বিভাগ/বিষয় নিরপেক্ষ

সুপারিশকৃত লিন্ক : এপ্রিল ২০১৪

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।

১৩ comments

  1. মাসুদ করিম - ১ এপ্রিল ২০১৪ (১:২২ অপরাহ্ণ)

    ভারতীয় জনতা পার্টির নেতা ভারতের প্রধানমন্ত্রী পদপ্রার্থী নরেন্দ্র মোদি আসাম রাজ্য সরকারের বিরুদ্ধে অভিযোগ করেছেন তারা বাংলাদেশ থেকে অবৈধ অনুপ্রবেশকারীদের জায়গা করে দিতে নির্বিচারে গণ্ডার হত্যা করছে — কত বড় গণ্ডমূর্খ এই মোদি, তার ক্ষমতায় অধিষ্ঠানের পর আসামের গণ্ডার দিয়ে তিনি বাংলাদেশ-ভারত সীমান্তে পরাক্রমের শিংচালনা করাবেন প্রতিনিয়ত, এই নিয়তই তো করেছেন মনে হচ্ছে।

    Assam government killing rhinos to make way for Bangladeshi immigrants: Narendra Modi

    Narendra Modi has alleged a conspiracy to eliminate the endangered rhinoceros in Assam to make way for Bangladeshi settlers. He accuses “people sitting in the government.”

    Assam is ruled by the rival Congress.

    Mr Modi, the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate was quoted by Press Trust of India as saying, “Aren’t rhinos the pride of Assam? These days there is a conspiracy to kill it. I am making the allegation very seriously. People sitting in the government…to save Bangladeshis… they are doing this conspiracy to kill rhinos so that the area becomes empty and Bangladeshis can be settled there.” He was addressing an election rally in Dhemaji, a remote district on the north bank of the Brahmaputra river. (Full coverage: India Votes 2014)

    And he also warned that the poaching of rhinos would not be tolerated, “Those who are conspiring to finish off rhinos, they should listen to this carefully. After May 16, they will be taken to task one by one (chun chun ke hisab liya jayega).”

    A number of opinon polls say Mr Modi is the frontrunner for the top post of PM. “We have to save the future of Assam. It is our responsibility to save it from forces which are looting the state,” he promised.

    The BJP leader also said local people increasingly faced unemployment as people migrating from Bangladesh were taking up jobs in India. He said it was the demand of time that these “intrusions” stopped.

    Assam sends 14 members to the Lok Sabha. In 2009, the Congress had won seven seats and BJP had won four seats mostly in urban centres.

    The state votes in three phases in elections beginning next month.

  2. মাসুদ করিম - ৫ এপ্রিল ২০১৪ (২:৪২ অপরাহ্ণ)

    প্রবৃদ্ধি আর উন্নয়নই একমাত্র বিবেচ্য নয় আর, জিডিপি সূচক দিয়েই কোনো দেশের অবস্থার সামগ্রিক চিত্র পাওয়া যায় না, তাই গত বছর থেকে চালু হয়েছে সামাজিক প্রগতি সূচক। গত বছর খুব স্বল্প সংখ্যক দেশের উপর ভিত্তি করে এই সূচকের কাজ করা হয়েছিল, এবছর ১৩২ দেশের উপর ভিত্তি করে প্রথমবারের মতো ব্যাপক পরিসরে এই সূচকের কাজ করা হয়েছে,এতে বাংলাদেশের অবস্থান ৯৯তম। বিস্তারিত : সামাজিক প্রগতি সূচক ২০১৪।

    Bangladesh ranks 99th on social progress index

    Bangladesh ranks 99th among the 132 countries on the Social Progress Index (SPI), a measure of human wellbeing that goes beyond traditional economic measures such as GDP or per capita income, according to a website report and data on http://www.socialprogressimperative.org.

    Of the SAARC countries – Bangladesh ranked lower than Sri Lanka (85), while better than India (102), Nepal (101) and Pakistan (124) on the list of the SPI 2014 compiled by US-based non-profit group Social Progress Imperative.

    Of the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – only India ranked lower than the 100th position on the list.

    China was next lowest of the five, in the 90th position, and Brazil was the highest, at 46th.

    The low rankings of China and India showed that their rapid economic growth is not yet being converted into better lives for their citizens.

    Central and South Asia trails all regions but Sub-Saharan Africa in terms of overall index performance.

    The top performers for the region are Sri Lanka (85th), Kazakhstan (86th) and Mongolia (89th). The worst performance belongs to Pakistan, which is ranked 124th.

    The SPI rates 132 countries on more than 50 indicators, including health, sanitation, shelter, personal safety, access to information, sustainability, tolerance and inclusion and access to education.

    Using measures of access to basic human needs such as food and shelter and of equality of opportunity such as education and personal freedom, the index aims to measure quality of life throughout the globe.

    Last year the first SPI ranked 50 countries. This year, its ranking includes 132 countries around the world.

    New Zealand tops the list followed by Switzerland, Iceland and Netherlands. Chad ranks the lowest in the index.

    The SPI asks questions such as whether a country can satisfy its people’s basic needs and whether it has the infrastructure and capacity to allow its citizens to improve the quality of their lives and reach their full potential.

    “The index shows that economic growth does not automatically lead to social progress,” Michael Green, executive director of the Social Progress Imperative, a non-profit organisation that publishes the index, told Thomson Reuters Foundation.

    “If we are to tackle problems such as poverty and inequality, it shows that measuring economic growth alone is not enough.”

    পিডিএফ : সামাজিক প্রগতি সূচক ২০১৪

  3. মাসুদ করিম - ১৭ এপ্রিল ২০১৪ (৭:৪৪ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

  4. মাসুদ করিম - ১৮ এপ্রিল ২০১৪ (১০:১৮ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    দৃষ্টির অন্তরালে চলে গিয়েছিলেন আগেই, এবার লোকান্তরে চলে গেলেন যাদুকর, গতকাল ৮৭ বছর বয়সে গাব্রিয়েল গার্সিয়া মার্কেজ তার মেক্সিকোর বাসভবনে মারা গেলেন।

    Nobel winner Garcia Marquez, master of magical realism, dies at 87

    Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian author whose beguiling stories of love and longing brought Latin America to life for millions of readers and put magical realism on the literary map, died on Thursday. He was 87.

    A prolific writer who started out as a newspaper reporter, Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece was “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” a dream-like, dynastic epic that helped him win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

    Garcia Marquez died at his home in Mexico City. He had returned home from hospital last week after a bout of pneumonia.

    Known affectionately to friends and fans as “Gabo,” Garcia Marquez was Latin America’s best-known and most beloved author and his books have sold in the tens of millions.

    Although he produced stories, essays and several short novels such as “Leaf Storm” and “No One Writes to the Colonel” in the 1950s and early 1960s, he struggled for years to find his voice as a novelist.

    But he then found it in dramatic fashion with “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” an instant success on publication in 1967 that was dubbed “Latin America’s Don Quixote” by late Mexican author Carlos Fuentes.

    It tells the story of seven generations of the Buendia family in the fictional village of Macondo, based on the languid town of Aracataca close to Colombia’s Caribbean coast where Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1927, and raised by his maternal grandparents.

    In the novel, Garcia Marquez combines miraculous and supernatural events with the details of everyday life and the political realities of Latin America. The characters are visited by ghosts, a plague of insomnia envelops Macondo, a child is born with a pig’s tail and a priest levitates above the ground.

    At times comical and bawdy, and at others tragic, it sold over 30 million copies, was published in dozens of languages and helped fuel a boom in Latin American fiction.

    Garcia Marquez, a stocky man with a quick smile, thick mustache and curly hair, said he found inspiration for the novel by drawing on childhood memories of his grandmother’s stories – laced with folklore and superstition but delivered with the straightest of faces.

    “She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness,” he said in a 1981 interview. “I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself, and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.”

    Tributes poured in following his death.

    “The world has lost one of its greatest visionary writers – and one of my favorites from the time I was young,” said U.S. President Barack Obama.

    “Your life, dear Gabo, will be remembered by all of us as a unique and singular gift, and as the most original story of all,” Colombian pop star Shakira wrote on her website alongside a photograph of her hugging Garcia Marquez.

    MAGIC AND REALITY

    Garcia Marquez was one of the prime exponents of magical realism, a genre he described as embodying “myth, magic and other extraordinary phenomena.”

    It was a turbulent period in much of Latin America, when chaos was often the norm and reality verged on the surreal, and magical realism struck a chord.

    “In his novels and short stories we are led into this peculiar place where the miraculous and the real converge. The extravagant flight of his own fantasy combines with traditional folk tales and facts, literary allusions and tangible – at times obtrusively graphic – descriptions approaching the matter-of-factness of reportage,” the Swedish Academy said when it awarded Garcia Marquez the Nobel Prize in 1982.

    Although “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was his most popular creation, other classics from Garcia Marquez included “Autumn of the Patriarch”, “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”.

    He admired Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and was also influenced by esteemed Latin American writers Juan Rulfo of Mexico and Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges.

    U.S. author William Faulkner inspired Garcia Marquez to create “the atmosphere, the decadence, the heat” of Macondo, named after a banana plantation on the outskirts of Aracataca.

    “This word had attracted my attention ever since the first trips I had made with my grandfather, but I discovered only as an adult that I liked its poetic resonance,” he wrote in his memoirs, “Living to Tell the Tale.” POLITICS, LITERARY FEUD Like many of his Latin American literary contemporaries, Garcia Marquez became increasingly involved in politics and flirted with communism.

    He spent time in post-revolution Cuba and developed a close friendship with communist leader Fidel Castro, to whom he sent drafts of his books.

    “A man of cosmic talent with the generosity of a child, a man for tomorrow,” Castro once wrote of his friend. “His literature is authentic proof of his sensibility and the fact that he will never give up his origins, his Latin American inspiration and loyalty to the truth.”

    The United States banned Garcia Marquez from visiting for a decade after he set up the New York branch of communist Cuba’s official news agency and was accused of funding leftist guerrillas at home.

    He once condemned the U.S. war on drugs as “nothing more than an instrument of intervention in Latin America” but became friends with former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

    “He captured the pain and joy of our common humanity in settings both real and magical. I was honored to be his friend and to know his great heart and brilliant mind for more than 20 years,” Clinton said on Thursday.

    Despite his reputation as a left-leaning intellectual, critics say Garcia Marquez didn’t do as much as he could have done to help negotiate an end to Colombia’s long conflict, which has killed tens of thousands of people. Instead, he left his homeland and went to live in Mexico. The damning criticism he leveled at his homeland still rings heavily in the ears of some Colombians.

    He was also a protagonist in one of literature’s most talked-about feuds with fellow Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru.

    The writers, who were once friends, stopped speaking to each other after a day in 1976 when Vargas Llosa gave Garcia Marquez a black eye in a dispute – depending on who one believes – over politics or Vargas Llosa’s wife. But Vargas Llosa paid tribute to Garcia Marquez on Thursday, calling him a “great writer” whose novels would live on.

    Politics and literary spats aside, Garcia Marquez’s writing pace slowed down in the late 1990s. A heavy smoker for most of his life, he was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 1999, although the disease went into remission after chemotherapy treatment.

    None of his latest works achieved the success of his earlier novels.

    One of those, “Love in the Time of Cholera,” told the story of a 50-year love affair inspired by his parents’ courtship.

    It was made into a movie starring Spanish actor Javier Bardem in 2007, but many critics were disappointed and said capturing the sensuous romance of Garcia Marquez’s novel had proved too tough a challenge.

    Garcia Marquez’s most recent work of fiction, “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” got mixed reviews when it was released in 2004. The short novel is about a 90-year-old man’s obsession with a 14-year-old virgin, a theme some readers found disturbing.

    Garcia Marquez is survived by Mercedes Barcha, his wife of more than 55 years, and by two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

    When he was working, Garcia Marquez would wake up before dawn every day, read a book, skim through the newspapers and then write for four hours. His wife would put a yellow rose on his desk.

    His last public appearance was on his 87th birthday when he came out from his Mexico City home to smile and wave at well-wishers, a yellow rose in the lapel of his gray suit.

    The Hack

    The journalistic education of Gabriel García Márquez

    In 1955, eight crew members of a Colombian naval destroyer in the Caribbean were swept overboard by a giant wave. Luis Alejandro Velasco, a sailor who spent ten days on a life raft without food or water, was the only survivor. The editor of the Colombian newspaper El Espectador assigned the story to a twenty-seven-year-old reporter who had been dabbling in fiction and had a reputation as a gifted feature writer: Gabriel García Márquez.

    The young journalist quickly uncovered a military scandal. As his fourteen-part series revealed, the sailors owed their deaths not to a storm, as Colombia’s military dictatorship had claimed, but to naval negligence. The decks of the Caldas had been stacked high with television sets, washing machines, and refrigerators purchased in the U.S. These appliances, which were being ferried to Colombia against military regulations, had caused the ship to list dangerously. And because the Caldas was so overloaded, it was unable to maneuver and rescue the sailors.

    In addition, the life rafts on board were too small and carried no supplies, and the Navy called off the search for survivors after only four days.

    By the time the series ended, El Espectador’s circulation had almost doubled. The public always likes an exposé, but what made the stories so popular was not simply the explosive revelations of military incompetence. García Márquez had managed to transform Velasco’s account into a narrative so dramatic and compelling that readers lined up in front of the newspaper’s offices, waiting to buy copies.

    After the series ran, the government denied that the destroyer had been loaded with contraband merchandise. García Márquez turned up the investigative heat: he tracked down crewmen who owned cameras and purchased their photographs from the voyage, in which the illicit cargo, with factory labels, could be easily seen.

    The series marked a turning point in García Márquez’s life and writing career. The government was so incensed that the newspaper’s editors, who feared for the young reporter’s safety, sent him to Paris as its foreign correspondent. A few months later the government shut El Espectador down. The disappearance of his meal ticket forced García Márquez into the role of an itinerant journalist who sold freelance stories to pay the bills—and, crucially, continued to write fiction.

    The relatively spare prose of the Velasco series bears little resemblance to the poetic, multilayered, sometimes hallucinatory language that would mark García Márquez’s maturity as a novelist. Still, the articles—which were published in book form as The Story of A Shipwrecked Sailor in 1970, and translated into English sixteen years later—represent a milestone in his literary evolution. “This is where his gifted storytelling emerges,” says Raymond Williams, a professor of Latin American literature at the University of California, Riverside, who has written two books about the author. Prior to the series, he suggests, García Márquez had been writing somewhat amateurish short stories. Now, says Williams, he was rising to the challenge of constructing a lengthy narrative: “The ability he has to maintain a level of suspense throughout is something that later became a powerful element of his novels.”

    In fact, it was the reporter’s capacity to anatomize human behavior—rather than simply pass along the facts—that first drew García Márquez to the newsroom. He was a young law student with little interest in journalism when an acquaintance named Elvira Mendoza, who edited the women’s section of a Bogotá newspaper, was assigned to interview the Argentinean actress Berta Singerman. The diva was so arrogant and supercilious that she refused to answer any questions. Finally, her husband intervened and salvaged the interview.

    For García Márquez, this was a revelation about the possibilities of journalism. As he wrote in his autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, which appeared in English in 2003:

    Elvira did not write the dialogue she had foreseen, based on the diva’s responses, but instead wrote an article about her difficulties with Berta Singerman. She took advantage of the providential intervention of the husband and turned him into the real protagonist of the meeting . . . . The sangfroid and ingenuity with which Elvira . . . used Singerman’s foolishness to reveal her true personality set me to thinking for the first time about the possibilities of journalism, not as a primary source of information but as much more: a literary genre. Before many years passed I would prove this in my own flesh, until I came to believe, as I believe today more than ever, that the novel and journalism are children of the same mother . . . . Elvira’s article made me aware of the reporter I carried sleeping in my heart and I resolved to wake him. I began to read newspapers in a different way.

    García Márquez ended up leaving law school and working for a series of Colombian newspapers. He spent most of his early career writing movie reviews, human-interest stories, and a daily, unsigned column he shared with other reporters that resembled The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town”—a common feature of South American newspapers. Yet he aspired to cover more substantive issues, including politics and government corruption, and to pursue investigative projects.

    When he was first hired at El Espectador, García Márquez hoped to impress an editor by the name of Jose Salgar. “It seems to me that Salgar had his eye on me to be a reporter,” he later recounted in his autobiography, “while the others had relegated me to films, editorials, and cultural matters because I had always been designated a short-story writer. But my dream was to be a reporter . . . and I knew that Salgar was the best teacher.” The editor taught him to how to communicate his ideas clearly and pare down his florid prose. Every time Salgar read one of García Márquez’s stories, he made “the strenuous gesture of forcing a cork out of a bottle and said, ‘Wring the neck of the swan.’ ”

    Soon, García Márquez was assigned the kinds of projects he had dreamed of pursuing. He wrote numerous in-depth stories, including pieces about the corruption surrounding the construction of a port on the Caribbean coast, the neglect of war veterans by the government, and landslides that killed dozens of people in a slum neighborhood. He specialized in what Latin American newspapers called the refrito (“refried”): a detailed reconstruction of a dramatic news event, published weeks or months later with élan and great narrative skill. And then something new landed on his desk: the Velasco series.

    After Luis Alejandro Velasco washed ashore, he was lionized by the press, decorated by the Colombian president, and became a national hero. García Márquez thought it was absurd the way the government held up Velasco as an example of patriotic morality. What’s more, he believed the sailor had sold out in a most unseemly manner—advertising the brand of watch he wore at sea (because it had not stopped) and the shoes on his feet (because they were too sturdy for him to tear apart and eat during his ordeal).

    A month after his rescue, Velasco walked into El Espectador’s newsroom and offered the exclusive rights to his story. He had already told his tale to innumerable reporters as well as government officials, and the staff doubted he had anything new to add to the record. “We sent him away,” García Márquez recalls in his autobiography. “But on a hunch, [Salgar] caught up with him on the stairway, accepted the deal, and placed him in my hands. It was as if he had given me a time bomb.”

    At first, though, García Márquez declined the assignment. He believed the story was not only a “dead fish,” as he later wrote, but “a rotten one”—which is to say, both dated and dubious. Salgar persisted. “I informed him,” García Márquez recounts, “that I would write the article out of obedience as his employee but would not put my name to it. Without having thought about it first, this was a fortuitous but on-target determination regarding the story, for it obliged me to tell it in the first-person voice of the protagonist.”

    García Márquez proved the newspaper adage that there can’t be great writing without great reporting. Over the course of twenty consecutive days, he interviewed Velasco for six hours each day. To make sure his subject was telling the truth, he frequently interjected trick questions, hoping to expose any contradictions in Velasco’s tale. “I sincerely believe that interviewing is a kind of fictional genre and that it must be regarded in this light,” García Márquez wrote after his interviews with the sailor. He added:

    The majority of journalists let the tape recorder do the work, and they think that they are respecting the wishes of the person they are interviewing by retranscribing word for word what he says. They do not realize that this work method is really quite disrespectful: whenever someone speaks, he hesitates, goes off on tangents, does not finish his sentences, and he makes trifling remarks. For me the tape recorder must only be used to record material that the journalist will decide to use later on, that he will interpret and will choose to present in his own way. In this sense it is possible to interview someone in the same way that you write a novel or poetry.

    After 120 hours, García Márquez had a detailed, comprehensive account of Velasco’s ordeal. The challenge was how to involve the reader in a saga that featured a single character who was alone for ten days, floating aimlessly in a small raft.

    The answer was a steady heightening of dramatic tension. In the first few pages of the book, he notes that before the destroyer shipped out of Mobile, Alabama, Velasco and some of his shipmates watched The Caine Mutiny, foreshadowing the disaster to come. The best part of the movie, Velasco tells García Márquez, was the storm. And the sheer realism of the sequence inevitably made some of the crew uneasy: “I don’t mean to say that from that moment I began to anticipate the catastrophe,” Velasco says, “but I had never been so apprehensive before a voyage.”

    Not overly subtle, perhaps, but certainly effective. García Márquez concludes each section with a Dickensian cliffhanger. He ends chapter two, for example, with a dramatic description that compels the reader onward:

    I started to raise my arm to look at my watch, but at that moment I couldn’t see my arm, or my watch either. I didn’t see the wave . . . . I swam upward for one, two, three seconds. I tried to reach the surface. I needed air. I was suffocating . . . . A second later, about a hundred meters way, the ship surged up between the waves, gushing water from all sides like a submarine. It was only then that I realized I had fallen overboard.

    The next chapter begins with Velasco alone in the middle of the ocean. While García Márquez keeps his language relatively spare—he was writing for a newspaper, after all—there are frequent glimmers of the great descriptive powers that would later animate his novels. “Soon the sky turned red, and I continued to search the horizon,” recalls Velasco (or at least Velasco being channeled by the young reporter). “Then it turned a deep violet as I kept watching. To one side of the life raft, like a yellow diamond in a wine-colored sky, the first star appeared, immobile and perfect.”

    Throughout the sailor’s ordeal, García Márquez touches on themes that would consistently interest him for the rest of his career. In his early short stories, he had already explored the interior life of his characters, probing their dreams and sometimes surreal reveries. Yet these explorations felt anomalous—youthful stabs at insight without any real connection to the plot. In the Velasco series, he felt free to reconstruct his subject’s interior monologues, and for the first time, they were actually integral to the narrative. And when the sailor sees mirages, or converses with imaginary companions, or struggles with the distortions of time, these passages presage the author’s mature fiction.

    Here, as he did later on, García Márquez also affirms his belief that narrative plays a significant role in people’s lives. When Velasco finally washes ashore, after ten days in the open sea, a man wearing a straw hat comes upon him, with a donkey and an emaciated dog in tow. García Márquez relates the exchange between the two:

    “Help me,” I repeated desperately, worried that the man hadn’t understood me.

    “What happened to you?” he asked in a friendly tone of voice.

    When I heard him speak I realized that, more than thirst, hunger, and despair, what tormented me most was the need to tell someone what had happened to me.

    Countless literary critics have written about how Ernest Hemingway’s prose emerged from his journalism. Scholars have looked for a similar stylistic genealogy in the case of García Márquez. There are, of course, major differences between the two: García Márquez’s language is more complex and poetic. Yet even his inimitable passages of magic realism are influenced by his years as a reporter, says Robert Sims, a professor of Spanish literature at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of The First García Márquez: A Study of His Journalistic Writing from 1948 to 1955. The most surrealistic events are believable, Sims argues, because they are recounted in an objective, journalistic tone. And García Márquez first mastered this tone—in which magic always pays heed to realism—when he described Velasco’s ordeal. “It’s never melodramatic,” Sims says. “He never lets Velasco get overwrought or maudlin or sink into total despair. García Márquez always cuts it off before it reaches that point. The tone is even and neutral, just like in A Hundred Years of Solitude.”

    Nor did he ever forget the reporter’s obligation to hook readers with the very first sentence. Some of García Márquez’s early newspaper leads read like fiction, and point directly to his later work. For example, he wrote a series for El Espectador about a swampy, disease-ridden area of Colombia near the coast, and opened with a lead guaranteed to intrigue any reader: “Several years ago a ghostly, glassy-looking man, with a big stomach as taut as a drum, came to a doctor’s office in the city. He said, ‘Doctor, I have come to have you remove a monkey that was put in my belly.’ ”

    The reverse is true as well. In his novels and short stories, he often opens with indelible lines about death, many of which read like dramatic newspaper leads. Here he cuts to the chase and ensnares the reader with an elegant composure:

    Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. (A Hundred Years of Solitude)

    On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. (Chronicle of a Death Foretold)

    Since it’s Sunday and it’s stopped raining, I think I’ll take a bouquet of roses to my grave. (Someone Has Been Disarranging These Roses)

    When Jose Montiel died, everyone felt avenged except his widow; but it took several hours for everyone to believe that he had indeed died. (Montiel’s Widow)

    Senator Onesimo Sanchez had six months and eleven days to go before his death when he found the woman of his life. (Death Constant Beyond Love)

    Hemingway and García Márquez also differed on how lasting ones’ journalistic apprenticeship should be. The former admitted that journalism was good training for a young novelist, but contended that it was important to get out in time, because newspapers could ruin a writer. García Márquez felt otherwise. “That supposedly bad influence that journalism has on literature isn’t so certain,” he has said. “First of all, because I don’t think anything destroys the writer, not even hunger. Secondly, because journalism helps you stay in touch with reality, which is essential for working in literature.”

    García Márquez put this belief into practice: even after he attained great success as a novelist, he never abandoned journalism. He used the money from his 1982 Nobel Prize to purchase Cambio, a failing weekly newsmagazine in Colombia. He established the Foundation for New Ibero-American Journalism, where veteran reporters give workshops for young Latin American journalists. And during the past few decades, while writing novels, he has kept reality at close quarters, publishing numerous essays, opinion pieces, articles, and a masterful book of reconstructive journalism, News of a Kidnapping. In the latter, he chronicled the abduction of ten prominent Colombians by Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin drug cartel, and his painstaking account of their eight-month ordeal might strike some readers as a protracted ensemble version of The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor.

    In any case, his breakthrough series went on to be one of his most popular books, selling about 10 million copies, the majority of them in the original Spanish. To his readers, this apprentice work, with its early and exquisite balance of magic and realism, fit very comfortably into the author’s canon. The fact that it was told in the first person may have actually made it feel more literary rather than less—a feat of modernist ventriloquism.

    As for García Márquez himself, he had mixed feelings about the transformation of his newspaper series into a bona fide work of art—or at least a hardcover book. And in a new introduction he wrote, he seemed to betray some nostalgia for the days when he was simply a semi-anonymous reporter rather than an international brand name. “I have not reread this story in fifteen years,” he wrote. “It seems worthy of publication, but I have never quite understood the usefulness of publishing it. I find it depressing that the publishers are not so much interested in the merit of the story as in the name of the author, which, much to my sorrow, is also that of a fashionable writer. If it is now published in the form of a book, that is because I agreed without thinking about it very much, and I am not a man to go back on his word.”

    A Translator’s Long Journey, Page by Page
    By ANDREW BAST

    On Gregory Rabassa’s crowded bookshelves is a first edition of “Rayuela,” the experimental 1963 novel by the Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar. Mr. Rabassa had just finished his Ph.D. in Portuguese in the mid-1960’s when an editor at Pantheon — who had noticed his work editing a failed literary magazine at Columbia University — asked him to translate Mr. Cortázar’s book from Spanish into English. Without having read what has been called a “fiendishly esoteric” novel, Mr. Rabassa sat down and typed a draft in English, word by word. In 1967 Mr. Rabassa’s work, titled “Hopscotch” in English, won the first National Book Award for translation.

    “I’ve got 50 of them behind me,” Mr. Rabassa said, reflecting in the Upper East Side apartment he shares with his wife, Clementine. He has a slight build and white hair that he wears like a crown. He is surrounded by novels written by literary giants like Jorge Amado, Mario Vargas Llosa, José Lezama Lima and Gabriel García Márquez, the original Spanish or Portuguese edition beside his published English translation.

    Now, at 82, Mr. Rabassa is finally going to publish his own first full-length book, “If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents,” a playful reflection on his life’s work that New Directions is planning to bring out next spring.

    “My thesis in the book is that translation is impossible,” Mr. Rabassa said. “People expect reproduction, but you can’t turn a baby chick into a duckling. The best you can do is get close to it.”

    If that is true, then Mr. Rabassa has gotten about as close as one can. He is widely considered one of the greatest practitioners of his craft. “Rabassa’s great gift is to find the music in English that is true to the language of a wide range of writers in Spanish,” said Dan Simon, the founder of Seven Stories Press, which has published some of Mr. Rabassa’s translations. “Had Rabassa become a diplomat or brain surgeon, we could easily imagine not having readable translations of Cortázar and García Márquez.”

    Yet for all the accolades, translation is still a difficult and poorly understood art. Often the translator’s name will not even appear on the cover of the book, Mr. Simon said, yet “a poor translation of a text kills it in the market.”

    Walter Benjamin, the German literary critic, once wrote, “No translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original.”

    Mr. García Márquez has said that Mr. Rabassa read “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” sat down and then rewrote it in English. (He also said that Mr. Rabassa’s translation improved on the original.)

    But Mr. Rabassa contends that rewriting is not at all what he does: “I’m reading the Spanish, but mostly I’m reading it in English, and it comes out that way.

    “When I talk about it, I say the English is hiding behind his Spanish. That’s what a good translation is: you have to think if García Márquez had been born speaking English, that’s how a translation should sound.”

    In the case of Cortázar, Mr. Rabassa developed a relationship with him, and they became good friends, spending days and nights listening to 78’s of Count Basie and Lester Young. Mr. Rabassa translated Luis Rafael Sánchez and lounged with him on the beaches of Puerto Rico. And after translating “Seven Serpents and Seven Moons” by Demetrio Aguilera-Malta, a former Ecuadorian ambassador to Mexico, he ended up with one of the author’s paintings hanging on his apartment wall.

    Yet Mr. Rabassa has also produced brilliant translations without developing any relationship with the author. Jorge Armado and Mr. García Márquez wanted nothing to do with their books in English.

    Mr. Rabassa said he typed his translation of Mr. García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” page by page, just as he did with Cortázar’s novel. Yet unlike his blind excursion with “Hopscotch,” Mr. Rabassa had already read Mr. García Márquez’s magical epic about the Buendía family, before he tried the translation. “I knew it was a damn good book, but it wasn’t as much fun knowing all about it,” he said.

    Sitting in his armchair, nibbling on a greek pastry, Mr. Rabassa explained that titles pose their own challenge. He translated the 19th-century Portuguese classic “Memórias póstumas de Bráz Cubas” by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, which literally means “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas.” When Noonday Press issued the novel with the title “Epitaph of a Small Winner,” Mr. Rabassa complained.

    “You don’t mess around with a classic,” he said. “That’s like calling `Madame Bovary’ the story of a middle-class adulteress.” (Oxford University Press published the book with Mr. Rabassa’s translated title in 1997.)

    Half of Mr. Rabassa’s book will consist of reflections on each of the many authors he has translated, and half will be a memoir of how he ended up as a translator. The epilogue, he said, will be printed unfinished, as “translation is never finished.”

    Mr. Rabassa was born in Yonkers in 1922. His father was a Cuban sugar broker, but, he said, “the old man didn’t speak much Spanish around the house.” The young Mr. Rabassa studied French and Latin in high school; then at Dartmouth, he said, he “began collecting languages.” There he studied Portuguese, Russian and German. In conversation, his voice wanders seamlessly among the five he still speaks.

    “I’d dabbled in Italian,” Mr. Rabassa said. “But then I bought a beautiful edition of Dante. I used Spanish and Portuguese — they’re so similar to Italian — as I went along, substituting the real Italian words, and finally I was talking Italian.”

    In 1942 Mr. Rabassa volunteered for the Army and, because of his language skills, ended up in the Office of Strategic Services. Mr. Rabassa translated encryptions, or what he called English into English, and he also conducted interrogations.

    When he returned to the United States after spending time in Italy and Northern Africa, Mr. Rabassa lived on Morton Street, watched Charlie Parker play in Greenwich Village and wrote poetry. He studied for his master’s in Spanish at Columbia, then, tired of the language, kept on with his studies but finished his doctorate in Portuguese. At a cocktail party Mr. Rabassa met an administrator at Queens College and he ended up being hired as a professor there. He still teaches the freshman lecture course Hispanic Literature in Translation.

    “When I began teaching,” he said, “I was the same age as my students, and I still labor in the delusion. So it’s a good, youthful operation.”

    Mr. Rabassa says that although he is translating a new generation of Hispanic writers, little has changed since he translated the giants. Despite the differences in writing styles, the way he approaches the text is essentially the same.

    “They’re all so different, the ones I did,” he said. “I think it works because I don’t think I have a translation style. It’s a positive feeling I have about them. I find a lot of instinct in what I do. You have to just hit it right. I’m never sure whether something is right, but I know damn well when something is wrong.”

    • মাসুদ করিম - ২১ এপ্রিল ২০১৪ (১১:১৫ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

      Salaams Gabo
      Kavita Panjabi | Apr 20, 2014, 05.35 AM IST

      Garcia Marquez was a supreme architect of bridges, for through his tales he enabled the people of the North to see the South – us – as we see ourselves

      Shakespeare is Polish!” Jan Kott, the renowned philosopher of theatre had once declared, to indicate how closely Shakespeare’s works seemed to represent Poland to the Polish people. Today Indians seem to be saying something similar about Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Gabo, as he was popularly known. The news of his passing away spread like wildfire in the dead of night — the night of April 17 — and India, half way across the globe from Mexico where he breathed his last, did indeed experience the first night of his death, even before South America did. Never before, in the history of Facebook, have so many Indians grieved the passing away of a writer. Never before have they shared so many favourite passages from anyone’s prose, as if they were sheer poetry — which they are. Never before, in this century of the profoundest of generational divides, have twenty and fifty year olds come together here in such collective passion over a writer.

      Even before Garcia Marquez received the Nobel Prize in 1982, Indians had begun to read his novels avidly, intellectuals had begun to discuss him in addas and little magazines. Those who had some access to Latin American cultures had already begun to insist that we not truncate his last name to “Marquez”. Garcia was his father’s last name, and Marquez his mother’s —Latin Americans take on both, and the least we could do was accord to him the respect of his full name. Jadavpur University’s Comparative Literature department — in Kolkata, as is to be expected — had even introduced One Hundred Years of Solitude in its syllabus long before the world became familiar with Garcia Marquez as a Nobel Laureate. After the Nobel Prize in 1982, the publishing industry ensured that familiarity with his works no longer remained the privilege of intellectuals and academia.

      Theatre director Amal Allana’s rich colourful production of perhaps his most famous story ‘The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother’ was set in Rajasthan. It swept from the Thar desert to the Atacama, from banjara music, via flamenco in Spain, to the gypsy music of South America, and from the sad and forced heartlessness of impoverishment in India to Erendira’s exploitation through prostitution enforced by her ruthless grandmother. Three of the thirty languages that One Hundred Years has been translated into are Indian. The Malayalam version is into the 13th edition, having sold over 25,000 copies; the Bangla and Hindi translations are also bestsellers. Translations of scores of stories proliferate, in almost every Indian language.

      What has made us love Gabo? In the heyday of anti-imperialism, when Che and Fidel had become cult figures amongst the young and the fiery, when the more literary types had begun to quote to each other the love poems and existential musings from the newly published yellow bilingual edition of Neruda, Garcia Marquez brought to us the lived struggles and resilience of ordinary people in a world as beleaguered as ours. His novels and novellas, stories, journalistic writings and memoirs opened up for us another world in which we could see ourselves, as we had never been able to in the pages of any western novel. We understood the seriousness of the loss of cultural memory under colonialism as stylized by him in the mock-hilarious amnesia plague, when people in Macondo begin marking all objects and animals with their respective names, to a point when the cow has a sign hanging on it, indicating that it was a cow and had to be milked every morning to get the milk to be mixed with coffee to make cafe con leche! We thrilled, amidst our own struggles for worker’s rights, at the fact that his depiction of the banana company massacre in One Hundred Years of Solitude actually served to restore to Colombian history books the suppressed knowledge of the 1928 United Fruit Company massacre of over a thousand workers. We saw Apu’s wonderment at the train in Pather Panchali reflected in the washerwoman of Macondo, who, seeing a steam engine pulling a train for the first time in her life, exclaimed that it was “Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it.” The political intrigues, cycles of violence, labour strikes, joint family disputes, delightful bonds between grandparents and grandchildren, surreptitious passions and passionate activists jumped out of the pages of his books and echoed the realities of our own lives.

      An Indian teacher, discussing the novel in 1987 with university students in the US, was told that if they were to describe it in one single word, the word would be “funny” ! They cited the blood flowing down the streets, even uphill and downhill, as prime example. Two years later their counterparts in India chose the word “tragic” to describe this same work to her. Ironically, the same example was cited as proof of the opposite understanding — the blood flowing down the streets, so powerfully that it even warranted the metaphorical uphill flow. These 20-yearold students of 1987 were youngsters who had stories of blood flowing in their veins — their parents were the Partition generation, and they themselves had witnessed, even if only via the newspaper and TV, the anti-Sikh and anti-Muslim riots of the decade. They understood the violence in Colombia. Garcia Marquez’s stories, and the way he narrated them, drew us close, very close, to Latin America.

      Garcia Marquez’s penchant for hyperbole, such that blood could be seen to flow uphill, or that it rained for four years, eleven months and two days after the massacre, was a deliberate choice of stylization resulting from profound reflection. He had realized early on, that the reality of South America, ranging from its twoheaded llamas to unbelievable infant mortality rates, to the arrogance of dictators who could actually order a mass funeral for one leg lost, was already too “magical” for western readers to believe. Thus he had said in his Nobel Speech, “We have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.” He took description to a level of exaggeration such that even those given to the worst forms of exoticization would realize the writing was stylized — and then look for the meaning it carried, find the realism within the magic. He was a master weaver of tales, and a supreme architect of bridges, for through his tales he also enabled the people of the North to see the South — us — as we see ourselves. Gabriel Garcia Marquez no longer lives to tell the tale, but he has transformed the tale forever.

      • মাসুদ করিম - ২২ এপ্রিল ২০১৪ (৯:৪৯ অপরাহ্ণ)

        এবং সালমান রুশদির অসাধারণ শ্রদ্ধা গ্যাব্রিয়েল গার্সিয়া মার্কেজকে।

        Magic in Service of Truth

        Gabo lives. The extraordinary worldwide attention paid to the death of Gabriel García Márquez, and the genuine sorrow felt by readers everywhere at his passing, tells us that the books are still very much alive. Somewhere a dictatorial “patriarch” is still having his rival cooked and served up to his dinner guests on a great dish; an old colonel is waiting for a letter that never comes; a beautiful young girl is being prostituted by her heartless grandmother; and a kindlier patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, one of the founders of the new settlement of Macondo, a man interested in science and alchemy, is declaring to his horrified wife that “the earth is round, like an orange.”

        We live in an age of invented, alternate worlds. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Rowling’s Hogwarts, the dystopic universe of “The Hunger Games,” the places where vampires and zombies prowl: These places are having their day. Yet in spite of the vogue for fantasy fiction, in the finest of literature’s fictional microcosms there is more truth than fantasy. In William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, R. K. Narayan’s Malgudi and, yes, the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez, imagination is used to enrich reality, not to escape from it.

        “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is 47 years old now, and despite its colossal and enduring popularity, its style — magic realism — has largely given way, in Latin America, to other forms of narration, in part as a reaction against the sheer size of García Márquez’s achievement. The most highly regarded writer of the next generation, Roberto Bolaño, notoriously declared that magic realism “stinks,” and jeered at García Márquez’s fame, calling him “a man terribly pleased to have hobnobbed with so many presidents and archbishops.” It was a childish outburst, but it showed that for many Latin American writers the presence of the great colossus in their midst was more than a little burdensome. (“I have the feeling,” Carlos Fuentes once said to me, “that writers in Latin America can’t use the word ‘solitude’ any more, because they worry that people will think it’s a reference to Gabo. And I’m afraid,” he added, mischievously, “that soon we will not be able to use the phrase ‘100 years’ either.”) No writer in the world has had a comparable impact in the last half-century. Ian McEwan has accurately compared his pre-eminence to that of Charles Dickens. No writer since Dickens was so widely read, and so deeply loved, as Gabriel García Márquez.

        The great man’s passing may put an end to Latin American writers’ anxiety at his influence, and allow his work to be noncompetitively appreciated. Fuentes, acknowledging García Márquez’s debt to Faulkner, called Macondo his Yoknapatawpha County, and that may be a better point of entry into the oeuvre. These are stories about real people, not fairy tales. Macondo exists; that is its magic.
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        The trouble with the term “magic realism,” el realismo mágico, is that when people say or hear it they are really hearing or saying only half of it, “magic,” without paying attention to the other half, “realism.” But if magic realism were just magic, it wouldn’t matter. It would be mere whimsy — writing in which, because anything can happen, nothing has effect. It’s because the magic in magic realism has deep roots in the real, because it grows out of the real and illuminates it in beautiful and unexpected ways, that it works. Consider this famous passage from “One Hundred Years of Solitude”:

        “As soon as José Arcadio closed the bedroom door the sound of a pistol shot echoed through the house. A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs . . . and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack 36 eggs to make bread.

        “ ‘Holy Mother of God!’ Úrsula shouted.”

        Something utterly fantastic is happening here. A dead man’s blood acquires a purpose, almost a life of its own, and moves methodically through the streets of Macondo until it comes to rest at his mother’s feet. The blood’s behavior is “impossible,” yet the passage reads as truthful, the journey of the blood like the journey of the news of his death from the room where he shot himself to his mother’s kitchen, and its arrival at the feet of the matriarch Úrsula Iguarán reads as high tragedy: A mother learns that her son is dead. José Arcadio’s lifeblood can and must go on living until it can bring Úrsula the sad news. The real, by the addition of the magical, actually gains in dramatic and emotional force. It becomes more real, not less.

        Magic realism was not García Márquez’s invention. The Brazilian Machado de Assis, the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges and the Mexican Juan Rulfo came before him. García Márquez studied Rulfo’s masterpiece “Pedro Páramo” closely, and likened its impact on him to that of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” (In the novel’s ghost town of Comala it’s easy to see the birthplace of García Márquez’s Macondo.) But the magic-realist sensibility is not limited to Latin America. It crops up in all of the world’s literatures from time to time, and García Márquez was famously well read.

        Dickens’s unending court case, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in “Bleak House,” finds a relative in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in the unending railway train that passes by Macondo for a week. Dickens and García Márquez are both masters of comic hyperbole. Dickens’s Circumlocution Office, a government department that exists to do nothing, inhabits the same fictional reality as all the indolent, corrupt, authoritarian governors and tyrants in García Márquez’s work.

        Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, metamorphosed into a large insect, would not feel out of place in Macondo, where metamorphoses are treated as commonplace. Gogol’s Kovalyov, whose nose detaches itself from his face and wanders around St. Petersburg, would also feel at home. The French Surrealists and the American fabulists are also of this literary company, inspired by the idea of the fictionality of fiction, its made-up-ness, an idea that unshackles literature from the confines of the naturalistic and allows it to approach the truth by wilder, and perhaps more interesting, routes. García Márquez knew very well that he belonged to a far-flung literary family. William Kennedy quotes him saying, “In Mexico, surrealism runs through the streets.” And then: “The Latin American reality is totally Rabelaisian.”
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        But, to say it again: The flights of fancy need real ground beneath them. When I first read García Márquez I had never been to any Central or South American country. Yet in his pages I found a reality I knew well from my own experience in India and Pakistan. In both places there was and is a conflict between the city and the village, and there are similarly profound gulfs between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, the great and the small. Both are places with a strong colonial history, and in both places religion is of great importance and God is alive, and so, unfortunately, are the godly.

        I knew García Márquez’s colonels and generals, or at least their Indian and Pakistani counterparts; his bishops were my mullahs; his market streets were my bazaars. His world was mine, translated into Spanish. It’s little wonder I fell in love with it — not for its magic (although, as a writer reared on the fabulous “wonder tales” of the East, that was appealing too) but for its realism. My world was more urban than his, however. It is the village sensibility that gives García Márquez’s realism its particular flavor, the village in which technology is frightening but a devout girl rising up to heaven is perfectly credible; in which, as in Indian villages, the miraculous is everywhere believed to coexist with the quotidian.

        He was a journalist who never lost sight of the facts. He was a dreamer who believed in the truth of dreams. He was also a writer capable of moments of delirious, and often comic, beauty. At the beginning of “Love in the Time of Cholera”: “The scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” At the heart of “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” after the dictator sells the Caribbean to the Americans, the American ambassador’s nautical engineers “carried it off in numbered pieces to plant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red dawns of Arizona, they took it away with everything it had inside general sir, with the reflection of our cities, our timid drowned people, our demented dragons.” The first railway train arrives in Macondo and a woman goes mad with fear. “It’s coming,” she cries. “Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it.” And of course, unforgettably:

        “Colonel Aureliano Buendía organized 32 armed uprisings and he lost them all. He had 17 male children by 17 different women and they were exterminated one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had reached the age of 35. He survived 14 attempts on his life, 73 ambushes and a firing squad. He lived through a dose of strychnine in his coffee that was enough to kill a horse.”

        For such magnificence, our only possible reaction is gratitude. He was the greatest of us all.

  5. মাসুদ করিম - ২০ এপ্রিল ২০১৪ (১১:১৯ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    কণ্ঠশিল্পী বশির আহমেদ আর নেই

    ১৯৪০ সালে কলকাতায় জন্ম নেয়া বশির আহমেদ ১৫ বছর বয়সেই উচাঙ্গ সঙ্গীতের তালিম নেন। তবে তাকে জনপ্রিয়তা এনে দেয় চলচ্চিত্রের গানগুলো।

    জীবদ্দশায় জাতীয় চলচ্চিত্র পুরস্কারসহ অসংখ্য পদক পেয়েছেন বশির আহমেদ। তার স্ত্রী মীনা বশিরও সঙ্গীতশিল্পী। তাদের দুই সন্তান হুমায়রা বশির এবং ছেলে রাজা বশিরেরও গানের অ্যালবাম রয়েছে।

    দিল্লির এক পরিবারের সন্তান বশির আহমেদ কলকাতায় ওস্তাদ বেলায়েত হোসেনের কাছ থেকে সঙ্গীত শেখার পর মুম্বাইয়ে চলে যান। সেখানে উপমহাদেশের প্রখ্যাত ওস্তাদ বড়ে গোলাম আলী খাঁ’র কাছে তালিম নেন তিনি। ১৯৬০ সালে তিনি চলে আসেন ঢাকায়।

    ষাটের দশকে চিত্রনির্মাতা মুস্তাফিজের ‘সাগর’ ছবির জন্য গান লেখার মধ্য দিয়ে রুপালি জগতে পা দিয়েছিলেন বশির আহমেদ, সেই সঙ্গে শুরু হয় সুর করা এবং গান গাওয়াও।
    ১৯৬৪ সালে ‘কারোয়ান’ চলচ্চিত্রে তার গাওয়া ‘যব তোম একেলে হোগে হাম ইয়াদ আয়েঙ্গে’ গানটি পাকিস্তানে ব্যাপক জনপ্রিয়তা পায়।

    শবনম-রহমান অভিনীত বাংলা চলচ্চিত্র ‘দর্শন’ ১৯৬৭ সালে মুক্তি পাওয়ার পর এর গানগুলোর জন্য শ্রোতামনে স্থান করে নেন বশির আহমেদ।

    বশির আহমেদের জনপ্রিয় গানগুলোর মধ্যে রয়েছে- ‘সবাই আমায় প্রেমিক বলে’, ‘ডেকো না আমারে তুমি’, ‘ওগো প্রিয়তমা’, ‘খুঁজে খুঁজে জনম গেল’, ‘ঘুম শুধু ছিল দুটি নয়নে’, ‘যারে যাবি যদি যা’, ‘কাঁকন কার বাজে রুমঝুম’, ‘আমাকে যদি গো তুমি’ ইত্যাদি।

  6. মাসুদ করিম - ২০ এপ্রিল ২০১৪ (১২:১১ অপরাহ্ণ)

    The hijra legacy
    By Devdutt Pattanaik|Posted 20-Apr-2014

    The Supreme Court of India has finally recognised hijras as the third gender. This must be seen as a victory of ‘Indian culture’. Will it? Remarkably, this comes a few months after the Supreme Court recriminalised consensual sex between same sex adults, popularly considered ‘western corruption’.

    Unlike gay and lesbians who have long stayed invisible, the hijras have a reputation of making themselves visible. Unafraid of social mockery, they clap demanding acknowledgment of their existence. Feared by local people and made exotic by foreign travellers, many of them have even stood for elections.

    The English language and scientific terminologies developed in Europe and America are inadequate to explain hijras. Is it a sex (biological identity) or gender (social identity)? Are they intersex people, born with genitals that are difficult to differentiate as male or female because of either hormonal or genetic issues? Are they cross-dressing passive homosexuals? Are they transgendered people who refuse to express themselves using conventional gender rules of society? Are they transsexuals, men who feel they are trapped in the wrong body? Are they eunuchs, men who castrate themselves? The queer continuum is vast and complex and continuously expanding as definitions are constantly challenged. It becomes even more difficult to explain when culture is superimposed on it.

    The most critical part of being a hijra, which distinguishes them from all other sexual minorities, is the acceptance of a hijra guru, and being part of the hijra community. The community has many gharanas (clans) each with its own code of conduct and its own a nayak (leader), structured along lines of guru-chela parampara. These gharanas are remarkably secular, with a mixture of Hindu and Muslim practices, such as devotion to goddesses such as Bahucharji and many Sufi Pirs. They even speak a unique language with many words of Farsi origin. Long have they offered shelter to people ostracised by other communities. The rite of passage or castration ceremony is voluntarily and commonly described as ‘nirvana’.

    Those who want to see hijras as ‘alien to Indian culture’ claim they came as slaves and servants alongside Central Asian warlords who invaded India around a thousand years ago. They point to the eunuch general Malik Kafur, who was purchased for a thousand dinars and infamous for his many raids of southern Hindu kingdoms.

    However, the story of Brihanalla (Arjuna being cursed to live as a eunuch dancer in Virata’s court) in the Mahabharata dated to 300 BCE, indicates the practice of castrating men was known in India even before the Central Asian invaders. Also, the Sanskrit Kamasutra dated to 300 CE, refers to trittiya prakriti, or the third nature of people who cannot be classified as men or women. Pali literature such as Vinaya Pitaka dated to 500 CE speaks of ‘pandakas’ who could not be accommodated in either the male or female sections of Buddhist viharas.

    Were they referring to hijras? No one is absolutely sure.

    The hijras community was patronised in medieval times by Muslim and Hindu rulers of the land. They were singers and dancers and musicians often employed to serve the women’s quarters. They were invited during weddings and childbirths to bless, usher in fertility and ward away malevolent spirits. The British rulers declared them and other entertainers as Criminal Tribes. Stripped of their vocation, they were forced to beg and even indulge in sex work to combat poverty. Though the Criminal Tribe act was revoked, the damage was done. And until this landmark judgment of the Supreme Court, they remained unacknowledged and marginalised, stripped of identity and dignity and state welfare, and remaning at best, entertaining caricatures for Bollywood.

  7. মাসুদ করিম - ২৭ এপ্রিল ২০১৪ (৬:২৬ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Steven Spielberg launches center for genocide research

    Filmmaker Steven Spielberg is establishing a Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the University of Southern California.

    The formation of the new center was announced in a press conference Friday. Its primary goals will be to investigate the conditions leading to genocides and how to intervene in time to prevent such mass violence and slaughter.

    Spielberg founded what is now the USC Shoah Foundation 20 years ago following release of his Oscar-winning movie, “Schindler’s List.”

    “The USC Shoah Foundation has made tremendous progress during its first 20 years, but its work is far from finished,” Spielberg said in a statement, noting the 52,000 testimonies it has gathered and the educational programs it has launched.

    “Now comes the next significant chapter, one that establishes the Institute as one of the leading academic centers of excellence for the study of the Holocaust and genocides,” he said. “The potential is there for groundbreaking research.”

    The Shoah Foundation’s testimonies deal primarily with the Holocaust but also include eyewitness accounts of the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi genocide and the 1937 Nanjing massacre.

    Material on the Armenian and Cambodian genocides will be added to the archives this year.

    USC history professor Wolf Gruner will serve as director of the new center. Its first major conference, “Media, Memory and Technology: Exploring the Trajectories of ‘Schindler’s List’” will be held in November 2014.

  8. মাসুদ করিম - ২৮ এপ্রিল ২০১৪ (১২:০১ অপরাহ্ণ)

    BD power tariff now higher than India, Nepal, Bhutan

    The almost three-fold hike over the past four years has pushed the country’s average electricity tariff to a level higher than that of India, Nepal and Bhutan among the South Asian countries.

    The country’s average electricity tariff is now US cents 7.70 (Tk 6.15) per unit (1 kilowatt-hour), which is US cents 7.03 in India, US cents 7.63 in Nepal and US cents 3.21 in Bhutan, a recent World Bank (WB) report has revealed.

    The average electricity tariff in trouble-torn Afghanistan and Pakistan and Sri Lanka, which recently ended Tamil insurgency, is higher than that of Bangladesh, it stated.

    The average electricity tariff in Afghanistan and Sri Lanka is US cents 10.2 per unit and in Afghanistan US cents 9.18 per unit.

    Installation of oil-fired rental and quick rental power plants over the past several years has pushed the country’s average electricity generation cost up to Tk 6.7 per unit during the previous fiscal year (FY) 2013 from Tk 2.62 per unit in the FY 2011.

    “The change in the generation fuel mix over 2010-2013, with liquid fuel moving up from 5 per cent to 28 per cent of peak generation, has significantly increased the average cost of electricity,” the WB report revealed.

    The Washington-based multilateral donor agency called building of these short-term rental and quick rental power plants ‘unsustainable short-term solutions’ and suggested to phase them out instead of extending their tenure.

    It has recommended stopping payment to firms out of production to ease the government’s subsidy burden as the government has started renewing the contracts with the firms.

    To provide electricity on an emergency basis, the government signed 3 to 5-year contracts with private suppliers for 2,300 megawatts (MW) of generation capacity at diesel or furnace-oil fired ‘rental’ plants.

    “While these plants came on-line rapidly, they are less fuel-efficient than large coal or gas-fired plants. Moreover, since the contracts signed were quite generous, the power they supply is expensive,” the WB report spelled out.

    “To date some contracts have been renewed on a ‘no power no payment’ basis, while some rental prices have come down, more should be done to reduce the cost of rental power and eventually phase it out,” the WB report suggested.

    It has also called for increasing efficiency of state-owned power entities to develop the country’s energy sector.

    “It is important to mention that tariff increase is not the only means to cover the revenue gap. There are several aspects including increase in operational efficiency that contribute towards reducing the revenue gap and hence improving the financial viability of the power sector, the Bank report noted.

    Currently the country’s installed generation capacity is 10,213 MW, of which 58 per cent is in the public sector and 42 per cent in private sector.

    Rental power plants comprise 49.3 per cent capacity of the private sector or 20.5 per cent of the total generation capacity.

    Of the total installed capacity, 64.5 per cent is run by natural gas, 19.2 per cent by furnace oil, 6.7 per cent by diesel, 2.5 per cent by coal and 2.3 per cent by hydro power.

    The WB stated that direct state support to the energy sector was substantial and has grown over the past decade — budgetary transfers rose from $85m in FY 07 to $815m in FY 12, before falling back to $640m in FY 13 following gradual tariff adjustments over the past two years.

    Regarding future action plans, the WB said, “Bangladesh now needs to address the remaining demand supply imbalance in power by pursuing a multi-pronged strategy to ensure the sustainable availability of adequate and reliable power to support the country’s development.”

    The policy priorities are to boost new base-load supply, promote efficiency across the value chain, diversify fuel mix to enhance energy security, and reduce the fiscal burden through better alignment of retail prices with unit costs, the World Bank report said.

    “The government should not resort to install too many rental and quick rental power plants, which raised the country’s electricity tariff significantly over the past several years,” former Director General of state-owned Power Cell, BD Rahmatullah told the FE Saturday.

    Bangladesh was renowned for low-cost energy in the South Asian region, which had prompted many foreign investors to come here and invest, he said.

    If the government had been serious in rehabilitating inefficient old power plants and built base-load power plants, the tariff would not have increased this much, he said.

    The higher electricity tariff would discourage foreign investments, he added.

  9. মাসুদ করিম - ২৮ এপ্রিল ২০১৪ (১২:০৬ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Hillary cracks the authenticity code
    Discussing Edward Snowden, the presumptive Democratic candidate showed she’s learned how to turn her Washington-insider status into an asset.

    Substantively, I’m not sure I agree with Hillary Clinton’s attack Friday on Edward Snowden. But it offered a model for how she might run for president far more effectively than she did in 2008.

    What Hillary conveyed in her answer was something she rarely conveyed when running for president last time: authenticity. Back then, her efforts to appease a base embittered by her support for the Iraq War without giving the GOP any ammunition it could use against her in the general election made her often appear hyper-programmed and hyper-cautious, if not downright cynical. Her Waterloo came during an October 30, 2007, debate in Philadelphia when she refused to either support or oppose New York State’s plan to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. Eleven days later, Barack Obama eviscerated her at a Democratic Party dinner in Iowa, declaring that “not answering questions because we are afraid our answers won’t be popular just won’t do .… Triangulating and poll-driven positions because we’re worried about Mitt or Rudy might say about us just won’t do.” She never recovered.

    Speaking on Friday about Snowden, by contrast, Clinton did not sound poll-driven at all. She said something some liberals will not like—that America needs to spy and that Snowden’s motives are suspect—but which she undoubtedly believes. It sounded authentic because her natural instincts are to see the world as a Hobbesian place and to defend America’s governing institutions against those on the right or left who would delegitimize them. After two decades working at the highest levels in Washington, she can’t run credibly as a Ron Paul- or Elizabeth Warren style-populist, telling Americans their government is predatory and corrupt.

    What she can do is explain that the decisions a president makes are hard and complex, but she has the smarts and toughness to make them really well. That’s what she did in her answer Friday. She insisted that even before Snowden’s revelations, top Obama officials were already trying to safeguard Americans’ privacy: “The president actually had given a speech and many of us were beginning the process of trying to figure out, more than 10 years after 9/11, what we needed to do to make sure we got our liberty-security balance right.”

    But she implied that Snowden and his supporters don’t understand that balance because they don’t understand the threats America faces. She didn’t just say the world is dangerous, she deployed the kind of detail that someone like Warren and Paul could not. “When I would go to China or I would go to Russia,” she explained, “we would leave all my electronic equipment on the plane with the batteries out, because this is a new frontier and they’re trying to find out not just about what we do in our government, they’re trying to find out about what a lot of companies do and they were going after the personal emails of people who worked in the State Department. It’s not like the only government in the world that is doing anything is the United States.”

    It was a good example of how to turn Clinton’s Washington-insider status into a strength. Instead of simply asserting that her government experience would be an asset, she deployed the kind of example that people remember.

    Because she said what she really believes, she sounded authentic not only in substance, but in style. Clinton’s not a great inspirational speaker. When she lapses into ostensibly uplifting generalities, she often sounds canned. In her Snowden answer, by contrast, she displayed her natural voice: wonky and blunt. Like her husband, and more than Obama, she thrives when talking about the details of policy. And when she gives direct, unhedged answers like she did on Friday, she comes across as tough without having to say she is. She was even funny, mocking the fact that Snowden called “into a Putin talk show and says, ‘President Putin, do you spy on people?’ And President Putin says, ‘Well, from one intelligence professional to another, of course not.’ ‘Oh, thank you so much!’ I mean really.” Presidential candidates don’t often risk sarcasm, but it worked in this case because it sounded like the real Hillary.

    In his 2012 book Twilight of the Elites, Chris Hayes usefully divides American politics between “institutionalists” who think Americans should trust government more and “insurrectionists” who think they should trust it less. Hillary’s clearly the former. In 2008, however, she couldn’t run effectively as one because after eight years of George W. Bush, Democratic rage at Washington was sky-high. In 2016, given the grouchy public mood, running as an “institutionalist” still won’t be easy. But in her Snowden answer, Clinton showed how to do so in a way that makes her look capable and sincere and her insurrectionist opponents look irresponsible and dangerous. Given that she’s more likely to face an insurrectionist like Rand Paul in 2016 than an institutionalist like Jeb Bush, that may prove a very useful skill indeed.

  10. মাসুদ করিম - ৩০ এপ্রিল ২০১৪ (১:০৪ অপরাহ্ণ)

    ব্রুনাই এর সুলতানের অনুমোদনক্রমে আগামী কাল থেকে ব্রুনাইয়ে চালু হবে শরিয়া আইন।

    Brunei’s Sultan announces that syariah penal code will start on Thursday

    The Sultan of Brunei announced on Wednesday that a controversial new penal code featuring Islamic criminal punishments would be phased in beginning on Thursday.

    “Today… I place my faith in and am grateful to Allah the almighty to announce that tomorrow, Thursday May 1, 2014, will see the enforcement of syariah law phase one, to be followed by the other phases,” Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah said in a speech.

  11. মাসুদ করিম - ৩০ এপ্রিল ২০১৪ (৪:৪৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

    The history of jazz tells of the power of music to bring together artists from different cultures and backgrounds, as a driver of integration and mutual respect. […] Through jazz, millions of people have sung and still sing today their desire for freedom, tolerance and human dignity.

    Irina Bokova, Director General
    Message for International Jazz Day 2014

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