বিভাগ/বিষয় নিরপেক্ষ

সুপারিশকৃত লিন্ক: নভেম্বর ২০১৮

আজকের লিন্ক

মুক্তাঙ্গন-এ উপরোক্ত শিরোনামের নিয়মিত এই সিরিজটিতে থাকছে দেশী বিদেশী পত্রপত্রিকা, ব্লগ ও গবেষণাপত্র থেকে পাঠক সুপারিশকৃত ওয়েবলিন্কের তালিকা। কী ধরণের বিষয়বস্তুর উপর লিন্ক সুপারিশ করা যাবে তার কোনো নির্দিষ্ট নিয়ম, মানদণ্ড বা সময়কাল নেই। পুরো ইন্টারনেট থেকে যা কিছু গুরত্বপূর্ণ, জরুরি, মজার বা আগ্রহোদ্দীপক মনে করবেন পাঠকরা, তা-ই তাঁরা মন্তব্য আকারে উল্লেখ করতে পারেন এখানে।
ধন্যবাদ।

আজকের লিন্ক

এখানে থাকছে দেশী বিদেশী পত্রপত্রিকা, ব্লগ ও গবেষণাপত্র থেকে পাঠক সুপারিশকৃত ওয়েবলিন্কের তালিকা। পুরো ইন্টারনেট থেকে যা কিছু গুরত্বপূর্ণ, জরুরি, মজার বা আগ্রহোদ্দীপক মনে করবেন পাঠকরা, তা-ই সুপারিশ করুন এখানে। ধন্যবাদ।

১৮ comments

  1. মাসুদ করিম - ৪ নভেম্বর ২০১৮ (৯:০৭ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Jair Bolsonaro declared Brazil’s next president

    Controversial admirer of dictators says in video broadcast: ‘We are going to change the destiny of Brazil’

    A far-right, pro-gun, pro-torture populist has been elected as Brazil’s next president after a drama-filled and deeply divisive election that looks set to radically reforge the future of the world’s fourth biggest democracy.

    Jair Bolsonaro, a 63-year-old former paratrooper who built his campaign around pledges to crush corruption, crime and a supposed communist threat, secured 55.1% of the votes after 99.9% were counted and was therefore elected Brazil’s next president, electoral authorities said on Sunday.

    Bolsonaro’s leftist rival, Fernando Haddad, secured 44.8% of votes.

    In a video broadcast from his home in Rio de Janeiro, Bolsonaro thanked God and vowed to stamp out corruption in the country.

    “We cannot continue flirting with communism … We are going to change the destiny of Brazil,” he said.

    Haddad, the defeated Workers’ party (PT) candidate, urged the 45 million voters who had backed him not to lose hope. “We will continue with our heads held high, with determination and with courage,” he said. “We have a lifelong commitment to this country and we will not allow this country to go backwards.”

    Donald Trump called Bolsonaro to congratulate him and both men expressed a strong commitment to work together, the White House said.

    Italy’s far-right interior minister, Matteo Salvini, offered his congratulations to Bolsonaro, tweeting: “Even in #Brazil the citizens have sent the left packing!” The French far-right leader Marine Le Pen also sent a message of encouragement.

    News of the results sent Bolsonaro devotees outside his beachfront home in western Rio de Janeiro into ecstasy.

    “This is phenomenal. It’s a unique feeling,” said Rafael Gomes, a 34-year-old salesman who was among the crowds. “I can see a better future for my son, better health, education and security, something we haven’t had for years.”

    In the midst of an increasingly raucous atmosphere one group of young men jumped up and down chanting: “Go fuck yourselves, PT!”

    Hordes of jubilant Bolsonaro supporters flocked on to Avenida Paulista, one of São Paulo’s most important boulevards, where they sang Brazil’s national anthem and set off fireworks.

    Many fans wore the green and yellow colours of Brazil’s national flag, which has become the trademark of Bolsonaro’s push for power.

    “I feel so happy. Brazil is waking up. We are coming out of a trance,” said Jordan Requena, a 20-year-old student who was among the crowds.

    Pietro Sambugaro, a 28-year-old Bolsonaro activist, broke down in tears as he described his joy. “I feel so proud to have been part of this change. He is our hope!”

    “For the first time we are going to have a God-fearing and genuinely right-wing president,” said Fernando Pereira, a 40-year-old physiotherapy student celebrating as fireworks exploded around him. “He is the president we have been waiting for for so long.”

    But Bolsonaro’s triumph will leave many millions of progressive Brazilians profoundly disturbed and fearful of the intolerant, rightwing tack their country is now likely to take.

    Over nearly three decades in politics, he has become notorious for his hostility to black, gay and indigenous Brazilians and to women, as well as for his admiration of dictatorial regimes, including the one that ruled Brazil from 1964 until 1985.

    “The extreme right has conquered Brazil,” Celso Rocha de Barros, a Brazilian political columnist, told the election night webcast of Piauí magazine. “Brazil now has a more extremist president than any democratic country in the world … we don’t know what is going to happen.”

    Clóvis Saint-Clair, a Rio-based journalist who has written an unauthorised Bolsonaro biography, said he feared Brazil’s young democracy was at risk. “This is a moment of great doubt and apprehension.”

    Saint-Clair said a cocktail of voter frustration at political sleaze and the successful demonization of the PT explained how a once widely ridiculed and peripheral firebrand had been catapulted from the political wilderness to the presidency.

    Bolsonaro voters had voted on “feelings not facts” and were obsessively focused on the PT’s not inconsiderable sins while refusing to recognise the advances of its 13 years in power, which ended with Dilma Rousseff’s highly controversial impeachment in 2016.

    “The PT got many things right,” he said, pointing to the war on extreme poverty launched by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s now jailed former president.

    Saint-Clair said he expected Bolsonaro to intensify police repression and pay scant attention to Brazil’s neediest citizens. “If he follows through on all the promises he has made, the next four years will be very difficult for the majority of the population.”

    Chico Paiva Avelino, whose politician grandfather, Rubens Paiva, was tortured and disappeared under Brazil’s military regime in 1971, said he was disgusted that a man who had praised that dictatorship was on his way to the presidency.

    “It is unacceptable that in 2018 someone can be elected off the back of this discourse,” the 31-year-old said.

    However, for the tens of millions of voters who backed Bolsonaro, he represents change after years of economic recession and eye-watering corruption scandals that they blame on the Workers’ party, which ruled Brazil from 2003 until the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016.

    “We are happy. We want change,” declared Maicon Mesquita, a 23-year-old businessman who had brought his family to Avenida Paulista to celebrate. “He will be a president who has no involvement at all in corruption.”

    The previous night, a group of young activists had set up camp just a few metres from where he stood in an ultimately futile last-minute bid to convince undecided voters to oppose Bolsonaro with offers of conversations and free cake.

    “This is already a resistance movement to say that we don’t want war … we want a government that preaches peace,” said Luciano Andrey, a 39-year-old actor.

    Andrey carried a handwritten placard that asked passersby: “Let’s talk about the future?”

    On Sunday, as it entered a new, potentially illiberal political era, Brazil’s looked deeply uncertain.

  2. মাসুদ করিম - ৪ নভেম্বর ২০১৮ (৯:১৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Theatre veteran Na. Muthuswamy dies at 82

    He was the founder of avant-garde theatre group Koothu-p-pattarai

    Veteran theatre personality Na. Muthuswamy, founder of avant-garde theatre group ‘Koothu-p-pattarai’, died in Chennai on Wednesday. He was 82.

    Mr. Muthuswamy founded the theatre group in 1977 after studying for several years the traditional folk theatre.

    In an interview to The Hindu in 2008, Muthuswamy said he remembered being ‘swept off his feet’ when he saw a theru-k-koothu, a street theatre performance in the early 1970s, which prompted him to delve into the art.

    The group is known for plays centred around modern, contemporary themes and the members incorporated several aspects of folk theatre, martial arts, mime and choreography to depict social issues and transformation.

    Actors Vijay Sethupathi, Guru Somasundaram and Pasupathy are among the notable alumni of the theatre group who have gone on to make a mark in the film industry.

    Muthuswamy was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi award in 1999 and Padma Shri in 2012.

  3. মাসুদ করিম - ৪ নভেম্বর ২০১৮ (৯:৩৯ অপরাহ্ণ)

    What’s the Only Country in the World Where Men Claim They’re More Religious Than Women?

    It’s long been conventional wisdom that women identify as more religious than men. But our surveys show Israeli Jewish men turn that assumption upside down. Why do Jewish men in Israel seem more observant than Jewish women?

    Among scholars of religion in Europe and North America, it has long been conventional wisdom that women are more religious than men. That’s because survey results show that women in many countries pray more often, attend religious services more frequently, and are more likely to view religion as very important to their lives. These patterns are most prevalent among Christians.

    There is only one country among the 84 analyzed in a 2016 Pew Research Center report where men are consistently more religious than women by these measures: Israel.

    Our additional analysis (recently published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, a peer-reviewed journal in the social sciences) shows that 40% of Israeli men attend religious services at least weekly, compared with 21% of Israeli women. Three-in-ten men in Israel (30%) pray daily, compared with 24% of women. And 39% of Israeli men say religion is very important to them, compared with 33% of women.

    These figures come from a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2014 and 2015 among 5,601 Israeli adults selected at random from all parts of the country, including areas inhabited by Muslims, Christians and Druze. But the gender differences are driven mostly by Israeli Jews. Among Christians and Druze in Israel, men are no more religious than women on any of the measures.

    Among Israeli Muslims, men are more likely to attend religious services weekly or more often, but women are more likely to pray daily and say religion is very important in their lives. Outside Israel, Muslim men also tend to attend worship services more frequently than women, yet are not more religious by other measures.

    For example, in Afghanistan, Muslim men are 84 percentage points more likely to worship weekly – the largest gender gap we have found in religious attendance anywhere in the world – yet Afghan men are no more likely than women to say religion is very important in their lives. Jewish men in Israel stand out because they seem to be more religious than women by numerous measures.

    Not surprisingly, synagogue attendance is where the differences between Jewish men and women are most stark: Israeli men who describe themselves as Haredi [ultra-Orthodox], Dati [religiously observant] or Masorti [traditional] are 30 percentage points more likely than women in those same categories to say they go to synagogue at least weekly. (Among self-identified Hilonim, there is virtually no gender difference in synagogue attendance, as just 1% of secular Jewish men, and practically no secular women, go to synagogue weekly or more.)

    The fact that Jewish men go to synagogue much more often than Jewish women is unlikely to surprise many Israelis, because it reflects ancient norms of behavior embedded in Jewish law. Traditionally, women do not count in a minyan, the quorum of 10 Jewish adults that is necessary for public worship. And, while Orthodox Jewish men are required to pray three times a day, women do not have the same obligations (although they have other obligations).

    But in our study, we also examine responses to survey questions on which there is no obvious expectation that men and women should express devotion differently.

    For example: Do Jewish Israelis avoid riding in vehicles on Shabbat? Do they view themselves as observing all aspects of Jewish religious tradition? Do they keep kosher? These are the kinds of questions on which experts say there is no reason for Jewish men to behave differently from Jewish women.

    Yet there are small but significant gender gaps on some of these questions, and wherever a gap emerges, Jewish men seem more observant than Jewish women.

    For example, about four-in-ten Israeli Jewish men (39%) say they do not ride in vehicles on the Sabbath, compared with 33% of Israeli Jewish women. Men are also more likely than women to say they strictly observe all aspects of Jewish religious tradition (25% vs. 17%).

    On other questions, the differences are not large enough to be considered statistically significant. For example, Jewish men and women in Israel are about equally likely to say they keep kosher, both inside their homes (64% vs. 62%) and outside their homes (54% vs. 50%).

    Of course, if survey questions had been designed to focus on the traditional religious obligations of women, we could have found ways in which Jewish women seem more observant than men. For example, the survey asked Israeli Jews if someone in their household always lights Sabbath candles (64% of men said yes, compared with 62% of women). But it did not ask if they themselves light Sabbath candles; there is little doubt that women would score higher than men on such a question.

    Still, the example of Israel challenges the conventional notion – widely asserted for many years by scholars in the United States and other Christian-majority countries – that women are always more religious than men.

    In the survey data from Israel, we can see plainly that Jewish men and Jewish women are expected to express their religious commitment in different ways within the Orthodox Jewish enviroment dominant in Israel. Religious law and cultural norms encourage Jewish men toward certain public expressions of religiosity, such as regular synagogue attendance, while women have other obligations, such as keeping family purity laws.

    This is not evidence that, in their hearts, Jewish men actually are more religious than Jewish women, or vice versa. On the contrary, the Israeli example shows that religious tradition often includes strongly gendered norms of behavior, and thus it is wrong to assume that one of the sexes is intrinsically “more religious” than the other.

  4. মাসুদ করিম - ৯ নভেম্বর ২০১৮ (১১:২০ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Kuwaiti sculptors struggle for right to be seen

    Kuwaiti sculptor Sami Mohammed finished his towering statue of the country’s first emir over four decades ago, but now it just gathers dust unseen in a long-shuttered office block.

    Stymied by a conservative view of Islam that bans representations of the body, the 75-year-old faces any artist’s nightmare: he can’t get his work displayed to the public in his homeland.

    Like other sculptors in the Gulf state he bristles at claims that his creations constitute idol worship and urges the authorities to push back against demands he sees as outmoded.

    “We have to get past these issues because the human, the individual, has reason and thought, and it’s really not possible that we would go back to worshipping idols,” Mohammed, himself a devout Muslim, tells AFP.

    “We no longer live in a time of ignorance. We live in the era of technology.”

    ‘Find a cave’
    Like Christianity and Judaism, Islam bans idol worship, but some Muslims go further and forbid any representation of the human form.

    While there is no law in Kuwait that explicitly prohibits the display of sculptures or statues in public places, the Gulf emirate is home to an influential circle of conservatives that has pushed to lock them up.

    Kuwait’s Museum of Modern Art is a prime target.

    It opened in 2003 and boasts multiple statues of people by Kuwaiti artists in its collection.

    But they all sit behind closed doors, hidden from the public eye, as a debate centring on Islam and art rages.

    Artist Badr Fadel Alemdar, 42, is convinced he knows the reason sculptures are being hidden.

    He says “fear” among officials of clashing with conservatives prevents his work from seeing the light of day.

    “The working environment for us is uncomfortable because some see the art of sculpting as blasphemy, especially if it is statues of famous people,” he said, adding that he has been attacked in the past over his creations.

    The passions over the issue were highlighted recently by disagreements among Kuwaiti lawmakers.

    In September legislator Mohammed Hayef al-Mutairi called on the government to stop local artists from making statues, arguing that they had “paved the way for the establishment of temples” in the Gulf, referring to non-Muslim places of worship.

    But fellow MP Ahmed al-Fadel dismissed this view as “backward”.

    Fadel in another instance also lashed out at those who wanted to close a shop because it was selling printed 3D figurines.

    “I want to know how long this backward mindset can continue,” Fadel said in a video posted online.

    “This is a country of freedoms ruled by law… 1,400 years later (after the emergence of Islam), you’re still talking about idols? What you should do is find a cave and stay there.”

    ‘Get used to it’
    Arguments over the representation of the human form in the Muslim world are by no means limited to Kuwait.

    At the most extreme end the jihadists of the Islamic State group have smashed up and pillaged artworks they deemed sacrilegious across Iraq and Syria.

    In 2013, French football legend Zinedine Zidane found himself unwittingly at the heart of a dispute in the Gulf state of Qatar.

    The installation of a statue depicting Zidane’s infamous headbutt of Italian Marco Materazzi by Algerian-born artist Adel Abdessemed triggered a wave of complaints on social media.

    Many people insisted it was a violation of Islam, and the statue was removed.

    Elsewhere though there have been signs of greater acceptance.

    In the capital of fellow Gulf nation the United Arab Emirates, visitors can marvel at priceless sculptures in the Louvre Abu Dhabi which opened last year.

    And even ultra-conservative regional powerhouse Saudi Arabia in September launched an exhibition of Chinese art that included the famed terracotta warriors.

    For Bader al-Daweesh, an official at Kuwait’s National Council for Culture, Arts and Literature, these steps means there are reasons to be positive about the potential for change in his country.

    “People will get used to it — to seeing statues — in the future,” he argues.

    And, despite his frustrations, artist Sami Mohammed also continues to live in hope that his work will find a place in his homeland.

    “Kuwait cannot separate itself from the rest of the world,” he says.

  5. মাসুদ করিম - ১১ নভেম্বর ২০১৮ (১১:৫২ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    ৭ নভেম্বর কী হিসেবে চিহ্নিত করবো?

    বাংলাদেশের রাজনীতিতে সবচেয়ে আলোচিত সমালোচিত বিতর্কিত দিন ৭ নভেম্বর। ১৯৭৫ সালে সংগঠিত এদিনের ঘটনা জাতীয় রাজনীতিতে যে ওলটপালট করে দেয় তার রেশ থেকে আজও মুক্ত হতে পারেনি বাংলাদেশের রাজনীতি। ৭ নভেম্বর অনেকের কাছে জাতীয় বিপ্লব ও সংহতি দিবস, অনেকের কাছে সৈনিক-জনতার অভ্যুত্থান দিবস আবার অনেকের কাছে মুক্তিযোদ্ধা সৈনিক হত্যা দিবস। রাজনৈতিক ইতিহাস পর্যালোচনা করলে তিনটি বিশ্লেষণ বা মূল্যায়নের পূর্ণ নয় আংশিক সত্যতা পাওয়া যায়।

    ৭ নভেম্বর বাংলাদেশের ইতিহাসে একমাত্র ব্যর্থ সামরিক অভ্যুত্থান, যে অভ্যুত্থানে সরাসরি সামরিক বাহিনীর সাথে সে সময়ের অন্যতম প্রধান বিরোধী রাজনৈতিক দল জাসদ সম্পৃক্ত ছিল। জাসদ কখনো তার সংশ্লিষ্টতাকে অস্বীকার করেনি। অভ্যুত্থান পরবর্তী তার ফলাফলে নিজেদের ব্যর্থতাকে অস্বীকারের চেষ্টাও করে না। সামরিক বাহিনীর সাথে রাজনৈতিক দলের সম্পর্ক নিয়ে তাদের ব্যর্থতা বাংলাদেশের রাজনীতিতে স্থায়ীভাবে সামরিক বাহিনীকে অনেকাংশে সরাসরি রাষ্ট্রক্ষমতার অঙ্গে পরিণত করেছিল। অনেক ক্ষেত্রে বলা যায় বুর্জোয়া রাজনীতিতে সামরিক বাহিনীকে রাষ্ট্রক্ষমতার সাথে সম্পর্কের যে বিষয়টি বলা হয় সেখানে স্থায়ীভাবে প্রতিষ্ঠিত করেছে।

    স্বাধীন বাংলাদেশে ৭ নভেম্বর প্রথম প্রকাশ্যে হত্যার শিকার হন ২ জন সেক্টর কমান্ডার ও ১ জন সাব সেক্টর কমান্ডার। আর এই ৭ নভেম্বরকে কেন্দ্র করে ২১ জুলাই ১৯৭৬ সালে স্বাধীন দেশে প্রথম ফাঁসিতে মৃত্যুবরণ করেন আরেকজন সেক্টর কমান্ডার। এছাড়া সেনাবাহিনীর ভেতরে ১৩ জন হত্যার শিকার হন। আমাদের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধেও কোনও সেক্টর কমান্ডারকে সরাসরি কোন যুদ্ধক্ষেত্রে শহীদ হতে হয়নি। আর তাই হত্যার নৃশংস ভয়াবহতা ৭ নভেম্বরকে একটি কলঙ্কজনক অধ্যায়ে পরিণত করেছে। সপরিবারে ১৫ অগাস্ট বঙ্গবন্ধু হত্যাকাণ্ড, ৩ নভেম্বর জেলে জাতীয় চার নেতা হত্যাকাণ্ড, ৭ নভেম্বরের হত্যাকাণ্ড, জিয়াউর রহমানের শাসনামলে সশস্ত্র বাহিনীতে হাজার হাজার সৈনিক হত্যাকাণ্ড, জিয়াউর রহমানের হত্যার পরে জেনারেল মঞ্জুর, জিয়া হত্যাকাণ্ডকে কেন্দ্র করে প্রহসনমূলক বিচারে ১৩ জন বীর মুক্তিযোদ্ধার ফাঁসির ঘটনা বাংলাদেশের সশস্ত্র বাহিনীসহ দেশের ইতিহাসকে এক কলঙ্কজনক অধ্যায়ে ঠেলে দিয়েছে।

    ৭ নভেম্বরকে একটি অংশ ‘জাতীয় বিপ্লব ও সংহতি দিবস’ হিসেবে পালন করতে চান। জাতীয় বিপ্লব ও সংহতি দিবস পালনকারিরা মূলতঃ জিয়াউর রহমান ও তার দল বিএনপি এবং কয়েকটি ধর্মীয় উগ্র সাম্প্রদায়িক দল। সাম্প্রদায়িক দলগুলো মূলত: মুক্তিযুদ্ধে যুদ্ধাপরাধের জন্য জাতির বড় অংশের কাছে ঘৃণিত। সাম্প্রদায়িক দলগুলোর স্পষ্ট বক্তব্য, ৭ নভেম্বরের জন্যই জিয়াউর রহমানের হাত ধরে তাদের আবার বাংলাদেশের রাজনীতিতে অংশ নেয়া সম্ভব হয়েছে। এছাড়া জিয়াউর রহমানের দল বলার চেষ্টা করে, সেদিন সিপাহী বিপ্লবের মধ্য দিয়ে সাধারণ সিপাহীরা বন্দিদশা থেকে জেনারেল জিয়াউর রহমান মুক্ত করে দেশের স্বাধীনতা সার্বভৌমত্বকে নিরাপদ করেছেন।

    যারা এই বিপ্লবের তত্ত্বের কথা বলেন, তারা কখনো সেদিন কোন সিপাহীরা জিয়াউর রহমানকে মুক্ত করেছিলেন, বা কোন সিপাহীরা বিপ্লব করেছিলেন সে বিষয়ে আশ্চর্যরকম নিশ্চুপ থাকেন। জিয়াউর রহমান তার ক্ষমতায় থাকাকালীন বা পরবর্তীতে তার দল খালেদা জিয়ার নেতৃত্বে ক্ষমতায় থাকাকালীন এ বিষয়ে কোনও রকম প্রমাণ হাজির করেনি। অথচও তারা সিপাহী বিপ্লবের প্রচারণা চালিয়ে যাচ্ছেন। সিপাহী বিপ্লব বললে তো অবশ্যই বিপ্লবী সিপাহীদের মূল্যায়ন করতে হবে, তাদেরকে জাতির সামনে পরিচয় করে দিতে হবে। অথচও জিয়াউর রহমান ও পরবতীতে তার দল ক্ষমতায় থাকাকালীন ৭ নভেম্বরকে সিপাহী বিপ্লব হিসেবে ‘জাতীয় বিপ্লব ও সংহতি দিবস’ হিসেবে পালন করে। ভবিষ্যতেও কখনো ক্ষমতায় গেলে রাষ্ট্রীয় ছুটিসহ গোঁজামিলের বক্তব্যের মধ্য দিয়ে আবারো তারা পালন করবে।

    ‘জাতীয় বিপ্লব ও সংহতি দিবস’ পালনকারিরা ৭ নভেম্বরের হত্যাকাণ্ডের জন্য কর্নেল তাহের, জাসদ ও সিপাহী-জনতার অভ্যুত্থান দিবস পালনকারিদের দায়ী করেন। এ বিষয়ে ৭ নভেম্বরে হত্যাকাণ্ডের শিকার হওয়া খালেদ মোশারফ, হায়দার ও হুদার অন্যতম সহযোদ্ধা কর্নেল শাফায়াত জামিল বীর বিক্রম তার মুক্তিযুদ্ধসহ সে সময়ের স্মৃতিচারণমূলক গ্রন্থ ‘একাত্তরের মুক্তিযুদ্ধ রক্তাক্ত মধ্য আগস্ট ও ষড়যন্ত্রময় নভেম্বর’ গ্রন্থে লিখেছেন- “৭ নভেম্বরের হত্যাকাণ্ড তদন্ত ও বিচারের হাত থেকে চিরদিনের জন্য দায়মুক্ত থাকার ব্যবস্থা হিসেবে অত্যন্ত সুচতুরভাবেই এই দিনটিকে ‘জাতীয় সংহতি ও বিপ্লব দিবস’ রুপে ঘোষণা করা হয়েছে। এটি নিঃসন্দেহে জিয়ার একটি মানবতাবিরোধী পদক্ষেপ। এর অবসান হওয়া প্রয়োজন ছিল। সেই সঙ্গে সামরিক ও বেসামরিক সকল হত্যাকাণ্ডের সুষ্ঠু তদন্ত বিচারের ব্যবস্থা করা প্রয়োজন।”

    ৭ নভেম্বর একটি অংশ ‘সিপাহী-জনতার অভ্যুত্থান দিবস’ হিসেবে পালন করেন। মূলত এ পালনকারিরা রাজনৈতিক দল জাসদ ও তার সমর্থক অংশ। এ অংশ সিপাহী জনতার অভ্যুত্থানটিকে ব্যর্থ এবং অভ্যুত্থানের মোটা দাগে ফল হিসেবে প্রতিক্রিয়াশীল চক্রের উত্থানকে অস্বীকার করেন না। সিপাহী এবং জনতার সাথে বিশ্বাসঘাতকতার মধ্য দিয়ে প্রতিবিপ্লবীরা ক্ষমতা দখল করেছেন বলে এ অংশ মনে করে থাকে। আর তাই ৭ নভেম্বরের ফল হিসেবে রাষ্ট্রযন্ত্রে একাত্তরের পরাজিত শক্তি অনুপ্রবেশের বিষয়টিও জাসদ অস্বীকার করে না। ৭ নভেম্বরের ইতিহাস পর্যালোচনা করলে দেখা যায়, মূলত ৭ নভেম্বর সিপাহীদের অভ্যুত্থান সংগঠনের পেছনে কর্নেল তাহেরের নেতৃত্বে জাসদ সবচেয়ে বড় ভূমিকা পালন করেছিল।

    অভ্যুত্থানের প্রথম কয়েক ঘণ্টা এই দলের একটি শক্ত অবস্থানও পরিলক্ষিত হয়। অভ্যুত্থানটির সূচনা ও পরিকল্পনাও করে কনেল তাহেরের নেতৃত্বে জাসদের বিপ্লবী সৈনিক সংস্থা। পরবতীতে কর্নেল তাহের ও জাসদ পুরোপুরিভাবে এ অভ্যুত্থান থেকে অপসৃত হন। উল্টো অভ্যুত্থানের কারণে কর্নেল তাহের, জাসদ নেতৃবৃন্দ ও বিপ্লবী সৈনিক সংস্থার সৈনিকেরা কোর্ট মার্শালের সন্মুখীন হন। কোর্ট মার্শালে কর্নেল তাহের ফাঁসিতে মৃত্যুকে আলিঙ্গন করেন। জাসদের কিছু নেতা, বিপ্লবী সৈনিক সংস্থার নেতৃবৃন্দ ও অধিকাংশ সৈনিক ট্রাইব্যুনালের বিচারে কয়েক বছরের জেল ও সশস্ত্র বাহিনী থেকে বহিস্কৃত হন। জাসদ এবং বিপ্লবী সৈনিক সংস্থার নেতৃবৃন্দ ৭ নভেম্বরে সংগঠিত হত্যাকাণ্ডগুলোর জন্য জিয়াউর রহমানের অনুগত ১৫ অগাস্ট বঙ্গবন্ধু হত্যাকাণ্ডের সাথে জড়িত অফিসার ও সৈনিকদের দায়ী করে থাকেন। আর তাই জিয়াউর রহমান ক্ষমতায় থাকাকালীন কখনো এই হত্যকাণ্ডের রহস্য উদঘাটন বা হত্যাকাণ্ডের সঙ্গে জড়িত অফিসার ও সিপাহীদের বিচারের কোনও রকম উদ্যোগ গ্রহণ করেন নি বলে তারা মনে করেন।

    উল্টো হত্যাকারী অফিসার ও সিপাহীরা সেনাবাহিনীতে পুরস্কৃত হয়েছেন। নিজেদের কলঙ্ক যাতে প্রকাশিত না হয় তাই কর্নেল তাহের, জাসদ ও বিপ্লবী সৈনিক সংস্থার উপর প্রচারণার মধ্য দিয়ে হত্যাকাণ্ডের দায় চাপিয়ে দেয়ার অপচেষ্টা করেন। ‘সিপাহী-জনতার অভ্যুত্থান দিবস’ পালনকারি জাসদ নেতৃবৃন্দ অভুত্থানে ব্যাপক সংখক জনতাকে সম্পৃক্ত করার ব্যর্থতাকে স্বীকার করেন এবং এই ব্যর্থতার জন্য অভ্যুত্থানটি তাদের হাতছাড়া হয়ে যায় বলে জাসদের অনেকে মনে করেন। অভুত্থানে জনগণ বিশেষ করে জাসদের মতাদর্শে বিশ্বাসী ও সমর্থকদের উল্লেখযোগ্য অংশকে সম্পৃক্ত করতে না পারার ব্যর্থতার জন্য জিয়াউর রহমান ১৫ অগাস্ট বঙ্গবন্ধু হত্যাকাণ্ডে অংশ নেয়া সৈনিক ও রাজনীতিবিদদের সঙ্গে মিশে কর্নেল তাহের জাসদ ও বিপ্লবী সৈনিক সংস্থার সঙ্গে বিশ্বাসঘাতকতা করার সাহস পেয়েছেন বলেও জাসদের অনেকে বিশ্বাস করেন।

    ৭ নভেম্বরের সকল বিষয়কে কলঙ্কজনক অধ্যায়ে পরিণত করে এদিনের হত্যাকাণ্ডগুলো। ১৫ অগাস্ট সপরিবারে বঙ্গবন্ধুকে হত্যার মধ্য দিয়ে হত্যাকারিরা বাংলাদেশের রাজনীতিকে পাকিস্তানি ভাবাদর্শের যে জায়গায় নিয়ে যাওয়ার চেষ্টা করেছিল ৭ নভেম্বরের মধ্য দিয়ে ক্ষমতাসীনেরা দেশকে আবারও সে জায়গায় নিয়ে যায়। মধ্যখানে ৩ নভেম্বর খালেদ মোশারফের নেতৃত্বে হত্যাকারিদের উৎখাত ও সেনাবাহিনীর মধ্যে চেইন অব কমান্ড প্রতিষ্ঠার একটি প্রচেষ্টা নেয়া হয়েছিল। সামরিক আদালতে কর্নেল তাহের ও জাসদের বক্তব্য অনুযায়ী তারা মুক্তিযুদ্ধের চেতনার একটি সমাজতান্ত্রিক বিপ্লবের লক্ষ্যে ৭ নভেম্বর সিপাহী জনতার বিপ্লবের প্রচেষ্টা নিয়েছিল। কিন্তু জিয়াউর রহমানের বিশ্বাসঘাতকতায় সামরিক আদালতে বিচারের নামে প্রহসন করে কর্নেল তহেরকে হত্যা ও প্রতিক্রিয়াশীল চক্রের ক্ষমতা দখলের মধ্য দিয়ে তাদের প্রচেষ্টা ব্যর্থতায় পর্যবসিত হয়।

    ৭ নভেম্বরে সেনাবাহিনীসহ বাংলাদেশ টেলিভিশনে সংগঠিত হত্যাকাণ্ডগুলোর শিকার প্রায় সকলে বীর মুক্তিযোদ্ধা ও মুক্তিযুদ্ধের আদর্শে বিশ্বাসী সৈনিক। সুতরাং এদিনকে একটি অংশ ‘মুক্তিযোদ্ধা সৈনিক হত্যা দিবস’ হিসেবে পালন বা মূল্যায়ন করে থাকে। ঐতিহাসিক বিচার বা মূল্যায়নে এ সত্যকে অস্বীকার করার কোনও উপায় নেই। মুক্তিযুদ্ধের পরে ১৫ অগাস্ট, ৩ নভেম্বরের ধারাবাহিকতায় ৭ নভেম্বর দেশে সবচেয়ে বড় সংখ্যক মুক্তিযোদ্ধা হত্যাকাণ্ডের শিকার হলেন। সুতরাং ‘মুক্তিযোদ্ধা সৈনিক হত্যা দিবস’ পালনকারিরা ঐতিহাসিক জায়গায় কোনও রকম ইতিহাস বিকৃত করছেন বলার কোনও সুযোগ নেই। দুভার্গ্যজনক হলেও সত্য ৭ নভেম্বরের হত্যাকাণ্ডগুলোর রহস্য উন্মোচন এবং হত্যাকারিদের বিচারের জন্য এখনো রাষ্ট্রীয় পর্যায়ে কোন উদ্যোগ গ্রহণ করা হয়নি। সেসব হত্যা নিয়ে বিভিন্ন মহল নিজেদের মত নানারকম বক্তব্য প্রদান করে যাচ্ছে। অথচও হত্যাকাণ্ডগুলো পরিচালনাকারিরা অনেকে এখনো জীবিত এবং বহাল তবিয়তে রয়েছে বলে নানারকম প্রমাণ পাওয়া যায়।

    ৭ নভেম্বর সকালে বাংলাদেশ টেলিভিশনে সংগঠিত হত্যাকাণ্ড নিয়ে আদালতে মামলা ও কয়েকজনের গ্রেপ্তারের ঘটনা গত কয়েক বছর আগে ঘটলেও আসামীরা আবার প্রত্যেকে জামিনে ছাড়া পেয়েছেন। মামলাটিও অনেকটা চাপা পড়েছে বলে মনে হয়। ৭ নভেম্বর সবচেয়ে বড় যে হত্যাকাণ্ডটি সংগঠিত হয় সেটি সেক্টর কমান্ডার খালেদ মোশারফ, এটি এম হায়দার ও সাব সেক্টর কমান্ডার খন্দকার নাজমুল হুদার। শেরে বাংলা নগরে ১০ম বেঙ্গল রেজিমেন্টে সকালে এই হত্যাকাণ্ডটি সংগঠিত হয়। মূলত এই হত্যাকাণ্ড জিয়াউর রহমানকে এককভাবে সেনা নেতৃত্বে প্রতিষ্ঠা করে। এই হত্যাকাণ্ড নিয়ে নানা রকম মত ও বক্তব্য রয়েছে।

    হত্যাকাণ্ডের জন্য নির্দেশদাতা হিসেবে জিয়াউর রহমান, কর্নেল তাহের, মীর শওকত আলী এবং হত্যাকারী হিসেবে মেজর আসাদ ও মেজর জলিল নামে ২ জন অফিসার, উত্তেজিত সিপাহীদের কথা বলা হয় এবং এনিয়ে কিছু বিবরণও পাওয়া যায়। দুঃখজনক হলেও সত্য যতটুকু জানা যায়, এ হত্যাকাণ্ড নিয়ে সেনাবাহিনী থেকে আজ পযন্ত কোনও কোর্ট অব ইনকোয়ারির ব্যবস্থা নেয়া হয়নি। আমি আমার ব্যক্তিগত পর্যায়ে এই হত্যাকাণ্ড নিয়ে সে সময়ে ১০ম বেঙ্গলে উপস্থিত থাকা কয়েকজনের সাথে আলাপ করে যেটি জানতে পেরেছি তাতে সে সময়ে ১০ম বেঙ্গলে ১২ জন অফিসার উপস্থিত ছিলেন বলে মনে হয়েছে।

    উপস্থিত থাকা অফিসারগণ হলেন- ১. লে. কর্নেল নওয়াজেশ উদ্দীন (সিও ১০ম বেঙ্গল, পরবতীতে কর্নেল ও ২৩ সেপ্টেম্বর ১৯৮১ সালে জিয়া হত্যাকাণ্ডের জন্য কোর্ট মার্শালে ফাঁসিতে মৃত্যুবরণ করেছেন) ২. লে. মুজিবুর রহমান (বাংলাদেশ সেনাবাহিনীর প্রথম বিএমএর অফিসার, পরবর্তীতে মেজর, ২৩ সেপ্টেম্বর ১৯৮১ সালে জিয়া হত্যাকাণ্ডের জন্য কোর্ট মার্শালে মৃত্যুবরণ করেছেন) ৩. মেজর কাইউম (বাংলাদেশ সেনাবাহিনীর প্রথম ওয়ার কোর্সের অফিসার) ৪. কর্নেল সিরাজ ৫. ক্যাপ্টেন মোক্তাদির (বাংলাদেশ সেনাবাহিনীর দ্বিতীয় ওয়ার কোর্স বা সেকেন্ড এসএস-এর অফিসার, মেজর হিসেবে অবসরপ্রাপ্ত) ৬. ক্যাপ্টেন আলম ফজলুর রহমান (বাংলাদেশ সেনাবাহিনীর দ্বিতীয় ওয়ার কোর্স বা সেকেন্ড এসএস-এর অফিসার, পরবতীতে সেনাবাহিনীতে মেজর জেনারেল ও বিডিআর প্রধান হিসেবে অবসরপ্রাপ্ত) ৭. মেজর নাসির ৮. মেজর আসাদ (বাংলাদেশ সেনাবাহিনীর প্রথম ওয়ার কোর্সের অফিসার) ৯. মেজর জলিল (বাংলাদেশ সেনাহিনীর প্রথম ওয়ার কোর্সের অফিসার) ১০. মেজর জেনারেল খালেদ মোশারফ বীর উত্তম ১১. কর্নেল খন্দকার নাজমুল হুদা, বীর বিক্রম ও ১২. লে. কর্নেল এটিএম হায়দার, বীর উত্তম। এই অফিসারদের অধিকাংশ এখনো জীবিত। সুতরাং সরকার উদ্যোগ নিলে এ হত্যাকা-ের রহস্য উন্মোচন এবং হত্যাকারিদের বিচার করা খুব বেশি কঠিন নয়।

    বাংলাদেশের ইতিহাসে ৭ নভেম্বরকে নানা মাত্রিকতায় মূল্যায়ন করা হয়। খালেদ মোশারফ সফলভাবে টিকে থাকলে কী হতো কর্নেল তাহের ও জাসদ সফল হলে কী হতো বিষয়গুলো শুধু অনুমান করা যায় মাত্র। ইতিহাসে কী হতো সে বিষয় নয়, কী হয়েছে, কেন হয়েছে সেই বিষয়ে মূল্যায়ন ও বিশ্লেষণ করা হয়।

    বাংলাদেশের ইতিহাসের কলঙ্কজনক অধ্যায় ১৫ অগাস্ট ও ৩ নভেম্বরের বিচার সম্পন্ন হয়েছে। ৭ নভেম্বরের কারণে ফাঁসিতে মৃত্যুবরণ করা কর্নেল তাহের ও জাসদ নেতাদের প্রহসনমূলক সামরিক আদালতের গোপন বিচারের বিষয়টি দেশের সর্বোচ্চ আদালত হাইকোর্টে রিভিউর মাধ্যমে উন্মোচিত হয়েছে। এখন ৭ নভেম্বরের হত্যাকাণ্ডগুলো বিশেষ করে জেনারেল খালেদ মোশারফ, লে. কর্নেল এটিএম হায়দার ও কর্নেল খন্দকার নাজমুল হুদার হত্যাকাণ্ডের বিচার করা আবশ্যক হয়ে পড়েছে।

    এই হত্যাকাণ্ডের বিচারের মধ্য দিয়ে উন্মোচিত হতে পারে ৭ নভেম্বরের সবচেয়ে সংবেদনশীল অধ্যায়টির গোপন রহস্যের। মীমাংসিত হতে পারে ইতিহাসের অনেক চাপা দিয়ে রাখা সত্যের। ৭ নভেম্বরকে মূল্যায়ন করতে গেলে সেদিনের হত্যাকাণ্ডগুলোকে কোনওভাবে আড়াল করা সম্ভব নয়। ইতিহাস ও জাতির কাছে ৭ নভেম্বরে হত্যার শিকার মুক্তিযোদ্ধাগণ এক জ্বলন্ত রহস্য নিয়ে দাঁড়িয়ে আছে। এই হত্যাকাণ্ডগুলোর রহস্য উন্মোচণের মধ্য দিয়ে ৭ নভেম্বরের মূল্যায়নের সকল ধরনের প্রতিবন্ধকতা খুলে যেতে পারে। ৭ নভেম্বরকে মূল্যায়ন করতে গেলে অবশ্যই সেদিনের হত্যার রহস্য উন্মোচিত হতে হবে। আর সেই রহস্য উন্মোচন ব্যতীত জাতির কাছে ৭ নভেম্বরের প্রকৃত মূল্যায়ন সম্ভব নয়।

    ৭ নভেম্বর বাংলাদেশে বীর মুক্তিযোদ্ধাদের হত্যার কলঙ্কিত ষড়যন্ত্রের দিন, বিশ্বাসঘাতকতার দিন, পাকিস্তানি ভাবাদর্শের রাজনীতি প্রতিষ্ঠিত করার অপচেষ্টার দিন। যেভাবে মূল্যায়ন করা হোক না কেন সেটি কথার কথা থেকে যাবে, যদি সেদিনের হত্যাকাণ্ডগুলোর রহস্য উন্মোচন ও বিচারের ব্যবস্থা করা না হয়।

  6. মাসুদ করিম - ১২ নভেম্বর ২০১৮ (১:০৮ অপরাহ্ণ)

    At first, recruitment for the war was voluntary, but by 1918, the World War 1 campaign was marked by coercion

    It took Santanu Das, a professor of English literature in UK 12 years to write his recently-released book, India, Empire and First World War Culture. But his research for the book has helped him unearth a wealth of information about the role played by Indians in the ‘Great War’. Research for the book took him to archives spread across seven countries in three continents. He met descendants of those who had been a part of the war and searched for anecdotes and memories within his own family. Excerpts from an interview with Poulomi Banerjee:

    Which were the major states and regions of India that sent soldiers to the First World War?

    In spite of India’s vast population, the men were recruited from a narrow geographical and ethnic pool, spread across Northern and Central India, the North West Frontier Province and the kingdom of Nepal in accordance with the theory of ‘martial races’. According to this construct, only certain ethnic and religious groups – such as the Pathans, Dogras, Jats, Garhwalis, Gurkhas and Sikhs, among others – were deemed fit to fight; incidentally, these were men from rural backgrounds who had traditionally been ‘loyal’ to the government, as opposed to the politicised Bengali who were branded ‘effeminate’. Various strands – from Victorian interest in physiognomy and Darwinism to indigenous notions of caste and political calculation – combined to form this elaborate pseudo-scientific theory. Forged in the aftermath of the Sepoy Uprising of 1857, it was enormously influential and shaped the formation of India’s armed forces.

    The total number of men enlisted from Punjab, including both the British districts and the Indian states, during the war years was 470,000, including 400,000 combatants and 70,000 non-combatants.

    How were these men recruited? Was it voluntary, or was authority/coercion used?

    In 1914, India had the largest voluntary army in the world, though a question mark hangs over the word ‘voluntary’. For most, soldiering was a source of livelihood. It is not however possible to impose a common motive for enlistment of the 600,000 combatants. If the FWW soldier is usually flattened into a izzat-driven sepoy or a hardened mercenary, we need to find a more socio-culturally and psychologically nuanced vocabulary. Economic necessity or incentive, family and community traditions, an internalised ethos of ‘martial races’ and the cult of heroic masculinity were all fused and confused, hinting at a complex structure of feeling that went beyond the reductive categories of organic loyalty or mercenary impulse: instead, what we have is a complex, and at times ambivalent, emotional world where loyalty to one’s regiment and comrades would co-exist with reservations against the colonial state.

    The whole recruitment campaign can be divided into three rough phases: from 1914 to 1916, it was largely ‘voluntary’, even if propelled by economic incentives; in 1917, we see the beginning of the use of force; and from April to November 1918, it was largely coercion. July 1917 marked a turning point. With a fresh directive to ‘double the previous flow of recruits’, Punjab was called upon to provide a monthly total of 14,290 fighting men and a punitive quota system was introduced whereby the zaildars, sufed poshes and lambardars were required to raise a certain number of men, through their influence or force.

    In the summer of 1918, the Lieutenant-Governor Michael O’Dwyer promised to raise 200,000 men over the coming year. Andrew Thompson, the Chief Secretary to the Punjab Government admitted to a series of coercive measures, from the cutting off of irrigation water supply to levying exorbitant revenues on zails which failed meet the recruitment quota. Indeed, the Congress Report on the Punjab Disturbances in 1919, widely held to be written by Gandhi, is particularly illuminating. During the summer of 1918, the district officers and local zaildars and lambardars, resorted to a spree of brutal measures: lists were compiled of families which had more than one son; recruits began to be bought and sold for large amounts of money; farmers who did not offer their sons were denied remission from income tax. The number of men charged with offences or ‘chalaned’ went up by 300% in 1918 and charges were dropped when they enlisted; in Attock and Mianwali, men fled to the North West Frontier province to avoid being recruited; water-supply was cut off to parts of Multan

    What was the average pay for these men and what was the highest rank that they could hope to reach in the force.

    The average pay of the sepoy or infantryman was Rs 11 and he received batta or special allowance for foreign or field service; a sowar or cavalryman was paid Rs 14, and an additional Rs 20 for the horse, totalling Rs 34.

    Bengal;s participation in the war, though significant, was different in nature from that of the rest of India. Do we have an estimate of how many combatants joined the force from here?

    During to the prevalence of the ‘martial race’ theory, the politically conscious Bengalis were constructed as ‘effeminate’ and thus barred from joining the British Indian army. However, during the war, due to the great enthusiasm and persistence of a number of prominent Bengalis, the 49th Bengalis – a regiment of ‘citizen-soldiers – was formed, expanded from the smaller ‘Bengal Double Company’ and generating tremendous excitement. In fact the famous Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam joined the 49th Bengalis in 1917, and quickly rose through the ranks, working successively as a Lance Naik, Havildar and finally Quarter-master Havildar. They were sent to Karachi for training and some of them even went to Mesopotamia in 1917 where they are remembered for their rather inglorious record. They never saw combat and struggled with the desert conditions and disease. A commanding officer divided the regiment into ‘Measles Squad’, ‘The Whooping Cough Squad’ and ‘Scarlet Fever Squad’! More seriously, there was infighting and a junior member opened fire on three senior colleagues while they were asleep, and the regiment was disbanded soon after the war.

    In addition to combatants, there was a large number of Bengalis among the labourers and lascars and often one comes across Bengali names in their memorials. There were also a sizeable number of distinguished Bengali doctors, including two from my extended family – one of them, Captain Dr Manindranath Das, was awarded the Military Cross for saving lives in Mesoptamia. In fact I had a third family member who served as a translator – Dhiren Basak – I vividly remember him from my childhood days.

    Yet, the best documented lives of two Bengalis who served in that war are those of the doctor Kalyan Mukherjee, captured through a remarkable memoir Kalyan Pradeep, written by his 80 year-old grandmother after he died in Mesopotamia; and the other is the truly extraordinary diary-cum-memoir Abhi le Baghdad by Sisir Kumar Sarbadhikari, a medical orderly who took part in the Siege of Kut, was taken a POW by the Turks, survived the brutal 500-mile march across the deserts and spent the war years in captivity. Abhi Le Baghdad is the most sustained and powerful first-person testimony to have emerged so far out of the war: in terms of its vividness, precision and emotional power, I think it matches up to the memoirs of Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon.

    What was the social/educational background of these people?

    Educational background varied widely, from non-literate lascars to super-sophisticated men such as Indra lal Roy, who was a student in London when the war broke out. Indra Lal Roy was credited with 8 ‘kills’ and awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the only Indian pilot to be so decorated during the war. He was sadly killed in action in a dogfight against Fokker D.VIIs of Jagdstaffel 29 over France on 22nd July 1918. He was the uncle of Air Marshal Subroto Mukerji, India’s first air chief.

    Please share with us in detail two or three interesting case studies of Bengalis in the first world war – Jon Sen and Indra Lal Roy, may be… and what you could find of them…

    Jon Sen: It was in December 2005 that I first came across the bloodstained glasses and other artefacts of ‘Jon Sen’ in a small quaint archive – the Dupleix Museum and House – in the former French colony of Chandernagore. And I became hooked. Jogen Sen was the only non-white member of the Leeds ‘Pals’ battalion or indeed, of any other battalion of the West Yorkshire regiment. He came to England in 1910 as a student and completed a degree in Engineering at the University of Leeds in 1913. He volunteered in the opening months of the conflict in the Leeds Pals Battalion. Popular as ‘Jon’ Sen among the ‘Pals’, he was gunned down on the night of 22 May, 1916, and his death was reported in The Times on 4 September 1916 as ‘A Bengali Soldier’s Death’. During an interview in 1988, Arthur Dalby, a Leeds Pals veteran, remembered his Indian comrade: ‘We had a Hindu in our hut, called Jon Sen. He was the best educated man in the battalion and he spoke about seven languages but he was never allowed to be even a lance corporal because in those days they would never let a coloured fellow be over a white man, not in England, but he was the best educated.’ More recently, a wartime letter, written by another Leeds Pals member Private Harold Burniston, written just before his own death on July 1, 1916, had surfaced which notes: ‘I heard poor Jon Sen had been brought in killed. He was hit in the leg and neck by shrapnel and died almost immediately’.

    Sisir Kumar Sarbadhikari: Abhi Le Baghdad is as singular in the history of the First World War as it is in the genre of South Asian life-writing. It is possibly the only surviving full-length memoir of the Indian war experience in Mesopotamia, including the Siege of Kut and captivity by the Ottoman forces. For the Indians, Mesopotamia was the main ground of battle: the largest number of Indians – some 588,717, including 7812 officers, 287,753 other ranks and 293,152 non-combatants (often forming porter and labour corps) – served there between 1914 and 1918. An educated middle-class Bengali youth, Sarbadikari volunteered for the Bengal Ambulance Corps as a stretcher-bearer and arrived at Basra on 15 July, 1915. His unit was attached to the 6th Division of the Indian Expeditionary Force ‘D’ commanded by General Charles Townshend and got caught up at the battle of Ctesiphon (22-23 November 1915) where he nursed the wounded and collected the dead from the battlefield. He experienced the six-month long Siege of Kut, from December 1915 till Townshend’s surrender on 29 April 1916, which he evokes with remarkable power. He was among the 10,000 Indians who were taken as POWS and subjected to two years of trauma, including the horrific march to Ras el Ayn via Baghdad in July 1916. He then worked in a number of hospitals as a POW, first at Ras el Ayn and then at Aleppo.

    Abhi Le Baghdad has a tantalising textual history. It was based on his secret Mesopotamia diary, written in captivity, which was broken up into individual pages and hidden in his boots during the horrific march from Samarra via Mosul to the POW camp in Ras-el-Ain in July 1916. Later, the contents of the faded pages were copied into a new diary which was hidden underground and retrieved at Ras el Ayn.

    An educated, middle-class non-combatant, his extraordinary memoir provides a detailed account of life in captivity and opens up the world of lateral encounters between an Indian subject and the multi-ethnic and multi-religious population of the Ottoman empire. From providing one of the very few Indian eye-witness accounts of the Armenian genocide to evoking the desperate yet cosmopolitan atmosphere in the hospital, Abhi le baghdad is ultimately an immensely moving and human record of both human lives uprooted by war as well as how it also creates spaces for fresh encounters. The core of the memoir is the web of relationships, friendships and alliances that develops between him and the people around him built around Sarbadhikari’s multiple, often contradictory, identities – as POW, as a British colonial subject, as fellow-Asian, as educated and middle-class, as both friend and enemy.

    Were you able to trace the descendants of any of the participants? Do you think the participation of Indians is well documented? ?

    Yes of course I managed to trace and interview many of the descendants. In fact, I’ve three people in my own family who served and my aunts – Mrs Sunanda Das and Professor Indrani Haldar – gave me vital anecdotes.

    How easy was it for you to find information while you were researching for your story? What were the challenges that you faced and where did you get the best records?

    It took me 12 years to write this book and it is based on research conducted in dozens of archives in some 7 countries across 3 continents. But far more importantly: I had to thinkdifferently; my subject is English literature and not history, and rather than doing a straightforward history, I wanted to capture the texture of sepoy experience, his inner tumultuous world of feeling or what I call the echoes of the sepoy heart. And I found it such a difficult thing to do – to be evocative while being rigorous, to consciously de-Europeanize the methodologies of conventional war studies and most importantly: to know what questions to ask of our materials.

    But how can you recover the story of a group of people most of whom did not know how to read and write and did not leave the superabundance of letters and memoirs – in the battlefields, hospitals and POW camps. And I realised that one has to go beyond the written and the textual: I started looking at artefacts, photographs, sketches, paintings, sound-recordings, rumours, posters, periodicals, folksongs, and different forms of literature. For, in a world of fugitive fragments, literature fills in the gaps of history. And I thought a cultural and literary history is one of the ways I could possibly catch the echoes of the sepoy heart. And it is the testimonial, the affective and the intimate that I have tried to recover and understand and through them their humanity, their vulnerability and their world of the senses where horror, pity, affection, wonder, awe, loneliness and vulnerability were often fused and confused.

    But I also wanted to look beyond the story of sepoys and labourers and wanted to embed the war in the socio-cultural, intellectual and literary fabric of undivided India. From heated debates about what India’s war participation might mean for its political future to the recruitment speeches of Mahatma Gandhi, from photographs, testimonies and voice-recordings of the troops to women’s folk-songs in Punjab, from fictional representations by Indian and British writers to the imagining of a post-war world by intellectuals such as Mohammed Iqbal and Rabindranath Tagore, the country’s involvement in the war, the book claims, produced a distinct and recognisable culture.

  7. মাসুদ করিম - ১৩ নভেম্বর ২০১৮ (৮:১০ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Going solo: Ohitorisama — the Japanese art of doing it alone

    Every so often, 33-year-old Masaki Kitakoga slips into a tiny booth with a desk and a chair and belts out karaoke tunes for 90 minutes — completely on his own.

    Kitakoga is part of a growing trend in Japan favoring solo activities that is now so widespread it has its own name: ohitorisama, or “on your own.”

    Analysts say that Japan’s demographic make-up — more than one third of households contain just one person — makes it perfect for the solo market, with many also craving “me time” in a fast-paced, interconnected and workaholic society.

    Karaoke, in many ways the archetypal social activity, is a case in point.

    Six years ago, the Koshidaka karaoke chain realized that some 30 percent of its customers in certain locations came on their own, so it set up “1Kara” tiny booths for solo singers.

    Now the firm runs a network of eight specialty karaoke parlors that each sees “tens of thousands” of crooners flock to its solo booths, according to Daiki Yamatani, a spokesman for the chain.

    “It’s a truly liberating experience,” said Kitakoga. “I like to sing. But beyond that, this lets me shake off stress.”

    As demand for such services grows, the stigma of doing activities alone has decreased, added Kitakoga, who also sings karaoke occasionally with friends.

    Many lone karaoke singers say they like singing just the songs they want to, without bowing to peer pressure for sing-along classics that everyone else knows.

    Signs of ohitorisama are everywhere in Japan, from cinemas offering seats with partitions to theme parks that let singles jump the line at certain rides.

    Grocery stores sell condiments and vegetables for single diners while travel agents design itineraries aimed at the solo voyager.

    The “super solo society” has become a buzzword among social scientists and marketing gurus.

    “Businesses are offering various goods and services to meet the trend of people enjoying solo activities,” said Motoko Matsushita, senior consultant with Nomura Research Institute.

    “The depth and range of such services reflect the expanding nature of the consumer trend,” she said.

    The growing phenomenon is also helping to liberate individuals from feeling like they have to conform to peer pressure, added Matsushita.

    Surveys show Japanese consumers — especially younger ones — rate quality time alone above hours spent with family and friends.

    Official data show the ratio of households with parents and children is gradually shrinking as fewer adults form relationships.

    In 1980 in Japan, only one in 50 men had never been married by the age of 50 and one in 22 women. That ratio is now 1 in 4 and 1 in 7, respectively.

    The demographic shift comes as Japan also grapples with a rapidly aging population, with nearly 28 percent of Japanese people over the age of 65.

    And the pace of modern life with ubiquitous social media is also pushing this trend, experts say, as fatigued people seek relief from round-the-clock contact.

    “Our data show sociable individuals tend to … seek solo activities,” said Matsushita, a married mother-of-two, who says she too is partial to a spot of solo karaoke.

    Restaurants are also cashing in. At the Ichiran ramen chain, it is possible to have a meal with barely any human interaction whatsoever.

    Customers order from vending machines and then sit in a partitioned booth to slurp down their noodles, unlike the experience at many ramen joints, where orders are shouted by teams of chefs behind greasy counters.

    “We were doing this even before the solo activities trend started. This ‘personal space’ concept has been well received in foreign markets too,” said Satomi Nozaki, spokeswoman at the popular chain, which also has outlets overseas.

    Karaoke fan Kitakoga also enjoys solo travel, taking himself off alone to a remote island in southern Japan last year.

    “Sure, it would have been fun to travel with friends too. But I knew what I wanted to do there and it was fantastic because I was able to do everything I wanted to do at the pace I wanted to do it,” he said.

  8. মাসুদ করিম - ১৩ নভেম্বর ২০১৮ (৯:১৩ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    We thought the Incas couldn’t write. These knots change everything
    A lost language encoded in intricate cords is finally revealing its secrets – and it could upend what we know about Incan history and culture

    THE Incas left no doubt that theirs was a sophisticated, technologically savvy civilisation. At its height in the 15th century, it was the largest empire in the Americas, extending almost 5000 kilometres from modern-day Ecuador to Chile. These were the people who built Machu Picchu, a royal estate perched in the clouds, and an extensive network of paved roads complete with suspension bridges crafted from woven grass. But the paradox of the Incas is that despite all this sophistication they never learned to write.

    Or did they? The Incas may not have bequeathed any written records, but they did have colourful knotted cords. Each of these devices was called a khipu (pronounced key-poo). We know these intricate cords to be an abacus-like system for recording numbers. However, there have also been teasing hints that they might encode long-lost stories, myths and songs too.

    In a century of study, no one has managed to make these knots talk. But recent breakthroughs have begun to unpick this tangled mystery of the Andes, revealing the first signs of phonetic symbolism within the strands. Now two anthropologists are closing in on the Inca equivalent of the Rosetta stone. That could finally crack the code and transform our understanding of a civilisation whose history has so far been told only through the eyes of the Europeans who sought to eviscerate it.

    The Spanish conquistadors, led by Francisco Pizarro, first encountered the Incas at the start of the 1530s. They were awestruck by the magnificent stone cities, the gold and treasure. But as the Spanish began to take over the Inca empire and impose their own customs, they became equally enthralled by the way the society was organised.

    The Incas governed the 10 million people in their realm with what amounted to a federal system. Power was centred in Cusco, in the south of what is now Peru, but spread through several levels of hierarchy across a series of partially self-governing provinces. There was no money and no market economy. The production and distribution of food and other commodities was centrally controlled. People had their own land to farm, but every subject was also issued with necessities from state storehouses in exchange for labour, administered through an impressive tribute system.

    Historians have argued variously that the Inca empire was a socialist utopia or an authoritarian monarchy. But no one disputes its efficiency. “It was an extraordinary system,” says Gary Urton, an anthropologist at Harvard University. “Administratively speaking, it was very sophisticated and it seems to have worked well.”

    Key to that success was the flow of reliable data, in the form of censuses, tribute accounts and storehouse inventories. For that, the Incas relied on the khipumayuq, or the keepers of the khipus, a specially trained caste who could tie and read the cords.

    The majority of surviving khipus consist of a pencil-thick primary cord, from which hang multiple “pendant” cords and, in turn, “subsidiaries”. The Spanish described how they were used to record all manner of information. The poet Garcilaso de la Vega, son of an Inca princess and a Spanish conquistador, noted in a 1609 account that they had “an admirable method of counting everything in the Inca’s kingdom, including all taxes and tributes, both paid and due, which they did with knots in strings of different colours.”

    There are reasons to think khipus may record other things, including stories and myths – the sort of narrative information that many cultures write down. De la Vega was among many chroniclers who hinted as much, writing in one passage that the Incas “recorded on knots everything that could be counted, even mentioning battles and fights, all the embassies that had come to visit the Inca, and all the speeches and arguments they had uttered”. True, he was prone to ambiguity and contradictions. But about a third of the khipus in collections seem to have a more elaborate construction than the others, as if they contain a different sort of information. For decades the point was moot, however, because no one could read any of them.

    The first hints of revelations from khipus came in the 1920s, when anthropologist Leland Locke analysed a bunch of them housed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He noticed that the knots are organised in rows almost like beads on an abacus (see diagram). He demonstrated that each row of knots at a certain height denoted units, tens, hundreds and so on. That made sense, fitting with the decimal system the Inca used to divide up groups for tribute purposes.

    Hard knot to crack

    The discovery sparked a wave of interest in khipus. By the 1990s, though, we still had no idea what the numbers meant. “Say you read off the number 76 – what does it refer to?,” asks Urton.

    To answer that, you would ideally have a translation of a khipu into a familiar language. It would be an equivalent of the Rosetta stone, which contained a translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics into ancient Greek and unlocked that picture language. In the absence of that, Urton has spent the last 25 years tracking down and carefully digitising the details of every khipu he could find in museums and private collections across the world. Today, his Khipu Database Project contains details of more than 900 of them.

    There are all sorts of varying factors in khipus: the colour of the strings, the structure of the knots and the direction in which they were hitched. Having spent countless hours poring over them, Urton began to think that binary differences in these features might be encoding information. For example, a basic knot tied in one direction could mean “paid”, while in the other it would mean “unpaid”. By 2012, he had developed a more specific hypothesis, proposing that the direction in which knots were tied, the colours of the strings, or some combination of the two, corresponded to the social status of the people whose tributes they recorded, and even individuals’ names. Without a khipu translation, however, the idea looked destined to remain untested.

    Then in 2016, Urton was browsing his personal library when he picked out a book that contained a Spanish census document from the 1670s. It was what the colonists referred to as a revisita, a reassessment of six clans living around the village of Recuay in the Santa valley region of western Peru. The document was made in the same region and at the same time as a set of six khipus in his database, so in theory it and the khipus were recording the same things.

    Checking it out, Urton found that there were 132 tribute payers listed in the text and 132 cords on the khipus. The fine details fitted too, with the numbers on the cords matching the charges the Spanish document said had been levelled. It seemed to be the match he had been looking for.

    Even so, Urton was struggling to pick apart the detail of the connections between the Santa valley khipus and the Spanish documents. He ended up letting a Harvard undergraduate student named Manny Medrano take a look. He turned out to have the perfect complement of skills for the job. He was a native Spanish speaker and, majoring in economics, he was a whizz with spreadsheets. Medrano painstakingly generated tables of the khipu data and combed through them in search of matching patterns. This year, he and Urton showed for the first time that the way pendant cords are tied onto the primary cord indicates which clan an individual belonged to.

    “It is a really important achievement,” says Jeffrey Splitstoser at George Washington University in Washington DC, who specialises in khipus from the Wari empire that preceded the Inca. “It gives us a new way to interpret these sources. Gary has made things a lot more tractable.” Yet the question of whether the khipus also contain stories still hung there.

    Urton was not the only one trying to find meaning beyond numbers and names in khipus. Sabine Hyland, an ethnographer at St Andrews University in the UK, has spent the past decade searching in the central Andes for communities with enduring khipu traditions. She starts by looking for mentions of khipus in archives, before travelling to remote villages in the hope they might have survived.

    The strategy tends to be more miss than hit, but in 2015, Hyland’s persistence paid off. Having seen a documentary about her work, a woman in Lima, Peru, got in touch about the khipus in the remote village of San Juan de Collata, where she grew up. After months of negotiations with the community, Hyland was invited to see two khipus. Villagers believe them to be narrative epistles created by local chiefs during a rebellion against the Spanish in the late 18th century. By that time, the people spoke Spanish too, so there are corresponding written records.

    The khipus were kept locked away in an underground chamber in the village church. Hyland and her husband were the first outsiders to lay eyes on them, and she was not disappointed. “It was an incredible moment,” she says. “But I didn’t have time to be awestruck because this was my big chance to study them, and I didn’t have long.” She had 48 hours before the man in charge of the khipus, the village treasurer, had to travel to a nearby community festival.

    Under strict supervision, Hyland set about photographing the cords, reviewing the manuscripts and taking notes. Each khipu had hundreds of pendant cords, and they were more colourful and complex than anything she had ever seen. It was clear the various animal fibres used could only be identified by touch. The villagers told her the khipus were the “language of animals” and insisted that the different fibres have significance.

    Her analysis eventually revealed that the pendants came in 95 different combinations of colour, fibre type and direction of ply. That is within the range of symbols typically found in syllabic writing systems, where a set of signs (say, the letters C-A-T) aligns with the sound of speech (the word “cat”). “I thought ‘Woah, could this be a syllabic writing system?’,” says Hyland. She has since hypothesised that the khipus contain a combination of phonetic symbols and ideographic ones, where a symbol represents a whole word.

    Earlier this year, Hyland even managed to read a little of the khipus. When deciphering anything, one of the most important steps is to work out what information might be repeated in different places, she says. Because the Collata khipus were thought to be letters, they probably encoded senders and recipients. That is where Hyland started. She knew from the villagers that the primary cord of one of the khipus contained ribbons representing the insignia of one of two clan leaders.

    She took a gamble and assumed that the ribbons referred to a person known as Alluka, pronounced “Ay-ew-ka”. She also guessed that the writer of this letter might have signed their name at the end, meaning that the last three pendant cords could well represent the syllables “ay”, “ew” and “ka”.

    Tangled mystery

    Assuming that was true, she looked for cords on the second khipu that had the same colour and were tied with the same knot as the ones she had tentatively identified on the first khipu. It turned out that the first two of the last three cords matched, which gave “A-ka”. The last was unknown. It was a golden-brown fibre made from the hair of a vicuna, an alpaca-like animal. Hyland realised that the term for this hue in the local Quechua language is “paru”. And trying this alongside the other syllables gave, with a little wiggle room, “Yakapar”. That, it turned out, was the name of another of the lineages involved in the revolt that these khipus recorded.

    “We know from the written testimony that one of the khipus was made by a member of the Yakapar clan and sent to Collata, and we think this is it,” she says. Hyland claims that the Collata khipus show that the cords really do hold narratives.

    Yet even if she is right, it is possible these later khipus were influenced by contact with Spanish writing. “My feeling is that the phoneticisation, if it’s there, is a reinvention of khipus,” says Urton. Equally, the Collata khipus might be a regional variation. Possibly even a one-off.

    Hyland is the first to admit that we don’t understand the link between these khipus and those dating from before the Spanish arrived. That doesn’t make them any less interesting though. “Even if these later khipus were influenced by the alphabet, I still think it’s mind-blowing that these people developed this tactile system of writing,” she says.

    She will spend the next two years doing more fieldwork in Peru, attempting to decipher the Collata khipus and looking for similar examples elsewhere.

    Urton too is turning his attention to narrative khipus, even if he has a different idea on how they encoded information. He suspects they are semasiographic, a system of symbols that convey information without being tied to a single language. In other words, they would be akin to road signs, where we all know what the symbols mean without having to sound anything out. That makes sense, given that the Inca ran a multi-ethnic, multilingual empire, says Urton.

    There is no solid evidence that any Spaniard living at the time learned to read or make a khipu. That suggests that they were more complicated than conventional writing – or perhaps just conceptually very different. “This is a writing system that is inherently three-dimensional, dependent on touch as well as sight,” says Hyland – and that presents us with a uniquely tangled mystery.

    It also gives us an important insight. If the Inca used khipus in this way, it might tell us something about their world view. With a writing system dependent on touch, says Hyland, “you must have a different way of being in the world”.

    Inca inventions

    You need only look at the archaeological site of Tambomachay to see how creative the Incas were. The site shown (above) is near Cusco, once the Incas’ capital, and consists of terraced rocks riddled with aqueducts and canals. We don’t know its function, but it may have been a military outpost or a spa for the Inca political elite. Either way, it shows how the people could organise and build.

    With little flat ground in the mountainous areas where the Incas lived, they also constructed terraces to grow crops. It is thought that they created experimental agricultural stations too, such as the one seen above (below), where they tested which crops would grow best on terraces at different altitudes.

    It seems odd that all this sophistication arose but writing did not. That is one reason to think their knotted cords might record ideas and stories, not just numbers (see main story).

    They certainly went to great lengths to transport the khipus. Couriers would loop the cords over their shoulders and run with them across the empire. To navigate the terrain, a vast network of roads and woven grass bridges were built. The last remaining bridge, known as Queshuachaca (bottom), straddles a river high in the Andes. Local people band together to renew the woven grass ropes every year.

  9. মাসুদ করিম - ১৪ নভেম্বর ২০১৮ (৭:৫৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Stan Lee was flawed, just like many of his Marvel creations

    The co-creator of Spider-Man, The Hulk and the others was also a showman, an impresario and a businessman.

    Stan Lee was the voice of my childhood. As I sat transfixed by Spider-Man cartoons on Saturday mornings, his energetic narration welcomed me into the story; made me feel part of the gang. Never mind that the animation wasn’t up to much; it looked like a comic, had a great theme tune, and Stan “The Man” Lee, my buddy, was giving it his personal seal of approval.

    Famously, Lee originally honed this warm persona in print. The words “Stan Lee Presents” in the Marvel comics I was also feverishly devouring – black and white British reprints of the American originals – were a guarantee of quality. When he signed off a letters page or editorial with his trademark “Excelsior!” I never failed to smile. I was, and remain in many respects, a “True Believer”, as Lee called all dedicated Marvel readers. As we shall see, however, the man’s performance masked some uncomfortable truths.

    Lee, born Stanley Martin Lieber, had been working in comics since 1939. He was first an office assistant for Timely, the company that went on to become Marvel, before becoming an editor and writer. He would eventually rise to editor-in-chief, chairman and publisher, but it was his work as a writer in the early 1960s that changed comics forever.

    At the time, superheroes had fallen out of favour, following the heyday of Superman and Batman in the 1930s and 1940s. Marvel now helped turn that around, with angsty rebellious heroes like The Fantastic Four (launched 1961), Spider-Man (1962), The Hulk (1962), The X-Men (1963) and so many more.

    A huge part of the success was the fantastic artwork and storytelling of two other comics geniuses, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. But nobody wrote like Stan. Having written many romance and horror comics in the 1950s, his tone was over-the-top, bombastic and mock-Shakespearean – but always warm and inviting.

    The mythos that Lee created also extended to the gang behind the scenes. In regular features “Bullpen Bulletins” and “Stan’s Soapbox”, he wove tales of the Marvel Bullpen, the lively creative hub at the centre of the studio’s success, with characters like Jack “King” Kirby and “Sturdy” Steve Ditko. This human touch was Lee’s gift. He made these comics creators seem like friends, and made the readers feel like part of a gang or club.

    Bullpen blues

    When I learned about the history of Marvel Comics later in life, I realised that things were not always as they seemed. The angst in those Spider-Man and Hulk comics wasn’t all on the page; like any business, there were tensions and rivalries behind the scenes. Many of the artists who worked with Lee harboured deep resentments.

    In the 1960s, Lee and the artists developed what became known as the “Marvel method” of creating comics. At rival DC Comics, home of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, the editor was king, and kept a firm grip on the factory-line production process of creating a comic. But at Marvel, Lee would come up with a story idea and pass it to the artist as a kind of pitch or brief.

    This allowed for huge creative freedom and sped up the production process considerably – a real benefit for a small company with big ambitions. But the artists’ work was not always fully recognised. They were being credited purely for the art when they were often creating the characters and story, too – before Lee layered the dialogue and captions on top.

    Lee compounded this recognition problem in interviews and in books like Origins of Marvel Comics (1974), where he talked enthusiastically about how he had created all the stories and characters. The artists knew different. Frustrated by creative differences, Ditko left in 1965 and Kirby went five years later.

    To make matters worse, their original artwork often wasn’t returned to them – at a time when a community of comic collectors was coming together and a market was emerging for this artwork. Marvel made millions exploiting the rights to the characters and stories while the artists received very little.

    Having risen to a position of power in the company, Lee could have shared more of the profits – and the limelight. But he was a showman, an impresario, and a businessman. He took the credit and protected the company he had worked so hard to build. As a salaried company man, he was not always as loyal to his collaborators – many of whom were freelancers.

    Later in the 1970s and early 1980s, when young comics creators like Frank Miller were championing creator rights and lobbying for the return of artwork to Kirby and his family, Lee was sometimes cast as the villain. I am sure he wasn’t. But like the best Marvel heroes, he was certainly flawed. He could have been at the forefront of creator rights and made the “Marvel method” stand for something more. Instead, Marvel ended up echoing practices at DC Comics, where artists like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, creators of Superman, were made to wait decades, often in crushing poverty, for a small share of the profits.

    The consequences of Lee’s silence were considerable, not just for those in the Bullpen but for following generations of comics creators. Even now, the relationship between publishers and creators over rights and profit-sharing has been rocky to say the least. Lee was courageous in other ways – his comics battled racism, for instance, and he wrote a landmark essay on the subject in 1968. It also goes without saying that he helped create characters who continue to inspire millions. But had he taken a stand on creators’ rights, the industry and comics historians might not be so divided on his legacy today.

    Postscript: Stan’s last act

    Stan Lee’s later years seemed tumultuous. He would make appearances at huge comic cons looking tired, and taking photos with huge numbers of fans who paid for the privilege of meeting him. This prompted suspicions that those in charge of Lee’s business affairs didn’t always have his best interests at heart. Earlier this year, his lawyer brought a suit against his handlers accusing them of elder abuse.

    A couple of years back, I had a chance to meet my hero at a New York Comic Con. I watched as others had their photos taken with this frail old man, and wondered how I’d condense all I wanted to say, about what he meant to me, what he’d contributed to the world. And to ask about his proudest moments, his deepest regrets. But all that was on offer were a few seconds of The Man’s time, and a weak smile.

    So I decided not to get my photo with him. I don’t know if I made the right decision, but on hearing of Lee’s death I asked an artist friend, Elliot Balson, to draw a picture of me meeting him (below). I know it’s self-indulgent, but I’m finally meeting this man who gave me so much, where I’ve always met him – in the comics.

  10. মাসুদ করিম - ১৭ নভেম্বর ২০১৮ (১০:৪৮ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Khmer Rouge leaders found guilty of genocide in landmark ruling

    For the first time, two leaders of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia have been found guilty of genocide.

    The two top leaders of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime were found guilty Friday, in a landmark ruling almost 40 years after the fall of a brutal regime that presided over the deaths of a quarter of the population.

    Nuon Chea, 92, was the deputy of regime leader Pol Pot, and Khieu Samphan, 87, was head of state.

    They were on trial at the UN-backed tribunal on charges of exterminating Cham Muslims and ethnic Vietnamese.

    The guilty verdict is the first official ruling that what the regime did was genocide, as defined under international law

    The reign of terror led by “Brother Number 1” Pol Pot left some two million Cambodians dead from overwork, starvation and mass executions but Friday’s ruling was the first to acknowledge a genocide.

    The defendants were previously handed life sentences in 2014 over the violent and forced evacuation of Phnom Penh in April 1975.

    But the judgement at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) also found Nuon Chea guilty of genocide against the ethnic Vietnamese and Cham Muslim minority group, among a litany of other crimes.

    “The chamber finds that Nuon Chea exercised ultimate decision-making power with Pol Pot and… therefore finds Nuon Chea is responsible as a superior for all the crimes,” presiding judge Nil Nonn said.

    “This includes the crime of genocide by killing members of Cham ethnic and religious group.”

    Khieu Samphan was also found guilty of genocide against ethnic Vietnamese, though not against the Cham, he added.

    Both parties were sentenced to “life in prison”, merging the two sentences into a single term, Nil Nonn said.

    Hundreds of people, including dozens of Cham Muslims and Buddhist monks, were bussed to the tribunal located on the outskirts of Phnom Penh to attend the hearing.

    – Cambodia’s ‘Nuremberg’ –

    The events covered by the verdict span the four years of the Pol Pot regime and include extensive crimes against humanity.

    “The verdict is essentially the Nuremberg judgement for the ECCC and thus carries very significant weight for Cambodia, international criminal justice, and the annals of history,” said David Scheffer, who served as the UN secretary general’s special expert on the Khmer Rouge trials from 2012 until last month.

    The revolutionaries who tried to recreate Buddhist-majority Cambodia in line with their vision of an agrarian Marxist utopia attempted to abolish class and religious distinctions by force.

    The verdict read out by Nil Nonn presented a society where minorities were targeted and killed, Buddhist monks forcibly defrocked and groups of people executed, while men and women were coerced into marriages and forced to have sex to produce children for the regime.

    The atrocities fell under the additional list of charges, which the two men were found guilty of as well.

    Lawyers for Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan said they were planning to appeal.

    “Khieu Samphan did not have power to make any decision, so the verdict to me is very confusing,” said his lawyer Kong Sam Onn.

    Los Sat, a 72-year-old Cham Muslim who attended the verdict hearing with his wife, said he had lost “too many” family members under the regime.

  11. মাসুদ করিম - ১৭ নভেম্বর ২০১৮ (৭:০৭ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Advertising and theatre personality Alyque Padamsee dies at 90

    Padamsee played the role of Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the 1982 historical drama ‘Gandhi’.

    Theatre personality and advertising film maker Alyque Padamsee died in Mumbai on Saturday, CNBC-TV18 reported. He was 90.

    Padamsee headed the Lintas ad group in Mumbai. He created some of the most memorable advertising campaigns, including the Liril girl, “Humara Bajaj” and “Lalita ji” for Surf. He also played Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the 1982 historical drama Gandhi.

    Padamsee received the Padma Shri in 2000.

  12. মাসুদ করিম - ১৭ নভেম্বর ২০১৮ (৭:১৬ অপরাহ্ণ)

    একুশে গ্রন্থমেলার নকশা পুনর্বিন্যাসের আহ্বান বাংলাদেশ লেখক ঐক্যের

    ২০১৯ সালের ফেব্রুয়ারিতে অনুষ্ঠেয় একুশে গ্রন্থমেলা পাঠক ও ক্রেতাদের জন্য আরও আকর্ষণীয় করতে এর নকশা পুনর্বিন্যাসের আহ্বান জানিয়েছে বাংলাদেশ লেখক ঐক্য। সংগঠনটির পক্ষ থেকে এজন্য বাংলা একাডেমির কাছে সুনির্দিষ্ট কিছু প্রস্তাবও পেশ করা হয়েছে। শনিবার (১৭ নভেম্বর) হাতিরপুলের রোজভিউ প্লাজার ‘লেখক আড্ডা’য় এক সংবাদ সম্মেলনের মাধ্যমে এসব প্রস্তাব করা হয়েছে।

    সংবাদ সম্মেলনে সংগঠনের পক্ষ থেকে প্রস্তাবগুলো পাঠ করেন বাংলাদেশ লেখক আড্ডার সভাপতি ফাহমিদুল হক। এসময় গ্রন্থমেলার নতুন একটি খসড়া বিন্যাস ও নকশা প্রস্তাব আকারে উপস্থাপন করেন ডিজাইনার মেহেদী হক।

    ফাহমিদুল হক বলেন, বাংলাদেশ লেখক ঐক্য বিদ্যমান মেলা বিন্যাসের নানান সীমাবদ্ধতা খুঁজে পেয়েছে। বিদ্যমান মেলা বিন্যাসে বেশ কিছু অনাকাঙ্ক্ষিত বাঁক ও আড়াল রয়েছে, নকশার কারণে অনেক স্টল একেবারে আড়ালে পড়ে যায়, পাঠকরা সহজে কাঙ্ক্ষিত স্টল খুঁজে পান না, প্রচুর স্থান অপচয় হয়, দুর্ঘটনা ঘটলে ফায়ার সার্ভিসের গাড়ি প্রবেশের উপায় থাকে না। ফলে স্টলবিন্যাসের নকশা পুনর্বিন্যাসের প্রয়োজন রয়েছে।

    প্রস্তাবিত নকশা ছাড়াও সংবাদ সম্মেলনে অন্যান্য যেসব প্রস্তাব তুলে ধরা হয় তার মধ্যে রয়েছে, মেলার সময়সীমা রাত সাড়ে ৯টা পর্যন্ত বাড়ানো ও ২১ ফেব্রুয়ারির পর থেকে মেলা সকাল ১১টা থেকে শুরু করা, মেলা পরিচালনা কমিটিতে লেখকদের অন্তর্ভুক্ত করা, লেখক সম্মানী নিশ্চিত করার জন্য বিশেষ আইনি সেল ও বুথ খোলা, বাংলা ধ্রুপদী সাহিত্যের পৃথক স্টল বরাদ্দ করা ইত্যাদি।

    এসময় ডিজাইনার মেহেদী হক প্রস্তাবিত নকশাটি সাংবাদিকদের কাছে ব্যাখ্যাসহ তুলে ধরেন।

    উল্লেখ্য ‘বাংলাদেশ লেখক ঐক্য’র প্রতিষ্ঠার পর থেকে বিগত দুই বছরে বইমেলাকে সামনে রেখে এই সংগঠন আরও দু’টি সংবাদ সম্মেলন করেছিল এবং বইমেলা ও সাহিত্যচর্চার বিভিন্ন দিক নিয়ে বাংলা একাডেমি ও সংস্কৃতি মন্ত্রণালয়ের যথাযথ কর্তৃপক্ষের কাছে প্রস্তাবগুলো পেশ করেছিল। সেই প্রস্তাবগুলোর কিছু কিছু তারা বাস্তবায়নও করেছিল। এজন্য সংবাদ সম্মেলন থেকে বাংলা একাডেমি কর্তৃপক্ষকে ধন্যবাদ জানানো হয়।

    সংগঠনের সাধারণ সম্পাদক শওকত হোসেনের উপস্থাপনায় অনুষ্ঠিত সংবাদ সম্মেলনে অন্যান্যদের মধ্যে উপস্থিত ছিলেন সহ-সভাপতি প্রাবন্ধিক আরশাদ সিদ্দিকী, কথাসাহিত্যিক ইমতিয়ার শামীম, অনুবাদক জিএইচ হাবীব, সাবেক সভাপতি ও কথাসাহিত্যিক রাখাল রাহা, সংগঠনের প্রচার সম্পাদক নাট্যকার ও আবৃত্তিকার আলমগীর খান, কথাসাহিত্যিক নূরুদ্দিন জাহাঙ্গীর, সাহিত্য সংগঠক নাজিফা তাসনিম প্রমুখ।

  13. মাসুদ করিম - ১৮ নভেম্বর ২০১৮ (৯:৫৮ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    ‘মি টু’: আরও অভিযোগ আসছে

    সামাজিক যোগাযোগ মাধ্যমে ‘#মিটু’ আন্দোলনের ধাক্কা হলিউড, বলিউড ছাড়িয়ে বাংলাদেশেও লেগেছে কিছুদিন হল; মুখ খুলতে শুরু করেছেন সমাজে প্রতিষ্ঠিত পুরুষদের দ্বারা ‘যৌন নিপীড়নের’ শিকার নারীরা।

    সর্বশেষ খ্যাতনামা আবৃত্তিশিল্পী মাহিদুল ইসলামের অভিযোগের আঙুল তুলেছেন তার কাছে আবৃত্তির প্রশিক্ষণ নেওয়া জাকিয়া সুলতানা মুক্তা। গত ১১ নভেম্বর নিজের ফেইসবুক অ্যাকাউন্টে ১০ বছর আগের সেই ঘটনার কথা বলেছেন জাকিয়া।

    এর আগে ৮ নভেম্বর জার্নালিজম ট্রেইনিং অ্যান্ড রিসার্চ ইনিশিয়েটিভের (জেএটিআরআই) প্রধান জামিল আহমেদের বিরুদ্ধে যৌন নিপীড়নের অভিযোগ করেন আসমাউল হুসনা নামের এক নারী।

    ২০০৬ সালে আফ্রো আমেরিকান সামাজিক আন্দোলনের কর্মী তারানা বুরকি নারী অধিকার নিয়ে কাজ করতে গিয়ে নারীর উপর যৌন নিপীড়নের বিষয়ে প্রথমবারের মতো ‘মি টু’ ধারণার কথা বলেন, পরে একই নামে একটি প্রামাণ্যচিত্রও নির্মাণ করেন।

    এরই ধারাবাহিকতায় পরে হলিউড অভিনেত্রী অ্যালিসা মিলানো প্রযোজক হার্ভে উইনস্টেইনের বিরুদ্ধে যৌন নিপীড়নের বিরুদ্ধে অভিযোগ তুলে সামাজিক যোগাযোগ মাধ্যমে মি টু হ্যাশট্যাগ দিয়ে আন্দোলনের সূত্রপাত করেন।

    এরপর একে একে মুখ খুলতে থাকেন হলিউডের অভিনেত্রীরা। নীরবতা ভেঙে যৌন নিগ্রহের কথা সামাজিক যোগাযোগ মাধ্যমে জানান দিতে থাকেন নারীরা।

    পরে এর ধাক্কা এসে লাগে ভারতেও। শুধু রুপালি জগতেই নয়, রাজনীতিসহ অন্য ক্ষেত্রেও যৌন নিপীড়নের কথা মুখ ফুটে বলতে শুরু করেছেন তারা।

    বাংলাদেশিদের মধ্যে মডেল মাকসুদা আক্তার প্রিয়তি সম্প্রতি রংধনু গ্রুপের চেয়ারম্যান রফিকুল ইসলামের বিরুদ্ধে নিপীড়নের অভিযোগ তুলে প্রথম আলোচনার সূত্রপাত ঘটান।

    এর ধারাবাহিকতায় পরে শুচিস্মিতা সিমন্তি নামের আরেক নারী তার মায়ের এক সময়কার বন্ধু-সহকর্মী সাংবাদিক প্রণব সাহার বিরুদ্ধে যৌন নিগ্রহের অভিযোগ তুলে ধরেন ফেইসবুকে।

    এরপর পাঠক সমাবেশের ব্যবস্থাপনা পরিচালক শহিদুল ইসলাম বিজুর বিরুদ্ধে যৌন নিপীড়নের অভিযোগ তোলেন ট্রান্সজেন্ডার শিল্পী তাসনুভা আনান শিশির। অভিযোগের তালিকায় সর্বশেষ সংযোজন হল মাহিদুল ইসলাম আর জামিল আহমেদের নাম।

    তবে রংধনুর রফিকুল ইসলাম, সাংবাদিক প্রণব সাহা, পাঠক সমাবেশের বিজুর মতো মাহিদুলও অভিযোগ অস্বীকার করেছেন।

    মাহিদুল ইসলাম

    আবৃত্তি সংগঠন সংবৃতার সপ্তম কর্মশালায় প্রথম স্থান অধিকার করা জাকিয়া তার সাবেক শিক্ষক মাহিদুল ইসলামের বিরুদ্ধে ফেইসবুকে লিখেছেন।

    জাকিয়া লিখেছেন, ঢাকা বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ের টিএসসির একটি কক্ষে অনুশীলনের ছলে মাহিদুল তাকে জড়িয়ে ধরে চুমু দেওয়ার চেষ্টা করেছিলেন। তখন আরেক সহপাঠীর আকস্মিক উপস্থিতিতে সেদিন রক্ষা পেয়েছিলেন তিনি।

    অভিযোগটির বিষয়ে জানতে চাইলে মাহিদুল ইসলাম ১০ বছর আগের ঘটনাটি মনে করতে পারছেন না বলে জানান।

    তিনি বিডিনিউজ টোয়েন্টিফোর ডটকমকে বলেন, আট বছর আগে দলটি ছেড়ে আসেন তিনি। ওই দলটি ছেড়ে আসার সময়ও তার বিরুদ্ধে ‘অপপ্রচার’ চালানো হয়েছিল।

    তার ভাবমূর্তি ক্ষুন্ন ও সাংগঠনিকভাবে দুর্বল করার জন্য এখন এই অভিযোগ তোলা হচ্ছে বলে মাহিদুলের দাবি।

    জাকিয়া যে অভিযোগ তুলেছেন, তেমন কিছু ঘটেনি বলে দাবি করেন তিনি।

    জামিল আহমেদ

    বাংলাদেশে ‘#মি টু’ আন্দোলনের ওপর দৃষ্টি রাখা একাধিক সাংবাদিকের মতে, বাংলাদেশে অবস্থান করে কারও বিরুদ্ধে অভিযোগ তোলা প্রথম নারী আসমাউল হুসনা।

    ২০১৩ সালে ঘটে যাওয়া ঘটনা নিয়ে গত ৭ নভেম্বর আসমাউল হুসনা ফেইসবুকে যে স্ট্যাটাস লেখেন, তাতে অভিযোগের কাঠগড়ায় জার্নালিজম ট্রেইনিং অ্যান্ড রিসার্চ ইনিশিয়েটিভ (যাত্রী) প্রধান জামিল আহমেদ।

    ওই বছরের কোনো একদিন শিল্পকলা একাডেমিতে দেখা করতে যাওয়ার পরের ঘটনা স্মৃতিচারণ করে আসমাউল হুসনা লিখেছেন, বন্ধু হওয়ার কথা বলে তাকে শিল্পকলা একাডেমিতে নিয়ে জোর করে চুমু খেয়েছিলেন জামিল।

    “আমি খুবই ভীত ও হতভম্ব হয়ে যাই। তাকে ধাক্কা দিয়ে সরিয়ে মৎস্য ভবনের দিকে দৌড়ে গিয়ে রাস্তা পার হয়ে রিকশা নেই। সেদিন আমি সারা রাত কেঁদেছি এবং ঘুমাতে পারিনি। আমি বাইরে যেতে ভয় পেতাম এবং নতুন মানুষের সাথে দেখা করতে ভয় পেতাম। এই ট্রমা ও ভয় থেকে বের হতে আমার বছরের পর বছর লেগেছে। তবে সম্পূর্ণভাবে ক্ষত সেরে ওঠেনি।”

    আসমাউল হুসনার অভিযোগের বিষয়ে জানতে জামিল আহমেদের ফোনে একাধিকবার কল করা হলেও সাড়া মেলেনি। পরিচয় দিয়ে এসএমএস করার পরও ওপাশ থেকে জবাব মেলেনি। তবে ফোন কলগুলোর মধ্যে কয়েকবার তাকে ‘ওয়েটিং’এ পাওয়া গেছে।

  14. মাসুদ করিম - ১৮ নভেম্বর ২০১৮ (১১:০৩ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    একাত্তরের বীর কুলদীপ সিং আর নেই

    একাত্তরের বীরযোদ্ধা ভারতীয় সেনাবাহিনীর অবসরপ্রাপ্ত ব্রিগেডিয়ার কুলদীপ সিং চাঁদপুরী মারা গেছেন। ভারতের পাঞ্জাবের মহালিতে একটি হাসপাতালে চিকিৎসাধীন অবস্থায় ৭৮ বছর বয়সে গতকাল শনিবার সকাল সাড়ে ৮টার দিকে শেষ নিঃশ্বাস ত্যাগ করেন তিনি। দীর্ঘদিন তিনি ক্যান্সারে ভুগছিলেন। খবর এনডিটিভি ও ইন্ডিয়ান এক্সপ্রেসের।

    ১৯৭১ সালে বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতাযুদ্ধের সময় ৫ ডিসেম্বর রাতে পাকিস্তান রেজিমেন্ট টি-৫৯ এর সহায়তায় ৫১ পদাতিক ব্রিগেডসহ ভারতের রাজস্থানে হঠাৎ একটি বড় হামলা চালায়। তাদের উদ্দেশ্য ছিল লংগিওয়ালা এবং রামগড় দখল করা। সে সময় মেজর পদে কর্মরত চাঁদপুরী মাত্র ১২০ জনের একটি ছোট দল নিয়ে সারারাত তাদের প্রতিরোধ করেন। পরের দিন সকালে ভারতের এয়ারফোর্স শত্রুদের ট্যাঙ্ক ধ্বংস করে দেয়।

    অসীম সাহসিকতার স্বীকৃতিস্বরূপ কুলদীপকে ভারতের দ্বিতীয় সর্বোচ্চ সাহসিকতার পুরস্কার মহাবীর চক্র পুরস্কার দেওয়া হয়েছিল। কুলদীপকে নিয়ে সিনেমাও তৈরি হয়। জে পি দত্তের ‘বর্ডার’ নামের ওই সিনেমায় অভিনয় করেন সানি দেওল। কুলদীপের ছেলে হারদীপ সিং চাঁদপুরী জানিয়েছেন, আরেক ছেলে জার্মানি থেকে ফিরলে তার শেষকৃত্য সম্পন্ন করা হবে।

  15. মাসুদ করিম - ২২ নভেম্বর ২০১৮ (১:২৯ অপরাহ্ণ)

    #MeToo: A gender curriculum
    The #MeToo moment calls for a rethink of our education system

    Over the past few weeks, many women have spoken about their experiences of sexual harassment. Some have named the accused. Many of these accounts have been of incidents at the workplace and by co-workers, and expose the prevalence of deep-seated sexism across professions. There have been various responses by the accused to these testimonies: unconditional apologies, resignations, stepping away from duties until further investigation — but also denial, intimidation and even further harassment. Some of these were immediate responses to mounting public pressure and questions; whether they reflected repentance or realisation on the part of the accused is debatable. Some other responses, such as intimidation through defamation cases, show the entitlement that many men in power enjoy. Both sexual harassment and the kinds of responses from the accused lay bare a critical failure of our education system. It will not be sufficient to say that it is society that allows, or even conditions, men to behave the way they do. Education, an important part of the socialisation process, is also to blame.

    What our education lacks

    The education that we are imparted needs to be held accountable at this juncture because of its failure on fundamental grounds. The purpose of education is not to only ensure that people secure employment or rise to coveted positions of power alone, it is also to ensure that they learn and practice equality and mutual respect. Many of the accused are qualified, educated men. Their actions compel us to ask whether those years spent in school, college and university have been unsuccessful in instilling basic values. It seems as though rising to top positions and enjoying power have emboldened men to behave in unacceptable ways, and the education system has done nothing to prevent this.

    It is not uncommon to hear of incidents of sexual harassment being justified as “casual flirting” or being attributed to the offender’s “glad eye”. Using these terms to explain away or even justify these acts reflects the depth and expanse of the problem. I am reminded of an encounter that a friend’s mother had with a senior bureaucrat (now retired) a few years ago. During a meeting regarding a project on which her organisation and his department were collaborating, he told her that she was “smart and beautiful”. He then recited couplets in Hindi and Urdu. Such blatant display of inappropriate behaviour, which makes women uncomfortable, shows that men in power enjoy the impunity that accompanies attitudes and acts entrenched in patriarchy.

    Today, many of us are not surprised at the volume of complaints of sexual harassment. This is because it has been normalised. Sexism is not casual, it is systemic. That our education system is failing to teach boys and men to recognise, challenge and refrain from sexist and even unlawful behaviour must be acknowledged and tackled.

    The way forward

    This is not to say that sexual misconduct or gender inequality is a by-product of a lack in education. The spotlight is not to be put on the educated alone, but on the system too. Among other things, education has the basic duty of ensuring that we become socially aware and sensitive beings who know how to interact and engage with people of different genders, castes, classes and communities. We must teach students that consent is an essential component of any interaction and that decisions, even of refusal, must be respected.

    While there is considerable discussion on the need to change mindsets, efforts to actually bring about such long-term structural changes are rare. Gender equality must not be limited to newsroom debates, stand-up themes or films, although these are necessary. What the #MeToo movement demands is a continuous and systematic process of learning that leads to equality.

    There must be efforts to incorporate a gender curriculum in all school and college classrooms, establish anti-sexual harassment cells, organise regular awareness programmes on consent across the country, and formulate measures to address incidents of sexual harassment. The police should initiate community engagement drives so that students know how to report sexual harassment. Campaigns like Operation Nirbheek, initiated to improve safety and security of girls in schools, have proven to be successful to a large extent. Interventions in educational institutions will be a much-needed start to strengthen voices against sexual harassment and make homes and workplaces safe. It is imperative that we begin early if we are to secure a closure to our #MeToo experiences.

  16. মাসুদ করিম - ২৫ নভেম্বর ২০১৮ (১০:২৪ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    France to return 26 artworks to Benin

    France’s President Emmanuel Macron agreed Friday to return 26 artworks to Benin “without delay,” his office said.

    The decision came as Macron received the findings of a study he had commissioned on returning African treasures held by French museums, a radical policy shift that could put pressure on other former colonial powers.

    He proposed gathering African and European partners in Paris next year to define a framework for an “exchange policy” for African artworks.

    Macron agreed to return 26 royal statues from the Palaces of Abomey — formerly the capital of the kingdom of Dahomey — that were taken by the French army in 1892 and are now housed at Paris’ Quai Branly museum.

    Benin had requested their restitution, and earlier this week welcomed that France had followed the process through to the end.

    But Macron’s office said this should not be an isolated or symbolic case.

    The president “hopes that all possible circulation of these works are considered: returns but also exhibitions, loans, further cooperation”, the Elysee palace said.

    The report he received on Friday proposed legislation be developed to return thousands of African artworks taken during the country’s colonial period, now in French museums, to nations that request them.

    There are conditions, however, including a request from the relevant country, precise information about the works’ origins, and the existence of proper facilities such as museums to house the works back in their home country.

    Macron also wants “museums to play an essential role in this process”, his office said.

    They will be invited to “identify African partners and organise possible returns”.

    Museums should quickly establish “an online inventory of their African collections” to allow for searching an item’s provenance, the statement said.
    Macron also called for “in-depth work with other European states that retain collections of the same nature acquired in comparable circumstances”.

    Calls have been growing in Africa for restitution of artworks, but French law strictly forbids the government from ceding state property, even in well-documented cases of pillaging.

    Macron raised hopes in a speech last year in Burkina Faso, saying “Africa’s heritage cannot just be in European private collections and museums.”

    He later asked French art historian Benedicte Savoy and Senegalese writer Felwine Sarr to study the matter.

    Their report has been welcomed by advocates of the restitution of works which were bought, bartered, or in some cases simply stolen.

  17. মাসুদ করিম - ২৫ নভেম্বর ২০১৮ (১২:০৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

    The Naked Truth About Manet’s ‘Olympia’

    I was looking for a muse, and found in her eyes a gateway to the past, an icon for the present. Victorine Meurent was the painter’s star model but remained an enigma for 150 years.

    Her fame is so great, her beauty so particular, her gaze so challenging that I and many others have wanted to write long articles and books about Victorine Meurent. But there is so little that we really know about her.

    And of course that makes her all the more interesting.

    She was the great 19th-century French painter Édouard Manet’s favorite model in the 1860s, the central figure in what are certainly his two most famous and most enigmatic paintings: the naked woman at the picnic with clothed men in “Le Déjeuner Sur l’Herbe” in 1863 and the alluring, challenging, completely naked courtesan in his “Olympia,” first shown in 1865.

    While doing research for a book that takes place in Second Empire Paris, I recently revisited “Olympia” at the Musée d’Orsay, hoping that I might find in her a kind of muse opening the way to the decadence and creativity of those years, and I got more than I bargained for. She is, in her own striking way, a muse for the present.

    For the first time as I stood in front of the canvas I realized that the woman reclining there on an opulent bed, her only articles of clothing a ribbon around her throat and a flower in her hair, appears to be life size. A servant is delivering flowers from some admirer. A black kitten at the end of the bed screams in fright. And we are in the room with her. Olympia is just looking at us. Directly at us.

    Art critic Eunice Lipton described her beautifully some years ago: “Olympia did not drape herself suggestively upon her bed, or supplicate prospective lovers, or droop resignedly,” which is what other women are doing in so many of the paintings on the nearby walls of the Orsay. “Nor did she smile flirtatiously. Rather she reigned imperiously, reclining upon silken pillows, her steady gaze a dare, her tight little body and proprietary hand an omen.”

    When the painting was shown at the great yearly Salon in Paris in 1865, critics were deeply offended by those penetrating hazel eyes. They wrote about the “vicious strangeness” of this “woman of the night.” She was “a sort of female gorilla, a grotesque.”

    How threatened they must have been.

    It is said the painting had to be protected from men who wanted to strike it with their canes.

    And how much more threatened, still, they would have been if they learned that this young woman wanted to be a painter, even though she came from a poor family with no leisure for such indulgences. One can only imagine what they would have thought had they learned she was a lesbian, as Lipton concluded in her research for her slender, beautiful book, Alias Olympia: A Woman’s Search for Manet’s Notorious Model and Her Own Desire.

    Lipton, a petite, intense New Yorker, who came of age in the late 1960s, discovered “Olympia” in the early 1970s as a symbol in “those opening salvos of the Women’s Movement.” What better icon than “a woman whose naked body said: ‘See this? It’s mine. I will not be the object of your gaze, invisible to my own. This is my body, my life.”

    Consider for a minute Victorine Meurent’s world.

    In the Paris of 1861 whole classes of women were available — the cocottes, the lorettes, the grisettes — whose characteristics were well known to connoisseurs, even impecunious painters and poets. Some of the women were the mistresses of aristocrats and the rising rich of the bourgeoisie who could keep them in luxury, some were the mistresses of several men at a time, who might know perfectly well, but not always happily, that their paramours were the central figures in a small community of lovers. And then there were those women who worked in menial jobs, most famously as laundresses, but who also shared their favors for a few sous, hoping to climb the ladder toward greater comfort, like Émile Zola’s Nana, whatever the ultimate cost. Those were the “grisettes,” and there is even a statue dedicated to them above the Canal Saint Martin.

    The Emperor Napoleon III set the tone with his many well-known mistresses, most notably the amazing, beautiful, horribly vain Comtesse de Castiglione. His illegitimate half-brother, the powerful Duc de Morny, made no secret of his relationship with a comely Dutch-born courtesan, and, in 1861, his patronage of her teenage daughter Sarah Bernhardt as an actress at the Comédie Française.

    In the 1860s the physiognomy of the once-familiar city was changing daily and dramatically, becoming the Paris that now seems almost frozen in time. Huge new boulevards were being carved through the old quartiers of the Right Bank. Monumental buildings were going up, as solid as stone, as fanciful as the city’s over-wrought imagination. Construction was everywhere. Dust was everywhere. Speculators were everywhere.

    This was the Paris of Gustave Flaubert, who’d gained fame and infamy for his novel Madame Bovary a couple of years earlier. Charles Baudelaire’s “Tableaux Parisiens,” published in 1861 as an addition to Fleurs du Mal, captured the anomie of the metropolis at once destroyed and created by Napoleon III’s grandiose plans. One of the most striking poems, a lustful, ironic, half-metaphoric ode to a partially naked red-haired beggar girl certainly was not about Meurent but was about the way some men would have seen her:

    Pale girl with the auburn hair,

    Whose dress through its tears and holes

    Reveals your poverty

    And your beauty …

    Georges Feydeau amused the cynical city with his bedroom farces about the rich and indolent. Honoré Daumier caricatured Parisians in funny, bitter and increasingly dark detail, while younger painters struggled to break free of classical constraints. Manet and Cézanne were just beginning to come into their own. And the great photographer (and passionate, ambitious balloonist) Nadar tried to document it all.

    But it’s the journals of the Goncourt brothers that record, almost day by day, the intensity of literary and artistic creation and the casual decadence and domination of sexual relations with woman-objects.

    “I have my mistress seated on my knees wearing a shirt,” one of the Goncourts wrote toward the end of 1861. “I see from behind the shadow on the back of her neck, her face in the mirror is in the light. Wisps of her hair escape beneath her ear, curl like tiny agatized branches standing out against the luminous globe of the lamp on the mantelpiece. There is a strange pleasure in having thus on oneself the body of a woman about whom one sees nothing apart from the obscure flight of hair and the luminous reflection of her face, losing a little of its material reality in the mirror’s icy reflection.”

    The mistress is talking about death, and Goncourt is condescending to pay attention only for his intellectual amusement. “She’s talking about the burial of a neighbor – one of her favorite subjects. She talks about the decorations on the hearse, the beauty of the coffin whose oak had no knots, and she ends up declaring that if we do not do right by her funeral she would feel mortally offended. The epithet is oddly chosen, no?”

    The mistress’s body, her life, even her death was not her own.

    There are different stories about how Manet met Meurent, but it is likely that their first encounter came in the atelier of the painter Thomas Couture, whose “The Romans of The Decadence,” an enormous period piece full of drunken men and fawning women, hangs in the Orsay’s great hall almost within sight of “Olympia.”

    In the late 1850s Manet was studying with Couture, Meurent was modeling, but it is not entirely clear when they actually became acquainted. Once they were, Manet’s work shows that he could not take his eyes off of her.

    Meurent wasn’t just the central figure in “Déjeuner” and “Olympia,” she posed for Manet as a bullfighter wielding a sword, ready to kill with a flourish in “Mademoiselle Victorine in the Costume of a Matador,” and as an elegant lady in a silk dressing gown in “Woman with a Parrot.” Both paintings now hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She is a street singer holding a guitar in a canvas now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and she appears again in the later, somewhat stilted canvas of a woman with a book, a mother or governess next to a child looking through a fence at an unseen steam engine in “The Railway” at the National Gallery in D.C.

    To try to learn more about Meurent, I got in touch with Eunice Lipton and to my delight found that she spends much of her time in Paris. After exchanging a few emails, we met for a glass at a café in the 10th Arrondissement not far from the Gare du Nord.

    “Manet’s world was one world, and Victorine Meurent’s was another,” said Lipton. When they met, he was in his late 20s and she was in her middle or late teens. His background was bourgeois, she was from relative poverty, so there was tension there but also, for him, fascination. “The encounter of class and the encounter of desire is interesting,” said Lipton. “You don’t have to be an art historian to grasp that there was something between Manet and this woman he began to paint in 1862.”

    Whether that something was physical is not clear. Lipton thinks not. He clearly loved to paint women, especially the faces of women, and there are other models later on, most notably his sister-in-law Berthe Morisot, whom he drew with unmistakable adoration. She was of his class, and also an accomplished Impressionist painter. But that’s not quite what was going on with Meurent.

    What Manet looked to create in his best works, Lipton told me as she sipped a measure of scotch, was “a slab of reality that you wouldn’t forget.” He was in his way a revolutionary, and his passion for Meurent was what she could bring to his canvas, not what she could bring to his bed. “What Manet saw was a harder, crisper view of a Paris that could explode,” said Lipton. “He wasn’t a romantic. He was an anti-romantic, and so was she.”

    Lipton spent a year in France in the early 1990s trying to find out what happened to Meurent later in her life, when she was no longer posing for Manet or Degas or another less-revered painter, Alfred Stevens, with whom she allegedly had an affair.

    Scholars and avant-garde painters, even Suzanne Valadon, a powerful artist of a later generation whose mother had been a grisette, described Meurent as a drunken, dejected woman who prostituted herself, tried to cadge money from Manet’s widow, and claimed she was a painter without much to show for it.

    As you might imagine, Lipton dreaded coming to that conclusion, and in the end, her dogged detective work established that the conventional accounts of Meurent’s passing were off by about 30 years. She did not die in the late 1880s, as commonly believed, but in 1927. Moreover, Meurent not only learned to paint, her works were presented at the Salon, and in 1876 one of her canvases was accepted when Manet’s were not. In 1879, both she and he were in the “M” room. Her work there, perhaps her most ambitious, was a period called “Bourgeoise de Nuremberg au XVIeme Siecle,” but apart from that little is known. Altogether she exhibited in the prestigious Salon at the Académie des Beaux-Arts six times. In 1903 she was inducted into Société des Artistes Français.

    Meurent may may well have been a heavy drinker and she may have been a prostitute. There are many accounts of her decline in the 1880s. But it appears she had come out of that slough of despair by the time she started living with a woman named Marie Dufour in a house in Colombes, a town six or seven miles from the center of Paris.

    It was not a place where the intellectuals and artists often went, if ever, and her paintings were not of the kind the avant-garde that people paid attention to in later years. It seems, perhaps ironically, that they were more in the style of the era’s more conventional artists, perhaps even of Couture.

    What Lipton’s research showed her was that the great scholars of avant-garde art, including Adolphe Tabarant, author of what was long regarded as the definitive study of Manet and his work, had looked only at where Meurent came from, not where she was going. When they wrote about her they were focused on “an art world in which she did not live, and with which she had only occasionally rubbed shoulders.”

    “In the lexicon of the avant-garde art world, Meurent could not have figured as an artist,” Lipton wrote. “None of this means she was not an artist. It just means that her life was invisible to writers like Tabarant.”

    Are there works still extant by Meurent? A little museum in Colombes claims to have a couple. A gallery owner in Paris says he has at least one that is signed. They are not particularly distinguished, and Lipton notes a certain lack of forensic due diligence identifying the age and provenance of some “Meurent” canvases.

    Of course, I would like to believe she painted great paintings, just as I would love to see great sculptures by Rodin’s tortured disciple Camille Claudel. But if such works exist, they have not been found, not even the ones that were shown at the Salon.

    One might say that Meurent’s life was her art. But I think that’s not quite right. Her survival was her art, and ultimately it was on her own terms.

    “See this? It’s mine. I will not be the object of your gaze, invisible to my own. This is my body, my life.”

  18. মাসুদ করিম - ২৯ নভেম্বর ২০১৮ (৬:৫৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

    From ‘Last Tango’ to ‘Last Emperor,’ Bernardo Bertolucci Was the First and Last of His Kind

    The year 2018 is shaping up to be a tragedy of epic proportions for lovers of world cinema. In April, Czech director Milos Forman passed away, and now, in late November, within a matter of days, we have lost avant garde maestro Nicolas Roeg and that great Italian iconoclast Bernardo Bertolucci.

    Consider: Forman’s “Amadeus,” Roeg’s identity-shattering “Performance” (co-directed with Donald Cammell), and Bertolucci’s still unsurpassed exploration of moral ambiguity and personal compromise, “The Conformist.” The medium is inconceivable in its present form without these films, whose directors were hardly one-hit wonders, contributing masterpiece after masterpiece during the most fertile stretches of their careers. Though each had struggled to maintain his relevance in recent decades, any late-life disappointment seems inevitable when judged relative to the achievements that came before.

    Of the three, Bertolucci was by far the most successful at sustaining his impact until the end, for his brand was controversy, and even though few saw his final narrative stunt — “Io e te” (or “Me and You”), an out-of-touch rehash of themes previously explored in 1979’s quasi-incenstuous envelope-pusher “Luna,” this one shot in 3D — he was back in the headlines again two years ago over his treatment of actress Maria Schneider in the film “Last Tango in Paris.” At issue: whether Bertolucci’s instruction to Marlon Brando to surprise Schneider with a stick of butter in the film’s simulated rape scene constituted a violation in itself. In a 2007 interview with the Daily Mail, Schneider said, “I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci.” Schneider also specified that the sex was not real in the movie.

    In a way, this firestorm — which flared anew nearly 40 years after the film struck audiences like a kind of atomic bomb, forcing the international film community to confront a kind of grown-up sexuality never before depicted onscreen — served to illustrate just how potent the underlying work of art remained. Bertolucci defused the situation, to a degree, by clarifying how the scene was shot, but this was hardly the first time he’d found himself at the center of controversy. In fact, few of his films have opened without scandal of some kind, which can be attributed to his lifelong exploration of the political, spiritual, and carnal dimensions of the human experience — any one of which might incense certain audiences, but when taken together in different proportions across his filmography, seems a sure recipe to outrage the institutions.

    Personally, I like to think this approach — the compulsion to provoke, chipping away at the three pillars that underlie all human hypocrisy (politics, religion, sex) — was something he learned from the great Italian filmmaker-poet Pier Paolo Pasolini, for whom he worked as an assistant director, and from whom he learned his trade. Pasolini, for me, is perhaps the greatest filmmaker the medium has ever known, which is ironic, since he wasn’t necessarily a great director: Formally speaking, his films can often be quite clumsy, featuring uneven performances from actors with unforgettable faces, assembled somewhat awkwardly at times, and yet, in terms of sheer substance, they provoke and challenge and openly defy the values of the modern world.

    Bertolucci may have begun his apprenticeship on “Accattone” — Pasolini’s scrappy, street-level upgrade of the Italian neorealist tradition — but in the decades to come, his command of the cinematic craft would far surpass his teacher, to the extent that several of his films — “The Conformist,” “The Last Emperor,” “Little Buddha” — rank among the most beautiful movies ever made. Boasting breathtaking locations and nearly 2,000 costumed extras, “The Last Emperor” in particular is a feat nearly unfathomable in the present age of digitally enhanced filmmaking, and one for which film scholars must reach back nearly to D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance” to find precedent.

    With “The Last Emperor,” Bertolucci identified his Everest and set out to climb it, convincing the Chinese government to let him film in the Forbidden City, becoming the first Western feature ever to do so. Though the title emphasizes the absurd and seemingly tragic fate of Pu Yi — who was born a god among men, made emperor at the age of three, and ousted at seven — “The Last Emperor” is not so much about Pu Yi being the last of some great and noble tradition (yes, all that pageantry is part of the film’s appeal), but his becoming the first and only emperor to be given a chance to abdicate, re-educate, and assimilate into the modern world. (More thoughts on the Criterion Collection release here.)

    Set halfway across the world in the moments just before Benito Mussolini’s fall, his most significant artistic achievement, “The Conformist,” offers a complex and deeply disturbing character study of a young man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) whose past guilt makes him an ideal pawn for the Fascist Party, allowing him to accept far greater crimes — most notably, the assassination of a former teacher — in a corrupt attempt to clear his conscience of a murder and homosexual attraction in his past.

    The film, which predated Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” by two years, had an enormous influence on American cinema in the 1970s and beyond (DP Vittorio Storaro would later go on to shoot “Apocalypse Now”), both in its bold, expressionistic style and the insidious suggestion that a film’s “hero” could be so morally compromised.

    For me, “The Conformist” is a key text in understanding the career of Martin Scorsese, who, more than Tarantino, is a master synthesizer of all that has come before. Although Scorsese has cited countless influences over the years, “The Conformist” is the one film whose influences I find most consistently (or perhaps most intriguingly) woven throughout his oeuvre: a visual style unabashed about calling attention to itself, the notion of allowing a character’s psychology to dictate the film’s language, and a kind of direct, nonjudgmental approach toward violence that’s far more chilling for its apparent ambivalence.

    I met Bernardo Bertolucci just once, for an interview about his 2003 film “The Dreamers,” certainly one of the sexiest films ever made, which had sparked the umpteenth scandal of his career. Once again, Bertolucci was testing the limits of American prudishness with this steamy love triangle — an erotic awakening set in Paris against the backdrop of the political uprisings of May 1968 — which the MPAA had slapped with an NC-17 rating for a scene of male frontal nudity.

    Bertolucci was a large man, deeply intellectual, with a confidence in his opinions that I found quite intimidating, but have since come to recognize as a particularly Italian quality: an ability to lean back, swell one’s chest, and hold forth, repeating bold provocations with great certainty, no matter how outrageous. I had hoped to steer the conversation to his earlier work, though Bertolucci dismissed the idea, insisting that he thought of his past films like old lovers, preferring not to revisit them.

    “The Dreamers” was Bertolucci’s last great film — certainly far better than “Stealing Beauty,” which benefits from his gift for sensuous filmmaking, but ultimately feels too lecherous to be taken seriously. From “Last Tango in Paris” to “The Last Emperor,” Bertolucci’s career seems like a collection of lasts, but is in fact, one of beginnings, or of the anticipation of things to come. The title that best describes this outlook was that of his second feature, “Before the Revolution,” which conveys how knowing what was to come — say, the virginity Liv Tyler’s character is so determined to lose in “Stealing Beauty” — lends depth to drama that, if viewed solely in the context of the present, might seem frivolous. In a sense, Bertolucci was the revolution as far as cinema was concerned, and now we find ourselves with no more Molotov cocktails to anticipate, but the fires he started still raging strong.

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