বিভাগ/বিষয় নিরপেক্ষ

সুপারিশকৃত লিন্ক: অক্টোবর ২০১৩

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।

১০ comments

  1. মাসুদ করিম - ২ অক্টোবর ২০১৩ (১০:২৫ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    জাইদি সাত্তারের লেখাটি পড়ে আমার মনে হয়েছে, এই যে সবসময়ে বলি ‘বিজেএমইএ’এর নিজের ‘ব্যবসা ও অর্থনৈতিক পরিষদ’ গড়ে তোলা খুবই জরুরি, সেটা সত্যিই জরুরি — এছাড়া শ্রমিকের ন্যূনতম মজুরির গ্রহণযোগ্য আলোচনা যে শুধু পদে পদে বাধাগ্রস্ত হচ্ছে তা নয় এই শিল্পের ভবিষ্যৎ নিয়েও অন্ধকারে বসবাসের ঝুঁকি বেড়ে যাচ্ছে।

    Economics and business of minimum wage in RMG

    It is paradoxical that the our readymade garment (RMG) industry attained stupendous success on the back of what one local daily found it apt to describe as “ruthless exploitation” of workers. The truth might be a bit more sobering than that because of the complex phenomena created by a vast army of surplus labour desperately seeking work in a tight jobs market. The Rana Plaza episode has brought the issue of labour standards, worker rights, and workplace environment in the forefront of the discourse. These are issues not to be ignored anymore. Singular attention is now focused not just on a living wage but on what the minimum wage should be in the $20 billion garment industry. Raising the minimum wage will affect wage setting across the board in the RMG sector. It is as much a human and social challenge as it is an economic one.

    Thus the debate on the subject of raising the minimum wage in the RMG sector is heating up. Not surprisingly, there are as many shades of opinion as there are speakers on the subject. In my view, two aspects of the debate need to be carefully examined: the part that deals with providing a minimum living wage to the garment worker, and the part that affects the long-term sustainability of the RMG industry that will continue to be the biggest source of formal sector job creation in the country for some time to come. One cannot be resolved without taking the other into account. Though the first aspect has wider social implications, we also need to examine the underlying economic rationale behind setting a minimum wage and the income and employment implications of such a measure. Then there are the business implications related to cost escalation and maintaining of competitiveness in global markets which ought to be kept in focus.

    Employment in the RMG sector must first be looked at in the overall context of Bangladesh’s employment challenge. According to the Labour Force Survey of 2010, about 88% of our labour force of 65 million are employed in informal low-productivity jobs of which agriculture makes up for the lion’s share. The employment challenge is to move the workforce from informal, low-productivity jobs to formal sector jobs in manufacturing or services. The rapid expansion of the RMG sector provided the scope for directly absorbing some 4.0 million (40 lakh) workers — mostly women. In addition, significant numbers are also employed in RMG linkage industries such as fabrics, accessories, packaging and courier services. This transformation process needs to be sustained. That means the rights of workers and the incentives of entrepreneurs to manage and expand the business must both be nurtured. Otherwise, we will be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

    A minimum wage in the garment industry is seen as a tool to provide a way for workers in low-earning (entry level) jobs to have a self-sustainable standard of living. What is that in the Bangladesh and RMG context? It would be difficult to put a Taka figure on this wage. At best, it could be a range. However, economic theory does provide some rationale for minimum wage setting, while empirical research throws some light on the employment and income effects of this measure. Typically, a minimum wage (which is a wage floor) would be set at a level that is higher than the market clearing wage — a wage that would have prevailed in response to the uninhibited demand and supply of labour. The proximate result of setting a minimum wage in the textbook sense is to create unemployment as employers will be led to hire fewer workers at the higher than market clearing wage. Some workers eagerly looking for a job will not be hired. Empirical evidence from developing countries is mixed. Some research findings suggest that an increase in minimum wage is likely to have a positive wage effect for workers in the industry covered (RMG) by the minimum wage and a small negative employment effect which is stronger among low-wage workers. Overall, the evidence is rather inconclusive on whether minimum wages leave low-paid workers better off.

    Nevertheless, one can derive some clear indications from economic theory. If the labour market were perfectly competitive, the prediction is clear that an increase in the minimum wage would result in a reduction of employment. But the overall effect of the RMG minimum wage on the economy depends on multiple factors, including the degree of competition in the labour market, relative level of the minimum wage to the market clearing wage, structure of minimum wages, share of workforce covered by minimum wage, elasticities of demand in the RMG and non-RMG sectors.

    However, theory and evidence reveal that departures from the perfectly competitive model can lead to dramatic changes in the predicted effect of the minimum wage. And labour markets in the real world are seldom perfectly competitive. In a monopsonistic labour market (which is the case with RMG producers wielding asymmetric market power in hiring decisions), a moderate increase in the minimum wage that is greater than the market clearing wage but less than the marginal revenue product of labour (MRP), results in an increase in employment and wages. That is, if RMG producers were to increase minimum wage which is still lower than the incremental sales revenue from an extra low-wage worker (which is what MRP is), then the effects are positive. But if minimum wage exceeds MRP, then employment and income effects are negative — a lose-lose scenario. So the first order of business is to find the marginal revenue productivity of entry level (low-wage) workers in RMG. While there might be scope for raising the minimum wage, it is critical to ensure that minimum wage is not set above the marginal revenue product of labour of low-wage workers. That is the clear economic policy message. In the circumstances, it is for RMG producers to share the information on this critical indicator (for an average RMG factory) that will help in determining the feasible increase in minimum wage in the RMG sector from its current level of Tk. 3000/-. If any proposed minimum wage is found to be higher than the marginal revenue product of low-wage workers, it will hurt this group of workers as well as the employers. If it is lower, then all is well and good. This marginal revenue product is not carved in stone. It is a function of the price that exporters can fetch in the world market. There lies the catch.

    The other logical outcome of raising the minimum wage is that it could lead to the upward revision of all categories of RMG wages thus resulting in substantial one-time cost escalation. The cost escalation would be greater depending on the rise in the minimum wage. So one should expect greater resistance from employers to higher fixation of minimum wage.

    Now if the minimum wage is raised, doing nothing will simply raise production cost per unit in RMG. What can producers do to stay competitive? A number of options are available to companies: employers may respond by becoming more efficient/productive; companies may settle for lower profits; employers may respond by cutting back on benefits or overtime; companies may actually improve output through less employee turnover; workers themselves might respond by voluntarily working harder. What would happen in reality is perhaps a mix of all these possibilities.

    That brings us to the business implications of minimum wage. In the context of Bangladesh RMG, what might be most difficult to realise would be to raise output prices in response to higher cost escalation. Unlike sales in the domestic market where prices can be jacked up in response to cost escalation, RMG exporters have very little say on price determination in the international market. They are basically price takers. This needs a bit of explaining from an economist’s point of view. International prices are determined by global demand and supply conditions on which our RMG exporters have little control since they are not owners of brand name clothing. They can export increasing volumes only at the prevailing prices. If they raise prices unilaterally, they will lose markets. Because cut-throat competition in the world market prevents them from asking and getting a higher price just because domestic costs went up. Consequently, their margins are going to be squeezed when costs escalate. The question is how much room do they have? This is a grey area on which there is minimal information; and it would be in the interest of the RMG producers to share data with researchers on revenue and profits.

    A look at relative minimum wages across competing countries (Fig.1) might give some but not complete idea of margins in Bangladesh. To give one example, if both Bangladesh and Vietnam supply Calvin Klein trousers of the same design which is sold at the same price in New York Macy’s, it is likely that either (a) margins are higher in Bangladesh, or (b) prices offered to buyers (e.g. GAP) are lower, or both.

    It is often argued that our RMG entrepreneurs are a rich class making huge profits. That may be true but they have no Bangladesh brand to command market power. Moreover, there is fierce domestic competition to get buyers’ contracts thus lowering prices to rock bottom. The market power to determine prices is described by economists as “monopoly power”. Brand name clothing chains — e.g. Tommy Hilfiger, Levis, Calvin Klein, Van Heusen — who source their product from Bangladesh are the ones exercising monopoly power in a market that may be loosely described as monopolistic competition. Each product is differentiated from the other — a differentiation that attracts loyal customers. This product differentiation commands extra price in the global marketplace, often loosely related to cost of production. This is why retail and distribution margins can be huge and a function of product differentiation, while cutting and making margins (received by most RMG producers in Bangladesh) are relatively small. Until such time that we have a Bangladesh brand that sells in Walmart or Target, or Macy’s, we can only be at the receiving-end of price making.
    That is not to say that our producers cannot sit down with buyers and negotiate prices. International pressure that has been mounted is not all about raising wages and labour standards in Bangladesh RMG factories, it is also about global brand name buyers paying a decent price for products they buy from Bangladesh so that Bangladeshi producers in turn can pay higher wages and improve compliance. So higher minimum wages could help overall cost increases that buyers would be forced to pay as long as Bangladesh still remains competitive vis-à-vis other countries. It is not unknown that in the product value chain, retail and distribution margins are large and leaves room for absorbing some of the cost escalation in Bangladesh industry.
    Nevertheless, at the end of the day, it is the asymmetrical market power in the global clothing market that determines who is a price-maker and who, a price-taker. Do Bangladeshi RMG exporters face an impervious price ceiling?

  2. মাসুদ করিম - ২ অক্টোবর ২০১৩ (৭:১০ অপরাহ্ণ)

    চীনের কী হবে? চীনের রাজনৈতিক রাশ মধ্য থেকে ডানে হেললেই চীনের ধ্বংস অনিবার্য এবং পার্টি বোঝার আগেই তা ঘটে যেতে পারে। পার্টি তাই এখন থেকেই ভাবছে কী করা যায়। সাংস্কৃতিক আন্দোলন, অর্থনৈতিক সংস্কার, পার্টি মনোনীত রাষ্ট্রপতি পদে সাধারণ ভোট — এরকম একগুচ্ছ কর্মপন্থা নিয়ে সামনে যেতে চায় চীনের মধ্যপন্থায় বদ্ধমূল একক শাসনতান্ত্রিক পার্টি।

    A devious blueprint to empower the party
    By Francesco Sisci

    A few days ago, a junior official came to me asking to check the name of an Italian author and the thesis of a book. At first I really could not figure out the author, but then from the name of the book I made out the writer. The official wanted to apply the argument of the book to the Communist Party. He was raving and talking what I thought was nonsense. I tried to calm him down, but he then grew even more agitated trying to explain the deep connections between these two old civilizations, China and Italy, that went well beyond the love for spaghetti or fireworks.

    I pretended to understand and agree, but actually could not quite get it. He calmed down and left on my table two typewritten pages with some blurred red stamps on them. The pages were a more lucid presentation of what he was talking about and even more bizarre than I figured. It is unlikely that anybody will pay attention to this, yet to add to the many thoughts circulating on the Internet nowadays, I figured I would translate it, adapt it, and just for fun offer it to readers patient enough to follow me. The missive follows …

    ***

    The predicament of President Xi Jinping is quite understandable. After the difficulties he faced in carrying out the broad economic and political reforms he had in mind early this year, and because he had to eradicate the influence of former Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai, Xi had to move fast to concentrate power and don the neo-Maoist mantle of his enemy, Bo. Therefore he could only use the tools he had available: Mao’s old techniques of launching a propaganda campaign for the unification of thought and mobilizing the people against the party’s middle ranks. The president is doing this through his ongoing campaign for self-criticism and his emphasis on control of the media.

    To concentrate power, Xi had also to show he was in the middle and not leaning too much on the right. Therefore he had to clamp down on high-flying dissident financier Wang Gongquan in order to better strike down the top echelons of people still supporting Bo.

    This I all understand: it is old-school Chinese Communist Party and necessary at this moment, as it was after the Tiananmen protests in 1989 or the Falun gong movement in 1999. But party history also shows that these tools cannot be used for a long time, and after a while they tend to backfire. To unify thoughts in the short term gives power to the center, but in the medium and long term makes the center blind and management at the grassroots ineffective. Everybody will be afraid to report the truth out of fear of offending their superiors, and everybody will stop taking initiatives in ruling their areas since they are scared of being criticized for deviating from the center.

    Soon, the country will fall apart from the periphery and the center will not be informed; and the leaders will realize this when it is too late. This happened during Mao’s times, but then China was closed and the impact of these mistakes could be digested over a long period of time. Now China is open and similar mistakes could be much harder to digest and could produce deep cracks in the society and party.

    China needs a change of the political system and it must look at Western democracies for inspiration, just as it looked at the West when it imported Marxism as its main theory for the communist revolution or took from the West when it started Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. However, the party has to be clear that western democracy is not an absolute democracy. It is a system built to find peaceful compromises and agreements between different interest groups and different agendas for running a country.

    Power struggle is inherent in any power structure, but a different political system can resolve a power struggle in a peaceful or not peaceful manner. Western democracies have managed to solve their power struggle issues in a peaceful manner that ultimately better preserves the losing party (who most times do not end up in prison) and the system, because the power struggle does not affect the system but only the interested parties.

    Therefore we think that although these present measures are necessary, the center should think about the medium and long term, as described in the Italian novel The Leopard by Tomasi di Lampedusa. To enhance the power of the center and of the party in China, everything has to change – in order to change nothing. The Italian writer described the behavior of the Sicilian aristocracy around 1861, when Garibaldi liberated the south of Italy and gave it to the Piedmont to rule. The Sicilian aristocrats, who a few years before sided with the king of Naples in cracking down on the liberals, later turned into supporters of liberal Garibaldi in order to retain their power and continue accruing their riches.

    Our [the Communist] party perhaps ought to do the same with a medium- and long-term plan.

    After the end of this mass campaign and the launch of the long-promised economic reforms, which will reduce the power and money of the state-owned enterprises, the president should consider two moves.

    In the medium term, he should consider a cultural campaign centered on China being a normal country in the world, and thus adhering to generally accepted international practices. China cannot be isolated with its “Chinese characteristics” any longer, as it is part of a global environment, and neither can it impose its “Chinese characteristics” on the whole world. China has to adapt by absorbing foreign ideas and contributing ideas to the world. This is a path already shown by thinkers like Zhao Tingyang and Ge Zhaoguang, who are both very Chinese and can be very international. This cultural campaign is the only real guarantee that a neo-Maoist campaign a la Bo Xilai will cut less and less ice in the country.

    In the long term, there should be open elections between two candidates selected by the party but voted on by the whole population, who then will have a sense of belonging. The rest of the world will also take part and feel they are inside China, and thus de facto supportive of its political system. To have a vote before the cultural campaign would only lead to the election of a nationalist demagogue. Bo Xilai was not a real leftist; he only leaned on the left because he understood it would help him get popular approval and support from old party veterans. The cultural campaign therefore cannot be short or hasty.

    Now is surely not the time, but the president should consider announcing soon his plans for the future. Many in China are very uncertain about the direction of the country, and despite easy sympathies with the new left, the real “decision-makers” – the people able to make money, the ones able produce the necessary new ideas, and many honest officials – are worried that reforms may stall and lead back to a Maoist path. If they do not feel reassured, they could flee abroad or stop working, both things that will hamper our growth and development, and thus all our ambitions to become a great country.

    Conversely, these steps would insure our party’s hold on power, which is our ultimate goal.

  3. মাসুদ করিম - ৫ অক্টোবর ২০১৩ (২:২৬ অপরাহ্ণ)

    ১০২ বছর বয়সে জীবনাবসান গতকাল, হাসপাতালে তার জীবন কাটছিল ২০০৯ থেকে, তাকে বলা হয় সর্বকালের সর্বশ্রেষ্ঠ সামরিক স্ট্র্যাটিজিস্ট, পৃথিবীর দুই পরাক্রমশালী সামরিক বাহিনি ফ্রান্স ও আমেরিকাকে তার নেতৃত্বে হারিয়েছিল ভিয়েতনামের অকুতোভয় মুক্তি সেনানিরা, সাম্রাজ্যবাদকে তার মতো এমন করে কেউ পদদলিত করেনি, তিনি ভিয়েতনামের প্রাণপ্রিয় ‘জেনারেল গিয়াপ’, পুরো নাম ভো নগুয়েন গিয়াপ।

    3490188_4_c9c3_portrait-diffuse-le-5-juillet-1976-par-l-agence_bf5cdc9566f6b7c25144bb2d122b6e12

    Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, Who Ousted U.S. From Vietnam, Is Dead

    Vo Nguyen Giap, the relentless and charismatic North Vietnamese general whose campaigns drove both France and the United States out of Vietnam, died on Friday in Hanoi. He was believed to be 102.

    The death was reported by several Vietnamese news organizations, including the respected Tuoi Tre Online, which said he had died in an army hospital.

    General Giap was among the last survivors of a generation of Communist revolutionaries who in the decades after World War II freed Vietnam of colonial rule and fought a superpower to a stalemate. In his later years, he was a living reminder of a war that was mostly old history to the Vietnamese, many of whom were born after it had ended.

    But he had not faded away. He was regarded as an elder statesman whose hard-line views had softened with the cessation of the war that unified Vietnam. He supported economic reform and closer relations with the United States while publicly warning of the spread of Chinese influence and the environmental costs of industrialization.

    To his American adversaries, however, from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, he was perhaps second only to his mentor, Ho Chi Minh, as the face of a tenacious, implacable enemy. And to historians, his willingness to sustain staggering losses against superior American firepower was a large reason the war dragged on as long as it did, costing more than 2.5 million lives — 58,000 of them American — sapping the United States Treasury and Washington’s political will to fight, and bitterly dividing the country in an argument about America’s role in the world that still echoes today.

    A teacher and journalist with no formal military training, Vo Nguyen Giap (pronounced vo nwin ZHAP) joined a ragtag Communist insurgency in the 1940s and built it into a highly disciplined force that ended an empire and united a nation.

    He was charming and volatile, an erudite military historian and an intense nationalist who used his personal magnetism to motivate his troops and fire their devotion to their country. His admirers put him in the company of MacArthur, Rommel and other great military leaders of the 20th century.

    But his critics said that his victories had been rooted in a profligate disregard for the lives of his soldiers. Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who commanded American forces in Vietnam from 1964 until 1968, said, “Any American commander who took the same vast losses as General Giap would not have lasted three weeks.”

    General Giap understood something that his adversaries did not, however. Early on, he learned that the loyalty of Vietnam’s peasants was more crucial than controlling the land on which they lived. Like Ho Chi Minh, he believed devoutly that the Vietnamese would be willing to bear any burden to free their land from foreign armies.

    He knew something else as well, and profited from it: that waging war in the television age depended as much on propaganda as it did on success in the field.

    These lessons were driven home in the Tet offensive of 1968, when North Vietnamese regulars and Vietcong guerrillas attacked scores of military targets and provincial capitals throughout South Vietnam, only to be thrown back with staggering losses. General Giap had expected the offensive to set off uprisings and show the Vietnamese that the Americans were vulnerable.

    Militarily, it was a failure. But the offensive came as opposition to the war was growing in the United States, and the televised savagery of the fighting fueled another wave of protests. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had been contemplating retirement months before Tet, decided not to seek re-election, and with the election of Richard M. Nixon in November, the long withdrawal of American forces began.

    General Giap had studied the military teachings of Mao Zedong, who wrote that political indoctrination, terrorism and sustained guerrilla warfare were prerequisites for a successful revolution. Using this strategy, General Giap defeated the French Army’s elite and its Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, forcing France from Indochina and earning the grudging admiration of the French.

    “He learned from his mistakes and did not repeat them,” Gen. Marcel Bigeard, who as a young colonel of French paratroops surrendered at Dien Bien Phu, told Peter G. Macdonald, one of General Giap’s biographers. But “to Giap,” he said, “a man’s life was nothing.”

    Hanoi’s casualty estimates are unreliable, so the cost of General Giap’s victories will probably never be known. About 94,000 French troops died in the war to keep Vietnam, and the struggle for independence killed, by conservative estimates, about 300,000 Vietnamese fighters. In the American war, about 2.5 million North and South Vietnamese died out of a total population of 32 million. America lost about 58,000 service members.

    “Every minute, hundreds of thousands of people die on this earth,” General Giap is said to have remarked after the war with France. “The life or death of a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousands of human beings, even our compatriots, means little.”

    A Student of Revolution

    Vo Nguyen Giap was born on Aug. 25, 1911 (some sources say 1912), in the village of An Xa in Quang Binh Province, the southernmost part of what would later be North Vietnam. His father, Vo Quang Nghiem, was an educated farmer and a fervent nationalist who, like his father before him, encouraged his children to resist the French.

    Mr. Giap earned a degree in law and political economics in 1937 and then taught history at the Thanh Long School, a private institution for privileged Vietnamese in Hanoi, where he was known for the intensity of his lectures on the French Revolution. He also studied Lenin and Marx and was particularly impressed by Mao’s theories on combining political and military strategy to win a revolution.

    In 1941, Ho Chi Minh, the founder of the Vietnamese Communist Party, chose Mr. Giap to lead the Viet Minh, the military wing of the Vietnam Independence League.

    In late 1953, the French established a stronghold in the northwest at Dien Bien Phu, near the border with Laos, garrisoned by 13,000 Vietnamese and North African colonial troops as well as the French Army’s top troops and its elite Foreign Legion.

    After an eight-week siege by Communist forces, the last French outposts were overrun on May 7, 1954. The timing was a political masterstroke, coming on the very day that negotiators met in Geneva to discuss a settlement. Faced with the failure of their strategy, French negotiators gave up and agreed to withdraw. The country split into a Communist-ruled north and a non-Communist south.

    In the late 1950s and early ’60s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and later President John F. Kennedy looked on with rising anxiety as Communist forces stepped up their guerrilla war. By the time Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, the United States had more than 16,000 troops in South Vietnam.

    General Westmoreland relied on superior weaponry to wage a war of attrition, in which he measured success by the number of enemy dead. Though the Communists lost in any comparative “body count” of casualties, General Giap was quick to see that the indiscriminate bombing and massed firepower of the Americans caused heavy civilian casualties and alienated many Vietnamese from the government the Americans supported.

    With the war in stalemate and Americans becoming less tolerant of accepting casualties, General Giap told a European interviewer, South Vietnam “is for the Americans a bottomless pit.”

    A Turning Point

    On Jan. 30, 1968, during a cease-fire in honor of the Vietnamese New Year (called Tet Nguyen Dan), more than 80,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops hit military bases and cities throughout South Vietnam in what would be called the Tet offensive. For the Communists, things went wrong from the start. Some Vietcong units attacked prematurely, without the backing of regular troops as planned. Suicide squads, like one that penetrated the United States Embassy in Saigon, were quickly wiped out.

    Despite some successes — the North Vietnamese entered the city of Hue and held it for three weeks — the offensive was a military disaster. The hoped-for uprisings never took place, and some 40,000 Communist fighters were killed or wounded. The Vietcong never regained the strength it had before Tet.

    But the fierceness of the assault illustrated Hanoi’s determination to win and shook the American public and leadership.

    “The Tet offensive had been directed primarily at the people of South Vietnam,” General Giap said later, “but as it turned out, it affected the people of the United States more. Until Tet, they thought they could win the war, but now they knew that they could not.”

    He told the journalist Stanley Karnow in 1990, “We wanted to show the Americans that we were not exhausted, that we could attack their arsenals, communications, elite units, even their headquarters, the brains behind the war.”

    He added, “We wanted to project the war into the homes of America’s families, because we knew that most of them had nothing against us.”

    The United States government began peace talks in Paris in May 1968. The next year, Nixon began withdrawing American troops under his policy of Vietnamization, which called for the South Vietnamese troops to bear the brunt of the fighting.

    In March 1972, the North Vietnamese carried out the Easter offensive on three fronts, expanding their holdings in Cambodia and Laos and bringing temporary gains in South Vietnam. But it ended in defeat, and General Giap again bore the brunt of criticism for the heavy losses. In summer 1972, he was replaced by Gen. Van Tien Dung, possibly because he had fallen from favor but possibly because, as was rumored, he had Hodgkin’s disease.

    Although he was removed from direct command in 1973, General Giap remained minister of defense, overseeing North Vietnam’s final victory over South Vietnam and the United States when Saigon, the South’s capital, fell on April 30, 1975. He also guided the invasion of Cambodia in January 1979, which ousted the brutal Communist Khmer Rouge. The next month, after Hanoi had established a new government in Phnom Penh, Chinese troops attacked along the North Vietnamese border to drive home the point that China remained the paramount regional power.

    It was General Giap’s last military campaign. He was removed as minister of defense in 1980 after his chief rivals, Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, eased him out of the Politburo. Too prominent to be openly denounced, he was instead made vice prime minister for science and education.

    But his days of real power were gone. In August 1991, he was ousted after Vo Van Kiet, a Western-style reformer, came to power.

    In his final years, General Giap was an avuncular host to foreign visitors to his villa in Hanoi, where he read extensively in Western literature, enjoyed Beethoven and Liszt and became a convert to pursuing socialism through free-market reforms.

    “In the past, our greatest challenge was the invasion of our nation by foreigners,” he told an interviewer. “Now that Vietnam is independent and united, we can address our biggest challenge. That challenge is poverty and economic backwardness.”

    Addressing that challenge had long been deferred, he told the journalist Neil Sheehan in 1989. “Our country is like an ill person who has suffered for a long time,” he said. “The countries around us made a lot of progress. We were at war.”

  4. মাসুদ করিম - ৭ অক্টোবর ২০১৩ (৭:৫৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

    এটা খুবই মজার এক শব্দে পৃথিবী, বড়ি, বেলুন, বুলেটকে বোঝানো — শব্দটি হিব্রু ‘কাদুর’।

    Word of the Day / Kadur: Around the ball in 80 days
    By Shoshana Kordova

    Balls in Hebrew have got nothing to do with a man’s crown jewels (those are eggs in the holy tongue, naturally), but you need to invoke the spherical object known as a kadur (ka-DOOR, with the second syllable pronounced like the “oo” in “pool” if you want to talk about pills, bullets, hot-air balloons or the Earth.

    The formal word for “pills” is glulot and for “bullets” is kli’im, but both are also regularly referred to as kadurim, the Hebrew plural for “balls” or “spheres.”

    As for our planet, kadur ha’aretz, literally “ball of the land,” means both Earth and the circular map known as a globe (though the latter is often referred to as a globus). Similarly, a hemisphere is a hatzi kadur; the term in both English and Hebrew means “half a sphere.”

    Though I’m not sure why one would want to promote the notion that the Earth is flat, the Hebrew term makes it quite tough for flat-Earthers to do that. You would have to say that the ball is flat, and that sounds dumb even if you really don’t like Pythagoras, Aristotle, Euclid or Ptolemy, all of whom wrote about the Earth as a sphere way before Columbus set sail, as Valerie Strauss points out in her Answer Sheet blog in The Washington Post.

    As for the derivation, Avraham Even-Shoshan speculates that kadur may have come from the word dur, which means “circle” and comes, in turn, from the Akkadian word duru, meaning “wall that surrounds a city.” Ka is a shortened version of k’mo, meaning “like,” such that kadur means “like a circle.”The word is used in Isaiah: “And I will encamp against thee round about [kadur], and will lay siege against thee with a mound, and I will raise siege works against thee” (29:3).

    As one might expect, kadur is a key component of kadur-sal (basketball), kadur-regel (football, a.k.a. soccer) and kadur-af, which refers to volleyball but literally means “flying ball.” It also comprises 50 percent of a kadur pore’ah, literally a “flowering ball” or, more to the point, a “flying-away ball,” otherwise known as a hot-air balloon.

    The noun kadur, in the sense of “ball,” can also be used as a verb. Kidrur means dribbling the ball, whether with your hands, as in basketball, or your feet, as in soccer.

    Whichever sport you might play or watch, the many forms that the Israeli ballcan take make it imperative that you heed what is perhaps the most basic of all sports rules: Always keep your eye on the kadur.

  5. মাসুদ করিম - ৮ অক্টোবর ২০১৩ (১০:১১ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    সকালে ঘুম থেকে উঠেই মৃত্যুসংবাদ, আমার অত্যন্ত পছন্দের ফরাসি চিত্রপরিচালক পাত্রিস শেরো (Patrice Chéreau) ৬৮ বছর বয়সে গতকাল মারা গেছেন। সর্বকালের সেরাদের মাপের এই পরিচালককে হারিয়ে ফ্রান্স শোকাভিভূত। IMDb তে Patrice Chéreau পাতা।

    3491558_3_6c09_patrice-chereau-en-1983-lors-d-une-reception_daa14b37e7d501064503ba2d5f1762cc

    Patrice Chéreau, Opera, Stage and Film Director, Dies at 68

    Patrice Chéreau, a director whose iconoclastic theater, opera and film productions sometimes offered broad social critiques that made them both deeply provocative and widely influential, died on Monday in Paris. The French newspaper Libération reported that he died of lung cancer. He was 68.

    Mr. Chéreau, who also acted and wrote for the screen, came to international prominence in 1976, when he staged a production of Wagner’s operatic tetralogy, “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” at Bayreuth, the festival Wagner founded, on the centenary of the first “Ring” cycle.

    Wagner’s epic told of the ruthless interplay of ancient Norse gods in a world of mortals, giants, dragons and dwarves. But in his production, which was conducted by Pierre Boulez, Mr. Chéreau updated the action to the mid-19th century — Wagner’s time — and replaced some of the mythological scenery with industrial age machinery.

    For Mr. Chéreau, the story was a Marxist allegory of capitalism and the exploitation of the working class. It was an approach he based partly on ideas that George Bernard Shaw explored in “The Perfect Wagnerite,” in 1898, but his staging — in Bayreuth, no less — was unlike anything Wagner fans had seen. Moreover, its audience was magnified when a film of the production was broadcast around the world (by PBS in the United States) and released on home video.

    Audiences were split between those who were outraged and those who regarded Mr. Chéreau’s approach as unalloyed genius. That production, in any case, helped open the floodgates of directorial reinterpretation of opera, in which the original settings and relationships were reconfigured to represent a director’s viewpoint. That approach quickly became accepted in the opera world, and when his “Ring” cycle had its final performance at Bayreuth, in 1980, it was given a 45-minute standing ovation.

    Mr. Chéreau was born on Nov. 2, 1944, in Lézigné, Maine-et-Loire, in western France, to parents who were both painters. He developed a passion for the theater as a child, and became manager of his high school theater when he was 15. When he was 19, and a student at the Sorbonne, he directed a production of Victor Hugo’s “Intervention” that was so successful that he left the university to start his own theater company in Paris.

    He began directing in Italy and Germany in the early 1970s, and he had a few opera productions under his belt, including a staging of Offenbach’s “Contes d’Hoffmann” at the Paris Opera by the time he undertook his Bayreuth “Ring.”

    Mr. Chéreau’s other opera productions include both of Berg’s operas — “Wozzeck” in Paris and Berlin, the three-act version of “Lulu” in Paris — as well as Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” (at the Salzburg Festival) and “Così Fan Tutte” (at Aix-en-Provence) and Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” (at La Scala). But he professed ambivalence about opera.

    “Once or twice in your life, it’s a great opportunity to take on a 14-hour work,” he told The New York Times in 1985. ”You learn to have reflexes of steel. But opera consists merely of works from the past — and for audiences I don’t particularly like. Directing opera provides a pleasure akin to reviving the dead.”

    Mr. Chéreau’s many films include “Flesh of the Orchid” (1975); “Queen Margot,” which won the 1994 Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize; “Intimacy” (2001), which won the Berlin Film Festival Golden Bear award; “His Brother” (2003) and “Persécution” (2009).

    He gave master classes in film at Columbia University, the City College of New York and the School of Visual Arts in 2003, and was president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival the same year.

    He was a guest curator at the Louvre in 2010.

    Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, where Mr. Chéreau’s production of Janacek’s “From the House of the Dead” was staged in 2009, described Mr. Chéreau as “one of the most influential European directors of theater and opera of the last 50 years.

    “He once jokingly told me,” Mr. Gelb said in an interview of Mr. Chéreau, “that he was responsible for the movement disparagingly referred to as ‘Eurotrash,’ because his production of the Ring at Bayreuth, which is now legendary, was the first kind of high-concept operatic production that radically transformed the action.”

    Mr. Chéreau’s most recent production, a staging of Richard Strauss’s “Elektra,” which had its premiere this summer in Aix-en-Provence, is on the Metropolitan Opera’s schedule for 2016.

  6. মাসুদ করিম - ৯ অক্টোবর ২০১৩ (১০:৩৯ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    লেখার দশ নিয়ম, বাতলে দিলেন মার্গারিট এটউড।

    Margaret Atwood’s 10 Rules of Writing
    by Maria Popova

    “­Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.”

    In the winter of 2010, inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing published in The New York Times nearly a decade earlier, The Guardian asked some of today’s most celebrated authors to each produce a list of personal writing commandments. After 10 from Zadie Smith and 8 from Neil Gaiman, here comes Margaret Atwood with her denary decree:

    Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

    If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

    Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

    If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.

    Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

    Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What ­fascinates A will bore the pants off B.

    You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.

    You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

    Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

    Prayer might work. Or reading ­something else. Or a constant visual­ization of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

  7. মাসুদ করিম - ২৪ অক্টোবর ২০১৩ (১০:১৫ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    মহাসিন্ধুর ওপারেই চলে গেলেন, দীর্ঘ রোগ ভোগের পর, মান্না দে আজ সকালে বেঙ্গালোরের এক হাসপাতালে ৯৪ বছর বয়সে মারা গেছেন। তার গান চিরদিন শুনবে মানুষ কিন্তু তার কণ্ঠস্বর চিরদিনের জন্য স্মৃতি হয়ে গেল।

    Legendary singer Manna Dey dies at 94 in Bangalore

    Legendary singer Manna Dey died on Thursday morning in a Bangalore hospital. Manna Dey was being treated for respiratory illness and renal failure. Manna Dey’s daughter and son-in-law were with him at the time of his death. His body will be kept for public viewing to pay tributes at Bangalore’s Ravindra Kala Shetra from 10 am to 12 pm, following which his funeral will be held. The 94 year-old-legendary singer began his playback career in 1943 with the film Tamanna. He has sung over 3,500 songs in Hindi, Bengali and other regional languages.

    কিংবদন্তি শিল্পী মান্না দে আর নেই

    দীর্ঘদিন অসুস্থতার সঙ্গে লড়াই করে বৃহস্পতিবার ভোরে বেঙ্গালোরের একটি হাসপাতালে তার মৃত্যু হয়। তার বয়স হয়েছিল ৯৪ বছর।

    গত পহেলা মে এই প্রখ্যাত গায়কের ৯৪তম জন্মদিন পালন করা হয়। পশ্চিমবঙ্গের মুখ্যমন্ত্রী মমতা বন্দ্যোপাধ্যায়ও সেদিন তার সঙ্গে দেখা করেন।

    এবারের জন্মদিনে পশ্চিমবঙ্গ সরকারের পক্ষ থেকে মান্না দে কে ‘বিশেষ সংগীত মহাসম্মান’ দেয়া হয়।

    শিল্পী সেদিন মমতাকে জানান, স্ত্রী সুলোচনার স্মৃতিতে কিছু গান রেকর্ড করার জন্য অসুস্থ শরীরেও তিনি কলকাতায় ফিরতে চান।

    ১৯৫০ থেকে ১৯৭০ এর দশকে ভারতীয় চলচ্চিত্রে গান গেয়ে জনপ্রিয় হয়ে ওঠা এই শিল্পীর জন্ম ১৯১৯ সালে। পরিবারের দেয়া নাম প্রবোধ চন্দ্র দে হলেও ভারতীয় উপমহাদেশের সংগীতপ্রেমীরা তাকে মান্না দে নামে এক নামে চেনে।

    বাংলা ও হিন্দি ছাড়াও মারাঠি, গুজরাটিসহ ভারতের বিভিন্ন ভাষায় গাওয়া অসংখ্য জনপ্রিয় গানের কল্যাণে মান্না দে পরিণত হয়েছেন জীবন্ত কিংবদন্তীতে।

    কফি হাউজের সেই আড্ডাটা; আবার হবে তো দেখা; এই কূলে আমি, আর ওই কূলে তুমি; তীর ভাঙা ঢেউ আর নীড় ভাঙা ঝড়; যদি কাগজে লেখো নাম; সে আমার ছোট বোনসহ মান্না দের কণ্ঠের বহু গান বাংলাদেশের শ্রোতাদের কাছেও দারুণ জনপ্রিয়।

    সংগীতে অসামান্য অবদানের জন্য ভারত সরকারের দেয়া পদ্মশ্রী, পদ্মবিভূষণসহ বহু পুরস্কার ও সম্মাননা পেয়েছেন এই শিল্পী।

  8. মাসুদ করিম - ২৮ অক্টোবর ২০১৩ (১১:০৪ অপরাহ্ণ)

    রাস্তার পান্ক কবি, ভেলভেট আন্ডারগ্রাউন্ড ব্যান্ডের দলনেতা, চেকস্লোভাকিয়ার ভেলভেট রেভুলিউশন-এর অন্যতম অনুপ্রেরণাদাতা আমেরিকার কিংবদন্তি গায়ক লু রিড (Lou Reed), রবিবার ৭১ বছর বয়সে নিউইয়র্কে মৃত্যবরণ করেছেন।

    3503806_5_6c40_lou-reed-en-2000-au-printemps-de-bourges_40fa4043c630686e41c76a90d1b98a74

    Appreciation: Lou Reed lived in the musical moment

    As the summer of ’69 collapsed into the autumn of the unknown, Lou Reed had a question for the youth of Texas: “Do you people have a curfew or anything like that?”

    It was Oct. 19. Two months after Woodstock. The crowd that had gathered in Dallas that night to see the Velvet Underground was too meek to give much of a response.

    “Then this is gonna go on for a while,” Reed said, “so we should get used to each other.”

    Reed — who died Sunday at age 71 — never let this world get used to him. He sang about lives infinitely more dangerous, glamorous, horrific and insane than ours. Most of the time, he was living one, too.

    That night in Dallas, after the chit-chat died down, he started strumming “I’m Waiting for the Man,” a brilliant ramble about the $26 bulging from his jeans pockets to pay his heroin dealer — “feel sick and dirty, more dead than alive.” It’s the first cut from “1969: The Velvet Underground Live,” an album that best captures the Velvets in all of their casual brutality.

    The band started recording in 1965, when the Beatles were singing about hiding your love away. Reed wanted to sing about folks hiding in the gutters of New York City — junkies, prostitutes, artists and other assorted maniacs. His grime fantasies made danger feel like the intersection of nihilistic fun and abject fear. The noises that came coughing out of his guitar amp were as messy as the world he was singing about.

    It didn’t take long for the Velvets to find a champion in Andy Warhol, an association that gave their street ballads the sheen of high art. It also helped make Reed the archetype of Gotham cool. Black leather jackets and giant sunglasses have become respective American industries. So, too, did glam, punk and alternative rock. But that all took time.

    All four studio albums Reed made with the Velvet Underground were stunners. And all four were flops. Reed had to wait until 1972 to become a rock star, when his single, “Walk on the Wild Side,” finally breezed onto the airwaves. It made life in Warhol’s milieu sound dreamy and nightmarish at once. Do-do-do-do-do . . .

    By 1975, he had delivered a landmark in pop contrarianism with “Metal Machine Music,” an album of feedback drones that sounded like a staring contest with the void. That same year, the great rock critic Lester Bangs called his hero “a completely depraved pervert and pathetic death dwarf and everything else you want to think he is . . . a liar, a wasted talent, an artist continually in flux, and a huckster selling pounds of his own flesh. A panderer living off the dumbbell nihilism of a seventies generation that doesn’t have the energy to commit suicide.”

    Which is to say that Reed was our most uncompromising rock star. The pedestal that so many reserve for Bob Dylan? It belongs to Reed. Reed, the grouchy genius. Reed, the street poet with the lousy singing voice. Reed, the inscrutable self-mythologizer. Reed, the white guy (too frequently, very erroneously) credited with inventing rap. Reed, the guy who always made rock-and-roll feel mysterious and alive.

    Did you hear his most recent album? The one he recorded with Metallica in 2011? It’s called “Lulu,” it’s based on a series of German expressionist plays and it’s even more gnarled and baffling than anyone had imagined. But if you had the curiosity and the endurance to listen to it, you heard Reed delivering fresh reportage from an unknown gutter.

    “Maybe listening to my music is not the best idea if you live a very constricted life,” he told Spin magazine in 2008. “Or maybe it is.”

    Through all of his contortions, he was consistently digging his heels into right now, listening. In recent years, New York concert-goers could spot the man and his wife, composer Laurie Anderson, at various nightspots. A sighting was a treat but not always a surprise. He was out there.

    Earlier this year, Reed wrote a review of Kanye West’s new album, “Yeezus,” for a new Web site called the Talkhouse. His closing thoughts casually explained the essence of listenership itself: “[West] obviously can hear that all styles are the same, somewhere deep in their heart, there’s a connection.”

    He was talking about Kanye West, but also Lou Reed, and anyone out there who’s really, truly been listening.

    Lou Reed’s Best Songs In Honor Of The Late Rock Star

    Lou Reed wasn’t as much a hit maker as he was a rock ‘n’ roll poet who influenced and inspired generations of musicians and artists. His one Top 20 hit, 1972’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” tops this list, but all are essential listening.

    1. “Walk on the Wild Side,” 1972: “Shaved her legs and then he was a she; she says hey babe, take a walk on the wild side.” This trampy transvestite and her key catchphrase became part of pop culture.

    2. “Sweet Jane (live),” 1974. Originally a Velvet Underground song, this track got new life when Reed performed it live, and again in 1994, when Cowboy Junkies’ sweet cover version was included on the “Natural Born Killers” soundtrack.

    3. “Satellite of Love,” 1972. Whether it’s the gentle melody or the lulling “bum bum bum” of the background singers, this love song remains one of Reed’s best.

    4. “Wild Child,” 1972. A vivid portrait of vibrant life in New York with snarly rock guitars, includes the lines “suicides don’t need notes” and “life is a theater, certainly fraught with many spills and chills.”

    5. “Dirty Blvd.,” 1989. Almost as though no time has passed, Reed waxes poetic about the rich and poor on this track that channels the energy of his 1972 solo debut.

    6. “Perfect Day,” 1972. An ironic ode to drugs or sincere reminiscence of time with a loved one? Either way, this song, revived on the soundtrack of 1996’s “Trainspotting,” is classic, melancholy Reed.

    7. “Coney Island Baby,” 1975. Reed’s muted delivery matches the tender message and melody of this coming-of-age classic.

    Lou Reed’s Politics

    Lou Reed, who has died at age 71, will be rightly remembered for creating a canon that was groundbreaking in the scope of its sociological and literary achievement. There was nothing unreasonable about Reed’s 1987 suggestion to Rolling Stone that “all through this, I’ve always thought that if you thought of all of it as a book then you have the Great American Novel, every record as a chapter. They’re all in chronological order. You take the whole thing, stack it and listen to it in order, there’s my Great American Novel.”

    Yet Reed was, as well, an artist who understood and engaged in the political struggles of his times. No one who followed the remarkable career of the Velvet Underground co-founder and iconic solo artist over the better part of five decades failed to recognize his determination to speak up—and to show up.

    From the beginning of his career, Reed identified himself as an artist who was determined to explore and explain the great societal taboos. He wrote songs about sex and sexuality, addiction, abuse, disease and communities that refused to conform or capitulate. His 1972 hit, “Walk on the Wild Side,” took AM radio and a generation of young Americans to places they had never been before. That wasn’t an explicitly political song by most measures, yet it achieved a remarkable political end: transforming how people saw one another, and themselves.

    Reed kept pushing the limits in the 1970s and ’80s, relishing controversy, challenging conventions and siding with those who did the same. He outlined his political philosophy in very nearly gentle 1982 song, “The Day John Kennedy Died.”

    I dreamed I was the president of these United States
    I dreamed I replaced ignorance, stupidity and hate
    I dreamed the perfect union and a perfect law, undenied
    And most of all I dreamed I forgot the day John Kennedy died

    I dreamed that I could do the job that others hadn’t done
    I dreamed that I was uncorrupt and fair to everyone
    I dreamed I wasn’t gross or base, a criminal on the take
    And most of all I dreamed I forgot the day John Kennedy died

    Reed finished the 1980s with the album New York, a visceral assessment of America at the close of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Topical and barbed, New York pulled no punches, especially on Reed’s masterpiece: “The Last Great American Whale.”

    Reed closed that song with an indictment:

    Well Americans don’t care for much of anything
    land and water the least
    And animal life is low on the totem pole
    with human life not worth more than infected yeast

    Americans don’t care too much for beauty
    they’ll shit in a river, dump battery acid in a stream
    They’ll watch dead rats wash up on the beach
    and complain if they can’t swim

    They say things are done for the majority
    don’t believe half of what you see and none of what you hear
    It’s like what my painter friend Donald said to me
    “Stick a fork in their ass and turn them over, they’re done”

    Yet those who heard Reed’s passionate rendering of “The Last Great American Whale” at 1990’s Farm Aid concert recognized that his commentary was biting not because he was cynical but because he cared. Reed showed up for benefit concerts, for Tibet House and Tibetan Freedom, for Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union. He was there to recall the Freedom Riders, and to condemn apartheid as part of Little Steven Van Zandt’s “Sun City” project. He was there to defend human rights and to decry attacks on artistic freedom. “It’s one thing to read about things. [But it’s something else] when someone’s sitting right in front of you telling and articulating some of these gruesome, unbelievable things that happen to people who do things that we take for granted every day,” he explained in before an Amnesty International “Conspiracy of Hope” concert in the mid-1980s. “I mean, some of the records that I’ve made: I would be rotting in jail for the last ten years.”

    Reed did not just take the stage.

    “I have never been more ashamed than to see the barricades tonight,” Reed told the Occupy crowd outside Lincoln Center.

    “I want to occupy Wall Street,” he continued on that cold December night. “I support it in each and every way. I’m proud to be part of it.”

    In that remarkable mic-check moment, the crowd responded: “I’m proud to be part of it.”

    Lou Reed was smiling right then. He was where he wanted to be: very much thick of things, very much on the side of those who were upsetting the status quo.

    Reed spoke up. He showed up. He was indeed proud to be part of it.

    He took to the streets. In 2011, when Occupy Wall Street activists were being hounded in New York City, Reed took their side as one of the city’s best-known and most respected artists.

  9. মাসুদ করিম - ২৯ অক্টোবর ২০১৩ (১২:১২ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Hindi Author Rajendra Yadav Dead

    Noted Hindi author Rajendra Yadav, a pioneer of the literary movement ‘Nayi Kahani’, died here last night.

    84-year-old Yadav experienced difficulty in breathing last night and was rushed to hospital. However, he died on the way, his family said today.

    Yadav is survived by his wife Mannu Bhandari, who is also a Hindi writer, and daughter Rachna.

    Born on 28 August, 1929, Yadav edited the literary magazine HANS, which was founded by Munshi Premchand in 1930. The magazine had ceased publication in 1953 but Yadav relaunched it on 31 July, 1986.

    He was a pioneer of the Hindi literary movement ‘Nayi Kahani’ along with Mohan Rakesh.

    His first novel was ‘Pret Bolte Hain’, which was published in 1951 and later retitled as ‘Sara Akash’ in the 1960s. It was adapted into a movie of the same title, Sara Akash, by Basu Chatterjee.

    He also translated into Hindi many works of Russian language writers like Turgenev, Chekhov, and Lermontov (A Hero of Our Times), as also Albert Camus (The Outsider).

    Besides being a writer, Yadav was also a nominated board member of Prasar Bharti in 1999-2001.

  10. মাসুদ করিম - ৩০ অক্টোবর ২০১৩ (৯:৪৬ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    ভারতের ‘মঙ্গল’ যাত্রার অনেকদিনের সাধনার পর্দা উঠতে যাচ্ছে আগামী সপ্তাহে — নভেম্বর মাসের ০৫ তারিখ শুভসূচনা হবে ইন্ডিয়ান স্পেস রিসার্চ অরগানাইজেশন (ISRO)-র ‘দেশি’ Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM)। এটাকে অনেকে ভারতের সাথে চীনের ‘স্পেস রেস’ বলতে চায় — কিন্তু না, এটা তা নয়, এটা একবারেই ‘মঙ্গল’ জয়ে ভারতের ৫০ বছরের নিভৃত সাধনার সবচেয়ে বড় ধাপ অতিক্রমের আনুষ্ঠানিক সূচনা।

    India is going to Mars! But don’t call it a space race.

    Next week, India is set to launch a probe bound for Mars. It’s a big moment for a country that has spent the last 50 years quietly tinkering away on space research while NASA and the European Space Agency have gotten all the glory. And it’s a thumb in the eye of China, whose own Mars ambitions came apart in 2011 when technical issues forced Beijing to abandon its launch.

    But even though India might benefit from beating China to the red planet, experts say gaining an edge back on Earth is the last thing scientists at ISRO, India’s space agency, have on their minds. Unlike the space race of the Cold War, where getting to the moon first held important geopolitical ramifications, India’s interest in space — much like China’s — is very closely tied to its economic goals.

    “To think that India’s going to the moon and Mars because of some cynical ploy to engage in one-upsmanship with the Chinese is wrong,” says John Sheldon, a national security analyst and founder of The Torridon Group, a strategy firm.

    India’s space program might be obscure to most, but millions of Indians are beneficiaries of it. Not in the American sense that it’s produced fun inventions like Tang and Velcro, says Dean Cheng, a scholar at the Heritage Foundation. Instead, the country realized early on that satellites would enable health officials to practice medicine remotely, reaching inaccessible parts of the country. The same was true for remote education. ISRO’s major focus, in other words, has been to use space research as a way to overcome the country’s (still) steep economic obstacles.

    “For every rupee invested,” Sheldon adds, “there is a return for regular Indian people in terms of what that program provides.”

    Space exploration is a little bit different; it doesn’t provide same direct economic benefits as building new imaging technologies or figuring out how to put something into geosynchronous orbit over Earth. Still, the tie-in to development is plainly clear: Countries that venture into outer space become part of an exclusive scientific club. Membership means being taken seriously in international circles. And that might be just as important for India’s future as figuring out how to feed, shelter and clothe the next few hundred million people who’ll be born there by 2050.

    Even though politics might influence budgetary decisions about space policy, says Cheng, competition isn’t a driving factor.

    “When we look at top-tier Asian space powers,” he says, “Japan, India, China — all of these countries went into space for their own reasons. They did not go into space because somebody else went into space. … Space is the dreadnought of the 21st century, or the automobile. You cannot make a claim about having moved beyond mid-level status unless you have a real space program.”

    And today, that means sending a mission to Mars.

  • Sign up
Password Strength Very Weak
Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.
We do not share your personal details with anyone.