Monday, acclaimed writer Nayantara Sahgal announced that she would be returning the Sahitya Akademi Award she won in 1986 for her novel Rich Like Us. Her gesture, she said, was a protest against the increasing attacks on the right to dissent in India.

   Here is the full text of her statement.

   “In a recent lecture, India’s Vice-President, Dr. Hamid Ansari, found it necessary to remind us that India’s Constitution promises all Indians ‘liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship’. The right to dissent is an integral part of this Constitutional guarantee. He found it necessary to do so because India’s culture of diversity and debate is now under vicious assault. Rationalists who question superstition, anyone who questions any aspect of the ugly and dangerous distortion of Hinduism known as Hindutva – whether in the intellectual or artistic sphere, or whether in terms of food habits and lifestyle – are being marginalized, persecuted, or murdered. A distinguished Kannada writer and Sahitya Akademi Award winner, M.M. Kalburgi, and two Maharashtrians, Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare, both antisuperstition activists, have all been killed by gun-toting motor-cyclists. Other dissenters have been warned they are next in line. Most recently, a village blacksmith, Mohammed Akhlaq, was dragged out of his home in Bisara village outside Delhi, and brutally lynched, on the supposed suspicion that beef was cooked in his home.

   In all these cases, justice drags its feet. The Prime Minister remains silent about this reign of terror. We must assume he dare not alienate evil-doers who support his ideology. It is a matter of sorrow that the Sahitya Akademi remains silent. The Akademis were set up as guardians of the creative imagination, and promoters of its finest products in art and literature, music and theatre. In protest against Kalburgi’s murder, a Hindi writer, Uday Prakash, has returned his Sahitya Akademi Award. Six Kannada writers have returned their Awards to the Kannada Sahitya Parishat.

   In memory of the Indians who have been murdered, in support of all Indians who uphold the right to dissent, and of all dissenters who now live in fear and uncertainty, I am returning my Sahitya Akademi Award.”

   আকাদেমি ফেরালেন নয়নতারা সেহগাল

   দেশের ধর্ম ও সাংস্কৃতিক ভিন্নতা রক্ষা করতে ‍ব‍্যর্থ সরকার। সাহিত‍্য আকাদেমি পুরস্কার ফিরিয়ে দিচ্ছেন সাহিতি‍্যক নয়নতারা সেহগাল। জওহরলাল নেহরুর ভাগ্নি, নয়নতারা সেহগাল ১৯৮৬ সালে সাহিত‍‍্য আকাদেমি পুরস্কার পেয়েছিলেন ইংরেজি উপন‍্যাস ‘রিচ লাইক আস’–এর জন‍্য। পুরস্কার ফিরিয়ে দেওয়ার সিদ্ধান্ত সম্পর্কে একটি দীর্ঘ চিঠিতে তিনি ক্ষোভ উগরে দিয়েছেন সরকারের ওপর। এম এম কালবুর্গি, নরেন্দ্র ধবলকার, গোবিন্দ পনেসরের হত‍্যা থেকে কাশ্মীরে গো মাংস নিষিদ্ধ করা বা মহম্মদ একলাখের মৃতু‍্য, ক্ষুব্ধ নয়নতারা মনে করেন বি জে পি সরকারের আমলে দেশে সাধারণ মানুষের স্বাধীন জীবনযাত্রার ওপর হস্তক্ষেপ করছে প্রশাসন। ভারতীয় সংবিধানের ধর্মনিরপেক্ষতার মূল আদর্শ তাতে বারবার ক্ষুন্ন হয়েছে। হিন্দু ধর্মের মূল কথা থেকে অনেক দুরের তথাকথিত ‘হিন্দুত্ব’ নিয়ে কেউ প্রশ্ন করলেই তাঁকে প্রাণ হারাতে হচ্ছে। ভারত বহু ধর্মের দেশ। সেখানে ধর্মের নামে এই অত‍্যাচার সহ‍্যের সীমা ছাড়িয়েছে। একটার পর একটা ঘটনা ঘটে গেলেও মুখ খুলছেন ‍না প্রধানমন্ত্রী। তিনি একবার বললেই হয়ত অনেক দোষীর শাস্তি হয়। কিন্তু দলীয় সমর্থকদের পিঠ বাঁচাতেই তিনি ব‍্যস্ত। প্রশ্ন তুলেছেন সাহিত‍্য ‍আকাদেমির ভূমিকা নিয়েও। তাঁর মতে, সারা দেশেই বিভিন্ন ‍আকাদেমি প্রতিষ্ঠা করা হয়েছিল নাটক, গান বা সাহিত‍্যের ক্ষেত্রে স্বাধীন চিন্তাকে উৎসাহ দেওয়ার জন‍্য। কিন্তু এখন, শিল্পী–সাহিতি‍্যকদের স্বাধীনতা নিয়ে একটাও কথা বলছে না কেউ। এই ধর্ম গোঁড়া প্রশাসনের বিরোধিতা করে ইতিমধ‍্যে পুরস্কার ফিরিয়েছেন হিন্দি ভাষার সাহিতি‍্যক উদয় প্রকাশ। নয়নতারা বলছেন, ধর্মীয় গোঁড়ামি আর অন্ধবিশ্বাসের প্রতিবাদ করে যাঁরা প্রাণ হারিয়েছেন, যারা এখনও রোজ লড়াই করছেন কুসংস্কারের বিরুদ্ধে। তাঁদের সবার সমর্থনে তিনি ফিরিয়ে দিচ্ছেন সাহিত‍্য আকাদেমি।

   আকাদেমি ফেরালেন নয়নতারা সেহগাল http://t.co/RIY4FwWYHh #নয়নতারাসেহগাল #সাহিত‍্যআকাদেমি #সাহিত‍্যআকাদেমিপুরস্কার #ভারত #kalburgi via #আজকাল

   — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) October 7, 2015

   The unmaking of India: Why writer #NayantaraSahgal is returning her Sahitya Akademi Award http://t.co/EJIW2sdLyC pic.twitter.com/yFx8ZU8ZFy

   — scroll.in (@scroll_in) October 6, 2015

   Much respect for #NayantaraSahgal for standing up: "In support of all Indians who uphold the right to dissent". http://t.co/jv6YTqCUHI +

   — Nilanjana Roy (@nilanjanaroy) October 7, 2015

   + And these six young Kannada writers protesting #Kalburgi's murder: http://t.co/X07ATCdvDg

   — Nilanjana Roy (@nilanjanaroy) October 7, 2015

   + Sahgal joins many other writers who are protesting: Chandrashekhar Patil: http://t.co/u0ucZZYGDg Uday Prakash: http://t.co/f8W2YVXexh +

   — Nilanjana Roy (@nilanjanaroy) October 7, 2015

   এবার খেতাব ফেরালেন অশোক বাজপেয়ী

   লেখিকা নয়নতারা সেহগালের পর এবার কবি অশোক বাজপেয়ী। ভারতের বহুত্ববাদ এবং সাংস্কৃতিক ভিন্নতার ওপর আক্রমণের প্রতিবাদে সাহিত্য আকাদেমি পুরস্কার ফিরিয়ে দিলেন তিনি। দেশে এম এম কালবুর্গি, নরেন্দ্র দাভোলকার, গোবিন্দ পানসারের মতো যুক্তিবাদীর খুন। খাদ্যাভ্যাসের কারণে সংখ্যালঘুকে পিটিয়ে হত্যা। এর পরেও কেন চুপ প্রধানমন্ত্রী নরেন্দ্র মোদি এবং সাহিত্য আকাদেমি? প্রশ্ন তুললেন ললিত কলা আকাদেমির প্রাক্তন চেয়ারম্যান বাজপেয়ী। দেশের সমস্ত লেখক–কবিদের একযোগে প্রতিবাদে নামার ডাকও দিলেন তিনি। সেহগালের সুরেই বললেন, প্রচারসভায় লাখ লাখ মানুষের উদ্দেশে বক্তব্য রাখেন। অথচ দেশের নিরীহ সংখ্যালঘু বা যুক্তিবাদী লেখকদের মৃত্যুতে একটি শব্দও খরচ করেন না প্রধানমন্ত্রী। একবারও বলেন না, ধর্মীয় অসহিষ্ণুতা বরদাস্ত করবে না সরকার। ছাড়লেন না সাহিত্য আকাদেমিকেও। কটাক্ষ, প্রতিবাদ না করে নিজেদের স্বায়ত্তশাসন ক্ষমতাকে অসম্মান করেছে লেখকদের এই সংগঠন। এর আগে সরকারের বিরুদ্ধে ক্ষোভে সাহিত্য আকাদেমি পুরস্কার ফিরিয়েছিলেন হিন্দি লেখক উদয় প্রকাশও।

   India a 'bahuvachan' and will remain so: Poet Ashok Vajpeyi after returning Sahitya Akademi http://t.co/SEQYXqEGqp pic.twitter.com/f8QBW14xWJ

   — India Today (@IndiaToday) October 7, 2015

8. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ৯ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (৪:৪৫ অপরাহ্ণ)

   জলবায়ু ঝুঁকি মোকাবেলায় নতুন জোট ভি২০

   জলবায়ু পরিবর্তনের ঝুঁকি মোকাবেলায় পারস্পরিক সহযোগিতার অঙ্গীকার নিয়ে যাত্রা শুরু করেছে বাংলাদেশ, নেপাল, ভুটানসহ ২০ দেশের নতুন জোট ‘ভালনারেবল টোয়েন্টি’, সংক্ষেপে ভি২০।

   পেরুর রাজধানী লিমায় বিশ্বব্যাংক-আইএমএফের বার্ষিক সভার আনুষ্ঠানিক উদ্বোধনের আগে বৃহস্পতিবার বিশ্ব ব্যাংকের প্রেসিডেন্ট জিম ইয়ং কিমের উপস্থিতিতে এই জোট গঠনের ঘোষণা আসে।

   ৭০ কোটি মানুষের এই ২০ দেশের অর্থমন্ত্রী ও কেন্দ্রীয় ব্যাংকের গভর্নরদের উপস্থিতিতে এই সভায় কার্বন নিঃসরণ কমিয়ে আনতে শিল্পোন্নত দেশগুলোর প্রতি আহ্বান জানানো হয়।

   বাংলাদেশ ব্যাংকের গভর্নর আতিউর রহমান সভায় বাংলাদেশের অর্থমন্ত্রী আবুল মাল আবদুল মুহিতের লিখিত বক্তৃতা পড়ে শোনান।

   বিশ্ব ব্যাংকের প্রেসিডেন্ট জিম ইয়ং কিম বলেন, জলবায়ু পরিবর্তন, অভিবাসী সঙ্কেটসহ আন্তর্জাতিক সমস্যাগুলোর সমাধানে বিশ্বনেতৃবৃন্দের রাজনৈতিক সদিচ্ছার ওপর সবচেয়ে বেশি জোর দিতে হবে।

   “আজ যে জোট গঠন হল, এই জোটের সঙ্গে আমরা (বিশ্ব ব্যাংক) আছি। উন্নত দেশগুলো গ্লোবাল ক্লাইমেন্ট ফান্ড গঠন করে সহায়তার যে প্রতিশ্রুতি দিয়েছিল- এখন তা পূরণ করার পালা।”

   গভর্নর আতিউর রহমান পরে বিডিনিউজ টোয়েন্টিফোর ডটকমকে বলেন, “জলবায়ু পরিবর্তনের ক্ষতি মোকাবিলায় বাংলাদেশের অনেক সাফল্যের কাহিনী আছে। আজ আমরা সভায় তা তুলে ধরেছি।”

   তিনি বলেন, “আমরা আমাদের প্রধান রপ্তানি খাত তৈরি পোশাক শিল্পকে, অর্থ্যাৎ বস্ত্র খাতকে ‘সবুজ বস্ত্র খাতে’ পরিণত করতে চাই। পরিবেশের যাতে ক্ষতি না হয় সে লক্ষ্যেই আমরা এ খাতকে গড়ে তোলার উদ্যোগ নিয়েছি।”

   পরিবেশের ক্ষতি হয় এমন কোনো শিল্পে ঋণ না দিতে ব্যাংকগুলোকে ইতোমধ্যে নির্দেশ দেয়া হয়েছে বলে জানান আতিউর।

   ভি২০ তে বাংলাদেশ, মালদ্বীপ, ভুটান, নেপাল, আফগানিস্তান, ফিলিপাইন, ভিয়েতনাম যেমন রয়েছে, তেমনি আছে বার্বাডোজ, কোস্টা রিকা, পূর্ব তিমুর, ইথিওপিয়া, ঘানা, কেনিয়া, কিরিবাতি, মাদাগাস্কার, রুয়ান্ডা, সেন্ট লুসিয়া, তানজানিয়া, টুভালু ও ভাতুয়ানুর মত দেশ।

   এসব দেশের অনেকগুলোই স্থলবেষ্টিত। আবার সমুদ্রপৃষ্ঠের উচ্চতা বৃদ্ধির সঙ্গে সঙ্গে কয়েকটি দেশের বেশিরভাগ ভূ-ভাগ সাগরে হারিয়ে যাওয়ার ঝুঁকিতে রয়েছে।

   জোটের সভায় বাংলাদেশের পক্ষে অর্থমন্ত্রীর বক্তব্য তুলে ধরে গভর্নর বলেন, উন্নত বিশ্বকে দায়বদ্ধ করার বিষয়ে জোটের সদস্যদের ঐক্যবদ্ধ থাকতে হবে।

   জোট গঠনের ভূমিকায় বলা হয়েছে, আফ্রিকা, এশিয়া, ক্যারিবিয়া, লাতিন আমেরিকা ও প্যাসিফিক অঞ্চলের মধ্য আয়, স্বল্পোন্নত এবং ছোট দ্বীপ দেশগুলোর জলবায়ু পরিবর্তনের ঝুঁকি মোকাবিলায় তহবিল গঠন এবং সেই অর্থের যথাযথ ব্যবহার নিশ্চিত করা জোট গঠনের প্রধান উদ্দেশ্য।

   নতুন এই জোটের অর্থমন্ত্রীরা বছরে দুই বার মিলিত হবেন এবং উদ্দেশ্য ও লক্ষ্য বাস্তবায়নের জন্য পরিকল্পনা গ্রহণ করবেন।

   বিশ্বব্যাংক-আইএমএফ এর সম্মেলন উপলক্ষে পেরুতে আসা বাংলাদেশ প্রতিনিধি দল বৃহস্পতিবার বেশ কয়েকটি বৈঠকে অংশ নেন। ভারতের অর্থমন্ত্রী অরুণ জেটলির দেয়া মধ্যাহ্নভোজেও যোগ দেন তারা।

   সম্মেলনে অংশ নিতে অর্থমন্ত্রী আবুল মাল আবদুল মুহিতও ইতোমধ্যে লিমায় পৌঁছেছেন।

   জলবায়ু ঝুঁকি মোকাবেলায় নতুন জোট #ভি২০ http://t.co/kQMLH8Iw1R #ভালনারেবলটোয়েন্টি #climatechange via @bdnews24com

   — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) October 9, 2015

9. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ১০ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (১০:৪৫ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

   Vast marine debris found in Bay, poses threat to life

   Vast amounts of marine debris have been found in the Bay of Bengal. These are non-disposable, posing a grave threat to marine life, marine economy and human health, according to a study.

   The study report titled ‘Bangladesh Marine Debris Report 2014’, due to be published later this month, is going to be the first of its kind in the country.

   A brief excerpt of the survey report shows that among the debris, plastic materials constitute 54.26 per cent and glass and ceramic, metal, rubber, wood, cloth, paper/cardboard and mixed materials 45.74 per cent.

   Among the plastic materials, most abundant objects were poly-pack of consumer products like biscuits, potato chips, chanachur, food wrappings, and water bottles.

   Among the other materials, most abundant items were beverage cans, shoes, tableware and dishes.

   Save Our Sea (SoS) Founder and CEO Mohammad Arju said the state of marine debris in the Bay poses a wide range of threats to fisheries, tourism and recreation, and the value these add to our local economies also complicates shipping and transportation by causing navigation hazards.

   SoS conducted the debris survey in cooperation with regional initiative Mangroves For the Future (MFF) Bangladesh.

   “We should concentrate on building national capacity for research, monitoring and reduction of marine debris, as ‘significantly reducing land-based marine debris and nutrient pollution’ are also a target under newly adopted UN Sustainable Development Goals,” he said FE.

   The report contains results from Save Our Sea’s survey organised last year under the National Underwater Cleanup in marine areas adjacent to Saint Martin’s Island. Total sampling hours were 72.88 hours and total sampling area was 79,463 square metres in the study.

   The rubbish collected is categorised based on material of construction: plastic, glass/ceramic, metal, rubber, wood, cloth, paper/cardboard, mixed materials and other debris items.

   Contacted, Professor of Department of Zoology at the University of Dhaka Dr. M Niamul Naser said the long-term effect of plastic and other solid debris found in the sea would be mixed up with environment after 100 or more years and ultimately would be consumed by human and other living beings.

   “So health risk of our future generation is grave from this debris,” he said.

   “And short-term impact from debris in the sea is destruction of coral and other sea plants gradually that would influence food chain gravely,” he said.

   Senior Scientific Officer of the National Oceanographic Research Institute Abu Sayeed Muhammad Sharif said a national-level awareness campaign is now number one priority to prevent pollution of the Bay of Bengal.

   “A large-scale national awareness campaign should be initiated by government including broadcasting advertisements in national mass media to make people understand how harmful this debris in the Bay could be to human life and marine life ,” he said.

   He said large-scale removal of plastic marine debris is not going to be cost-effective and is simply not feasible.

   “This means we need to prevent plastic from entering the oceans in the first place through better waste management, more reuse and recycling, better product design and material substitution,” he added.

   vast marine debris found in #BayOfBengal, poses threat to life http://t.co/pwZwusWr4y #Bangladesh #SaveOurSea #FE pic.twitter.com/Xf1YA0H59U

   — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) October 10, 2015

10. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ১০ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (১১:০৭ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    30m stoves to be replaced with eco-friendly ones to cut fuel consumption

    Department of Environment (DoE) and German International Cooperation (GIZ) have set a target to replace around 30 million (three crore) traditional clay-cooking stoves with improved and eco-friendly ones by 2021 in a bid to significantly reduce fuel consumption, air pollution and health hazards, reports UNB.

    According to DoE and GIZ, the country can save around Tk 35 billion (Tk 3,500 crore) and around 46,000 lives annually, and avoid the emission of nearly 60 million tonnes of carbon dioxide only by bringing nearly 300 million households under the use of improved cooking stoves, popularly known as ‘Bondhu Chula’.

    A study conducted by the DoE and GIZ shows that Bangladeshi households on an average burn about 80 million tonnes of biomass like wood, rice husks, leaves, cow dung, jute sticks and other agricultural wastes every year for cooking, and they mostly use inefficient and poorly ventilated clay stoves that produce smoke, carbon monoxide and carcinogens.

    The World Health Organisation (WHO) has estimated that 46,000 women and children die each year in Bangladesh as a direct result of exposure to indoor air pollution caused by the smoke of the cooking stoves, while millions more suffer from respiratory diseases, tuberculosis, asthma, cardiovascular disease, eye problems and lung cancer.

    Under the circumstances, the DoE and GIZ have set a target to replace the traditional clay stoves with eco-friendly and fuel-saving Bondhu Chula by 2021 said GIZ project manager Dr M Khalequzzaman.

    He said ‘Bondhu Chula’ is designed to draw off the smoke and toxins, thus creating a safer environment for women and children.

    Dr Khalequzzaman said if all the households, now using traditional stoves, come under the coverage of ‘Bandhu Chula’ use by 2021, it will save 40 million tonnes of wood and other fuel materials worth about Tk 35 billion a year.

    Besides, he said, it will help save 32,000 children and 14,000 women who die now every year by inhaling smoke from the traditional clay cooking stoves. “The climate change impact will also be eased to some extent as ‘Bondhu Chula’ will check emission of over 60 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.”

    The GIZ project manager said the main source of cooking fuel in rural areas and even at many parts of the cities is wood as only seven to eight per cent people enjoying gas supply facilities.

    DoE additional director general Quazi Sarwar Imtiaz Hashmi said the low-cost ‘Bondhu Chula’ produces no smoke in the kitchen, increases energy efficiency by 30 per cent and saves fuel by 50 per cent compared to traditional stoves.

    He said it is necessary to popularise ‘Bondhu Chula’ everywhere both in rural and urban areas in the greater national interest. “The use of ‘Bondhu Chula’ can save up to 90 per cent fuel cost of a family benefiting them in many ways, including cooking time.”

    In 2012, Mr Hashmi said Bangladesh Climate Change Trust, DoE and GIZ

    jointly undertook a project, ‘Market Development Initiative for Bondhu Chula’, aiming to install 500,000 stoves throughout Bangladesh by March 2014.

    On successful completion of the project, he said, they have now taken another project to set up 400,000 more improved stoves by December 2016.

    Mr Hashmi, however, said bigger projects are needed to reach their target of installing 30 million improved stoves in all the districts of the country by 2021.

    GIZ project manager Dr Khalequzzaman said nearly 1.7 million Bondhu Chulas have so per been installed in the country since 2006 and 1.2 million of them with the lone initiative by GIZ.

    He said they have taken another project with financial assistance from India for installing 70,000 improved cooking stoves in eight upazilas of the country by November 2016.

    Suchitra Hajong, communication manger, Bondhu Chula Programme, said in the early 1980s, a group of scientists at the Institute of Fuel Research and Development (IFRD) of the Bangladesh Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (BCSIR), led by Dr AM Hasan Rashid Khan developed the improved stove and GIZ introduced concrete version of Bondhu Chula in 2010.

    She said so far, around 5800 sanitary shop owners have become Bondhu Chula entrepreneurs and offered the stove for around Tk 800-1200. From the Bangladesh Climate Change Trust (BCCT) a grant of Tk 200-700 depending on the financial condition of the consumers is provided to make the stove affordable.

    30m stoves to be replaced with eco-friendly ones to cut fuel consumption http://t.co/bGZlzHDeyF #FEtradecommodities | #DoE & @giz_gmbh

    — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) October 10, 2015

11. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ১৪ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (২:৩৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Solid growth is harder than blowing bubbles

    Now it is not just America — the world economy also catches a cold when China sneezes

    It used to be said that when the US sneezed, the world economy caught a cold. This is still true. But now the world economy also catches a cold when China sneezes. It has lost its last significant credit-fuelled engine of demand. The result is almost certain to be a further boost to the global “savings glut” or, as Lawrence Summers calls it, “secular stagnation” — the tendency for demand to be weak relative to potential supply. This has big implications for global economic risks.

    In its latest World Economic Outlook , the International Monetary Fund strikes not so much a gloomy note as a cautious one. The world economy is forecast to grow by 3.1 per cent this year (at purchasing power parity) and 3.6 per cent in 2016. The high-income economies are forecast to grow by 2 per cent this year, with growth at 1.5 per cent even in the eurozone. Emerging economies are forecast to grow 4 per cent this year. This would be well below the 5 per cent in 2013 or 4.6 per cent in 2014. While China’s economy is forecast to grow by 6.8 per cent and India’s by 7.3, Latin America’s is forecast to shrink by 0.3 per cent and Brazil’s by 3 per cent.

    The IMF also lists enough downside risks for any committed worrier: disruptive shifts in asset prices and turmoil in asset markets; yet lower growth of potential output, which would weaken investment and aggregate demand; a bigger than expected decline in China’s output; yet lower commodity prices; a strengthening of the dollar, which would further undermine balance sheets of borrowers in dollars, particularly those who borrowed to finance commodity production; geopolitical risks; and further weakening in aggregate demand.

    So think of the world as a single economy. If it grows as forecast, it will probably be expanding at best in line with potential. But if a few of the things on the list were to go wrong, it would suffer rising excess capacity and disinflationary pressure. Even if nothing worse happened (and it easily could), it would still be a concern because room for policy manoeuvre is now quite limited.

    Commodity-exporting and debt-burdened emerging countries will now have to retrench, just as crisis-hit eurozone countries had to a few years ago. Just as was the case in the eurozone, these economies look for external demand to pick them up. They may wait in vain. High-income countries are already at or close to the zero lower bound on short-term interest rates. Their ability, or at least willingness, to act effectively in response to a large negative shock to demand is very much in question. The same might even prove true of China.

    Over the past one and a half decades long-term real interest rates on high-quality securities have been low, indicating chronic weakness of investment relative to saving and risk aversion. In the period up to 2007, needed global demand was generated in large part by expansions in credit and housebuilding, particularly in the US and Spain. This engine ran out of fuel in the western crises of 2007-09 and eurozone ones of 2010-2013. This created our world of zero short-term nominal interest rates and zero long-term real ones. Demand and potential and actual output have remained subdued in these economies ever since. Fortunately, China’s jump in credit-fuelled investment in 2009 took up the slack, providing a powerful boost to exporters of industrial raw materials and investment goods. But now, that is also at an end. (See charts)

    While the high-income economies are recovering from their shocks, no sign (or likelihood) of a big burst in spending relative to potential output is to be seen. In the eurozone, a boom is especially unlikely. China might be able to sustain growth of real demand at 7 per cent a year. But for an economy investing well over 40 per cent of gross domestic product, even this would mean rising excess capacity. It is also far easier to imagine a decline in China’s investment relative to its savings than the opposite. In other words, China is almost certain to suffer from a worsening demand shortfall in the next few years. Meanwhile, capacity is certainly going to rise in many emerging economies. In all, the world’s glut of potential supply seems sure to worsen. This is why disinflationary pressures are so likely to rise worldwide.

    How should one manage a world in this sort of condition? Here are answers for the short, medium and longer term.

    In the short term, it is now vital to avoid a significant slowdown, let alone anything worse. The instruments to deal with such a condition are not readily available, as much for political as for other reasons. Resistance to yet more unconventional monetary policies and strongly expansionary fiscal policies is entrenched. This is foolish. But it is also a reality. This being so, it is really important not to need such policies at all.

    Over the medium term, however, it is vital to start talking about what would need to be done if the world economy were to suffer a substantial negative shock or shocks. The resistance to even more unconventional policies might be reduced if the way in which they might work were spelt out carefully.

    Over the longer term, it should surely be possible to realise that a world with such low real interest rates offers huge opportunities for investment, particularly in emerging and developing countries. Instead of a slowdown, we should be imagining how to achieve a global investment boom. China seems to understand this. Can the west, too?

    The world has run out of large economies ready and willing to let lending and spending rip. This means that global demand may be still more feeble in the next few years. Policy and thinking must adapt to this reality. Start now.

12. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ১৫ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (৯:৪৩ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    তাইতো বলেছিলাম দায়েশের পতাকা কালো শক্তি কালো তেল।

    Isis Inc: how oil fuels the jihadi terrorists

    Jihadis’ oil operation forces even their enemies to trade with them

    On the outskirts of al-Omar oilfield in eastern Syria, with warplanes flying overhead, a line of trucks stretches for 6km. Some drivers wait for a month to fill up with crude.

    Falafel stalls and tea shops have sprung up to cater to the drivers, such is the demand for oil. Traders sometimes leave their trucks unguarded for weeks, waiting for their turn.

    This is the land of Isis, the jihadi organisation in control of swaths of Syrian and Iraqi territory. The trade in oil has been declared a prime target by the international military coalition fighting the group. And yet it goes on, undisturbed.

    Oil is the black gold that funds Isis’ black flag — it fuels its war machine, provides electricity and gives the fanatical jihadis critical leverage against their neighbours.

    But more than a year after US President Barack Obama launched an international coalition to fight Isis, the bustling trade at al-Omar and at least eight other fields has come to symbolise the dilemma the campaign faces: how to bring down the “caliphate” without destabilising the life of the estimated 10m civilians in areas under Isis control, and punishing the west’s allies?

    The resilience of Isis, and the weakness of the US-led campaign, have given Russia a pretext to launch its own, bold intervention in Syria.

    Despite all these efforts, dozens of interviews with Syrian traders and oil engineers as well as western intelligence officials and oil experts reveal a sprawling operation almost akin to a state oil company that has grown in size and expertise despite international attempts to destroy it.

    Minutely managed, Isis’ oil company actively recruits skilled workers, from engineers to trainers and managers.

    Estimates by local traders and engineers put crude production in Isis-held territory at about 34,000-40,000 bpd. The oil is sold at the wellhead for between $20 and $45 a barrel, earning the militants an average of $1.5m a day.

    “It’s a situation that makes you laugh and cry,” said one Syrian rebel commander in Aleppo, who buys diesel from Isis areas even as his forces fight the group on the front lines. “But we have no other choice, and we are a poor man’s revolution. Is anyone else offering to give us fuel?”
    Oil as a strategic weapon

    Isis’ oil strategy has been long in the making. Since the group emerged on the scene in Syria in 2013, long before they reached Mosul in Iraq, the jihadis saw oil as a crutch for their vision for an Islamic state. The group’s shura council identified it as fundamental for the survival of the insurgency and, more importantly, to finance their ambition to create a caliphate.

    Most of the oil Isis controls is in Syria’s oil-rich east, where it created a foothold in 2013, shortly after withdrawing from the north-west — an area of strategic importance but with no oil. These bridgeheads were then used to consolidate control over the whole of eastern Syria after the fall of Mosul in 2014.

    When it pushed through northern Iraq and took over Mosul, Isis also seized the Ajil and Allas fields in north-eastern Iraq’s Kirkuk province. The very day of its takeover, locals say, militants secured the fields and engineers were sent in to begin operations and ship the oil to market.

    “They were ready, they had people there in charge of the financial side, they had technicians that adjusted the filling and storage process,” said a local sheikh from the town of Hawija, near Kirkuk. “They brought hundreds of trucks in from Kirkuk and Mosul and they started to extract the oil and export it.” An average of 150 trucks, he added, were filled daily, with each containing about $10,000-worth of oil. Isis lost the fields to the Iraqi army in April but made an estimated $450m from them in the 10 months it controlled the area.

    While al-Qaeda, the global terrorist network, depended on donations from wealthy foreign sponsors, Isis has derived its financial strength from its status as monopoly producer of an essential commodity consumed in vast quantities throughout the area it controls. Even without being able to export, it can thrive because it has a huge captive market in Syria and Iraq.

    Indeed, diesel and petrol produced in Isis areas are not only consumed in territory the group controls but in areas that are technically at war with it, such as Syria’s rebel-held north: the region is dependent on the jihadis’ fuel for its survival. Hospitals, shops, tractors and machinery used to pull victims out of rubble run on generators that are powered by Isis oil.

    “At any moment, the diesel can be cut. No diesel — Isis knows our life is completely dead,” says one oil trader who comes from rebel-held Aleppo each week to buy fuel and spoke to the Financial Times by telephone.

    “I could choose whatever position I wanted, he promised me,” he said. “He said: ‘You can name your salary’.” Sceptical of the Isis project, Rami ultimately turned down the offer and fled to Turkey.

    Isis also recruits from among its supporters abroad. In the speech he gave after the fall of Mosul, Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi called not only for fighters but engineers, doctors and other skilled labour. The group recently appointed an Egyptian engineer who used to live in Sweden as the new manager of its Qayyara refinery in northern Iraq, according to an Iraqi petroleum engineer from Mosul, who declined to be named.

    The central role of oil is also reflected in the status it is given in Isis’ power structures.

    The group’s approach to government across the territories it controls is highly decentralised. For the most part, it relies on regional walis — governors — to administer territories according to the precepts laid down by the central shura.

    However, oil — alongside Isis’ military and security operations and its sophisticated media output — is centrally controlled by the top leadership. “They are organised in their approach to oil,” said a senior western intelligence official. “That’s a key centrally controlled and documented area. It’s a central shura matter,” he added, referring to Isis’ ruling “cabinet”.

    Until recently, Isis’ emir for oil was Abu Sayyaf, a Tunisian whose real name, according to the Pentagon, was Fathi Ben Awn Ben Jildi Murad al-Tunisi, and who was killed by US special forces in a raid in May this year. According to US and European intelligence officials, a treasure trove of documentation relating to Isis’ oil operations was found with him. The documents laid bare a meticulously run operation, with revenues from wells and costs carefully accounted for. They showed a pragmatic approach to pricing too, with Isis carefully exploiting differences in demand across its territories to maximise profitability.
    A national oil company

    Isis’ strategy has rested on projecting the image of a state in the making, and it is attempting to run its oil industry by mimicking the ways of national oil corporations. According to Syrians who say Isis tried to recruit them, the group headhunts engineers, offering competitive salaries to those with the requisite experience, and encourages prospective employees to apply to its human resources department.

    A roving committee of its specialists checks up on fields, monitors production and interviews workers about operations. It also appoints Isis members who have worked at oil companies in Saudi Arabia or elsewhere in the Middle East as “emirs”, or princes, to run its most important facilities, say traders who buy Isis oil and engineers who have worked at Isis-controlled fields.

    Some technicians have been actively courted by Isis recruiters. Rami — not his real name — used to work in oil in Syria’s Deir Ezzor province before becoming a rebel commander. He was later contacted by an Isis military emir in Iraq via WhatsApp.

    Oversight of the oil wells is carefully controlled by the Amniyat, Isis’ secret police, who ensure revenues go where they should — and mete out brutal punishments when they do not. Guards patrol the perimeter of pumping stations, while far-flung individual wells are surrounded by protective sand berms and each trader is carefully checked as he drives in to fill up.

    At the al-Jibssa field in Hassakeh province, north-eastern Syria, which produces 2,500-3,000 bpd, “about 30-40 big trucks a day, each with 75 barrels of capacity, would fill up”, according to one Hassakeh oil trader.
    Isis’ distribution network

    But the biggest draw is al-Omar. According to one trader who regularly buys oil there, the system, with its 6km queue, is slow but market players have adapted to it. Drivers present a document with their licence plate number and tanker capacity to Isis officials, who enter them into a database and assign them a number.

    Most then return to their villages, shuttling back to the site every two or three days to check up on their vehicles. Traders say that towards the end of the month, some people come back and set up tents to stay close to their trucks while they wait their turn.

    Once in possession of al-Omar’s oil, the traders either take it to local refineries or sell it on at a mark-up to middlemen with smaller vehicles who transport it to cities further west such as Aleppo and Idlib.

    Isis’ luck with oil may not last. Coalition bombs, the Russian intervention and low oil prices could put pressure on revenues. The biggest threat to Isis’ production so far, however, has been the depletion of Syria’s ageing oilfields. It does not have the technology of major foreign companies to counteract what locals describe as a slow drop in production. Isis’ need for fuel for its military operations means there is also less oil to sell in the market.

    For now, though, in Isis-controlled territory, the jihadis control the supply and there is no shortage of demand. “Everyone here needs diesel: for water, for farming, for hospitals, for offices. If diesel is cut off, there is no life here,” says a businessman who works near Aleppo. “Isis knows this [oil] is a winning card.”

13. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২১ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (৩:৫৮ অপরাহ্ণ)

    How the British victory at Plassey created the modern Durga Pujo

    The short history of Bengal’s greatest festival.

    As far as names go, the “Battle of Plassey” is a terrible one. It was actually fought at a place called “Pawlāshi” in modern West Bengal, “Palāsi” being the Persian language mangling of the village adopted by the British. It was also not much of a battle. Bribed by the British colonel, Robert Clive, most of the Bengal army simply deserted Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah. After a little more than half an hour of fighting on June 23, 1757, Clive found himself master of Bengal and one of the richest, most powerful people in the subcontinent.

    So astounding was his fortune that Clive attributed it to providence and sought to give thanks to the Lord. Unfortunately, the only church in the town of Calcutta had been destroyed by the Nawab. At this moment, Clive’s Persian interpreter and clerk, a zamindar named Nabakrishna Deb stepped up and asked Clive to offer thanks to Maa Durga instead. Nubkissen, as he spelt his name at the time, ensured a grand celebration for Clive at his mansion, as his pandits conducted an equally grand puja to Durga to celebrate the British conquest of Bengal. And thus, it is said, the tradition of Durga Pujo was born in Calcutta. In fact, till today, the pujo conducted at Deb’s historical Shobhabazar mansion is called the “Company Pujo”.

    This tale, neat and explanatory, has gained wide fame as the definitive origin tale of the modern Kolkata Durga Pujo. The only problem ­– it’s completely made up, probably by Deb babu himself. The only source is an anonymous painting, maybe commissioned by Nubkissen. Deb only became Clive’s munshi after 1757, so it seems unlikely that Clive would have partied at his mansion after the battle (although, as you can imagine, the rumour did Deb no harm).

    Raj associations

    However, even if the literal details of this particular story are untrue, it can still act as a fairly accurate allegory, telling us that the modern festival of Durga Pujo was developed by the new zamindar class of British Bengal and was tied closely to the establishment of the Raj.

    To begin at the beginning, as academic Saugata Bhaduri points out, while worship of the mother goddesses, both Vedic and adivasi, has been a feature of Bengal for all of recorded history, Durga seems to be practically absent from the pantheon before the 18th century. Yet, by the end of the 1700s, Bhaduri informs us, the sharad or autumn Durga Puja, in a form very similar to the one we see today, had become the “most important festival of the Hindu Bengalis”.

    The establishment of British rule was the single most important event in the history of Bengal since the Delhi Sultanate captured the Bengal capital of Gaur in 1203. As such, it had a massive effect on Bengali society. One of those changes was the rise of a powerful zamindari class, whom you might call compradors, if you’ve read one Marxist historian too many. Since they owed their position to the British, the zamindars were keen supporters of Company Raj. It was in this historical crucible that Kolkata’s modern Durga Pujo was forged. The pujo was an event used by the zamindars to show off their wealth and power, to each other as well as the Raj (this is why Nabakrishna was so keen to claim the first Durga Pujo for himself). The Raj, in turn, patronised the pujo in order to gain popular legitimacy for themselves as the rulers of Bengal.

    Historian Tapan Raychaudhuri writes:

    For the nouveau riche, the products of the East India Company’s trade and their tenurial system, Durga Puja became a grand occasion for the display of wealth and for hobnobbing with the sahibs. Initially, the tendency was to celebrate in one’s village home and thereby acquire a reputation for wealth and generosity in the eyes of the local community. But soon one had higher aspirations: wealth was not worth acquiring if it was not used to impress the elite of Calcutta and the sahibs who were the ultimate source of that wealth as well as status. This is how the rural elite of Bengal began to sever the umbilical cord which had bound them to the villages and their people for centuries. Conspicuous consumption rather than display of bhakti was the central motif of these urban festivals. Bhakti, such as it was, was directed as much to the English masters as to the mother of the universe.

    The trump card was to have the governor-general as the chief guest at the puja. The compliment was duly repaid when the governor-general, Lord Wellesley, ordered a nine-gun salute in honour of Kali on appropriate occasions, much to the chagrin of believing Christians. The sahibs were entertained in great style. There were performances by the ubiquitous nautch girls. Karan bari, the sacred liquid, i.e. alcohol, was of course de rigueur in Sakta ritual. So whisky, champagne and lesser wines flowed freely and the feasts were truly fit for the gods.

    Syncretic creation

    The creation of this autumnal Durga Pujo was an amazingly syncretic process and, in many ways, would act as a precursor to the Bengal Renaissance of the next century. Durga is usually worshipped as a warrior but in Bengal she is also imagined as a family figure. Some of this reimagining of the Bengali Durga involved bits that were at odds with Puranic scripture. Saraswati, for example, is the daughter of Brahma everywhere else but in a Kolkata pujo pandal, where Shiv and Durga are her parents. And nowhere else is Durga worshipped along with her children.

    A number of mantras and rituals are Puranic but, then again, many are not, being borrowed from Tantric, adivasi or folk culture. Some rituals, such as the sindur khela, are secular and have nothing to do with worship at all. Even Bengal’s subaltern Muslim cultivator class seemed to have had an effect: the kolakuli – or triple hug – Bhaduri says is taken from the Islamic practice on Eid.

    Durga and Bengali nationalism

    Given its popularity as well as the Pujo’s use in statecraft, as nationalist feelings started to develop in Bengal amongst the bhadralok class, it was almost natural that the Goddess Durga would act as an icon for this new type of imagined community. Historian Raychaudhuri writes:

    In Bengal, the link between the mother cult and nationalist perceptions was first projected by the writer Bhudev Mukhopadhyay. Responding to the comments of an English Professor of Hindu College who asserted that Indians never had a sense of nationhood, Bhudev wrote that the story of the pithasthanas, the legend that the parts of the goddesses’ body was scattered all over India, was really an allegory: the divine body was the same as the motherland. His younger and better-known contemporary Bankim Chatterji carried the idea much further in his novel Anandamath (Abbey of Bliss). The novel, based on a highly fictionalised version of a popular rebellion in the days of Warren Hastings, the Faqir or Sanyasi Rebellion, has for its protagonists a group of patriotic monks who worshipped Vishnu in his role of a very well-armed God the Preserver. But their monastery also contained three images of the Mother: as she had been, as she had become and as she would be in the future. These images, more of the Motherland than the Mother Goddess, projected the increasingly popular belief in a glorious and prosperous past, impoverishment under colonial rule and the hopes of a great future in which at least some were beginning to believe, The patriotic monks are described by the novelist as the santans, the children of the Mother, i.e., both the Divine Mother and the Motherland. The two are in fact the same. The Motherland is conceived as Durga with ten arms and the song to celebrate her glory, Bandemataram, which became India’s first national anthem, pays homage to a land that is prosperous, beautiful and endowed with the potentialities of great power.

    Some twenty-five years after the song was written, Bandemataram (‘Hail Mother’) became the battle-cry of the first popular movement of resistance to colonial rule in which the middle class Bengalis participated. The action was intended to annul the decision to partition the Bengal Presidency into two provinces, a decision seen to be an attempt to divide the politically-conscious Bengali people. Bandemataram was the name adopted for a patriotic periodical with extreme views. The revolutionary movement first born of the anti-partition agitation treated Anandamath as its Bible. Aurobindo Ghosh, the Cambridge-educated Bengali revolutionary, projected the vision of a Bhavani Mandir, a temple dedicated to the goddess, as the centre of revolutionary activity. His Mandir was closely modelled on Anandamath.

    To the masses

    The growth of a Bengali identity meant that more myths were added to the imagining of Durga. To her worship as a mother and warrior was added the beautiful backstory of her returning back to her parent’s house – which, in this case, was Bengal – for an autumnal holiday, thus also worshipping her as a daughter. Forces similar to those that imagined her as a nationalistic icon pushed Durga out of the courtyard of the zamindari mansion and made the pujo a truly mass event. A popular origin tale of the collective pujo dates to 1790, where 12 friends are supposed to have got together and organised a baro-yari (12 comrades) pujo. However, breaking free of the zamindar mansion, the Durga Pujo in its modern sense, as a sarbajanin, community event dates to 1910, where the Sanatan Dharmotsahini Sabha held a collectively funded pujo in Kolkata’s Baghbazar.

    The 20th century establishment of a fully developed modern Bengali identity and the simultaneous decline of the institution of zamindari meant that the sarbajanin pujo slowly took over from the rajbari or mansion pujo. Today, the traditional zamindar pujo, as held since the 18th century, is mostly dead. In Rituparno Ghosh’s fantastic movie, Utsab, for example, a family gathers for what could be their last Durga pujo as their ancestral mansion is to be sold to realtors, even as the youngest family member, a young boy, threatens to run off to the “club-er pujo” (public pujo) given how boring and slow he finds this one.

    Still maintains its original core

    Even as Kolkata’s Durga Pujo has changed immensely since it first took modern shape in the 18th century, its core has been preserved. Its social, cultural and political role still holds, in a manner rather similar to how it was imagined three centuries back. It might, for example, seem ironic that the Communists would inaugurate pujos. However, it could simply be looked at as the continuation of a tradition where British officials, non-believers in the Pujo just like the Communists, would act as chief guests for zamindari pujos. And, of course, the trend continues till today, with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee patronising pandals across the city and even, as it turns out, writing a song for the autumn festival.

    Earlier zamindars would compete to show who was boss; today pujo committees do, their finances coming not out of land revenue but from modern capitalism in the form of corporate endorsements. The relatively small role of worship ­­– ironic in a religious festival ­– has also been preserved. Durga pujo in Kolkata is more about community, art and culture than any strict observance of religion. Pandals and idols are meant to be seen by the masses as public works of art and only a small minority end up going through any ritualistic form of faith. Very often idols even convey a political point ­– most famously, in 2001, one pujo had Durga slaying a demon in the likeness of Osama bin Laden.

    In this way, Durga worship as imagined in Bengal and, specifically, Kolkata is unique. In Delhi, for example, the simultaneous autumn worship of Durga by Punjabis – the navratri – is a sombre event and, amongst other things, involves intense food taboos even as, in contrast, Durga Pujo in Kolkata is fixated on eating out, extravagant meals being a crucial part of the celebration. Such is the benediction and magic of Durga pujo that, for four days in a year, it renders even the Kolkata Bengali more fun and less pretentious than the Delhi Punjabi.

14. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৭ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (১১:২০ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    দেড়শ’ বছরেও অবহেলিত শেরেবাংলার জন্মস্থান

    অবিভক্ত বাংলার মুখ্যমন্ত্রী ও বাংলার বাঘ খ্যাত শেরেবাংলা একে ফজলুল হকের ১৪২তম জন্মবার্ষিকী আজ। ঝালকাঠির রাজাপুর উপজেলার সাতুরিয়ার মিয়াবাড়িতে মাতুলালয়ে ১৮৭৩ সালের ২৬ অক্টোবর তিনি জন্মগ্রহণ করেন। শেরেবাংলার জন্মস্থানে তাঁর বহু জন্মস্মৃতি থাকলেও তা এখন বিলুপ্তপ্রায়। আজ পর্যন্ত এখানে উন্নয়নের কোনো ছোঁয়া লাগেনি। তাঁর জন্মের প্রায় দেড়শ’ বছর কেটে গেলেও অযত্ন-অবহেলায় পড়ে আছে শেরেবাংলার জন্মস্থান।

    ঝালকাঠি-পিরোজপুর আঞ্চলিক মহাসড়কের রাজাপুরের সাতুরিয়ার মিয়া বংশের জমিদার বাড়িতেই জন্মেছিলেন শেরেবাংলা আবুল কাসেম ফজলুল হক। শৈশবের বেশির ভাগ সময় তিনি কাটিয়েছেন তাঁর এই মামার বাড়িতেই। এখানে ঘাট বাঁধানো পুকুরে গোসল করা, পাশের নদীতে সাঁতার কাটা, গাছ থেকে বাদাম পেড়ে খাওয়াসহ অনেক স্মৃতি পড়ে আছে এই বাড়িতে। তবে তাঁর জন্মস্থান সাতুরিয়ায় মিয়াবাড়ির সেই আঁতুড়ঘর ও দালান এখন সংস্কারবিহীন জরাজীর্ণ অবস্থায় পড়ে আছে। মাত্র কয়েক বছর আগেও শেরেবাংলার ব্যবহূত বহু আসবাবপত্র এই বাড়িতে পড়ে থাকতে দেখা গেলেও মূল্যবান ওইসব জিনিসপত্র চুরি হয়ে গেছে। তাঁর ব্যবহূত অবশিষ্ট একটি চেয়ার এই বাড়িতে এখনও পড়ে থাকলেও তা বিনষ্টের পথে। এমনকি তাঁর প্রতিষ্ঠিত সাতুরিয়া এমএম মাধ্যমিক বিদ্যালয়টিও বেহাল দশা। ভবন ও বেঞ্চ সঙ্কটসহ শিক্ষা ব্যবস্থার নানা সমস্যায় জর্জরিত হয়ে আছে এই প্রতিষ্ঠানটি।

    শেরেবাংলার জন্মস্থান ও তাঁর জন্মস্মৃতি দেখতে দূর-দূরান্ত থেকে প্রতিনিয়ত বহু পর্যটক এখানে ঘুরতে আসেন। নতুন প্রজন্মের শিক্ষার্থীরা এখানে বেড়াতে আসেন শেরেবাংলার জীবন ইতিহাস সম্পর্কে দেখতে, শুনতে ও জানতে। তবে তাঁরা হতাশ হয়ে ফিরে যান তাঁর জন্মস্মৃতি আর জরাজীর্ণ ধ্বংসস্তূপ দেখে।

    শেরেবাংলার বংশধর হোসনেয়ারা বেগম বলেন, এ পর্যন্ত এই বাড়িটির উন্নয়নে কেউ কিছু করেনি। আমরা চাই এই বিখ্যাত লোকের জন্মস্থান সংরক্ষণ করা হোক। পর্যটক আবির হোসেন বলেন, শেরেবাংলার স্মৃতি সংরক্ষণ করে জাদুঘর ও একটি লাইব্রেরি স্থাপনের উদ্যোগ গ্রহণ করা হোক। শিক্ষার্থী আসয়া ইসলাম সেতু বলেন, আমরা অনেকেই জানি না শেরেবাংলার অবদানের কথা। নতুন প্রজন্মের কাছে শেরেবাংলাকে তুলে ধরতে হলে তাঁর স্মৃতি সংরক্ষণ করা দরকার। তাঁর স্মৃতি সংরক্ষণের জন্য আমরা আমাদের বিদ্যালয়ের পক্ষ থেকে প্রশাসনের কাছে জোর দাবি রাখছি।

    এ ব্যাপারে ঝালকাঠির জেলা প্রশাসক রবীন্দ্রশ্রী বড়ুয়া বলেন, ‘বাংলাদেশ সরকার এই ধরনের পুরাকীর্তিগুলো সংরক্ষণের জন্য অত্যন্ত আন্তরিক। তারই ফলে প্রত্নতত্ত্ব অধিদফতর ইতোমধ্যে শেরেবাংলা আবুল কাসেম ফজলুল হকের জন্মস্মৃতি সংরক্ষণে আন্তরিকতা দেখিয়েছে। জেলা প্রশাসনের পক্ষ থেকে আমরা তথ্য ও উপাত্ত পাঠিয়েছি। খুব শিগগিরই প্রত্নতত্ত্ব অধিদফতর এটি সংরক্ষণের জন্য প্রয়োজনীয় ব্যবস্থা গ্রহণ করবে।

    দেড়শ’ বছরেও অবহেলিত শেরেবাংলার জন্মস্থান https://t.co/VYVI5gA7Ay #শেরেবাংলা #আবুলকাসেমফজলুলহক #একেফজলুলহক #অবিভক্তবাংলারমুখ্যমন্ত্রী

    — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) October 27, 2015

15. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৭ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (৬:৫৯ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Shashi Kapoor Honoured With Retrospective at 2015

    Veteran actor Shashi Kapoor is being honoured with a retrospective at this year’s International Film Festival of India (IFFI), where some of his biggest titles like Deewar, Junoon, In Custody, Shakespearwallah and Householder will be screened for cinema lovers.

    The IFFI retrospective follows this year’s Dadasaheb Phalke award for the actor.

    His son Kunal, although, happy with the recognition that is being accorded to his father, believes the accolades came a little late for the actor.

    “I am quite thrilled. I just wish they had given him all these awards and retrospectives when he was in a healthy state. He would have been able to enjoy it then,” Kunal told PTI.

    When asked what was Kapoor’s response to the award, Kunal said his father does not take these things seriously.

    “He just smiled. He has always been like that when it comes to awards. He never takes these things to heart.”

    Filmmaker Shyam Benegal, who directed Kapoor’s first two productions Kalyug and Junoon, hailed the actor for devoting his whole life to cinema and theatre.

    “He devoted his entire life to theatre and cinema. He started off with his father in Prithvi Theatre. He cut his teeth in theatre by doing all kinds of work not just acting with his father’s troupe,” Benegal said.

    Kapoor grew up in the atmosphere of theatre, thanks to his father Prithviraj Kapoor and later father-in-law Geoffrey Kendal’s theatre company, Shakespeareana, was a major influence.

    The National award-winning director said Kapoor’s love for the theatre was the reason for the actor to get involved in alternative cinema even after he became a successful commercial star.

    “He grew up in the atmosphere of theatre. He soon became a film star as all the Kapoor children did at that time. Then he became a romantic hero, hugely successful. As he became more successful he decided that he would invest in both theatre and cinema and he built Prithvi Theatre in memory of his father’s group,” Benegal said.

    Kapoor’s production list may not be as lengthy as his acting assignments, but Benegal feels the actor’s greatest achievement was that he did what he believed in and backed projects like Govind Nihalani’s Vijeta, Girish Karnad’s Utsav and 36 Chowringhee Lane by Aparna Sen.

    “No single producer has produced such high quality films one after the other. Most of the films failed to return the investment. He lost a lot of money eventually but he did the kind of films he wanted to do. He did what he believed in. His greatest achievement has been that.”

    The ‘Retrospective Section’ will open with Benegal’s Junoon next month in Goa during the 46th edition of IFFI.

    #ShashiKapoor honoured with retrospective at 2015 https://t.co/fnALbFJ8dY via @Outlookindia pic.twitter.com/VlmUBv6cOs

    — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) October 27, 2015

16. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৯ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (১০:৩২ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    হাটে হাঁড়ি ভেঙে দিলেন মুশারফ

    হাফিজ সঈদ, জাকিউর লকভি এমনকী ওসামা বিন লাদেনরা আম পাকিস্তানিদের নায়ক ছিলেন। বিশেষ করে লস্কর–ই–তৈবা প্রধান সঈদ। কারণ তারা তো তখন কাশ্মীরে লড়ছিল। লড়ছিল ভারতের বিরুদ্ধে। আর তাই তাদের প্রশিক্ষণও দিয়েছিল পাকিস্তান। এক সময়ে মাথায় তোলার ফল, আজ পাকিস্তানের বিরুদ্ধেই হাতিয়ার তুলেছে জঙ্গি গোষ্ঠীরা। পাকিস্তানিদেরই মারছে। মত পারভেজ মুশারফের। আগলহীন এক সাক্ষাৎকারে পাকিস্তানের প্রাক্তন প্রেসিডেন্ট ও সেনা প্রধান স্বীকার করেছেন যে তাঁরাই জঙ্গিদের লালন পালন করেছেন বছরের পর বছর। অকপট মুশারফ জানিয়েছেন, ‘নয়ের দশক তখ‍ন। কাশ্মীরকে স্বাধীনতা পাইয়ে দেওয়ার লড়াই শুরু হয়েছে জোরদারভাবে। লস্কর–ই–তৈবার সঙ্গে উঠে এসেছে আরও ১১–১২টি গোষ্ঠী। জীবনের বাজি রেখে সবাই লড়ছে কাশ্মীরের জন্য। স্বভাবতই তখন ওরা আমাদের চোখে নায়ক। ওদের সমর্থন করেছি। প্রশিক্ষণও দিয়েছি।’ তালিবানদের প্রশিক্ষণ দেওয়ার কথাও স্বীকার করে নিয়েছেন জেনারেল মুশারফ। বলেছেন, ‘ওদের প্রশিক্ষণ দিয়ে রাশিয়ার বিরুদ্ধে লড়তে পাঠিয়েছি। ৭৯–তে সোবিয়েত রাশিয়ার বিরুদ্ধে ‘ধার্মিক জঙ্গিবাদ’–এর শুরু করে পাকিস্তানই। তালিবান, হাক্কানি, ওসামা বিন লাদেন, জাওয়াহিরি—ওরা সবাই তখন আমাদের নায়ক। তবে এখন খলনায়ক হয়ে গেছে! ‘ধার্মিক জঙ্গিবাদ’ সন্ত্রাসবাদে পরিণত হয়েছে। এবার ওদের নিয়ন্ত্রণ করতে হবে, রুখে দিতে হবে।’ প্রশ্ন ছিল তবে কী লকভি ও সঈদের বিরুদ্ধে ব্যবস্থা নেওয়া হবে? জবাব এড়িয়ে গেছেন মুশারফ। বরং চেপে ধরাতে রীতিমতো ক্ষুব্ধ হয়ে বলেছেন, তিনি ওই বিষয় আলোচনাই করতে চান না। বরং প্রসঙ্গ পাল্টাতে ভারতকে আক্রমণ করেন। বলেন, ‘ভারতের দেখানো পথেই চলছে পাকিস্তান! ২৬/১১–র প্রধান চাঁই হাফিজ সঈদের সঙ্গে শিবসেনা–আর এস এস–এর তুলনা টেনে প্রশ্নকর্তাকে তেড়েফুঁড়ে বলেন, ‘ভারতে ওরা কি করে, দেখতে পান না? শাহরিয়ার খানের সঙ্গে ওরা কি ব্যবহার করল? (পাকিস্তান ক্রিকেট বোর্ডের প্রধান সচিব) খুরশিদ মাহমুদ কাসুরির বই প্রকাশ অনুষ্ঠানের আয়োজকের মুখে কালি দিল। এমনকী গুলাম আলির অনুষ্ঠানও বাতিল করে ওঁকে অপমান করল!’ শিবসেনা প্রতিষ্ঠাতা বালাসাহেব ঠাকরেকে ‘সন্ত্রাসবাদী’ আখ্যা করে মুশারফের প্রশ্ন, ওঁকে কী কেউ কোনওদিন ধরতে পেরেছে? সমঝোতা এক্সপ্রেস বিস্ফোরণে যে সেনা কর্নেল জড়িত, তাঁকেই বা কে ধরেছে? আগে ওই কর্নেলকে ধরুন, তারপর সঈদের কথা বলবেন!’ আর এস এস–শিবসেনার দিকে নজর ঘোরালেও, পাকিস্তানই যে জঙ্গিবাদকে প্রশ্রয় দিয়েছে, তা প্রকাশ্যে এনে দেশের মুখ পুড়িয়েছেন মুশারফ। তাঁর মন্তব্যের প্রতিক্রিয়া দিতে গিয়ে এন সি পি নেতা মজিদ মেমন জানিয়েছেন, মুশারফের মন্তব্যকে গুরুত্ব দিয়ে দেখা উচিত। আন্তর্জাতিক ও দ্বিপাক্ষিক স্তরে এই নিয়ে আওয়াজ তুলুক ভারত। তবে শিবসেনা প্রধান প্রসঙ্গে পাকিস্তানের প্রাক্তন প্রেসিডেন্ট যা বলেছেন, তা নিছকই ভারতকে উসকে দিতে। সুতরাং তাতে গুরুত্ব দেওয়ার প্রয়োজন নেই। মুশারফের মন্তব্যকে হাতিয়ার করে সরকারকে রাষ্ট্রপুঞ্জের কাছে যেতে বলেছেন কংগ্রেস নেতা রশিদ আ‍লভি। তাঁর মত, মুশারফ যা বলেছেন, তা নতুন কিছু নয়। সারা পৃথিবী জানে জঙ্গিবাদের পৃষ্ঠপোষক পাকিস্তান। তবে মুশারফ পাকিস্তানের প্রাক্তন রাষ্ট্রপ্রধান। সেই সুবাদে তাঁর মন্তব্যকে গুরুত্ব দিয়েই দেখা উচিত।

    হাটে হাঁড়ি ভেঙে দিলেন মুশারফ https://t.co/tGc0nqPz0U #পাকিস্তান #লস্করইতৈবা #তালেবান #Pakistan via #আজকাল

    — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) October 29, 2015

    Pakistan Supported, Trained Terror Groups: Pervez Musharraf | https://t.co/QRut1PU0rL | Outlook Wires

    — Outlook Magazine (@Outlookindia) October 28, 2015

17. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৯ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (২:৩৪ অপরাহ্ণ)

    1st LD-Writethru: China Focus: New rules separates CPC discipline from law

    The Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee has published new rules on clean governance and sanctions for those who violate the Party code of conduct, as the CPC improves the management of its 88 million members.

    The two new regulations, adopted at a meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee on Oct. 12, updated existing rules deemed incompatible with the Party following the launch of its anti-corruption drive.

    Xie Chuntao, a professor with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, said some members were not familiar with the Party’s rules and code of conduct, resulting in a tenuous relationship with the organization, which is a threat to the very fabric of the CPC.

    President Xi Jinping once said that power should be restricted by a cage of regulations. He has repeatedly called for revisions to these regulations.

    The new rules on clean governance, for the first time, are applicable to all CPC members.

    In stark contrast, the previous rules, which were released in 2010, included 53 articles on behavior that is forbidden, while the new 8-article regulation mainly concerns itself with a moral ethical code that members must abide by.

    Gao Bo, a research fellow with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, noted that the new rules required officials not only to be honest in politics but also to concentrate on cultivating their own character and running a harmonious family.

    Party members must separate public and private interests, put the public’s interest first, and work selflessly, stated one article. Another required members to champion simplicity and guard against extravagance.

    The new rules on punishments have been dubbed by many to be the most comprehensive and strictest since the opening up and reform drive began.

    Ma Huaide, vice president of China University of Political Science and Law, said the biggest problems with the current disciplinary regulations, released in 2013, was that there was no clear boundary between Party discipline and laws.

    Ma added that nearly half of the disciplinary regulation was identical to the Criminal Law. For instance, the new regulation has deleted articles related to corruption, bribery and dereliction of duty, all of which overlap with the Criminal Law.

    A statement released after the Oct. 12 meeting said that the revisions uphold the principle that Party discipline is stricter than the law and discipline should be put before the law.

    The new discipline regulation explicitly lists extravagant eating and drinking and playing golf as violations, which were not included previously.

    The new regulation also includes content about the forming of inter-Party cliques, defying principles, hiding personal issues that should be reported to the Party, seeking profits for family members and staff with their political powers, among others.

    The new version of the disciplinary regulation deleted a previous clause about keeping paramours and conducting adultery. This was replaced by a clause saying that “having improper sexual relationship with others,” making the regulation stricter.

    “Some improper sexual relationship may only involve moral rather than legal issues. The previous version left loopholes,” said Xie.

    If the new regulation can be enforced well, it will have a preventative affect, said Xie.

    The CPC has issued a circular urging government and party organs at all levels to follow the rules and regulations. Enditem

    CPC publishes new rules on clean governance, separates party discipline from law https://t.co/pXZIWMKHGO pic.twitter.com/Y8fjUQUZvX

    — China Xinhua News (@XHNews) October 22, 2015

18. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ২৯ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (২:৪১ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Women leaders hail twin victories

    The country has created two firsts in history, something unimaginable a decade ago. Bidhya Devi Bhandari, heretofore CPN-UML deputy chair, beat her contender Nepali Congress leader Kul Bahadur Gurung in the presidential election on Wednesday to become the first female President of the new republic. Last week, UCPN (Maoist) leader Onsari Gharti was elected unopposed to the post of Speaker of the House. Women leaders have hailed the success of Bhandari and Gharti, saying that their feats would be motivation to women to fight for top positions. “It is a milestone for women’s movement to have women as head of state and speaker for the first time in the country. Male leaders agreed to offer the posts to women in a changed political scenario,” said Sashi Shrestha, a Maoist leader. However, they argue that the country still has a long way to go before women get into decision-making positions in all areas, including political and executive positions, to rejoice the success fully. So far, General Administration Minister Rekha Sharma, a member of the UPCN (Maoist), is the only female minister in the 18-minister Cabinet. Out of the 601 members in Parliament, only 173 are women. Political parties have not shown willingness to ensure a one-third representation of women in the government as well as state mechanism, Shrestha added. “This is what is lacking so far.” UML leader Garima Shah fears that chances of repeating of such opportunities for women will rarely occur if the parties do not act on their promises. “Women leaders still have a long way to go in order to become game changers. That is why we need the reservation system to provide us the prospect of grooming ourselves and coming at par with men in the future,” said Shah. Women are marginalised in politics because they are considered inferior to men within the society. The newly elected women leaders in top position have challenges of breaking this stigma attached with female politicians, she said. After a long struggle, the new constitution has guaranteed a one-third representation of women in state mechanism. Women leaders and activists, however, fear the constitutional provision will be confined in paper. In six month’s time, the country will see its first woman Chief Justice, which will be another historical achievement in judiciary. “We are looking forward to it, when the country will have a woman in top executive post,” Shah said.

19. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ৩০ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (১১:৩৪ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    ধান গবেষণা : নতুন পথের সন্ধানে

    দেশে এখন ভাতের অভাব নেই। কারণ এই প্রথম বাংলাদেশ থেকে চাল বিদেশে গেল। আমরা জেনেছি ৫০ হাজার টন সিদ্ধ চাল শ্রীলঙ্কায় রফতানি করা হয়েছে। সেটা ছিল বাণিজ্যিক প্রয়োজনে। আর মানবিক প্রয়োজনে ১০ হাজার টন চাল পাঠানো হয়েছে নেপালে। আরও কিছু অর্ডার আছে। তবে তা আতপ চালের। আমাদের এ ধরনের চালের ভাণ্ডার ততটা সমৃদ্ধ নয়। বিষয়টি নিয়ে এখনই চিন্তাভাবনা করা উচিত। কারণ ভবিষ্যতে চাল রফতানি করতে হলে অনেকটাই আতপের ওপর নির্ভর করতে হবে। পাশাপাশি আরেকটি কথা বলে রাখা দরকার, ভারতের বেশ কিছু চাল আমাদের বাজারে এসে গেছে। চাল আমদানির ব্যাপারে শুল্ক নিয়ে এতদিন কোনো কথা ছিল না। তাই কিছু ব্যবসায়ী অভ্যাসবশত সুযোগের অপব্যবহার করেছে বলা যায়। গেল বছর আমন ফলন ভালো ছিল। এবারের বোরোর উত্পাদনও ভালো হয়েছে। শিলাবৃষ্টি ও কিছুটা নেক-ব্লাস্টের উপদ্রব ছাড়া আর কোনো বৈরী অবস্থা নেই। হাওরের ধান নির্বিঘ্নে কাটা গেছে বলে শুনেছি। তাই মনে প্রশ্ন জাগে, কীজন্য চাল আমদানি করা হল? আমদানি-রফতানি নিয়ে যারা ভাবেন তাঁদেরকে এসব ব্যাপারে একটু সজাগ থাকলে ভালো। বোরো ধান ঘরে আসার সময়ে আমদানিকৃত চাল আমাদের দেশীয় ধানের বাজারে কিছুটা অপপ্রভাব রাখতে পারে, যা ক’দিন আগেই আমরা দেখেছি। যাই হোক, এ ব্যাপারে সরকারের তাত্ক্ষণিক ভূমিকা উল্লেখযোগ্য। কারণ ইতোমধ্যেই চাল আমদানিতে ১০ শতাংশ শুল্ক আরোপের কথা ঘোষণা করা হয়েছে।

    বাংলাদেশ কমবেশি ১৬ কোটি মানুষের দেশ। আবাদযোগ্য ভূমির পরিমাণ প্রয়োজনের তুলনায় খুবই কম। তারপরও আমাদের চালে স্বয়ংসম্পূর্ণতা অর্জন অনেকের কাছে অবিশ্বাস্য মনে হতে পারে। কিন্তু এটাই বাস্তব। এবং তা সম্ভব হয়েছে কৃষি তথা ধান গবেষণায় বিশেষ গুরুত্ব প্রদানের জন্য। আর ধান গবেষণায় আমাদের দেশে প্রধান ভূমিকা পালন করছে বাংলাদেশ ধান গবেষণা ইনস্টিটিউট (ব্রি)। এ ছাড়া সম্প্রতি বাংলাদেশ আণবিক কৃষি গবেষণা ইনস্টিটিউট, বাংলাদেশ কৃষি উন্নয়ন করপোরেশন, বঙ্গবন্ধু শেখ মুজিবুর রহমান কৃষি বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ও ধান নিয়ে বেশ এগিয়ে আসছে। পাশাপাশি ব্র্যাকসহ বেশ কিছু বেসরকারি সংস্থা ও বীজ কোম্পানিগুলো হাইব্রিড বীজ আমদানি ও গবেষণার মাধ্যমে ধান উত্পাদনে ভালো ভূমিকা রাখতে সক্ষম হয়েছে। এখানে একটি কথা বিশেষভাবে উল্লেখ করতেই হয়, ব্রি শুধু ধানের জাত বা কিছু প্রযুক্তিই নয়, ধান নিয়ে যারা কাজ করে তাদের জন্য প্রয়োজনীয় কিছু দিকদর্শনও দিয়ে থাকে। তাই যে যেভাবেই ধান নিয়ে এগিয়ে আসুক না কেন, তার ওপর প্রত্যক্ষ বা পরোক্ষভাবে ব্রির একটা বিশেষ ভূমিকা থাকে।
    আমাদের চাল সংক্রান্ত যে স্বয়ম্ভরতা; তা নিয়ে বড়াই করার তেমন কিছু নেই। কারণ এই স্বয়ম্ভরতা একটু অসতর্ক হলেই হুমকিতে পড়তে পারে। তবে ব্যবস্থাপনা বলে কথা। বর্তমান সরকারের কৃষি ব্যবস্থাপনা প্রশংসার দাবি রাখে। কৃষি ব্যবস্থাপনার জরুরি বিষয়গুলোর অন্যতম হল সার ব্যবস্থাপনা। বর্তমান সরকার কৃষি উন্নয়নের লক্ষ্যে কৃষকদেরকে সাশ্রয়ী মূল্যে সার জোগানের ব্যবস্থা নেয়। কারণ ইউরিয়া সারের দাম কিছুটা কম থাকলেও আনুষঙ্গিক দুটি জরুরি সার টিএসপি এবং এমওপির দাম ছিল সাধারণ কৃষকের ধরাছোঁয়ার বাইরে। ফলে চাষিরা ইউরিয়া সার বেশি করে ব্যবহার করত। অন্যান্য সার চাহিদামাফিক ব্যবহার করতে পারত না। জমিতে সার ব্যবস্থাপনা ঠিকমতো না হলে ফলন ভালো হয় না। এটা সবার জানা। তবু ভালো জাতের পাশাপাশি যথাযথ কৃষি ব্যবস্থাপনার প্রয়োজনীয়তা ইতোপূর্বে অন্য কোনো সরকার তেমন উপলব্ধি করেছে বলে মনে হয় না। বর্তমান সরকার কয়েক দফায় সারের দাম কমিয়েছে। ২০০৯-এ টিএসপি, এমওপি এবং ডিএপি সারের দাম ছিল যথাক্রমে ৮০, ৭০ এবং ৯০ টাকা। দ্বিতীয়বার ক্ষমতা গ্রহণের শুরুতেই সরকার এসব সারের দাম যথাক্রমে ২২, ২৫ এবং ৩০ টাকায় নামিয়ে আনে। ২০১০-এ ডিএপির দাম আরও কমিয়ে ২৭ টাকায় নির্ধারণ করা হয়। সারের দাম কৃষকের সহনশীলতার মধ্যে নামিয়ে আনতে সরকারকে প্রচুর পরিমাণে উন্নয়ন সহায়তা প্রদান করতে হয়। নন-ইউরিয়া সারে ২০০৮-০৯-এ এই সহায়তার পরিমাণ ছিল ১১১ শতাংশ। ২০০৯-১০ এবং ২০১১-১২-এ এই পরিমাণ দাঁড়ায় যথাক্রমে ১৬২.০ এবং ১৬.৫৩ শতাংশ। তুলনাটি আগের বছরের সাপেক্ষে। সহায়তার পরিমাণ টাকার অঙ্কে ২০০৯-১০, ২০১০-১১ সালে ইউরিয়া থেকে সামান্য কিছু বেশি ছিল। ২০০৮-০৯-এ ইউরিয়া সারে সহায়তার পরিমাণ ছিল ৪২.৭৩ বিলিয়ন টাকা এবং নন-ইউরিয়া সারে ৮.০১ বিলিয়ন টাকা। ২০১১-১২-তে সহায়তার চেহারাটা কিছুটা উল্টে যায়। তখন নন-ইউরিয়া সারে সহায়তার পরিমাণ দাঁড়ায় ৪৬.৫২ বিলিয়ন টাকা এবং ইউরিয়ার বেলায় ২৩.২৮ বিলিয়ন টাকা। শতকরা হারে মোট সার সহায়তার হার ৮৪-৩৩ শতাংশের মধ্যে উঠানামা করে। লক্ষণীয় যে, সারের বেলায় এই সহায়তা মোট বাজেটের ৪-৫ শতাংশ। পাশাপাশি কৃষি ঋণ বা উপকরণের সংগ্রহের প্রয়োজনে কৃষকের জন্য মাত্র ১০ টাকায় ব্যাংক অ্যাকাউন্ট খোলার সুযোগ প্রদানও ছিল যুগান্তকারী সিদ্ধান্ত। ফলে কৃষকের জন্য বরাদ্দকৃত অর্থ তার অ্যাকাউন্টে চলে আসায় কৃষক সরাসরি উপকৃত হতে পারছে। কৃষি ব্যবস্থার আরেকটি বিষয় হল তৃণমূল পর্যায়ে কৃষি কর্মকর্মতাদের সার্বক্ষণিক তত্পরতা। তা সম্ভব হয়েছে কৃষিমন্ত্রী মহোদয়ের সার্বক্ষণিক তদারকির কারণে।

    সরকারের ব্যবস্থাপনার বিষয়গুলো নিয়ে গবেষকদের তেমন উদ্বিগ্ন না হলেও চলে। তাঁরা উদ্বিগ্ন পরিবর্তিত জলবায়ু (বৈশ্বিক উষ্ণতা বৃদ্ধির) এবং বর্ধিত জনসংখ্যা নিয়ে। বৈশ্বিক উষ্ণতা বৃদ্ধির কারণে অদূর ভবিষ্যতে ধানের ফলন কমে যেতে পারে। ঘন ঘন বৈরী পরিস্থিতির (খরা, বন্যা, নতুন বালাইয়ের প্রাদুর্ভাব) উদ্ভব হতে পারে। আবাদ উপযোগী পানির পরিমাণ কমে যাচ্ছে। ভূগর্ভস্থ পানির স্তর নিচে নেমে যাচ্ছে। পরিবেশ দূষণ বাড়ছে। কৃষি জমির আশেপাশে জীববৈচিত্র্য ধরে রাখতে কষ্ট হচ্ছে। জনসংখ্যা বৃদ্ধির কারণে আবাদি জমির পরিমাণ যেমন কমছে, বাড়তি মুখের (জনসংখ্যা) সংখ্যা তেমন বাড়ছে। এক হিসাব মতে, জমির পরিমাণ বছরে প্রায় এক শতাংশের কাছাকাছি পরিমাণ কমছে। অপরদিকে বছরে ২২ লাখ করে লোক বাড়ছে। এজন্য কম করে হলেও বছরে ৩ লাখ টন বাড়তি চালের দরকার। আর এটাই হল ধান বিজ্ঞানীদের জন্য একটি বিশাল চ্যালেঞ্জ।
    আমাদের দেশে ব্রিতে প্রথম আধুনিক ধান গবেষণার শুরু হয় ১৯৭০-এ। এ পর্যন্ত চারটি হাইব্রিডসহ ৭২টি ধানের জাত উদ্ভাবন করা হয়েছে। তা দিয়ে এবং আরও কিছু প্রতিষ্ঠানের ধান গষেণার ফলাফলকে সঙ্গে নিয়ে আমরা আজকের অবস্থানে এসেছি। এ যাবত্ ধানের উত্পাদন প্রবৃদ্ধি বেশ ভালোই আছে বলে মনে করি। তবে সতর্ক না হলে সামনে পরিস্থিতি খারাপ হতে পারে তা আমি বলেছি। এবং সতর্ক থাকলে ধানের ফলন এখনও বাড়ানোর সুযোগ আছে। তবে কাজটা কিন্তু সহজ নয়। আমাদের অনুকূল পরিবেশে আবাদি আওতার সর্বোত্তম ব্যবহার প্রায় শেষ। কারণে-অকারণে ফেলে রাখা জমির পরিমাণ আমাদের একেবারেই সীমিত। আমরা এখন বৈরী পরিবেশে অবস্থিত আবাদি জমিগুলো ব্যবহারের দিকে যাচ্ছি। তারপরও কতটুকু শেষরক্ষা হবে চিন্তার বিষয়। কথাটা শুনতে বেশ খারাপ লাগতে পারে। তবে আশার কথা হল ধান বিজ্ঞানীরা প্রস্তুত। ব্রি প্রতিষ্ঠিত হয় সমস্যাভিত্তিক গবেষণা করার জন্য। সমস্যা আসবে এবং তা সমাধানে নিরন্তর কাজ করে যেতে হবে। সেখানে পরিবেশ-পরিস্থিতি সাপেক্ষে সিদ্ধান্ত নেওয়ার সুযোগ আছে। প্রতিষ্ঠাকালীন এই দর্শন এখনও বজায় আছে। প্রসঙ্গত বিবেকানন্দের কর্মযোগে উদ্ধৃত মহানির্বাণতন্ত্রের একটি দার্শনিক তত্ত্বের কথা বলতেই হয়। সেখানে বলা হয়েছে-
    অবস্থানুগতাশ্চেষ্টা সময়ানুগতাঃ ক্রিয়া।
    তস্মাদবস্থাং সময়ং বিক্ষ্যকর্ম সমাচরেত্।।
    অর্থাত্ চেষ্টা অবস্থার অনুগত এবং ক্রিয়া সময়ের। অতএব অবস্থা এবং সময় অনুসারেই কর্ম করিবে। এক সময় যাহা বিফল হইল, আর এক সময়ে তাহাতে প্রচুর সাফল্য লাভ হইল।

    কথাটি আমার মনে সবসময় বাজতে থাকে এবং ব্রির বিজ্ঞানীদের কথাগুলো আমি শোনাই। আমাদের দীর্ঘ, মধ্য ও স্বল্পমেয়াদি গবেষণা স্ট্রাটেজি ঠিক করা আছে। আমার কেন যেন মনে হয় সব স্ট্রাটেজি এই কথাগুলোর মধ্যেই বলা আছে। আর সে কারণেই আমি বিশ্বাস করি আমাদের বিজ্ঞানীরা আর আমাদের ভাতের অভাব হতে দেবে না। তবে এজন্য তাদের যা করতে হবে তা হল গতানুগতিক গবেষণা ধারায় আমূল পরিবর্তন আনা। আর সে পরিবর্তনের কথাগুলো আমি বলতে চাই।
    আগেই বলছি ধানের ফলন একটি পর্যায়ে এসে থেমে গেছে। আমরা এটাকে বলছি ণরবষফ পবরষরহম। আমাদের এই ণরবষফ পবরষরহম ভাঙতেই হবে। আমাদের জলবায়ু এবং চাষিবান্ধব ধানের জাত উদ্ভাবন করতে হবে। ধানের জীবনকাল কমিয়ে আনতে হবে। একাধিক বালাই প্রতিরোধী ধানের জাত বের করতে হবে। পুষ্টিগুণ সমৃদ্ধ ধানের জাত উদ্ভাবন করতে হবে। রফতানিযোগ্য ধানের জাত উদ্ভাবন করতে হবে। ধানের বিভিন্নমুখী বাণিজ্যিকীকরণের বিষয়গুলোকে বিবেচনায় আনতে হবে। ধান চাষকে যান্ত্রিকীকরণ করতে হবে। গবেষণায় আধুনিক কলা-কৌশল ব্যবহার করতে হবে। এগুলো হল আমাদের গবেষণা thrust। অবশ্য এসব thrust এমনি এমনি আসেনি।

    ধান গবেষণায় আমাদের এ পর্যন্ত যে অর্জন তা নিয়ে আজকাল অনেক ভালো ভালো কথা বলা হচ্ছে। অবশ্য এই অর্জনের পেছনে গবেষকদের সংখ্যা মাত্র শ’ দুয়েক। গবেষণার সুবিধাদিও ছিল সাদামাটা গোছের। এখন যে সমস্যাগুলো আসছে তা আমি কিছুটা ইঙ্গিত দিয়েছি। এ থেকে উত্তরণের জন্য এখন প্রয়োজন গবেষণায় নতুন পথের সন্ধান করা। আরও অর্থ বিনিয়োগ করা। আরও সক্ষম জনবল গড়ে তোলা। সত্যিকারের আধুনিক গবেষণাগার গড়ে তোলা। এজন্য সবার সহযোগিতা আমাদের দরকার। ইতোমধ্যেই আমাদের গবেষণাগার আধুনিকায়নের কিছু কিছু কাজ আমরা হাতে নিয়েছি। আমাদের গবেষণাগারেই এখন বেশ কিছু ক্লাসিক্যাল কাজ করা সম্ভব।

    গতানুগতিক ধারায় একটি ধানের জাত উদ্ভাবন করতে ১৪ বছর লাগে। আমাদের সব চেষ্টার সঙ্গে আরও একটি চেষ্টা যোগ করার চেষ্টা চলছে যাতে করে সময়টা অর্ধেক করা ফেলা যায়। আরেকটি বিষয় না বললেই নয়। ব্রি অনেক জাত উদ্ভাবন করেছে। তার সব কিন্তু মাঠে নেই। ব্রি ধান১১, ব্রি ধান২৮ এবং ব্রি ধান২৯ বহু দিন ধরে মাঠে রাজত্ব করছে। এর পরে উদ্ভাবিত জাতগুলো কোনো না কোনো বৈশিষ্ট্যে তাদের পূর্বসূরিদের থেকে এগিয়ে থাকলেও চাষিদের কাছে তা জনপ্রিয় করা যাচ্ছে না। এ ব্যাপারে যথাযথ কর্তৃপক্ষ ব্যবস্থা নিতে পারে। এখন শুধু আর adoption নয়, চাষিদেরকে prescription নির্ভর হওয়ার জন্যও বলতে হবে। কারণ আমাদের জনসংখ্যা বৃদ্ধির সঙ্গে ধানের উত্পাদন ধরে রাখতে হলে একটি ভালো জাত কোনোক্রমেই পাঁচ বছরের বেশি মাঠে থাকা উচিত নয়। সঙ্গে অফড়ঢ়ঃরড়হ সময়ও কমিয়ে আনতে হবে। আমাদের এক গবেষণা বলছে, জনপ্রিয়তার তুঙ্গে পৌঁছাতে যে জাত যতবেশি সময় কম নেবে সে জাত নির্দিষ্ট সময়ের মধ্যে তত বেশি মোট উত্পাদনে অবদান রাখতে পারবে।
    শুরু করেছিলাম দেশে ‘এখন ভাতের অভাব নেই’ এই বলে। মাঝে বলেছি সতর্ক না হলে ভাতের অভাব হতে পারে। পরে বলেছি আমাদের অভাব হবে না কারণ আমরা নানাভাবে নিজেদেরকে তৈরি করছি। শেষ কথা হল, এই তৈরি করাটা সহজ নয়। এজন্য বিজ্ঞানীদের যেমন দায়িত্ব আছে তেমনই দায়িত্ব আছে সরকার এবং কৃষকের। আমার বিশ্বাস এই তিনে মিলে ধান গবেষণায় অবশ্যই সফল হব। সত্যি কোনো দিন আমাদের ভাতের অভাব হবে না।

    #ধান গবেষণা : নতুন পথের সন্ধানে – লিখেছেন #জীবনকৃষ্ণবিশ্বাস https://t.co/VQOB5M09Ha #বাংলাদেশ #ব্রি #BRRI #rice

    — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) October 30, 2015

20. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ৩০ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (১:০৭ অপরাহ্ণ)

    The Man Who Founded Television That Matters Is Born

    Fred Friendly helped bring down McCarthyism and even quit ​CBS News when the network opted for ‘I Love Lucy’ over a committee hearing on the Vietnam War.

    October 30, 1915, is the birthdate of Fred Friendly, the television-news pioneer, who virtually invented the news-documentary genre, and fought to keep the press independent, sometimes in the face of powerful opposition.

    Ferdinand Friendly Wachenheimer was born in New York, to Samuel Wachenheimer and the former Therese Friendly. Samuel was a New York-born descendant of Jewish-German immigrants, who owned a jewelry business together with his two brothers. On a sales trip on the West Coast, he met Therese, also the daughter of German Jews, though of higher social standing.

    Ferd, an only child, was 11 when the family moved from Manhattan to Providence, Rhode Island, where his father’s jewelry plant was situated. A year later, Samuel died suddenly, from meningitis, leaving Therese to raise Ferd by herself. She was well provided for, but she was hard-pressed to deal with, or even recognize, her son’s learning disabilities, which included dyslexia, though that was understood only many decades later.

    Footprints in the sand

    Ferd was clearly intelligent, but he did understandably poorly in school. He graduated high school only because his mother moved him to a private school for his senior year, and even then, he only was accepted into Nichols, a junior college, where he took business classes for two years, and was very involved in acting.

    As a child, Ferd and his father had built a crystal-radio set, and used it to listen to an early broadcast of a prizefight. Shortly after finishing Nichols, he came to WEAN, a Providence radio station, which accepted his proposal to make a series of short biographical portraits of historical figures, which he called “Footprints in the Sands of Time.” By now, he had legally changed his name to “Fred Friendly.”

    In 1941, he volunteered for army service, and was sent to work as a reporter for an army newspaper in the China-Burma-India theater. After the war ended in Europe, in May 1945, he received permission to travel around the former battlegrounds there, interviewing soldiers about their war experiences. His interviews were never aired, but the experience served him well in his professional life.

    That troublesome producer

    In 1948, Friendly, together with the vaunted war reporter Edward R. Murrow, produced a recording for CBS Records, “I Can Hear It Now,” an oral history of the years 1933-1945. The show incorporated both archival recordings and occasional recreations of certain events, something that was not always acknowledged.

    After a brief period at NBC Radio, where, among other things, Friendly produced a series about the making of the atom bomb, Friendly returned to CBS, where he and Murrow hooked up again to create a radio series, called “Hear It Now,” then moved it to TV, creating “See It Now.”

    “See It Now” was truly ground-breaking, but it brought Friendly into regular conflict with the network. He also had an ambivalent relationship with its chairman, William S. Paley, who generally backed his troublesome producer, but not always enthusiastically.

    The beginning of McCarthy’s end

    Among the most notable episodes of “See It Now” were the 1954 broadcast about Joseph McCarthy, which used archival material to demonstrate the bullying, anti-democratic demagoguery the Wisconsin senator employed in his campaign to root out “Communists” from every sector of public life. The show marked the beginning of the end of McCarthy’s his campaign of fear.

    After Murrow’s departure from CBS, Friendly produced the series “CBS Reports,” also hard-hitting documentaries, such as “Harvest of Shame,” about the plight of migrant farm workers in America.

    Friendly became president of CBS News in 1964, but resigned in a huff two years later, after the network chose to air a rerun of the 1950s show “I Love Lucy” instead of live coverage of a Senate committee hearing about the Vietnam War, as Friendly wanted.

    In the following decades, Friendly consulted on broadcasting with the Ford Foundation, where he did some of the foundational thinking that resulted in the establishment of the Public Broadcasting System. Later, he was on the faculty of Columbia Journalism School, where he developed the Media and Society Seminars, on ethics in journalism, that eventually were broadcast nationally. Fred Friendly died of a stroke on March 3, 1998, at age 82.

    The man who founded television that matters is born https://t.co/uoaCSS8VWy pic.twitter.com/4c4gz21zcd

    — Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) October 30, 2015

21. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ৩১ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (১০:০৪ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Russia opens major gulag museum as Putin blanks victims’ commemorations

    Russia on Friday (Oct 30) opened a major new museum on the horrors of the Soviet gulag labour camp system but President Vladimir Putin blanked the day commemorating victims of state terror.

    The hi-tech state-run museum tracing the history of the brutal camp system will be a rare memorial to some of the millions who suffered under Communist rule.

    The authorities under Putin have often sought to play down the crimes of the Soviet regime, focusing on Communist supremo Joseph Stalin’s role in defeating Nazism and industrialising the country rather than the estimated 20 million victims of his rule.

    The four-storey exhibition in central Moscow – the largest ever museum on the gulag in Russia – includes documents signed by Stalin sending thousands to camps.

    It allows visitors to watch nearly 100 newly recorded interviews with descendants of victims.

    “In the USSR, the terror was denied for a long time even at a family level, forgetting was the only way to survive” said Lyudmila Sadovnikova, who created the audiovisual displays.

    “We cannot deny history or cover up how it really was.”

    The opening of the museum in Moscow comes despite others in Russia dedicated to the issue facing a tough time.

    In March, rights activists running Russia’s only museum in a former camp in Siberia were ousted from the site and the local government took over, reportedly watering down the focus on the evils of the labour camps.

    Russia on Friday was holding isolated events to commemorate millions of victims of Stalin’s terror, although Putin, as in past years, was not set to mark the day.

    Putin’s participation in commemorative events “is not planned,” his spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists.

    The day of commemoration was officially established in 1991 as researchers and rights activists pressed on with the painful process of uncovering the crimes of the Stalin era.

    Putin this month backed a plan to put up a public monument in Moscow to the victims, calling the repression “one of the most bitter, difficult pages of Russian history.”

    Yet, under the Kremlin strongman, Russia has stressed its role as a superpower and heir to the Soviet Union and discussion of Stalin’s repressions has been sidelined.

    BLURRED THE LINE

    In August in a new policy statement, Russia acknowledged that rehabilitation of the victims “is not concluded” and there is still no national monument to them.

    “Russia cannot fully become a government based on the rule of law… without commemorating the many millions of its citizens who became victims of political repressions,” said the statement signed by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

    Putin, a former KGB agent, has several times condemned the repression but has also praised Stalin’s role in World War II.

    Authorities have allowed several Stalin statues to reappear across the country, erected with private donations.

    Putin has also condemned so-called “distortions of history” in films and school textbooks covering the Soviet role in World War II.

    “State propaganda by declaring unpatriotic any criticism of the actions of the Soviet leadership in the WWII years has blurred the line of what is acceptable,” wrote Vedomosti business daily in an editorial.

    Rights groups including Memorial, set up to rehabilitate victims of Stalin repression, have been branded “foreign agents” for receiving donations from abroad under a law signed by Putin.

    A survey by independent pollster Levada in March found 39 per cent of Russians liked, admired or respected Stalin. Thirty percent said they were “indifferent” to him.

    গুলাগ-এর ইতিহাস ও বাস্তব চিত্র via @ria_novosti http://t.co/SL8GhI3414 http://t.co/nG3u08d0a2

    — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) November 10, 2013

22. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ৩১ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (১১:৩০ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    China can help boost Bangladesh tourism sector

    By one account, against the global total of 6,000, Bangladesh is home to 500 Buddhist ancient monasteries and temples. Researchers in the tourism sector think if a small segment of the Buddhists, who account for around a third of world population including China, visit their religious heritage site in Paharpur that should yield a considerable amount of economic benefit for Bangladesh. Apart from this, Mahasthangarh and Mainamati are two other major sites of heritage of people of the Buddhist religious faith. However, the Buddhist world heritage lies in sheer neglect in the northern district of Naogaon, with its environs and access roads in not so good shape. An urgent facelift is an imperative to set the stage.

    Current reports have it that China singly boasts the highest number of world’s billionaires. Many of them have enough to live well and to spare for foreign travel. Large numbers of Chinese go abroad on holidaying vacation. If a fraction of its 1.5 billion strong population comes for such sightseeing in Bangladesh, Bangladesh’s tourism industry would get a big boost. Western China, particularly its Yunnan Province, is close to Bangladesh. The planned “Silk Road” bus route through Bangladesh would build a bridge of road communications between China and Bangladesh. Besides, when built and completed, the international airport in the beach-city of Cox’s Bazar could draw backpackers in large numbers from China and beyond.

    This is no surprise. Tourism, be it religious, ecological, business or the like, has received little attention from the powers that are in Bangladesh. A few years back, when the former Prime Minister of China had visited Dhaka, Bangladesh was informally designated as the number one tourist destination for the Chinese. There has been no follow-up from Dhaka’s part for cashing in on the gesture of Beijing. An avowedly socialist country, China has absorbed all the technological and monetary resources of the capitalist western world into its pragmatically devised ‘one-country, two economies’ system. World’s most trading centres are awash now with “made in China” commodities. The spin-offs of capitalism are learnt to have made many men rich in the socialist country – China.

    Besides, Bangladesh has so long been sitting unaware with several treasure-troves for tourism including a few unique ones in the world untapped. Two of the rarities of potential tourist interest are UN-recognized World Heritage Sites. The global legacies are the Sundarbans – the largest contiguous mangrove forest in the world – and world’s biggest Buddhist monastery at Paharpur in Naogaon. The Cox’s Bazar coast on the Bay of Bengal is also a unique one in that it is the longest unbroken sea beach in the world. The Bay, lying between South and Southeast Asia, is an important gateway that catches the imagination of all the big powers of the world: the United States, China, India, Australia and so on.

    The year 2016 has been declared Tourism Year as part of the latest development recipe. A tourism master plan has been designed by the authority concerned. An international-standard airport in Cox’s Bazar is seen as one of the keys to unlocking Bangladesh’s tourism potential for the global public. The project is conceived. The main focus of the year-long tourism promotion is evidently religious tourism, based on the prospect of making the most of the world’s largest monastery and a number of other sites in Bangladesh of anthropological-archaeological importance to the Buddhists of the world.

    Moreover, little of the tourist interest in the bewitching flora and fauna of the Sundarbans has been harnessed. The panoramic vistas of rare trees, spotted deer and the world-famous Royal Bengal Tiger, aside streams fraught with fishes and crocodiles are worth seeing and attractive to both the indigenous and foreign tourists. The pre-Moghul-era Saat Gambuz Mosque in Bagherhat, in the vicinity of the Sundarbans, is also designated by the UNESCO as a heritage site. With the change of watchmen in the tourism ministry of Bangladesh, it appears that a little importance is being laid on development of tourism-related largest economic sector of the world with mobility of people getting supersonic speed – travelling across borders, seas, continents and even across the space.

    However, a lot of classroom work has been done, even involving international agencies, on what is to be done for exploiting the potential of the tourism industry of Bangladesh. The World Tourism Organisation (WTO) prepared a strategic Tourism Master Plan with UNDP assistance in 1990 for Bangladesh. Establishing Exclusive Tourism Zones in the offshore islands was envisaged. Foreign direct investment for developing the sector was encouraged. Apart from developing the other facilities so far mentioned above, a prime need also is to develop the right infrastructural facilities including tourism products and ensure foolproof security in the tourist resorts and sites with sustained political stability in the country to attract foreign tourists; be it from China or elsewhere.

    #China can help boost #Bangladesh #tourism sector https://t.co/K3xB6oD11x … #FEanalyses via @febdonline | @XHNews @cctvnews @UNESCO

    — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) October 31, 2015

23. 

    মাসুদ করিম - ৩১ অক্টোবর ২০১৫ (১১:৫৭ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    When hilsa returns to its old habitat upstream Padma

    Few can say for sure when hilsa was last sighted in the Padma near Rajshahi. As the mighty river largely silted up, with swathes of sandbars dotting the riverbed, the delicious silver fish had receded far down to the Mawa point in Munshiganj. Now, by a welcome reversal of fortunes, hilsa is back upstream.

    Shoals of hilsa were being netted near Rajshahi’s Charghat area. Some of them are reported to have swum up to bordering Chapainawabganj.

    Return of hilsa this far upstream is no miracle or a freak of nature either. The main reason seems to be the full flooding of the north-western region during the just-past rains. The region had witnessed scanty rain and inadequate floods over the years. Many streams, rivers, rivulets and water bodies had been in death throes, groundwater table had subsided alarmingly and arsenic poisoning of subsoil water threatened public health. Desertification set in slow process.

    In a sudden change of destiny, the curse of aridity was over with long-lasting rains this past monsoon. Frequent incessant downpour sent all sources of water into a spate. Ponds, streams, rivers burst their banks amid over-flooding. Floods washed away crops and fishes from innumerous ponds dug in recent times for pisciculture. People suffered woes.

    It all, however, turned out to be a blessing in disguise in the end. The aquifers down the ground are recharged, surface water bodies of all sorts are full to the brim and croplands are getting green again with the farming of new crops. “It’s green all the way,” says a traveller from Dhaka to Rajshahi in his firsthand account of a sort of ‘green revolution’ taking place in the region because of farmers’ resilience and innovative ideas of farming.

    Abdur Rahman, who does a job in Dhaka city, also runs his agricultural farms in his village in Durgapur of Rajshahi with his kin and hired farm-workers, appeared upbeat about a change of fortunes-from weal and woe to wellbeing. Like him, farmers and farm-owners started growing crops in fields and culturing fish in ponds and even ditches.

    People are playing their part. The government has a role, too. And it is prime time the government played it. A recent disclosure by Fisheries and Livestock Minister Mohammed Sayedul Haque that Bangladesh has booked 4th position in the world in production of freshwater fishes comes as a fresh stimulus for a much greater attention to this sector. The minister also apprised the press that the annual output of freshwater fish had risen from around 27.01MT in 2008-9 to 35.48MT, worth some Tk 530 billion or 53,000 crore, in 2013-14.

    This position in the global rating, however, comes from the utilisation of a fraction of the potential Bangladesh holds. Much of the newly-designated ‘blue economy’ in the Bay, following the establishment of Bangladesh’s absolute ownership on its territorial waters by international arbitration, consists in the marine fisheries. Little has so far been discovered, developed and harnessed in this sector.

    Again, look back to the freshwater front. There are numerous beels and canals in the country which are regulated with sluice-gates. All are suitable for seasonal open-water fish farming, until floodwater recedes to the extent where crop cultivation could resume. Many suggest there should be specific government programmes for aiding and involving people in massive short-course fish-farming festivals in those fertile sources.

    A ‘silver revolution’ would you call it? Nothing is utopian nor is it a wishful thinking of any fecund mind. It must be pragmatic and practical. A useful prop to such proposition comes from the return of the national fish, hilsa, into its once-favourite sanctuary with the benediction of abundant monsoon rain.

    But the deepwater fish, which lives and enjoys frolicking in the vast turbulent seawater in the Bay of Bengal, would naturally choose to pull back when floodwater recedes and the sunken sands surface to turn the vast expanse of the Padma waters into shallow, narrow streams once again. Now is the prime time the authorities acted to retain the finned immigrants.

    What are the dos? Ban on fishing during spawning and aid to fishermen can play a small part. But what holds the key is to find a holistic remedy–that is, restoration of normal flow of the Padma. In the present perspective, the most pragmatic way is to go for capital dredging. That’s of course a gigantic job. Bangladesh on its own can ill-afford to undertake it. The river is shared by India and there is no denying that its flow faces hindrance in the upper riparian country. So, they may be pursued for a joint re-excavation project.

    Donor financing may be sought for such a work of high ecological importance in this age of growing environmental concerns.

    In the latest development, India expressed interest in jointly building the much-talked-about Ganges barrage downstream the river, at Rajbari point. This barrage was planned long way back to offset the impact of the Farakka Barrage built over the Ganges (nomenclature change makes it Padma in Bangladesh part) on the Indian side.

    This goodwill gesture could be extended further. To put the first thing first, the focus, for now, should be on protecting the sanctuary for the hilsa and other fishes. River dredging is an immediate need to retain the delicious fish in its natural habitat in the first place, before the dry season sets in. Restoring normal Ganges flow is also in the common interest of economy, waterway trade, people-to-people contact and climatic normalcy on both sides.

    when #hilsa returns to its old habitat upstream #Padma https://t.co/skXHHsLhfk #Rajshahi #Chapainawabganj #Mawa #Munshiganj #FEviewsopinion

    — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) October 31, 2015