বিভাগ/বিষয় নিরপেক্ষ

সুপারিশকৃত লিন্ক : জুলাই 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।

১২ comments

  1. মাসুদ করিম - ৩ জুলাই ২০১৪ (৮:১৯ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    মাটির ব্লক দিয়ে বানানো ঘর নিয়ে বেঙ্গালোরের স্থপতির আশাবাদ, বাড়ি নির্মাণের খরচ এতে কমবে ১৫ শতাংশের মতো।

    The magic of mud blocks

    Bangalore has around 10,000 mud houses today, informs M.R. Yogananda, a doctorate in Civil Engineering from IISc. But isn’t it time we thought of mud as a medium for construction with cement costs spiralling?

    “Irrespective of the cement costs, one has to think about ways to reduce material consumption in constructions, as most consume high energy in their production and transportation,” says Mr. Yogananda, who propagates sustainable methodologies in construction. In soil-stabilised blocks, we are looking at utilising mud excavated at the site itself, explains Mr. Yogananada.

    Soil-stabilised blocks are a mixture of mud (72 to 75 per cent), with small portions of cement , sand and lime depending on the location. The silt-mud of Delhi will have to bring in coarse-aggregates into the mix, the sandy soil of Kanakapura would eliminate the necessity to blend sand, while acidic mud would have to get in lime water too. These blocks have the potential to be mixed with any industry/factory generated waste like the red mud, an off-shoot of any aluminium factory, or fly ash from the Raichur Thermal Power Station, he said.

    Mr. Yogananda recollects comments people passed about his mud house that was built just before the rainy season in 1987. “It will collapse Sir, don’t take the risk,” many people told him. It is 27 years now but the test for mud construction was still the first rain ,” he says.

    Says architect Neelam Manjunath, who specialises in a bamboo-and-mud combo in her constructions, “The strength that mud imparts is just incredible. I use the bamboo-and-mud combo for walls and columns too.” Architect S.N. Ramesh, who has built several apartments and a resort in Ramanagaram using mud blocks says that people have to necessarily use mud blocks only after determining the ratio of material mix required, as the scientific soil test is the decisive factor for stability.

    But that’s not all. Mud blocks make sense only when left unplastered as the earthy look also eliminates the sand, cement and paint costs on wall. “The wisdom lies in training masons. The overall costs come down by nearly15 per cent if mud blocks are used, says Mr. Yogananda.

  2. মাসুদ করিম - ৩ জুলাই ২০১৪ (৯:০৫ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Ancient water cache may be pristine primordial soup

    IT IS the closest we have ever come to finding Earth’s primordial soup. Ancient rocks deep underground contain water that has been locked away for billions of years. It may never have been touched by life.

    In 2007, geochemist Barbara Sherwood Lollar at the University of Toronto in Canada and her team found treasure in a copper mine. Water gushing out of cracks in the rock, caused by mining, turned out to be over a billion years old. Now the group has made a similar find in a second mine, suggesting ancient rocks could be riddled with such time capsules, right back to the early days of life on Earth.

    Sherwood Lollar’s team is now scouring the water for ancient forms of life, perhaps unknown to science. So far it seems it holds no life, but that is just as exciting because it means the water they found may be identical to that in which life began.

    If that’s the case, it opens up an extraordinary opportunity to understand how life got started on Earth, and where (see “Beginner’s guide to the origin of life”). The find could also offer insights into how life may survive on other planets.

    Sherwood Lollar first got a whiff of the hidden water over a decade ago, deep inside the Kidd Creek Mine in Timmins, Ontario, Canada. In a corridor more than 2 kilometres beneath the surface, she caught a whiff of gas from a fracture in the rock. Water dripped from the hole. Subsequent analyses revealed it to be between 1.1 and 2.7 billion years old (Nature, doi.org/tgw). The smell came from the sulphurous gases mixed in with the water, which also holds methane and hydrogen.

    Crucially, as far as the team could tell, the water contained no trace of life. “It speaks to this question of whether we can find an exotic small part of this planet that has not been touched by life,” says Sherwood Lollar. “These fractures may have been isolated long enough that they retain chemistry that reflects the same kind of processes that were taking place before there was life on Earth. At that time, presumably the whole planet would have looked something like this.”

    The discovery could have been a one-off, so the team has been looking for other places where ancient water exists in deep rocks. Last month at the Goldschmidt conference in Sacramento, California, team member Chelsea Sutcliffe presented their results from two mines in the Sudbury basin, also in Ontario.

    Like Timmins, the mines are dug into rock that is billions of years old. Sutcliffe collected water from 1.3 and 1.7 kilometres down, and so far it looks very similar to the Timmins water. The chemicals in the water are similar, and isotope ratios suggest it is similarly old. The team are now running further analyses: the noble gases in the water samples will provide a fairly precise age.

    “If they are seeing the same thing at Sudbury, that’s pretty powerful,” says Tullis Onstott of Princeton University. This water is “an abiotic fringe zone – a place where life could exist but doesn’t yet”, he says. “This is a zone that’s been trapped for billions of years, providing a geological experiment on the genesis of life.”

    At most, the Timmins and Sudbury water is 2.7 billion years old – the age of the rock it is trapped inside. That’s about a billion years after life got started, so the researchers are not suggesting they have bottled the actual primordial soup in which life began. But the chemistry they are seeing corresponds to water that could have given rise to life.

    “Geochemically, it’s the kind of site that has been invoked for the origins of life on our planet,” says Onstott. “Yet here we see it isolated from the present-day DNA world.”

    There are two leading theories for where life got started on Earth. Perhaps the most famous is Darwin’s “warm little pond” – a soup of organic chemicals bathed in sunlight. The other, which has gained popularity in recent years, is that deep-sea vents at the bottom of the ocean acted as a cradle for life, offering both heat and nutrition via fluids pumped up through Earth’s crust.

    That’s where the ancient water from the Ontario mines comes in. The rocks they are held in were formed by hydrothermal vent systems at the bottom of the ocean, billions of years ago.

    “I would say this is as close as we have come to bottling the warm little pond, in a warm little fracture,” says Sherwood Lollar. Onstott agrees: “They are literally like Darwin’s warm little pond without the light.”

    Having bottled Earth’s primordial soup, the researchers are now probing it to see what they can learn. It may be that chemical reactions deep underground have given rise to some of the very earliest stages in the formation of life, like the generation of amino acids, or the building blocks of DNA.

    If they find anything like this, it would suggest that life can begin without light – good news for the quest for life on other planets. Many distant worlds have never received as much light as Earth, but it is suspected that some of them have hydrothermal systems similar to Earth’s deep-sea vents. Can such systems generate life in an otherwise dead world? We don’t know for sure, but Sherwood Lollar’s water offers an unprecedented opportunity to find out.

    “Given the chemistry that we have all speculated might have led to life,” says Onstott, “given that it’s there and it’s been there for billions of years, should we not anticipate seeing some prebiotic reactions trapped in there? Once we can find these types of sites, we can turn all our instruments on them to see if we find things like a primitive RNA world.”

    Regardless of whether we find such pre-life chemistry in the water, Sherwood Lollar says one thing is fairly certain: the fluids are still full of energy-rich chemicals, the same energy that may have helped to kick-start life.

    Sutcliffe’s latest results from Timmins show that the ancient waters are now slowly being colonised. Something seems to be eating the chemicals that have been trapped there for billions of years. It’s probably a modern organism that found its way into the ancient niche when it was cracked open by miners, and is now feasting. But the stuff it is eating has been around since life’s earliest days.

  3. মাসুদ করিম - ৪ জুলাই ২০১৪ (১২:০২ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Confessions of a Soccer Addict
    Charles Simic

    I haven’t done a thing in three weeks except watch soccer. Mowing the lawn, paying bills, working on an essay and a lecture whose deadlines are fast approaching, writing overdue letters of recommendation and one of condolences, answering dozens of urgent emails and writing an angry letter to The New York Times pointing out the many historical inaccuracies in John Burns’s recent piece on the hundredth anniversary of the 1914 assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria—all these have had to wait. With sixty-four games to watch, it’s a wonder I find time to brush my teeth or tie my shoelaces. The only phone calls I let through these days are those from other junkies who want to discuss some game we are watching. Should an unexpected visitor come to the door, I would emulate the example of soccer players and fake an injury, dropping on the floor and writhing in agony until the person left.

    Consequently, I was astonished last Sunday when my wife marched into our TV room, where I was making myself comfortable in my chair to watch the Netherlands play Mexico, and asked me if I wanted to go picking strawberries with her and our little granddaughter. My mouth fell open. I was about to ask her to repeat what she said, but then I remembered how it is with soccer and the women in my family. My grandmother once came to watch me play and when she got home told my mother: “All the other kids were running around nicely and kicking the ball, except your son, who kept jumping up and down and flailing his arms.”

    As hard as it is to comprehend, there are human beings on this planet who have no interest in the World Cup. Not just in the United States, where many sneer at this foreign import and find the global passion for the game incomprehensible, but also in countries where the fate of the national team in such a tournament is the sole topic of conversation for months. I remember visiting the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz in Mexico City on the day his country was playing Italy in the 1994 World Cup. At first, we lolled around for a couple of hours, sipping wine and having a leisurely chat about literature and art. But to my surprise and distress, when the time came for the game, instead of turning on the TV, Paz and his wife took me and my Mexican translator to a French restaurant where we sat surrounded by empty tables, because everyone else in Mexico that evening was either at home watching the game or in one of the big plazas in the city seeing it on a huge screen. As we got into an argument about Heidegger, I recall cheers and gasps of collective disappointment reaching us from the vast crowd gathered outside. Desperate to find out the score, I kept going to the bathroom so I could peek into the kitchen where the cooks and the waiters were watching the game. I have no memory of anything Octavio said that night, and I sincerely regret that, because he was the most learned and articulate man I ever encountered in my life. But I do remember the final score: Mexico one; Italy one.

    For us in the US who think back to the years when the World Cup was rationed to a few games on American television and one had to drive to Canada or Mexico and check into a hotel to see the rest, this month-long tournament with thirty-two teams competing and every one of the games televised is an addict’s paradise. Ordinarily, I keep my substance abuse under control. From August to May, I follow the English Premier League, going through extreme mood swings on weekends as I root for Arsenal, but lead a normal life the rest of the week with scarcely a thought about the next game. The World Cup is different. I approached the early rounds of this year’s cup with Olympian detachment, not caring particularly what team won and observing with equal interest both the perennial favorites and countries with little or no chance of advancing. Like any fan, I have my own ideas how the game ought to be played and delight in second-guessing the coaches and referees, as well as the decisions made by the players in key moments. Of course, after a couple of weeks, the impartiality was gone. I fell in love with the disciplined, quick counter-attacking games of Costa Rica, Mexico, Colombia, and a few other teams whom no one appears to have told that they are expected to roll over when they play Spain, England, and Italy.

    More than any other World Cup that I can remember (and I’ve seen sixteen others since 1950) this one has been about underdogs, teams that turned out to be as talented and as well coached as their more famous opponents. Even Brazil and Argentina, two great soccer nations with Neymar and Messi and other famous names on their rosters, often appear ponderous and short of ideas when attacking and had, as we’ve just seen, enormous difficulties getting past Chile and Switzerland. The Netherlands and Germany looked tougher and savvier at first, but after barely squeezing past Mexico and Algeria, it’s hard to make predictions. I suspect there’ll be more epic battles and more surprises. As for the United States, I never expected they would defend so well and play with so much flair after being two goals down against Belgium, though in an attempt to reestablish my credentials as a prophet, I must not leave out that I told my cat Zelda (who I suspect is a secret Liverpool fan) that Suárez, whom I greatly admire as a player, might revert to biting if he came up against some hard-nosed and unyielding defender during this summer’s World Cup.

    So far, this has been a hugely entertaining tournament—not just the drama and suspense of the many close games and the large number of goals scored, but the spectacle. Brazilian crowds require no instruction on how to party, but they got plenty of help from fans of other nations, giving these games a carnival-like atmosphere and providing the alert TV cameramen with many delightful little scenes, like the one of a young couple holding on to each other and sobbing after their country’s last-minute defeat and then suddenly, as they catch sight of their faces being on the big screen over the stadium, beginning to wave and smile happily through to their friends and relatives back home. May we all do that when the final game of the World Cup draws to a close. In the meantime, there still remains the mystery: Who named a talented young midfielder from Costa Rica after Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, the ineffective and frequently drunk former Russian president?

  4. মাসুদ করিম - ৮ জুলাই ২০১৪ (১০:৫৩ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    কোনোদিন বিশ্বকাপ খেলেননি তাই হয়ত বিশ্বকাপ চলার সময়ই গতকাল সোমবার চিরবিদায় নিলেন কারো কারো মতে ইউরোপের সর্বকালের সর্বশ্রেষ্ঠ ফুটবলার আলফ্রেদো দি স্তেফানো।

    Alfredo Di Stefano dies aged 88

    Real Madrid’s legendary Argentine striker Alfredo Di Stefano, known as the Blond Arrow, has died after he had a heart attack

    Real Madrid legend Alfredo Di Stefano’s death was announced on Monday afternoon, after he suffered a heart attack on Saturday.

    A medical team had battled for nearly 20 minutes to revive the 88-year-old after his heart and breathing stopped while he was eating with his family near Real Madrid’s Bernabeu Stadium. He went into a coma, but died in the Gregorio Maranon hospital.

    Di Stefano – known as La Saeta Rubia (Blond Arrow) – had been hospitalised seven times for similar episodes, and underwent emergency quadruple heart by-pass surgery after suffering a major heart attack in 2005.

    He is one of Real Madrid’s most celebrated players, having represented the club for 11 seasons between 1953 and 1964, winning five European Cups. He holds the title of honorary club president.

    Born in Buenos Aires to Italian parents, he began his professional career with hometown club River Plate in 1945 before leaving for Colombian club Millonarios four years later after the Argentine league ground to a halt following a pay strike.

  5. মাসুদ করিম - ১০ জুলাই ২০১৪ (১১:৪৫ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Zohra Sehgal dies at the age of 102

    Veteran actress and former dancer Zohra Sehgal died at a hospital in New Delhi today at the age of 102.

    The veteran theatre and film actor was last seen in the 2007 hit movie Cheeni Kum as Amitabh Bachchan’s mother. Sehgal, born on April 27, 1912, started her career in 1935 as a leading dancer with the Uday Shankar Ballet Company and travelled the world over. In 1945, she joined Prithviraj Kapoor’s Prithvi Theatre group as an actor on a monthly salary of Rs 400.

    Her sister Uzra Butt too was a popular actor. During this period, she married a fellow dancer, Kameshwar Sehgal. After having acted in several plays, she made her film debut in Indian People’s Theatre Association’s (IPTA) first film, Dharti Ke Lal (1946), which was directed by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas. She followed it up with another IPTA film, Neecha Nagar.

    The actress was also seen in movies like ‘Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam’ and ‘Saawariya’. She was also seen in ‘Bhaji on the Beach’(1992), ‘The Mystic Masseur’(2001), ‘Bend It Like Beckham’(2002), ‘Dil Se’ (1998).

    Zohra Sehgal was residing in Delhi with her daughter, Kiran Sehgal, and, as her friends said, the sprightly actor’s zest for life was still intact.

    Zohra Sehgal had also received the Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan.

    A Nymph Called Zohra Sehgal (1912-2014)

  6. মাসুদ করিম - ১১ জুলাই ২০১৪ (২:২০ অপরাহ্ণ)

    A victory for Bangladesh
    Payam Akhavan

    The end of this long and complex process now opens the way for the exploitation of vast offshore resources

    July 7, 2014 may go down in history as a turning point for Bangladesh. On that day, an arbitral tribunal sitting in The Hague rendered its award delimiting the maritime boundary between Bangladesh and India. An earlier March 14, 2012 judgment of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea sitting in Hamburg, Germany, had already delimited the maritime boundary between Bangladesh and Myanmar.

    Both decisions are final and legally binding. In combination, they represent the successful conclusion of the government’s courageous and far-sighted decision on October 8, 2009, to initiate two parallel cases to resolve all its maritime boundary disputes in the Bay of Bengal. The end of this long and complex process now opens the way for the exploitation of vast offshore resources – including natural gas – that could revolutionise the fortunes of the Bangladeshi people.

    The decision to bring these two cases followed many years of unsuccessful negotiations in which Myanmar and India proposed maritime boundaries that fell well short of Bangladesh’s entitlements under international law. Under such circumstances, Bangladesh had the unappealing choice of either accepting plainly inequitable boundaries, or leaving the boundary disputes indefinitely unresolved.

    Given the need for legal certainty required for investment of millions of dollars for offshore exploration, this situation hindered the development of natural resources. It was within Bangladesh’s rights under the 1982 UN Law of the Sea Convention to initiate compulsory judicial procedures in order to settle these disputes once and for all. Indeed, it was also to the benefit of Myanmar and India to put an end to the legal uncertainty.

    Bangladesh was in the challenging position of simultaneously litigating two separate but closely related cases. Because of broad similarities in the geographical context of the dispute with both Myanmar and India, the precedent established in the first judgment would invariably shape the outcome of the second judgment.

    This was important because the general principle of maritime delimitation between adjacent states is to draw a boundary that is equidistant from both their coasts. Myanmar and India insisted on this delimitation method both in negotiations and litigation. This position however, was highly disadvantageous for Bangladesh.

    Because of its concave coastline, such boundaries would severely “cut-off” its entitlement to a 200-mile maritime area – and beyond that, to an extended continental shelf. This would reduce Bangladesh’s maritime space to a small triangle, sandwhiched between its neighbours. Thus, the central objective in both cases was to demonstrate that an equidistant boundary was not the appropriate solution under international law.

    It is difficult to assess the success of these cases given the complexity and multiplicity of factors relevant to maritime boundary delimitation. There are legal principles to be applied, but this is not an exact science that can be easily quantified in terms of “splitting the difference” between two opposing claims and the like. Furthermore, in attempting to measure the relative success of these cases, I may be accused of arriving at a self-serving conclusion of a triumph given that I served as counsel for Bangladesh. That is why I leave it to the words of the Indian-appointed arbitrator Dr PS Raoto to describe just how remarkable a victory the July 7, 2014 award was for Bangladesh.

    In his partially dissenting opinion, he observed that the 177° 30’ 00” azimuth of the boundary adopted in the majority opinion “comes very close to (and indeed nearly matches) the 180° bisector claimed by Bangladesh.” In other words, Bangladesh got nearly all that it asked for.

    A map depicting the difference between the negotiating and litigation positions of Myanmar and India respectively, and the boundaries that Bangladesh was ultimately awarded, leaves little doubt that the final outcome of this five-year long process is truly outstanding.

    In short, Bangladesh managed to persuade both tribunals that an equidistance line was inequitable because it would “cut-off” its maritime space, and that a significant adjustment of boundaries in Bangladesh’s favour was required. Bangladesh thus received thousands of square kilometres of additional maritime space.

    As with all success stories, it is easy to forget how many things could have gone wrong along the way. From the determination of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to initiate the two cases in pursuit of the national interest, to the capable leadership of then Foreign Minister Dipu Moni, to the exemplary dedication of Admiral Khurshed Alam, to the solidarity of the legal team, this was an odyssey with results that far exceeded our expectations. It has been a true honour and privilege to contribute, in some small measure, to this important chapter in the history of the people of Bangladesh.

  7. মাসুদ করিম - ১৬ জুলাই ২০১৪ (৪:১৬ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Nadine Gordimer, Novelist Who Took On Apartheid, Is Dead at 90

    Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer whose literary ambitions led her into the heart of apartheid to create a body of fiction that brought her a Nobel Prize in 1991, died on Sunday in Johannesburg. She was 90.

    Her family announced her death in a statement.

    Ms. Gordimer did not originally choose apartheid as her subject as a young writer, she said, but she found it impossible to dig deeply into South African life without striking repression. And once the Afrikaner nationalists came to power in 1948, the scaffolds of the apartheid system began to rise around her and could not be ignored.

    “I am not a political person by nature,” Ms. Gordimer said years later. “I don’t suppose, if I had lived elsewhere, my writing would have reflected politics much, if at all.”

    But whether by accident of geography or literary searching, she found her themes in the injustices and cruelties of her country’s policies of racial division, and she left no quarter of South African society unexplored, from the hot, crowded cinder-block neighborhoods and tiny shebeens of the black townships to the poolside barbecues, hunting parties and sundowner cocktails of the white society.

    Through Ms. Gordimer’s work, international readers learned the human effects of the “color bar” and the punishing laws that systematically sealed off each avenue of contact among races. Her books are rich with terror: The fear of the security forces pounding on the door in the middle of the night is real, and freedom is impossible. Even the political prisoner released from jail is immediately rearrested after experiencing the briefest illusion of returning to the world.

    Critics have described the whole of her work as constituting a social history as told through finely drawn portraits of the characters who peopled it.

    Ms. Gordimer told little about her own life, preferring to explore the intricacies of the mind and heart in those of her characters. “It is the significance of detail wherein the truth lies,” she once said.

    But some critics saw in her fiction a theme of personal as well as political liberation, reflecting her struggles growing up under the possessive, controlling watch of a mother trapped in an unhappy marriage.

    Ms. Gordimer was the author of more than two dozen works of fiction, including novels and collections of short stories in addition to personal and political essays and literary criticism. Her first book of stories, “Face to Face,” appeared in 1949, and her first novel, “The Lying Days,” in 1953. In 2010, she published “Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954-2008,” a weighty volume of her collected nonfiction.

    Banned Novels and a Nobel

    Three of Ms. Gordimer’s books were banned in her own country at some point during the apartheid era — 1948 to 1994 — starting with her second novel, “A World of Strangers,” published in 1958. It concerns a young British man, newly arrived in South Africa, who discovers two distinct social planes that he cannot bridge: one in the black townships, to which one group of friends is relegated; the other in the white world of privilege, enjoyed by a handful of others he knows.
    Continue reading the main story

    “A World of Strangers” was banned for 12 years and another novel, “The Late Bourgeois World” (1966), for 10: long enough to be fatal to most books, Ms. Gordimer noted. “The Late Bourgeois World” deals with a woman who faces a difficult choice when her ex-husband, a traitor to the anti-apartheid resistance, commits suicide.

    The third banned novel was one of her best known, “Burger’s Daughter,” the story of the child of a family of revolutionaries who seeks her own way after her father becomes a martyr to the cause. It was unavailable in South Africa for only months rather than years after it was published in 1979, in part because by then its author was internationally known.

    Ms. Gordimer was never detained or persecuted for her work, though there were always risks to writing openly about the ruling repressive regime. One reason may have been her ability to give voice to perspectives far from her own, like those of colonial nationalists who had created and thrived on the system of institutionalized oppression that was named the “grand apartheid” (from the Afrikaans word for “apartness”) when it became law.

    Her ability to slip inside a life completely different from her own took her beyond the borders of white and black to explore other cultures under the boot of apartheid. In the 1983 short story “A Chip of Glass Ruby,” she entered an Indian Muslim household, and in the novel “My Son’s Story” (1990), she wrote of a mixed-race character. She won the Booker Prize in 1974 for “The Conservationist,” which had a white male protagonist.

    Long before the struggle against apartheid was won, some of her books looked ahead to its overthrow and a painful national rebirth. In “July’s People” (1981), a violent war for equality has come to the white suburbs, driving out the ruling minority. In a reversal of roles, July, a black servant, brings his employers, a white family, to his isolated village, where he can protect them.

    Ms. Gordimer wrote: “The decently-paid and contented male servant, living in their yard since they had married, clothed by them in two sets of uniforms, khaki pants for rough housework, white drill for waiting at table, given Wednesdays and alternate Sundays free, allowed to have his friends visit him and his town woman sleep with him in his room — he turned out to be the chosen one in whose hands their lives were to be held; frog prince, saviour, July.”

    In “A Sport of Nature” (1987), the white wife of an assassinated black leader becomes, with a new husband, the triumphant first lady of a country rising from the rubble of the old order.

    Perhaps surprisingly, Ms. Gordimer’s books were not the product of someone who had grown up in a household where the politics of race were discussed. Rather, Ms. Gordimer said, in her world, the minority whites lived among blacks “as people live in a forest among trees.”

    It was not her country’s problems that set her to writing, she said. “On the contrary,” she wrote in an essay, “it was learning to write that sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.”

    Nadine Gordimer was born to Jewish immigrant parents on Nov. 20, 1923, in Springs, a mining town in the province now known as Gauteng (formerly part of the vast northeastern area referred to as the Transvaal). Her father, Isidore Gordimer, a watchmaker who had been driven by poverty to emigrate from Lithuania, eventually established his own jewelry store. Her mother, the former Nan Myers, had moved with her family from Britain and never stopped thinking of it as home.

    Theirs was an unhappy marriage.

    “I suspect she was sometimes in love with other men,” Ms. Gordimer said in a 1983 interview with The Paris Review, “but my mother would never have dreamt of having an affair.” Instead she poured her energy, sometimes to a smothering degree, into raising Nadine and her older sister, Betty.

    As a child, Ms. Gordimer recalled, she was a brash show-off who loved to dance and dreamed of becoming a ballerina. But her mother insisted that she stop dancing, because she had a rapid heartbeat. When she was 10, her mother pulled her out of the convent school she attended, telling her daughter that participating in running and swimming could harm her.

    Years later, Ms. Gordimer said she learned that the rapid heartbeat was a result of an enlarged thyroid, and that it did not pose the danger her mother had implied. She came to believe that her supposed ill health had dovetailed with her mother’s hunger for romance.

    “The chief person she was attracted to was our family doctor,” she told The Paris Review. “There’s no question. I’m sure it was quite unconscious, but the fact that she had this delicate daughter, about whom she could be constantly calling the doctor — in those days doctors made house calls, and there would be tea and cookies and long chats — made her keep my ‘illness’ going in this way.”

    Childhood Reflected in Fiction

    Scholars and critics have found threads from Ms. Gordimer’s childhood running through her fiction. John Cooke, in his book “The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: Private Lives/Public Landscapes,” saw “the liberation of children from unusually possessive mothers” as a central theme in Ms. Gordimer’s work. In novel after novel, he wrote, “daughters learn that truly leaving ‘the mother’s house’ requires leaving ‘the house of the white race.’ ”

    It took Ms. Gordimer years to tear herself from her mother’s house.

    Removed from school, Ms. Gordimer said, she became a “little old woman,” studying with a tutor and accompanying her mother to social engagements. The antidote to her isolation was reading, she said.

    In 1945, she attended the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and thrived in what she called the “nursery bohemia” of university life, studying literature and deciding to pursue a writing life.

    With the exception of a trip to what is now known as Zimbabwe, it was not until she was 30 that she ventured outside South Africa.

    In 1949, Ms. Gordimer married a dentist, Gerald Gavron, and they had a daughter, Oriane. The marriage ended in divorce in 1952. Two years later, she married Reinhold H. Cassirer, an art dealer who had fled Nazi Germany and was a nephew of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Their son, Hugo, was born in 1955. Reinhold Cassirer died in 2001; her son and her daughter survive her.
    Continue reading the main story

    Ms. Gordimer said little about her personal life in interviews. Journalists commonly noted her impatience with certain personal questions, sometimes describing her response as disdainful and irritable.

    She did mention flirtations on occasion. “My one preoccupation outside the world of ideas was men,” she once said, without providing details.

    She never wrote an autobiography. “Autobiography,” she said in 1963, “can’t be written until one is old, can’t hurt anyone’s feelings, can’t be sued for libel, or, worse, contradicted.”

    She was, however, the subject of a 2005 biography, “No Cold Kitchen,” which drew wide attention not least for the bitter fallout she had with its author, Ronald Suresh Roberts, a former Wall Street lawyer who had grown up in Trinidad. She had originally authorized the biography and granted him access, but she later withdrew the authorization, objecting to the manuscript and accusing the author of breach of trust. The publishers under contract for the book — Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States and Bloomsbury in Britain — declined to issue it. (Both were publishers of Ms. Gordimer’s work.)

    The biography was eventually published by a small South African house and was the talk of literary South Africa for its accusation that Ms. Gordimer had admitted to fabricating key elements in an autobiographical essay in The New Yorker in 1954. It also paints Ms. Gordimer as a hypocritical white liberal whose words masked a paternalistic attitude toward black South Africa.

    When the Nobel committee awarded Ms. Gordimer the literature prize in 1991, it took note of her political activism but observed, “She does not permit this to encroach on her writings.”

    That sentiment was one she said she clung to throughout her career. In 1975, she wrote in the introduction to her “Selected Stories”: “The tension between standing apart and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer. That is where we begin.”

    In later interviews, she said that no one could live in a society like South Africa’s and stay isolated from politics. Looking back, she told an interviewer in 1994, “The fact that my books were perceived as being so political was because I lived my life in this society that was so much changed by conflict, by political conflict, which of course in practical terms is human conflict.”

    She never stopped grappling with politics, despite her disdain for the polemical. And book by book, she crept closer to reconciling her writing with her political self. What she did not want to do, she said, was to write in the service of the anti-apartheid movement, despite her deep contempt for the government system. Over time, she revealed that she had been far from passive when politics touched her personally. She passed messages; hid friends, including high-ranking figures, who were trying to elude the police; and secretly drove others to the border. All these actions appear in her fiction, carried out by characters much braver than she portrayed herself to be.
    Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

    The great victory, the end of apartheid, is not the end of the knotty moral problems those characters confront. In “None to Accompany Me,” published in 1994, the year Nelson Mandela was elected president in the country’s first fully democratic vote, one subplot concerns a black political exile, Didymus Maqoma, who comes home only to find that he has no place in the current struggle. Despite his sacrifices, he is overlooked by the post-revolutionary leaders in favor of his wife.

    Reading Ms. Gordimer’s work is a reminder that the noose around South Africans tightened by increments, with ever stricter laws followed by correspondingly dimmer expectations. Critics have said that the tone of Ms. Gordimer’s writing fluctuated with the political climate, with an air of hope giving way to a sense of bleakness as racial violence gathered force.

    Walls Come Tumbling Down

    Some of her most difficult moments came in the 1970s, when the black consciousness movement sought to exclude whites from the fight for majority rule. That period cut her off from many intellectuals and artists and left her work vulnerable to criticism from many black Africans, who contended that a white author could never authentically tell a story through the eyes of a black character.

    Ms. Gordimer fought off that accusation, saying, “There are things that blacks know about whites that we don’t know about ourselves, that we conceal and don’t reveal in our relationships — and the other way about.”

    In the end, the government was too weak to enforce its laws while contending with armed opposition within and economic and political pressure from outside. In 1990, Mr. Mandela was released from prison; in 1991, apartheid laws were repealed; in 1993, a new Constitution was approved, and in 1994, the walls came tumbling down with the election.

    During that exhilarating period, when Mr. Mandela’s African National Congress party regained legal standing, Ms. Gordimer, who had been a secret member, paid her dues in person and got a party card.

    It was then, after the release of the man who would be president within a few years, that Ms. Gordimer won the Nobel Prize. “Mandela still doesn’t have a vote,” she said at the time.

    Ms. Gordimer went on writing after apartheid, resisting the idea that its demise had deprived her of her great literary subject. It “makes a big difference in my life as a human being,” she said, “but it doesn’t really affect me in terms of my work, because it wasn’t apartheid that made me a writer, and it isn’t the end of apartheid that’s going to stop me.”

    But there were critics who thought she had lost her bearings. In a review of her 1998 novel, “The House Gun,” in which a white South African husband and wife see their only son go on trial for the murder of a friend, Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times that the book suggested that the author “has yet to come to terms, artistically, with the dismantling of apartheid and her country’s drastically altered social landscape.”

    She ventured into an Arab country in her 2001 novel, “The Pickup,” and continued to write prolifically for years after apartheid became history. Politically, she eventually embraced other causes, among them the fight against the spread of the H.I.V. virus and AIDS in South Africa and a writers’ campaign against the country’s punishing secrecy law.

    In the end, one of her greatest fears proved hollow. Although Ms. Gordimer was immensely gratified to receive the Nobel, its valedictory connotations led her to worry about what it said to the world about her future.

    “When I won the Nobel Prize,” she said, “I didn’t want it to be seen as a wreath on my grave.”

    Correction: July 14, 2014
    Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary misstated the day of Ms. Gordimer’s death. It was Sunday, not Monday. That version also misstated the location to which the white characters flee with their black servant in the novel “July’s People.” It is an isolated rural village, not the township of Soweto.

  8. মাসুদ করিম - ১৬ জুলাই ২০১৪ (৪:৪৬ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Scientists discover molecule that controls appetite

    A molecule produced in the colon has been found to control appetite, a discovery which could help the future treatment of conditions such as obesity and anorexia nervosa.

    While the existence of the molecule was known, its purpose had remained a mystery to scientists.

    But an international team of researchers from Melbourne’s Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health and Cambridge University established the molecule – known as insulin-like peptide 5 or Insl5 – plays a key role in telling the brain when the body is hungry or full.

    Significantly, the research team also managed to make an artificial version of Insl5 in the laboratory, meaning scientists are on the way to being able to produce a drug capable of influencing appetite.

    Such a treatment could either stimulate appetite for patients needing to gain weight such as those undergoing treatment for cancer or AIDS, or to suppress appetite in patients with type 2 diabetes or people wishing to lose weight.

    ”What this research reveals for the first time is that mechanisms going on in the gut are working hand in glove with the brain to control how you react and respond to food,” Florey Institute deputy director Henry de Aizpurua said.

    Establishing the role it plays in appetite adds to growing evidence that peptides in the gut ”talk” to the brain and influence the body’s behaviour, reinforcing the idea that the gut is ”the second brain”.

    It is the second hormone found to influence appetite. The first, known as ghrelin or the ”hunger hormone”, has its target in the brain, unlike Insl5 which has its target in the gut.

    Outlined in the journal PNAS on Monday, the findings mean future drugs would not have to cross the difficult-to-penetrate blood-brain barrier, as is the case with many obesity treatments.

    ”The beauty with Insl5 is that it does its business in the gut and then the gut talks to the brain and so it doesn’t have to get through the blood-brain barrier which will make a huge difference in the logistics involved with developing a drug,” Dr de Aizpurua said.

    The study was conducted using mice. Head of the Florey’s insulin peptides laboratory, Akhter Hossain, said normal mice were injected with the Insl5 peptide, which stimulated their appetite and prompted them to eat.

    Dr Hossain said the effect was evident within 15 minutes and lasted for up to three days. However genetically modified mice bred without the Insl5 receptors, when injected with the peptide, did not start eating.

    Researchers from the pharmaceutical company Takeda Cambridge also participated in the study, which was financially supported by the Japanese-owned group.

  9. মাসুদ করিম - ২৩ জুলাই ২০১৪ (৫:৪৭ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Brazil to unleash GM-mosquito swarms to fight dengue

    Time to unleash the mozzies? Genetically modified mosquitoes will be raised on a commercial scale for the first time, in a bid to stem outbreaks of dengue fever in Brazil. But it is unclear how well it will work.

    Next week biotech company Oxitec of Abingdon, UK, will open a factory in Campinas, Brazil, to raise millions of modified mosquitoes. Once released, they will mate with wild females, whose offspring then die before adulthood. That should cut the number of dengue-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. In April, Brazil’s National Technical Commission for Biosecurity (CTNBio) approved their commercial use.

    The mosquitoes could be an important step forward in controlling dengue, which affects more than 50 million people every year, with a 30-fold increase in the last 50 years. There is no vaccine or preventive drug, so all anyone can do is to spray insecticide on a large scale in a bid to kill dengue-carrying mosquitoes.

    The Brazilian state of Bahia is one of the affected areas. A state of alert, declared in February, is in force in 10 rural districts. Oxitec plans to release millions of modified mosquitoes in the Bahia town of Jacobina, as part of an expanded research programme. A larger release could follow if the Brazilian Health Surveillance Agency also lends its approval, as expected.

    Question mark

    But no one is sure if the insects will succeed. Margareth Capurro at the University of São Paulo has studied the effects of a trial release in Jacobina last year. She plans to submit her report this month.

    Capurro says her data show the number of mosquito eggs falling by an impressive 92 per cent in Jacobina. But so far this has not led to a drop in the incidence of dengue.

    That may be because the study was too small, says Capurro. Only after a full epidemiological study next year will we know for sure if the GM mosquitoes are working.

    “In every trial we’ve demonstrated excellent control of the dengue mosquito in an urban setting,” says Hadyn Parry of Oxitec. For now they are only measuring success in terms of mosquito numbers.

    Dangerous precedent

    The CTNBio set a dangerous precedent by approving the commercial release of the mosquitoes before full epidemiological studies had been completed, says agronomist Leonardo Melgarejo, who works for Brazil’s Ministry of Agrarian Development, and economist Antonio Inacio Andrioli of the Regional Northwest University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil.

    In a technical paper presented before the authorisation of the GM mosquitoes, they argued that they should only be released commercially once the technology had been fully evaluated.

    In the long run the modified mosquitoes might be stymied by their high cost, says Thomas Unnasch of the University of South Florida in Tampa. The technology depends on sterile males, who by definition cannot pass on the genetically engineered trait. So Unnasch says it would be necessary to release huge numbers of them year after year, at a cost of millions of dollars.

  10. মাসুদ করিম - ২৪ জুলাই ২০১৪ (১:৫৭ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Communist Party must win ‘eight new battles’ to hold onto power in China, scholar warns

    If the Communist Party is to continue ruling the world’s most populous nation, it will have to win “eight new types” of battles, cautions a top party scholar.

    Professor Han Qingxiong, vice-dean of studies at the Central Party School, the training base for senior officials, also identified what he called “four challenges” and “four risks” the world’s largest ruling party is now facing.

    He listed the eight new types of battles as those involving resources, currency, market share, ideology, territorial integrity, anti-graft, internet, and separatism.

    The “four challenges” facing the ruling government will come from maintaining rulership in the long term, the implementation of a reform and openness policy, the introduction of a market economy, and protection from the external environment.

    The “four risks” are a slackness in spirit; the inability to meet challenges; losing contact with masses; and widespread corruption among officials.

    Describing the statement as seemingly reminiscent of the extremely leftist idea of “class struggle” and a “Great Struggle” during the Cultural Revolution, some analysts said the rhetoric also reflected the leadership’s increasing concern that the party can maintain its rule.

    Xigen Li, associate professor with City University’s department of media and communication, called Han’s idea of “The Great Struggle” rhetoric taken from party discourse, and added: “It is more of a cliché than an actual call for action.”

    Zhang Ming, professor of political science at Renmin University, said the rhetoric reflects “an overwhelming sense of crisis among party leaders”.

    The context of Han’s presentation is President Xi Jinping’s sweeping ideological campaign targeting liberal intellectuals and an intense crackdown on political dissenters.

    Earlier, an official with the party’s anti-graft and discipline watchdog warned of “infiltration by foreign forces” in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

    Han made similar warnings of threats, infiltration and containment by foreign forces and the negative influence of Western ideals such as “constitutionalism”, “neo-liberalism” and “universal values”.

    Li said that domestically, official corruption, pollution and the crisis of social trust are severe problems. But the solutions don’t constitute any “great struggle”, but instead a strict implementation of laws and a restoration of moral values.

    Li said that internationally, China is now leaving a world of illusion that some scholars within the system created and entering the real world.

    “The strategic partnerships established recently with several Western countries illustrate why Chinese leaders disapprove of confrontation,” Li said.

  11. মাসুদ করিম - ২৪ জুলাই ২০১৪ (২:১০ অপরাহ্ণ)

    First things first: Investing in urban toilets

    Bangladesh has more than seven million workers employed overseas, sending about 14 billion dollars home annually. Many economists have often lamented the fact that migrant families neither save nor invest much; that a great deal of the money is spent on “unproductive expenditure”-in consumption, buying land, or building or sprucing up the house. However, unbeknownst to most of these economists is the fact that the so-called unproductive expenditures of migrant workers have had a tremendous social payoff in improving the sanitary standards in rural Bangladesh.

    Currently, of about one billion people in the world who practise open defecation (without using a toilet or latrine), a large majority of them -about 60 per cent- call India home. India has more than twice the number of open defecators than the next 18 countries combined, according to a report by WHO-UNICEF. While India remains resolute in its quest for economic grandeur, its progress in achieving basic sanitation-so eloquently preached as well as practised by Mahatma Gandhi-has so far been dismal.

    Many countries have made great strides in tackling open defecation, including Vietnam and Bangladesh, the two countries which have virtually stamped out the practice within a short span of time. Beginning with a 30 per cent of the population practising open defecation in 1990, Bangladesh has all but eliminated this by 2010. A good deal of this success is due to the quiet revolution in rural home improvements, largely fuelled by overseas remittance inflows, and to the helping hands of NGOs in popularising low-cost sanitary innovations, among others.

    Recent research studies by Princeton Professor Angus Deaton and his collaborators have established a strong causal relationship between open defecation and poor health outcomes such as child mortality, children’s height and childhood stunting. They have also found that for a given level of economic status, children in Bangladesh are taller than those in Paschimbanga because of the lower incidence of open defecation in Bangladesh. What is the causal mechanism? They argue that differences in the disease environment matter. In India, with high population density, open defecation occurs near where children live; children who grow up in these high population density settings without sanitation are exposed to more fecal pathogensthan children who do not; this, in turn, leads to easy intestinal infections and poor health outcomes such as low height and stunting.

    While Bangladesh has done well in rural sanitation, urban sanitation is, however, altogether a different story-it is an unmitigated disaster. Consider the case of Dhaka, which has over 16 million residents, with more than one million people commuting into the city every day. It is one of the fastest growing-as well as the least liveable-of megacities in the world, whose population would exceed 23 million in a decade, if the current trend continues. About a third of the population is poor and mostly inhabits the slums. Almost two-thirds of Dhaka’s sewage is untreated- and trickles into waterways. A common type of toilet in the slums is the hanging ones that dump waste directly into waterways. Finally, the city has precious few public toilets, even those that exist are neither functioning nor hygienic enough for people to use. This creates for the poor subhuman conditions, where waterborne diseases-such as cholera, diarrhea, dysentery and typhoid-abound.

    Why is the picture of urban sanitation so dramatically different from that of rural sanitation? Why a country that is so successful in villages is such a disgraceful failure in cities? The answer is not far to seek. Rural sanitation, at the basic level, is more of a private good, which is individually provided. Thus, the issue of rural sanitation can be essentially addressed by individual efforts at improving sanitation. On the other hand, much of urban sanitation is a public good, which has to be provided publicly: the so-called free rider problem largely precludes markets from providing public toilets anywhere in the world. This, if the success of rural sanitation is testament to our rural folks’ quick receptiveness to ideas, the disaster in urban sanitation is exhibit A of the enduring failure of the government.

    Why does the government show so little sensitivity to these issues, while it spends wads of money on things that have little value beyond recreation? Some argue this reflects the elite-bias in planning, others attribute this to leaders’ lack of exposure to these problems in their quotidian existence; still others reason -somewhat more cynically-that it is myopic economic self-interest: it is the abject conditions of the slums or near-slums that compel an assured supply of domestic workforce, at depressed wages, for ensuring daily comfort. While the correct answer may be ‘all of the above’, the sad fact is that the two worlds are inextricably linked: contrary to what many leaders in government like to believe, there is no cordon sanitaire between their world of luxury and the nether world of slums and near-slums. If there is an outbreak of epidemic, it percolates from one world to the other easily and effortlessly. Given this inexorable link, political leaders should take the issue of urban sanitation seriously, if for nothing else, at least for reasons of enlightened self-interest.

    This effort may begin with constructing public toilets-many, many more, and hygienic and functioning ones. The success the country has achieved in villages, it can also achieve in cities-and be a model for South Asia-with a relatively modest investment. Cross-country experiences suggest several successful investing and operating modalities for urban sanitation. However, no matter what, it is one endeavour where the government must take the lead. And this should be done sooner rather than later-before the great urban sanitation disaster happens.

    M.G. Quibria, Professor of Economics, Morgan State University, US, is currently Senior Fulbright Visiting Fellow at Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS). mgquibria.morgan@gmail.com

  12. মাসুদ করিম - ৩১ জুলাই ২০১৪ (৯:৩২ অপরাহ্ণ)

    কয়েকদিন ধরে বিকল ছিলাম, আজ নবারুণ ভট্টাচার্যের মৃত্যুর খবর শুনে বিমর্ষ হয়ে গেলাম।

    Post by Suman Mukhopadhyay.

    Famed Bengali writer Nabarun Bhattacharya, a Sahitya Akademi awardee known for his radical left and anti-establishment views and championing of the marginalised urban milieu, died at a hospital here Thursday after a long battle with pancreatic cancer, his associates said. He was 66.

    Bhattacharya, who left behind his wife and a son, breathed his last at 4.20 p.m. at the Thakurpukur Cancer hospital.

    The only child of late actor-playwright Bijon Bhattacharya and Magsaysay award winning writer Mahasweta Devi, Bhattacharya won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1997 for his novel “Herbert”, which many critics have called anarchic. It was later made into a film of the same name by Suman Mukhopadhyay.

    Born in Baharampur in Murshidabad district, Bhattacharya was greatly inspired by his father, writer of the legendary play “Nabanna” on the Bengal famine.

    The philosophy of his life, political leanings and artistic faculties were also greatly influenced by the time he spent with famous filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, a close relative.

    Bhattacharya flowered as a writer in Kolkata, where he relentlessly wrote about those marginalised sections living on the city’s streets, slums and dark alleys, using satire, dark humour and fantasy to telling effect to highlight oppression and exploitation.

    His writings very often brought him in conflict with the powers that be, but till the end he remained a fearless voice against power and its misuse.

    “Herbert”, the story of a tragi-comic Kolkata protagonist claiming to explore the dead amidst decay and debauchery, also fetched Bhattacharya the Bankim Puraskar in 1996, but he returned it in protest against the then Left Front government’s bid to forcibly acquire farmland for industries in Singur and Nandigram and let loose what he called “state-sponsored violence” to quell peasant protests.

    However, he later became a staunch critic of the Trinamool Congress government led by Mamata Banerjee for “stifling democratic protests” and “civil rights”.

    On his bookshelf, co-existing with classics, was leftist literature and writings of Lenin and Marx and a cartoon collage of Mamata Banerjee which had in 2012 resulted in a professor being sent to jail.

    In 2003, Bhattacharya wrote the widely read novel “Kangaal Malshaat” (The War Cry of Beggars), which made the censors see red when made into a film by Mukhopadhyay in 2012.

    The novel has sold over 13,000 copies, one of the biggest successes in contemporary Bengali literature.

    Using magic realism in his books like “Mausoleum” and “Kangaal Malshaat”, Bhattacharya introduced a strange set of human beings “fyataru” (sound created by kites when they are flown and hinting at someone worthless), a marginal section who unsettle diabolical political structures and evil interests through pinpointed mayhem. They remain his most outstanding creations.

    Among his other novels are “Lubdhak”, “Halaljhanda o Onyanyo”, “Mahajaaner Aayna”, “Raater Circus” as also the book of poems “Ei Mrityu Upotyoka Aamaar Desh Na” (This valley of death is not my country).

    Post by Masud Karim.

    Post by Niharul Islam.

    Post by Nasreen Taslima.

  • 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.