বিভাগ/বিষয় নিরপেক্ষ

সুপারিশকৃত লিন্ক: আগস্ট 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।

১৯ comments

  1. মাসুদ করিম - ২ আগস্ট ২০১৪ (২:২২ অপরাহ্ণ)

    • মাসুদ করিম - ১১ আগস্ট ২০১৪ (৪:৫৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

  2. মাসুদ করিম - ৫ আগস্ট ২০১৪ (১:২৮ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Moving up the global innovation ladder

    In the Global Innovation Index (GII)-2014 Switzerland is the leader for the fourth consecutive year. The United Kingdom moves up by one rank to the second place, followed by Sweden. A new name among the top 10 this year is Luxembourg (9th).

    Bangladesh is placed at the 129th position in the annual GII survey for 2014, just one place ahead of last year.

    The annual rankings are jointly published by Cornell University, INSEAD (a graduate business school with campuses in Europe, Asia and the Middle East), and the World Intellectual Property Organisation. The survey covered 143 economies around the world, using 81 indicators to gauge innovation capabilities and results.

    Interestingly, India is the worst performer among BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and south Africa) with all the others improving their positions from those of the last year. China is the best among BRICS nations. It has secured the 29th place, up by six notches.

    Russia has improved its position by 13 notches to stay at 49. South Africa ranks 53rd, up by five notches, while Brazil secures the 61st position, three places ahead of the last year’s ranking.

    India continued its dismal performance in global innovation for the fourth consecutive year. It has slipped from the 62nd position in 2011 to 64th in 2012 and 66th in 2013.

    In fact, earlier this year in the World Bank’s “Doing Business Report” for 2014, India slipped by three notches to the 134th spot. The report was prepared based on a survey of 189 countries.

    The Modi-government has initiated steps such as single-window clearances, emphasis on self-certification by industries and easing labour laws in a bid to improve the environment for business in the country.

    CSA (Central and Southern Asia) Zone

    CONNECTIVITY AS THE DRIVER OF INNOVATION: Innovation creates social progress and improves the economic well-being of people. The fundamental driver behind any innovation process is the human factor associated with it.

    Innovation is the process that sees generation of ideas that are commercialised and innovation hubs can help elevate that process to the level of differentiating capability.

    In today’s globalised world, innovation is often associated with progress. It represents a business’s tenacity in evolving and adapting to the changing competition and market conditions. In short, to innovate is a survival instinct linked to staying relevant.

    Organisations today can no longer take a myopic stance, as their very existence is largely dependent on the environment, in which they exist and to which they cater. Organisations have a moral obligation to make sure that innovation is given a larger mandate to be the engine that enables economic growth, driving societal changes and laying the foundation for an empowered and competitive nation.

    Education is a fundamental element in innovation and access to both basic and vocational education is key to skill development. Countries should invest more in education and building the human infrastructure to drive innovation and growth. It is equally important for industries and businesses to get involved in enhancing education systems. Advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) in recent years played a crucial role in changing traditional education and making it more accessible, affordable and effective globally.

    BANGLADESH MOVES ONE NOTCH UP: Bangladesh has moved up by one notch to 129 in this year’s Global Innovation Index (GII) from last year’s 130.

    Improvement in three key areas-human capital and research, market sophistication and creative output-helped the country make progress in the index for 2013-14, according to the Global Innovation Index.

    By and large restrictive conditions may thwart innovation and enterprise-but history shows that this need not be so. There are many examples of successful innovations coming out of rigid systems. China is high on patenting intellectual property today. The United States’ dominance in this area is (now) challenged. We see two vastly different economic systems when we compare China and the USA.

    At times, creativity thrives in adversity. It is actually about the mindset as to whether to fight or be in flight from the reality, or board a boat and float away! Necessity is the mother of invention.

    In Bangladesh, we do have a quite salubrious environment and taking life easy appears to be a way forward. When things do not turn out well, we resort to conspiracy theories and cry out for help instead of helping ourselves.

    This is not the time to feel disappointed, rather we should think about how to get rid of the situation and secure a proper place in the GII ranking. A group of emerging and middle-income countries such as Fiji, China, Hungary, Malaysia, Bulgaria and some more have set up an example for us. They are faring very well in innovation and moving up the GII rankings. These countries demonstrate the above-par levels of innovation compared with other countries with similar income levels. Their progress, even if not uniform, is mostly a result of a good policy mix on multiple fronts: institutions, skills, infrastructure, integration with global markets, and linkages to the business community.

    WHAT TO DO TO BECOME ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL NATIONS: The following points can be considered and implemented in Bangladesh so that we can become one of the most powerful nations in terms of global innovation:

    * The government should be honest and sincere in their plans and policies.

    * The government should practise good governance, which will lead to transparency, accountability and the rule of law and thus prevent crime and corruption and ensure sustainable development.

    * Environment of regional innovation needs policy support during the initial stage, that is, the structure of governance linking academies, companies and government.

    * The government should make the best possible framework for promoting local people’s participation in governance and development process as well as for articulation of local needs and mobilisation of local resources.

    * The government should make selective interventions for the enterprise-academy-government relationship is not generated spontaneously.

    * The local governments must be firmly involved with the centres and setting their agenda.

    * The area where policies are developed must be separated from the area where they are executed (politicians are not necessarily good managers).

    * The management of the centres must be carried out by professional management personnel under professional management structures. The managers must be trained in business administration (not in research or teaching-professors are not necessarily good managers also).

    * People in Bangladesh may be encouraged to develop appropriate technologies that are indigenous in nature. Research should be carried out to further develop and improve these technologies.

    * A systemic approach must be promoted from the political environment to improve communication among all the associates. The quality policies, the information systems, and sharing strategic plans among the actors are some of the instruments that can be employed to achieve this goal.

    * Mechanisms to evaluate the impacts of the centres and a clear commitment to management that defines short, medium and long-term goals in accordance with the goals of the regional and national governments must be established.

    * The innovation environment must generate ties with local companies in general and with the social and local actors where the centre is located.

    * The regional centres of innovation are dynamic structures where the generation of ties with other actors of the national innovation system must be promoted.

    * The creation of public-private alliances must be encouraged.

    * Strategic leadership at the regional and local levels is necessary.

    * Linkages among research, extension, technology and education should be strengthened.

    Finally, global innovation needs global talent. To be successful in business today, when capital, goods, talent and knowledge move quickly around the world, we need to treat global markets as a single market, build global value chains that integrate the world’s best resources. By doing this, local innovation is promoted and used globally, making local innovation truly valuable in the global ecosystem. Both the public and private sectors have important roles to play in the formation of healthy innovation ecosystems. Furthermore, when they work together, as they do in developing innovation hubs, they can raise their innovation capabilities to new heights and drive corporate and national prosperity.

    It is important to create an environment for innovation. It is also essential that the government gets involved as a catalyst for interaction among stakeholders, particularly regarding the mechanism that leads to a closer relationship between the academia and businesses, the promotion of the best intellectual property management practices at universities and technical institutions and actions that facilitate an increase in the number of patents.

  3. মাসুদ করিম - ৬ আগস্ট ২০১৪ (৯:৩৪ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    5-Minute Animation Maps 2,600 Years of Western Cultural History

    Working with his colleagues, Maximilian Schich, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas, took Freebase (Google’s “community-curated database of well-known people, places, and things”) and gathered data on 150,000 important artists and cultural figures who lived during the long arc of Western history (6oo BCE to 2012). The scholars then mapped these figures’ births and deaths (blue=birth, red=death) and traced their movements through time and place. The result is a 5-minute animation (above), showing how the West’s great cultural centers shifted from Rome, eventually to Paris (circa 1789), and more recently to New York and Los Angeles. Maps documenting the flow of ideas and people in other geographies will come next.

    According to NPR, “The models [used to create the videos] are the latest application of a rapidly growing field, called network science — which uses visualizations to find the underlying patterns and trends in complex data sets.” And they could yield some unexpected insights into the history of migration — for example, even with the advent of planes, trains and automobiles, modern artists don’t move too much farther from their birthplaces (an average of 237 miles) relative to the artsy types who lived in the 14th century (133 miles on average).

    A complete report on the project was published in the journal Science by Schich and his colleagues. Unfortunately you’ll need a subscription to read it.

  4. মাসুদ করিম - ১০ আগস্ট ২০১৪ (২:০৭ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    A finger in every pie: How Qatar became an international power

    As Hamas’s main sponsor, Qatar has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Gaza in recent years.
    By Asher Schechter

    Two weeks ago the U.S. signed its largest arms deal this year: an $11 billion sale to Qatar. In the deal, signed by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and his Qatari counterpart, Hamad bin Ali al-Attiyah, the U.S. will sell dozens of Apache helicopters, hundreds of Patriot missiles and hundreds of anti-tank rockets to the emirate.

    This news would cause far less discomfort if Israel had not been attacked by dozens of rockets every day, some of them funded by Qatari money. Three days after the signing ceremony at the Pentagon, Israeli troops went into Gaza and began exposing dozens of attack tunnels that were also funded in part by Qatar.

    As Hamas’s main sponsor, Qatar has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Gaza in recent years. The country allows high-ranking Hamas operatives such as Khaled Meshal to reside within its territory, travel in private aircraft, stay in luxury hotels and live like kings. And it has been exposed — not for the first time — as one of the biggest financial supporters of radical Islamic movements throughout the Middle East.

    Qatar’s openly declared support of Hamas did not stop it from playing a starring role in the conference on Gaza that was held in Paris. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with the foreign ministers of Qatar and Turkey, Khalid bin Mohammad al Attiyah and Ahmet Davutoglu, to try to bring about a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. The meeting caused discomfort both in Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Egypt, the regional power that was unable to arrange a cease-fire, was not invited to Paris, nor were PA representatives there. But Qatar left the conference with its status upgraded to that of a regional power without whose mediation no significant move is made.

    The events of the past few weeks, which prompted criticism of Qatar from Israeli ministers and other high-ranking officials, served to emphasize Qatar’s special status: a tiny but frighteningly wealthy country that donates millions of dollars to terrorist groups on the one hand while hosting the U.S.’s largest military base in the Middle East on the other; and seeks to promote democracy in the Arab world through the Al Jazeera network even as it nurtures a slave state and conservative regime that are light years away from democracy.

    Qatar, the richest country in terms of gross domestic product per capita, sits on enormous natural resources. Over the past 17 years, Qatar has used its financial power to transform itself from a negligible emirate to a regional and global power that can do as it wishes with impunity and even annoy the whole world. That includes its neighbors — Saudi Arabia among them — which recalled their ambassadors from Doha this year.

    Coming to the Fore

    “The Israeli public is discovering Qatar only now, but Qatar’s foreign policy has been interesting since 1995,” says Yoel Guzansky, a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies. “The richest country on earth, it sits on top of the world’s largest natural-gas field, and it is willing to use that money to support all kinds of radical elements, not just Hamas, so that it will be able to protect the natural resources it possesses. Qatar has been involved in every regional conflict in the Middle East since 1995.”

    One example of Qatar’s increasing power could be seen this month when United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon flew to the Middle East in a Qatari-funded private jet. Once reports of the source of the funding spread worldwide, UN spokeswoman Stéphane Dujarric confirmed them, saying that the Qatari government “very generously chartered a plane for the secretary-general to enable him to go about his visit.”

    Guzansky puts it this way: “Ban comes to Qatar. They send him a plane, pay for hotels, which costs millions. And there he expresses gratitude for the Qataris’ gracious assistance and criticizes Israel’s criminal blow against the Palestinians. That’s what’s going on.”

    Qatar is far from a radical state in the classic sense of the term. In recent years, it has made itself into a global brand. Its security and political cooperation with the U.S. is especially close. Georgetown University, Cornell University, the Brookings Institution think tank and many other academic entities have established local branches there. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has established a branch in Qatar. The FIFA World Cup will be held there in 2022, and the country wishes to host the 2024 Olympics as well. Qatar owns the Paris Saint-Germain Football Club and the luxury department store Harrods in London.

    “This stems from prestige and a desire for prominence and importance,” Guzansky says. “But within that, there’s a realization that this kind of prominence is also an insurance policy.”

    Qatar’s attitude toward Israel also differs from that of its friends in the Arab world. For many years, until Operation Cast Lead in 2008 and 2009, Qatar had open relations with Israel, including official missions. Although these relations were officially severed in January 2009, when the operation ended, Israelis still fly to Qatar. The CEO of El Al, David Maimon, attended a conference of the International Air Transport Association in Doha. Qatar has succeeded in avoiding an image as a radical country so well that even Israeli companies invested in it. Even the Arab-Israeli soccer team Bnei Sakhnin received a $500,000 donation from Qatar this week. About a decade ago, Qatar also helped build the team’s stadium, which was named Doha Stadium after its capital.

    Qatar racked up all these accomplishments despite its arid climate, small size (at 11,586 square kilometers, or 4,473 square miles, it is ranked 166th in the world by size) and location in the most tumultuous region on earth, where it is surrounded by powerful countries. Its army has 11,800 troops. The country has 270,000 citizens; also resident are roughly 1.5 million foreign workers, many of them held as slaves and unable to leave.

    Over the past 17 years Qatar has become a major player in the Middle East without anyone working against it. In less than two decades, Doha has become a global capital of commerce. Its investment fund, the Qatar Investment Authority, manages close to $200 billion and has made acquisitions worldwide, from shares in banks to soccer teams and clothing chains.

    Insurance Against the Radicals

    The answer to the question of how a tiny country like Qatar managed to transform itself into an influential power seems fairly simple: natural gas and oil. Blessed with 25 billion barrels of crude-oil reserves and the third-largest natural-gas reserves on earth, Qatar is the world’s biggest exporter of liquid natural gas. These two natural resources comprise about 70 percent of its national product and 85 percent of its export.

    Until crude oil was discovered in its territory in the 1940s, Qatar had been part of the Ottoman Empire and then of the British Empire. Its economy depended mainly on fishing and pearl diving. The growth of its local oil industry led to rapid economic development, which was accelerated still further when Qatar became independent in 1971. Throughout that time, Qatar was led by the House of Thani, which has been in power for 150 years.

    For many years, Qatar was a modest country that tried to avoid attracting too much attention lest it be annexed by its much larger neighbors, including Saudi Arabia. Although rich in natural resources, it was poor in terms of its labor force and soldiers to protect its borders. Kuwait found out what it meant to be in that kind of risky geopolitical situation when Saddam Hussein invaded it in 1990.

    Over the years, Qatar has seen several bloodless palace coups. In 1995 Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani seized power from his father, who was outside the country at the time. Hamad, who ruled peacefully in Qatar until he abdicated in 2013 in favor of his son, had a much keener political sense than his father did. After seeing what happened to Kuwait in the Gulf War, he set out to ensure that no matter the price, his own country would never suffer a similar fate.

    Under Hamad’s leadership, Qatar made the transition from a country of tents and camels to one of skyscrapers and luxury hotels. It became a paradise for its citizens: There are no taxes, and electricity, health care and education are free. The unemployment rate is less than 1 percent and the country has the largest percentage of millionaires on earth. It is true that democracy does not exist there, despite Al Jazeera’s preaching for the establishment of democracy in the Middle East. But who needs democracy when you have a million dollars in the bank and everything is free?

    That is the major reason why Qatar managed to extricate itself from the throes of the Arab Spring, which overthrew regimes around it but left it untouched. Life in Qatar is so good (once again, only for the citizens) that there is no reason to complain, particularly since those who do are punished severely. In 2011, the Qatari poet Mohammed al-Ajamy, also known as Mohammed ibn al-Dheeb, was arrested after he posted a video of himself reading a protest poem on Facebook. He was sentenced to life in prison; the punishment was then reduced to 15 years.

    Lesson in Opportunism

    Qatar’s foreign policy has become a lesson in opportunism and political shrewdness with a single goal: to protect the paradise it has created for its rulers and citizens. To ensure his country’s survival, Hamad worked in various ways to increase Qatar’s international involvement. A major tool in increasing its influence was Al Jazeera, which has been playing a central role in Qatar’s foreign policy since it launched in 1996.

    Qatar’s fingerprints have been found on just about everything over the past decade. During the Arab Spring, Al Jazeera’s coverage played a major role in spreading the popular uprisings from one country to the next. During the civil war in Syria, Qatar abandoned its old friend, Bashar Assad, and began assisting the rebels. In Libya it was among the major elements responsible for the overthrow of Muammar Gadhafi’s regime. Despite its strong alliance with the Western countries, which is illustrated by the presence of the U.S.’s largest military base in the region on its soil, Qatar has always taken care to nurture ties with its neighbors, including the radicals among them. It developed strong ties with Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban (which has offices in Doha) and Hezbollah. It supported the Islamic State, which is laying waste to Iraq, when that group was in its infancy.

    Qatar talks to everybody to make sure that nobody will attack it. “It believes that this will gain it some kind of insurance policy against the radical elements, as in: ‘I pay you and support you, so you can’t attack me,’” Guzansky says. “There is also an ideological link: The Qataris are Wahhabists — in other words, conservative Muslims, and the royal house has ideological ties to political Islam, meaning Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.”

    “They dance with everybody. That’s the main thing,” he adds. “They want to be all right with everybody. Qatar is a tiny country in the midst of a tumultuous region, and that’s how it survives — it dances at every wedding. That is why Qatar invited the Americans, who had been sitting in Saudi Arabia before, to build their major Middle East base there. The emir said, ‘Come, I’ll build you a base worth billions of dollars,’ and did exactly that. Qatar believes that this is its insurance policy.”

    The Dark Side of Paradise

    As Qatar’s extensive ties with terrorist groups have come to light in recent years, the world has also been finding out about the horrific situation of the hundreds of thousands of foreign workers being held there in conditions of slavery. It all started in 2010, when Qatar won the tender to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup championships despite its blazing heat, which reaches more than 40 degrees C. (104 degrees F.) in the shade.

    Four years after Qatar won the tender, its hosting privileges appear likely to be revoked since the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph reported that former FIFA Vice President Jack Warner had accepted $2 million bribe from the Qatari government to make sure that it would win. The expose ran after a series of accusations that high-ranking FIFA officials had been bribed to vote for Qatar. And it ran three months before an expose in another British newspaper, the Sunday Times, claimed that former FIFA Vice President Mohammed bin Hammam, of Qatari nationality, had taken advantage of his status to bribe other members of the organization with more than $5 million. FIFA had to announce that it was beginning an investigation to clarify the charges, and it looks as though the scandal will cost Qatar the opportunity to host the World Cup in 2022.

    In addition, in the past two years reports say that the Qatari authorities are guilty of human-rights violations against the foreign workers who were brought in to build the infrastructure and the stadiums for the FIFA games. According to the International Labour Organization, the foreign workers in Qatar are forced to work in horrible conditions, are paid terribly low salaries and, at times, are held in actual slavery. According to estimates, at least 1,000 workers who were employed to construct buildings for the World Cup have died in work accidents and of heart attacks, exhaustion and other health problems. In May, Qatar promised to improve the workers’ conditions, but this month the Guardian reported that workers from Nepal, Sri Lanka and other countries had not been paid their salaries for 13 months, and some were being paid less than 85 cents a day.

    The foreign workers in Qatar make up most of its population and 94 percent of its work force, but in practice, they are a vassal class without rights. Many of them cannot leave the country without permission from their employers, nor can they apply for a driver’s license, change jobs, rent a home or open a bank account without permission. They must work long hours in the blazing sun, without food or water, and live in sub-standard and dangerous conditions. In February, the International Trade Union Confederation defined Qatar as a “slave state.”

    The recent discoveries of Qatar’s support for terrorist groups, alongside the rising criticism by its neighbors and the Western world, led it to conclude that its activist foreign policy may not be as worthwhile as it was in the past. In March, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain recalled their ambassadors from Doha, claiming that Qatar had violated its agreements with them by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.

    According to Guzansky, Qatar may have reached the point where it has annoyed too many people. “Over the past few years, it has been playing with the big boys, and it may have gone too far,” he says. “They’re already starting to draw fire, and I don’t know whether they’ll be able to keep on doing what they’ve been doing for long. They’re not just annoying Israel at this point — with all due respect, we’re a small player — but they’re also annoying the Saudis.”

    Still, he says, the options for working with Qatar are limited precisely because of the “insurance policy” it obtained for itself. “It’s not a country like Iran that you can ostracize,” he says. “It’s not simple. A country that is going to be hosting the World Cup, that hosts so many campuses of prominent American institutions, is an international center that cannot be ignored or isolated. It has fingers in every pie. At this stage, the Americans are the only ones who can put pressure on Qatar. They have done so in the past, when Al Jazeera gave a platform to Al Qaida and the Americans didn’t like that, and they could do that now.”

  5. মাসুদ করিম - ১১ আগস্ট ২০১৪ (৯:৩৭ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    In the past, people could be poisoned from seemingly innocuous products. Lead was in sweetened wine, cosmetics, hair dye—and paint.

    The famous Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746–1828) suffered a mysterious illness with symptoms including partial paralysis, mood changes and blindness. Some researchers think lead poisoning was the cause, perhaps brought on by ingesting toxic dust when preparing his lead-based paints or by wetting his brushes with his tongue. Pictured is the painting “Saturn devouring one of his sons” by Goya, 1821-23, via Wikimedia.

  6. মাসুদ করিম - ১১ আগস্ট ২০১৪ (৯:৫২ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    11 Myths About Malnutrition in Latin America

    There is often the misconception that hunger and malnutrition refer to the same condition. While the two often go hand-in-hand there are significant differences. With the assistance of The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) we are hoping to break this common misconception. Read on for 11 myth busting facts about malnutrition and examples of how WFP is tackling it in Latin America.

    1. MYTH: Malnutrition is the same as hunger.

    Fact: Not the same! It is a common misconception that malnutrition means the same as hunger. However, many people globally suffer from malnutrition, even if they eat enough to feel full. This is because their diet lacks nutrients. WFP addresses this problem by fortifying foods. For example, in Panama the main staple food is rice. The World Food Programme (WFP) provided technical support to the Government of Panama for the development of the fortification of rice.

    2. MYTH: Malnutrition is all about being too thin.

    Fact: It is actually not! While it’s true that many malnourished babies and children are severely underweight, it’s a common misconception that malnutrition only relates to being too thin. Children need nutritious food to grow and be healthy, but healthy food with vitamins and minerals is often more expensive than unhealthy food such as grains or carbohydrates. One way WFP addresses child malnutrition by delivering School Meals. A daily school meal provides a strong incentive to send children to school and allows the children to focus on their studies, rather than their stomachs. In Honduras, school meals consist of beans, vegetables and rice.

    3. MYTH: Nutrition starts when a child is born.

    Fact: Actually, good nutrition should begin before a child is born! Malnutrition’s most devastating impact is in the womb, when the foetus can fail to develop properly, and during the first years of a child’s life, when it can hamper physical and mental development. This means that the best time to tackle malnutrition is in the first 1,000 days, from conception to age 2. WFP in Nicaragua provides pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers with provisions of fortified food, training, and community education initiatives, all of which endeavour to increase the level of participation in preventive health programmes and to increase their understanding of nutrition.

    4. MYTH: The consequences of malnutrition are only health-related.

    Fact: Malnutrition not only has a severe effect on health, but also on a person’s quality of life. Can you believe that adults who were malnourished as children earn at least 20 percent less on average than those who weren’t? Furthermore, undernourished children are less likely to perform well in school, have a lower economic status in adulthood, and are more likely to grow into malnourished adults. WFP’s role in preventing stunting begins by ensuring adequate complementary feeding, promoting nutrition-sensitive activities, and strengthening the capacity of national governments to create policies to prevent stunting.

    5. MYTH: Malnutrition only affects individuals.

    Fact: Malnutrition’s far-reaching effects are often dangerously underestimated. It can have direct consequences for mortality, productivity and economic growth, and traps countries in a cycle of poverty. To prevent a higher malnutrition rate in countries after a disaster, where people are left with nothing, WFP delivers Specialized Nutritious Foods and other products. This year, WFP in Bolivia delivered High Energy Biscuits (HEBs) which are easy to distribute and improve levels of nutrition.

    6. MYTH: Malnutrition is all about starving children in Africa.

    Fact: Not close, we are often presented with images of starving children in Africa, and while it is true that many countries in Africa suffer the effects of malnutrition we cannot forget about the children in other parts of the world. According to WFP’s World Hunger Map, in Haiti 44.5 percent of the population is undernourished.

    7. MYTH: Malnutrition is not as serious as other diseases in the world.

    Fact: Malnutrition is the number one risk to health worldwide! It is also associated with eleven percent of all disease in the world. Furthermore, 50 percent of all childhood deaths are attributed to malnutrition. Each year it kills 3.5 million children under five years old and impairs hundreds of thousands of growing minds. To break this cycle, WFP in Ecuador works in various ways such as School Meals, Food for Assets, Food Rations, Purchase for Progress (P4P), women empowerment, and nutrition education.

    8. MYTH: Nutrition and HIV are not linked.

    Fact: As a matter of fact, they are! Good nutrition helps prolong the lives of those that suffer from HIV. People with HIV may experience lack of appetite, difficulties to ingest food, and a poor absorption of nutrients. These potential symptoms makes it all the more difficult for the human body to fight against the virus. At the start of 2010, WFP began a project in Bolivia with the main objective to support at least 650 people living with HIV by distributing a food basket per month. It included rice, vegetable oil, soy grains, and salt.

    9. MYTH: It’s easy to get all the nutrients you need from food.

    Fact: Yes it is possible, but unfortunately it is not always the case that people eat this way. Essential vitamins and minerals in the diet are vital to boost immunity and healthy development. If you ate only the most nutrient-rich foods and enjoyed a well-rounded diet you could get all the nutrients you need from food. In 2004, the World Food Programme in Peru started a pilot project to fight anaemia. More than 1,000 mothers in the participating community received nutritional coaching and an iron-rich cookbook with economic and easy-to-make recipes.

    10. MYTH: Anemia cannot be reversed.

    Fact: Actually, most types of anaemia can be reversed! Anaemia is a global public health issue most often associated with iron deficiency. Anaemia can be reversed. In response to this public health issue, the Government of Cuba has launched a Micronutrient Powder initiative which is supported by the World Food Programme (WFP).

    11. MYTH: Fortified Foods are GMOs

    Fact: In reality they have nothing to do with GMOs. Fortified foods provide levels of energy, micronutrients, and macronutrients, necessary for growth and health in order to prevent or treat undernutrition. Since 1976, Colombia has delivered a Super Cereal called Bienestarina.

  7. মাসুদ করিম - ১২ আগস্ট ২০১৪ (৯:৪৫ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Robin Williams Dead: Beloved Actor Dies In Apparent Suicide

    Beloved actor Robin Williams was found dead on Monday, police reported.

    He was 63.

    The apparent cause of death was suicide by asphyxiation, authorities said. According to his publicist, Williams had been battling severe depression and spent time in rehab as recently as July.

    Police said that Williams was found unconscious around noon in his home in Tiburon, California, near San Francisco.

    Williams was best known for his starring roles in classic comedies like “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “Good Morning, Vietnam” and “Jumanji,” but also in acclaimed dramas such as “Dead Poets Society.” He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Dr. Sean Maguire in “Good Will Hunting.” He rose to fame while playing Mork the alien in the TV show “Mork & Mindy,” a “Happy Days” spinoff.

    In “Dead Poets Society,” Williams plays John Keating, an electric English teacher at an elite all-boys high school. In a quintessential speech, Keating tells his students:

    To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” Answer. That you are here – that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play *goes on* and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

    Most recently, Williams had starred in the new CBS sitcom ‘The Crazy Ones.’ It was cancelled after just one season. At his time of death, a sequel to “Mrs. Doubtfire” was in the works.

    Susan Schneider, the actor’s wife, released the following statement to the New York Times’ Dave Itzkoff:

    “This morning, I lost my husband and my best friend, while the world lost one of its most beloved artists and beautiful human beings. I am utterly heartbroken. On behalf of Robin’s family, we are asking for privacy during our time of profound grief. As he is remembered, it is our hope that the focus will not be on Robin’s death but on the countless moments of joy and laughter he gave to millions.”

    In 2006, after 20 years sober, he checked himself into rehab for alcoholism. He opened up about his struggles with addiction to alcohol and cocaine in a powerful interview with The Guardian and on “Good Morning America.”

    “It’s not caused by anything, it’s just there,” he said. “It waits. It lays in wait for the time when you think, ‘It’s fine now, I’m OK.’ Then, the next thing you know, it’s not OK. Then you realize, ‘Where am I? I didn’t realize I was in Cleveland.'”

    Last month, he spent time at Hazelden Addiction Treatment Center in a continued sobriety program. His publicist told HuffPost at the time that he was doing well.

    Here is the full press release on his death, courtesy of Marin PD.

    Fellow actors took to Twitter to express deep sorrows on the death of the popular actor.

    “I could not be more stunned by the loss of Robin Williams, mensch, great talent, acting partner, genuine soul,” said Steve Martin.

    “Terrible, terrible news,” Fred Willard tweeted. “Comedy has lost a great man.”

    “Shocked by the news of Robin Williams passing. Rest in peace my friend,” said Albert Brooks.

    Though Williams was most celebrated for his acting career, he is also remembered his charitable endeavors. Williams spearheaded Comic Relief, which holds concerts and variety shows to raise money to help the homeless.

    In a statement, President Obama said that Williams “was one of a kind… He made us laugh. He made us cry. He gave his immeasurable talent freely and generously to those who needed it most – from our troops stationed abroad to the marginalized on our own streets.”

    The actor was also an avid gamer and named his daughter Zelda after the popular video game character. In his last post to Instagram, he paid tribute to his young daughter on her birthday. Zelda Williams is also an actress.

    Williams was born in Chicago, Illinois and studied acting at the Juilliard School in New York City.

  8. মাসুদ করিম - ১৩ আগস্ট ২০১৪ (৯:০৪ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Lauren Bacall dead at 89

    She looked so terrific and strong for such a long time that it was easy to imagine Lauren Bacall might just hang around forever. And who wouldn’t want her to, for the pleasure of hearing her firing off smart, unvarnished remarks about old Hollywood in that husky voice? But the end came at last on Tuesday, when the 89-year-old actress died from a stroke at her home, according to a report on TMZ. The Humphrey Bogart Estate followed with this tweet: “With deep sorrow, yet with great gratitude for her amazing life, we confirm the passing of Lauren Bacall.”

    Whether she was trading double entendres with Humphrey Bogart, hawking freeze-dried instant coffee in a TV commercial, or taking a punch as a guest star on The Sopranos, Bacall had no equal at projecting an insolent, imperious, sexy, and slightly impish personality. (Okay, maybe Kathleen Turner came close for a while.) Was Bacall a great, rangy actress? No, but she was a lanky, electrifying presence, and a champion movie and stage star.

    In her tough, tart 1979 autobiography Lauren Bacall By Myself (updated in 2005 with 80 fresh pages and the expanded title By Myself and Then Some), Bacall lays out the improbable story of her near-instant ascension in Hollywood at age 19. Spotted on a 1943 fashion-magazine cover by the wife of director Howard Hawks, she landed opposite Humphrey Bogart in 1944’s To Have and Have Not, the first of their four films together. Hawks taught her how to speak in a low, provocative voice and nixed her birth name, Betty Joan. The stars sparked off screen as well as on. “Baby” and “Bogie,” as they called each other, wed in 1945, when she was 20 and he was 45.

    She lost Bogey to cancer in 1957, leaving her to raise their son Stephen and daughter Leslie alone, and in the 1960s she had a stormy marriage with heavy drinker Jason Robards Jr. (with whom she had another son, Sam Robards). In the toughest initial post-Bogey years, Bacall moved back East—she’d grown up in New York—to alternate movies with stage roles. She won Tonys for 1970’s Applause and 1981’s Woman of the Year and picked up her lone Oscar nomination for Barbra Streisand’s 1996 middle-aged romance The Mirror Has Two Faces. Bacall’s stage work is spottily archived, but her strongest movies, along with entertaining interviews, are easily found—and eternally pleasurable.

    5 Roles That Made Lauren Bacall the Coolest Woman in Movie History

    The actress was at her best working opposite Humphrey Bogart

    Humphrey Bogart — and then audiences — fell in love with Lauren Bacall, whose 1944 debut To Have And Have Not showcased her alluring cool and smoldering charm. Though just 19, she more than held her own acting opposite Bogart, who at 44 was already a star and hot off of Casablanca.

    The actress, who died Monday at 89, thrived during her decades-spanning career, continuing to prove why she had quickly shot to stardom in the first place.

    Here, we look at the five key roles that elevated Bacall to icon status.

    আরো মিডিয়া দেখতে পড়তে
    twitter search Results for Lauren Bacall

  9. মাসুদ করিম - ১৮ আগস্ট ২০১৪ (১০:০০ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Rescuing Brecht
    MICHAEL HOFMANN

    Stephen Parker
    BERTOLT BRECHT
    A literary life
    704pp. Bloomsbury. £30 (US $39.99).
    978 1 4081 5562 2
    Published: 13 August 2014

    In August 1956, the month of his death, Bertolt Brecht had a note put up for the actors of his Berliner Ensemble before they set off for London without him to perform Mother Courage, George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer and The Caucasian Chalk Circle: “There is in England a long-standing fear that German art (literature, painting, music) must be terribly heavy, slow, laborious and pedestrian. So our playing needs to be quick, light, strong”. So much of Brecht is there: the adversarial approach, the attention to detail and preparation, the often Chinese-sounding wisdom, the chess player’s mastery of his opponent based on superior understanding. The tour was a triumph, and most of the few good things that happened to Brecht in the English-speaking world date from that time: the association with his English editor and translator, John Willett, and with Willett’s publishers, Methuen; the passionate admiration of the Observer’s theatre critic, Kenneth Tynan; and the sympathy of a generation of English theatre people including Dame Peggy Ashcroft, George Devine and Sam Wanamaker. You might say, Brecht went out in absentia and on a small high.

    Because things have got worse for him since, of that there can be little doubt. England and America are, if not quite Brecht-free zones, nevertheless territories where he has persistently been misunderstood, unappreciated, unloved and under suspicion. It is almost what defines them: liberal economics and a dearth of Brecht. (Perhaps if we had had Brecht, we wouldn’t have needed Thomas Piketty.) Yes, there are productions of his plays still from time to time, but almost always tempting fate and against the odds; the poems remain absurdly little known; and the man and his ideas are routinely and casually butchered. He may just about exist as a name, but he is not accorded any warmth or respect. He is certainly not (as he was in his own half-ironic stylization) “der Klassiker”: an example, and an object of fascination and utility.

    The pattern was set much earlier. One of the low points of Brecht’s life – which in its way is as wonderfully scenic as epic theatre – was the winter of 1934 in London, when he was cold and hungry, got twice turned away from the Savoy (where he was supposed to have lunch with Princess Bibesco) for being too badly dressed, and generally failed to get anything off the ground at all. “I’m freezing. They only have open fireplaces here. The English eat leather and grass”, he complained, and (this from the author of Mahagonny!): “London is a wicked hard-bitten town. The natives here are among the most vicious in Europe. There is a high culture of corruption”. His involvement the following year with the New York Theatre Union production of The Mother was sufficient to sink them all – play, production and theatre – in waves of recrimination, and mark his card with generations of Broadway critics; if he had “not been so disliked”, James K. Lyon wrote in his soberly hilarious account of that glorious mismatch, Bertolt Brecht in America (1980), he “might have been forgotten entirely”. Brecht’s six years in exile in Hollywood (1941–7), a period of heroic inconsequence and unabating difficulty in his life, he summed up at his laconic appearance, with interpreter and cigar, before the House Un-American Activities Committee (which was, as someone put it, just about his only theatrical success in all his time there): “I am not a film writer, and I am not aware of any influence I have had on the film industry, either politically or artistically”. If it didn’t sound so matter-of-factly crushed, it could almost have been a boast.

    As he showed in his lifetime, Brecht could get by without interest from Britain and America; whether they can continue to do without him – in their literature, their political economy, their public intellectuals – is another matter. I think he needs to be there. Brecht’s living influence ought to amount to more than – what, the estimable Billy Bragg. There has been a string of false dawns (but also false dusks) – publications, productions, adaptations, translations. Brecht’s standing in English seems a lot to pin on any one work or endeavour. But Stephen Parker’s Bertolt Brecht: A literary life is that rare thing, not only the biography of a genius, but itself a biography of genius. Parker, a Professor of German at Manchester, has written a foot perfect, detailed, fascinating and really inward book on a man who was plausibly described as “one of the most complicated human beings of the past fifty years”. It may well be the best literary biography I have read, the intricate demands of the subject met and unfussily answered by the insightful calm and nuanced decisiveness of the biographer. It carries all the requisite social and political background, and can be read, without further ado, by those without German or any prior interest in Brecht. His is indeed one of the great literary lives, and Parker’s book is every bit as good as it needs to be.

    Parker’s achievement is all the more striking because a whole other lifetime has passed since Brecht’s passing – exactly fifty-eight years since B. B.’s own allotted span of fifty-eight years. One might conjecture that as much as by any new evidence and materials that have come to light (though there is plenty, notably Werner Hecht’s monumental day-by-day Brecht Chronik of 1997), Parker has been helped by the cooling of the so-called Cold War, the end of some of the old hoo-hah about the Stalin Peace Prize, the sedimenting of some of the personal testimonies. If we can now talk about Picasso properly, then surely this should be possible with Brecht, too. So we aren’t given Brecht the old unscrupulous automaton, the theatre shouter and “indoor Marxman” (Malcolm Lowry’s phrase, not about Brecht), the arid and grasping authoritarian and hypocrite. Instead we get a wholly fresh and absorbing sense of what it might have been like to be Brecht, from the sickly child to the prematurely old, dismally undiagnosed heart patient. Parker’s book is green, not grey. Certain themes are sounded insistently, implacably and rightly throughout: Brecht “the extravagantly gifted child”, his “extravagant intelligence”, “this hugely gifted boy”, “his extreme talent”. It may sound like a lot, like overkill, even, but it is only just, and anything less would have been remiss. Brecht was a prodigy to set beside Rimbaud and Keats, a superior and controlled and reflexively self- invented being, a “singular sensibility”. Parker is careful not to say that Brecht was brilliant because he was unwell, but unwellness is part of his picture of the man and his genius, as it tends to be part of ours nowadays, no matter the individual.

    The way Brecht negotiated his conditions (weak heart, panic attacks, dizzy spells, the twitching and trembling associated with Sydenham’s chorea, renal and urinary tract infections, lack of appetite) was – another one of Parker’s running themes – to pretend all was well, to ration his excesses discreetly after his roaring adolescence and early twenties, and to ask as much of himself as though he had been well. Parker shows how easily Brecht might have become the Late Romantic, private, neurasthenic type of poet he despised; it was what nature had equipped him for, to be a Stefan George, a Gérard de Nerval, a Charles Algernon Swinburne, a poet of Night and Storm and Sickness and Mother. Reading and discipline and mental strength and his own rebellious orientation fixed that. Interest was some where else; originality was somewhere else; autonomy and usefulness were somewhere else. Moreover, emotionalism, the despised “swill of feelings”, simply used him up, leaving nothing, no residue, no achievement. Chopin, Wagner and Dostoevsky were prime instances of unhealthy art; they simply made him ill; Brecht even took his temperature to prove it. He had to run himself carefully, as his life turned into “a gamble played out between weakness and strength”. His “cult of coldness” was actually self-preservation.

    Brecht was extremely hard-working, got up early, wrote every day, and believed writing was a function of the health he actually didn’t enjoy. “I have, as far as I can recollect, never written a single line when I wasn’t feeling well, physically. Only this feeling of well- being can give you the sense of being on top of things which you need if you are to write.” By the end of his life, it was the reverse: he dragged himself to his desk in an effort to persuade himself that he was well. In his plays Brecht created gargantuan monsters of appetite and insensitivity and tyrannous health like Baal, Kragler, Galy Gay, Fatzer, Macheath and others, through to Lucullus and Galileo, but they were the wish-fantasies of someone who all his life struggled to eat. Brecht included fresh air and bread among his likes, and coincidentally or not, “Justice is the bread of the people”. Finland was a revelation to him; California, “filled / with the oily smell of films”, and where bread had been successfully abolished as a function of the “nomadic” American lifestyle, a calamity. Brecht took to carping, with plaintive irony (like the provincial he half was), “We didn’t have that in Augsburg”. He was not an ascetic at all, just a poorly trencherman who had learned restraint. For a materialist through and through, it was an especially cruel fate:

    “To eat of meat joyously, a juicy loin cut
    And with the fresh-baked, fragrant rye bread
    Chunks from the whole cheese, and to swallow
    Cold beer from the jug; such things are held in
    Low esteem, but to my mind to be put in the grave
    Without ever enjoying a mouthful of good meat
    Is inhuman, and I say that, I who
    Am not good at eating.”

    Parker’s justly physical – somatic – pursuit of Brecht is richly productive; from early to late, he looks as physically governed as anyone, even Kafka of the diets and fads. The one was the author of the phrase “His Majesty, the body”, but it was the other whose lifelong fear of being buried alive led him to stipulate that a doctor should confirm that he was indeed dead, and, as they apparently do in these cases, his femoral artery was severed (not “a stiletto . . . put through his heart”, as an earlier biography had it), before he was buried in his – worm-proof, another phobia – steel (not zinc) coffin. If the truth is indeed concrete – as the famous poster on Brecht’s wall read – then the physical history of Brecht’s body is the logical place to start.

    Another mainstay of Parker’s biography is the instinctive speed and certainty of Brecht’s mind. There is no aetiology for this, we have to take it as given, which I think is why Parker rightly insists early and often on Brecht’s genius. That is our floor here. Germane here are the pleasure and wit, the perversity and simplicity of so many of Brecht’s utterances and statements. It is clear that he took unusual pleasure in formulation, in ideas, in argument, in debate. Much of his life was spent in company (the theatre directing, obviously, but also many meetings and groupings in Berlin and in exile, and social evenings at home, wherever he happened to be, with Helene Weigel, his actor and theatre-manager wife, cooking and entertaining); much of his work (including all the plays, by and by) was produced in collaboration, with Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Ruth Berlau (lovers and ex-lovers) and others. He had many male friendships – with Leon Feuchtwanger, with Karl Korsch, with George Grosz, with Walter Benjamin, with Hanns Eisler, with Charles Laughton – dozens and dozens, that were talk on a very high level. Not gossip, not shop, not the exchange of privacies, but working conversation. Accordingly, the lapidary list-poem “Pleasures” includes “Dialectics” alongside “Old music”, “New music” and “Being friendly”. Because no British or American artist would ever dream of saying such a thing (in an atmosphere that seems to have been coercively anti-intellectual forever), it should probably be stressed that this is not a pose. Compared to his, most writers’ lives look very solitary, penumbral, under-exposed. Brecht liked bringing things to clarity, and to fun. If the twentieth century had had an Enlightenment, he would have been it.

    All his life Brecht had an instinctive originality that may once upon a time have been contrived in the form of a conscious and perverse style, but again maybe wasn’t: I tend to suspect it was always in him. This underwrites numerous remarks and positions of effortless carry and suggestion, whether he is discussing desirable qualities in acting (“Witty. Ceremonious. Ritual.”) or, in another, equally dazzling collocation, noting that “I keep coming back to the fact that the essence of art is simplicity, grandeur and sensitivity, and that of its form coolness”. In thirty years of translating, I have known nothing like the feeling of a joyfully manipulative intelligence I had when working on the wedding scene in The Good Person of Sichuan. Aesthetic assumptions are confounded wholesale by Brecht, whether it is an unhesitating, dumbfounding rejection of depth (“Depth takes you no further. Depth is a dimension of its own, just depth – which is why nothing comes to light in it”), or naturalism (imagining a possible play on a nineteenth- century slave rebellion, Brecht wanted the slaves speaking standard English, no questions asked) or entertainment (following The Threepenny Opera of 1928, “he would never again allow his audience to enjoy themselves in such an unfettered way”) or metaphysics (“For Brecht, militant opposition to metaphysics was an article of faith”). His favourite book – although he said, “Don’t laugh”, was the Bible. He was uninterested in personal matters.

    Some things, you think, Brecht just needed to see and he went the other way. Judgements are crushing: “I found other plays wrong”, is how he remembers his own developing interest in the theatre as a youth. The Mother “would not dream of handing the spectator over to an inspiring theatrical experience”. In Hollywood, Brecht went looking for price tags in the artificial nature; “even the fig trees look as if they had just told and sold some contemptible lies”. For him, writing in the US was hopeless, “like writing a play for the tundra”. “The muckrakers have turned into gold-diggers.” Often, too, there is something to be dropped or switched. “A contract is good, you can always break it”, was a piece of advice in a particular situation, but then any arrangement and any idea can be picked apart or reversed, with Brecht’s mental agility. “I’m continually forgetting my opinions”, he wrote, as if he cared. And then, instead: “A man with one theory is lost. He needs several of them, four, lots!” – which of course got him in trouble later on, when he was at the mercy of people who had precisely one theory – or rather, one certainty – and guarded its purity against whatever they saw him as advancing, avant-gardism, sectarianism, formalism, Proletkult, cosmopolitanism, you name it. Parker calls him eclectic, unsystematic and intellectually “bordering on the promiscuous”. Brecht is not always on the right side of every argument, but he is always on the more thoughtful, heretical, interesting side.

    In some ways, Brecht changed remarkably little. He developed, he assimilated new tastes and materials (Horace, Chinese, elements of his old foe Stanislavsky), but he didn’t change. Already in his teens, he was independent, charismatic, dominant. He stopped washing and cut his hair and smoked. Once his interests settled around women and writing and theatre, they didn’t budge. Parker describes Brecht’s assiduous wooing, at nineteen, of seven local girls at once; he would capture one, and go on to the others, making sure he didn’t let the first one go. There was always room for one more. Meanwhile, what was sauce for the goose was definitely not sauce for the gander. Brecht disliked defections and scenes and open rupture. He enforced straightforward double standards, exerting what Willett called “a dreadful combination of possessiveness and sense of superiority”. He was like a planet acquiring satellites, some of whom (Hauptmann, Berlau, Käthe Rülicke) ended up as part of his ménage, continuing to work for him and live nearby when he was no longer otherwise interested in them. There was always room for one more. But even this ostensibly unexampled, radical, post-moral behaviour only replicated what Brecht had at home, growing up in the Wilhelmine age. There was the family (and there was no alternative to family), but it was understood to be a thoroughly hypocritical organization, and had to be endlessly accommodating. Brecht lived in glorious semi-detachment from the time he was a schoolboy. His attic kingdom had its own front door; his father kept a mistress in the town for decades; and even when Brecht set up house in Berlin, he took Mari Hold, the housekeeper-cook, with him from home to look after Weigel and the children. So intact and inviolably separate were Brecht’s personal arrangements, that it wasn’t until the summer of 1933 that they first lived under one roof; they had been married for four years, and it was principally the exigencies of exile that had brought it about.

    Many other things stayed the same. Brecht kept friends from boyhood, for the best part of fifty years. He had a Bavarian accent all his life. He was on respectful terms with his widowed father, whose industry and appetites he admired. Publicly, at least, he kept faith with Communism, since first reading Marx in 1926. He bought property wherever he was – in Bavaria, in Denmark, in Hollywood, in East Germany. It is good to read, from neighbours and acquaintances, such things as “His appearance is very pointedly proletarian but he is a nice, amiable man of good family”. The phrase, “obdurate owner of villas” applies to Brecht at least as much as to his class enemy Thomas Mann, to whom it was actually applied. The big study, with several large tables, where several projects could be kept going simultaneously, was a necessity not always provided. The endless tinkering with plays, the keeping alive of old materials (old songs), to reflect new views or altered historical or political circumstances, was a lifelong tendency; the obverse of this is that, refreshingly for a professional writer (and apart from The Threepenny Novel, knocked off in a year for money early on in exile), Brecht was unimpressed by the dictates of publication or production. It was almost as though he wrote steadily for the desk drawer: the poems, the great plays of the 1930s that would not see a theatre for twenty years, if then. He said: “I am by nature a difficult person to control. I reject angrily authority that exists without my respect, and I can only regard laws, regulating people’s lives together, as provisional proposals constantly to be changed”.

    Brecht’s story is the fascinating one of the contrarian in adversity; perhaps that’s why it’s so disappointing that the British, with their feeling for the free spirit, the underdog (Robin Hood their Schweyk or Eulenspiegel), don’t get him. It was only for a tiny part of his life – no more than five years in Weimar, ten at the outside – that things went his way. Perhaps from 1922, when, having written little and directed nothing, he was awarded the Kleist Prize at the perfect age of twenty-four by the critic Herbert Ihering, to 1928, when the Dreigroschenoper was premiered and Kurt Weill’s music retrieved it from probable disaster; arguably through to January 1933 when Hitler took power, and Brecht (though he seems not to have known it) was somewhere near the top of his list of undesirables. The rest of the time he was pretty solidly up against it. His provincial middle-class background (his father was the manager of a paper company in Augsburg) was rarely an advantage to him, most of his life he spent trying to live it down, it never ceased to raise eyebrows and there were plenty of times when it might have been his death sentence.

    I’m not really sure what the case against Brecht is. That he treated women and co-workers badly? That he played fast and loose with the intellectual property of others, but was litigiously possessive of his own? That he wrote no more hit shows after The Threepenny Opera? That he failed to crack America? That he wouldn’t denounce the Soviet Union? That he was drab and a killjoy? That he had it cushy after settling back in East Germany in 1949? That he was consumed with his own importance? Read Stephen Parker’s book and see what’s left of all that – even though it’s not at all a campaigning biography. Brecht remained, I think, unassimilable. He lent the force of his energy and enormous creativity to the cause of greater equality. He believed in drama, especially, as a teaching tool. He did a lot in groups and committees and organizations, in a way that seems utterly fatuous, but that was how they went about things in those days (the Writers’ Congress for the Defence of Culture in 1935 in Paris, with 250 writers from twenty-seven countries to hear eighty-nine speakers against Fascism – but it’s not as though we have any better ideas). He mocked a colleague for being “still totally taken up with the question of how men would have to change in order to change the world, so that they could change themselves”, but that’s not a million miles from where he was himself. He clung to his plays, particularly, and his ideas about staging them, because he had been travelling with them for year after year, and they were all he had; nor could he trust anyone to put them on the way he wanted.

    He suffered agonies of apprehension and loss. When he was in Moscow in 1941, on his way east to Vladivostok and then across the Sea of Japan to Santa Barbara, he was so fantastically ill at ease, he sat in a taxi and rode around aimlessly for days until tickets, papers and permission came through. At least Stalin couldn’t be put through to him in a taxi, not in those days. (It is surprising to learn that, after a version of The Threepenny Opera in 1930, no further play of Brecht’s was put on in Moscow in his lifetime.) His time in Hollywood is one of the great episodes in the history of exile: “For furniture they looked to the Salvation Army: Brecht had become a character in his own satire of charity in capitalism”, Parker writes. But then so, too, was his time in Finland:

    “Fleeing from my fellow countrymen
    I have now reached Finland. Friends
    Whom yesterday I didn’t know, put up some beds
    In clean rooms. Over the radio
    I hear the victory bulletins of the scum of the earth. Curiously
    I examine a map of the continent. High up in Lapland
    Towards the Arctic Ocean
    I can still see a small door.”

    (Note the simplicity, grandeur and sensitivity; note the coolness.)

    Nor is it true to suppose that after 1948 his worries were over, when the (not yet) East Germany swallowed him up, and he became his own monument. During 1947 and 1948, Brecht again went through agonies of disappointed hope. If he had been permitted to, he would probably have stayed in Switzerland – like Thomas Mann. It’s not as though the mode of exile abruptly ended when Brecht fetched up in East Berlin: far from it. His suitcases stayed packed. “This country still gives me the creeps!” he was known to say. The East Germans snooped on him as the FBI had done before. Brecht was able to set up his Berliner Ensemble, but they had no theatre and performed wherever they could; as late as 1953, the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, the one that Brecht had his eye on, “was earmarked for the Garrisoned People’s Police, the forerunner of the GDR army”. Brecht was dealing with a paranoid and unpopular regime, stuffed with his enemies who had spent the war plotting in Moscow, and were now terrified of his fame and brilliance and general uncontrollability. Production plans and scripts were monitored at every level. Audiences still applauded, but they liked to do it in the dark, where they could not be identified. Productions were pulled, and consequent self-criticism invited (an opera version of Lucullus). An amanuensis took down the following: “Brecht does not want to learn how to write from Ulbricht, how to translate his thoughts, expressed by someone from the Free German Youth. On the contrary, politicians should learn from poets, who represent the whole of society (example Lenin – Gorky)”. It sounds hopeless. Brecht was given his personal ideological watchdog. It was like the situation in a particularly toxic Renaissance principality in a particularly bloody seventeenth-century play, with a naive, charmed, clever and rapidly ageing hero. “How can a linden tree be expected to conduct a discussion with someone who reproaches it for not being an oak?” Brecht lamented that there was ideology everywhere, writes Parker; “The first thing we have to do is institute exhibitions and courses to develop taste, i.e. for the enjoyment of life”, he proposed with delightful implausibility. Aesthetics before ethics, as Joseph Brodsky put it.

    No wonder Brecht took such precautions as he could (and for which he was senselessly reviled): Austrian citizenship, money in Switzerland, house in Denmark, publishers in Frankfurt, doctors in Munich, renowned productions in Paris and Milan, Stalin Peace Prize (originally second class) in Moscow, half an eye on China as a possible further refuge. He became a plaything in the East–West conflict. Parker picks it out beautifully: “There were congratulations from friends and tormentors in East Berlin and the usual derision in the West”. Is it possible we are still no further along?

    Michael Hofmann is a poet, and a translator from the German. His Selected Poems appeared in 2009, and his translation of Gottfried Benn’s Impromptus: Selected poems and some prose was published last year.

  10. মাসুদ করিম - ১৯ আগস্ট ২০১৪ (১২:১৭ অপরাহ্ণ)

    ছোটবেলা থেকে এত দেখেছি এদের, এই বলিউড থেকে বোরখাদের।

    Yash Chopra & Bollywood to Zakir Naik & hijab: such a short journey

    Irena Akbar

    She wanted to be like Kareena Kapoor, and “could not wait to act in a movie”. In her last year of college, she “got offers from casting directors who would scout for faces in campuses and on Facebook”. But her “well-to-do” Mumbai-based Kashmiri Muslim family would not allow her to take up any film job unless it was offered by Yash Chopra’s YRF (Yash Raj Films). That was in 2012.

    Two years on, Murcyleen Peerzada, a 23-year-old Kashmiri woman based in Mumbai, does not idolise Kareena. She now dreams of “being like Yasmin Mogahed”, an Egypt-born American preacher known for her talks and articles on Islam.

    There are other changes in Peerzada’s life. She has given up her “Westernised, flamboyant” lifestyle. From a “crazy shopaholic” who would lap up the “most expensive dresses and jeans”, she now wears an all-black burqa. Speaking to The Indian Express over phone, she says, “During my last trip to Dubai, I bought a lot of burqas; earlier, I’d shop for Western clothes.”

    Her social media profile pictures have gone from her posing in glamorous tops to one in which she is draped in a hijab. All covered up, Peerzada is now an orator with the Mumbai-based, Zakir Naik-headed Islamic Research Foundation, and gives public talks on Islam in the city. Her last talk was at a ladies-only conference in Srinagar.

    What caused the sudden, drastic transformation in Peerzada’s aspirations and lifestyle? The Islamic preacher, though, says the change was anything but drastic. It began, she says, with Bollywood. Her father, Feroze Peerzada, a wealthy businessman who “had known Yash Chopra for the last three decades, since the days he wanted to be an actor” introduced her to the late Yash Chopra & Bollywood to Zakir Naik & hijab: such a short journey filmmaker in 2012. He offered her the job of an assistant director on the movie Ek Tha Tiger.

    “That, I took, as a stepping stone to becoming an actor. I was fascinated with acting.” Then, she was signed up for YRF’s Shuddh Desi Romance as a costume assistant director. But since the director Maneesh Sharma likes to take up newcomers for his movies, he asked her to do a screen test. “When I faced the camera, I suddenly felt exposed, emotionally and physically, even though I was wearing a salwar kameez. I felt vulnerable and uncomfortable. I just got up, and said, ‘I don’t want to do this,’” she says.

    After some introspection, she realised that “actors are always so exposed” and texted Yash Chopra’s son, filmmaker Aditya Chopra, that she has changed her mind about acting. “I didn’t even want to be an assistant director any more. It’s too hectic a job. What’s the point if you don’t want to be an actor any more?” she says. She then decided to become a costume stylist and began working with designer Manish Malhotra. Then, in October 2012, Yash Chopra passed away. “He was my mentor, and when he died, I felt I lost a big support. The idea of death shook me. I started questioning life. I wanted to look beyond singing, dancing and all that rubbish. What is the purpose of this life, I started thinking,” she says.

    Peerzada quit her work with Malhotra, and sat at home for three-four months. “I was depressed. All my friends were being launched in the film world. And here I was, giving up all opportunities,” she says. Then, she saw a file of papers gathering dust in her home. “It was lying around in our home for six years. Someone had come and given that file to us, and we never bothered to look it up,” she says.

    That evening in early 2013, she finally looked it up. It was a transcript of a video of Zakir Naik on the topic ‘Women in Islam’. “I was not religious. I would pray only occasionally. But this file gripped me. I finished reading it that evening itself,” she says. That helped her find her “purpose in life”.

    “I researched online and watched YouTube videos of Nouman Ali Khan and Yasmin Mogahed. I felt very enlightened and wanted to be like them,” she says. But she first needed to learn about religion. So, in March 2013, she enrolled for a course at IRF, under the tutelage of Farha Naik, the wife of Zakir Naik, “the most accurate researcher”. “I am doing their most advanced course in order to become an IRF orator,” she says. Giving talks at the IRF centre in Mumbai is a part of her course. She has delivered close to 10 lectures so far and, on August 10, she organised an ‘Islamic peace conference’ in Srinagar with the help of her father, “who has been supportive of and is inspired by” her transformation.

    Her tweets are usually re-tweets of Islamic scholars, and most are spiritual, asking people to turn to Allah to solve problems in their lives. “I don’t believe in teaching extremism. I have a very liberal approach towards religion. Angry speeches are not going to eventually appeal to the young, only love and wisdom can. Islam is a religion in controversy, and it needs youngsters like us to reach out to young Muslims in a humourous, light manner. American preacher Nouman Ali Khan cracks jokes in between his talks. That’s how it should be,” she says.

    None of Peerzada’s talks are up on YouTube, but on Instagram, where she goes by the username ‘turntoallah’ and has 19,000 followers, she has posted 10-15-second videos of the Srinagar conference. In one, she says, “Nobody forced me. I started wearing the hijab on my own. I have never felt so strong and liberated in my life.”

    In another clip, she says, “I don’t want to be a seductress, calling people to the wrong things, which is why I left and I think that is the best decision I’ve ever made in my life.” One video has her saying, “Be friends with the righteous people, the company that will guide you to the right side.” Peerzada, in line with her lectures, has cut off with all her “partying, clubbing friends”.

    Though Peerzada, who is doing her Masters in Islamic Studies from the Islamic Online University in Qatar, says she focuses on the “spiritual aspects” of the religion, and “has no say on who wears what”, some of her posts on Instagram suggest otherwise. “They (the media) reduce women to objects that satisfy men and cause only a negative impact in people’s life including social networking sites. All the girls should learn to value themselves and their bodies. Cover up for the sake of Allah! Your body and also your character… My friends aren’t the girls who display themselves to the world, my friends are the girls who say they believe in Allah and prove it everyday. They’re the kinds that will Insha Allah reunite with me in jannah. Their goal isn’t ‘boys, parties and fashion’. Their goal is jannah.”

    Peerzada feels that young Muslims are “bombarded with Westernisation”. “Half the songs we listen to and hum support a swag lifestyle. You know, like Kanye West’s song I am a God.” Her other issue with young Muslims is that they “don’t understand the meaning of the Quran because they’ve only read it in Arabic”. “We need to connect to the youth, speak in their language, be like some online preachers who are so joyful and approachable,” she says.

    It seems she is on that path to “connect to the Muslim youth”. She writes in a post on Instagram: “Yesterday there was a musical concert in Kashmir 15 minutes away from our conference which was attended by Bollywood actors Sohail Khan and Suniel Shetty. For Kashmir, that’s something rare. We were asked to move our conference so that we may be able to pull a crowd. But look at Allah’s greatness, we gathered a crowd of 4,000 people and the concert a crowd of 200.” In a video she posted, Kashmiri women are haggling to shake hands with Peerzada, dressed in a shimmering black cloak. “I was walking in a street in Mumbai, and five young burqa-clad girls came to me and said that they recognise me as someone who’s give a public talk,” she says.

  11. মাসুদ করিম - ২৩ আগস্ট ২০১৪ (৭:৪১ অপরাহ্ণ)

    8th Century inscription found in Purulia village

    Archaeologists from the University of Calcutta have found an 8th Century inscription in a village in West Bengal’s Purulia district.

    The inscription running into four lines was found from Dhuluri village on the corner of a long stretch of rock surface surrounded by dense vegetation and beyond the habited area of the village, Rajat Sanyal, Assistant Professor of the Department of Archaeology, University of Calcutta, told The Hindu.

    The rock is located in the Saturi block of the district on the banks of a local rivulet emerging from river Damodar.

    “A study of the characteristic features of the inscription suggests that the short epigraph is carved in an unusual and extremely calligraphic Siddhamatrka script. The only other example of such an inscription is datable to the 6th Century [C.E.] and found in the Sushnia hills in adjoining Bankura district,” he added.

    So far the archaeologists have only been able to decipher one line of the inscription that reads ‘sriyuvaraja’ which may be referring to a crown prince.

    “The first line has been deciphered with help from Professor Arlo Griffiths [an Indology expert] and efforts are on complete its decipherment,” Prof Sanyal said.

    “This is the earliest dated inscription found in Purulia region and once completely deciphered it can shed new light on the early- medieval history of the region,” said Bishnupriya Basak, assistant professor of the Department of Archaeology, University of Calcutta.

    The inscription was actually spotted by a local school teacher, Madhab Mondal, who informed the block development officer, Saturi Dibyendu Sekhar Das.

    Mr. Das informed the archaeologist team that visited the village. As the rock surface containing the inscription is fast decaying, archaeologists have urged local authorities to take measures for its preservation. The rock surface spans over 200 metres but the inscription covers only about a feet and cannot be removed.

    Within the Dhuluri village, the archaeologists have also spotted ruins of an ancient stone temple and many stone sculptures from apparently the same historical period.

  12. মাসুদ করিম - ২৩ আগস্ট ২০১৪ (১০:১১ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Shahabuddin gets highest French title

    Internationally renowned Bangladeshi painter Shahabuddin Ahmed has been bestowed with France’s highest civilian title for his contribution to Art in France and all around the world.

    The Paris-based Bangladeshi artist has been conferred with “Chevalier De L’ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres” (Knight in the Order of Fine Arts and Humanities) by the Ministry for Cultural Affairs and Communication of France.

    “I was informed of winning the title by the ministry on July 6 this year while the formal ceremony will take place in Paris, France, the next month [September]. It is really a matter of great joy for me. I, along with my family, carry Bangladeshi passports. I hope the award will enhance the image of my country and inspire Bangladeshi people living across the world,” said an elated Shahabuddin over the phone to this correspondent.

    Shahabuddin Ahmed is the second Bangladeshi to receive the title. Globally famed mime maestro and film actor Partha Pratim Majumder first received the award in 2011.

    Bold strokes, vibrant colours and figurative expressions are the hallmark of freedom fighter Shahabuddin’s works. The conscience and the indomitable spirit of the Liberation War have frequently appeared as prominent connotations on his canvas.

    Shahabuddin was born on September 11, 1950 and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dhaka. He obtained scholarship to study at Ecole des beaux-arts de Paris. He was one of the fifty master painters of contemporary arts, and had been bestowed with an award at the Olympiad of Arts, Barcelona, in 1992.

    He also received the Shadhinata Padak in 2000 and Bangla Academy Award in 1974.

    His paintings delve into contemporary life and times. He is an optimist and this is evidently expressed in his paintings. This optimism was firmly embedded in Shahabuddin when he took part in the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971.

    He has the capability to overcome constraints of time and space. In their dynamism his paintings depict fearless human figures that cut through the difficulties of life, which provide one the reason to live. The vibrancy and force of his brushwork highlight this aspect. Above all, his compositions are unmistakably musical and rhythmic.

    Shahabuddin’s works are displayed in many prestigious galleries around the globe.

  13. মাসুদ করিম - ২৫ আগস্ট ২০১৪ (৯:৫২ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Actor and director Richard Attenborough dies aged 90

    Oscar-winning British film director Richard Attenborough has died at the age of 90, his son has said.

    Lord Attenborough was one of Britain’s leading actors, before becoming a highly successful director.

    In a career that spanned six decades, he appeared in films including Brighton Rock, World War Two prisoner of war thriller The Great Escape and later in dinosaur blockbuster Jurassic Park.

    As a director he was perhaps best known for Gandhi, which won him two Oscars.

    Sir Ben Kingsley, who played the title role, said he would “miss him dearly”.

    “Richard Attenborough trusted me with the crucial and central task of bringing to life a dream it took him 20 years to bring to fruition.

    “When he gave me the part of Gandhi it was with great grace and joy. He placed in me an absolute trust and in turn I placed an absolute trust in him and grew to love him.”

    Lord Attenborough had been in a nursing home with his wife for a number of years, BBC arts editor Will Gompertz said.

    He had also been in a wheelchair since falling down stairs six years ago, our correspondent added.

    His son told the BBC that Lord Attenborough died at lunchtime on Sunday.

    His family is expected to make a full statement on Monday.
    ‘Huge impact’

    Paying tribute, Prime Minister David Cameron tweeted: “His acting in “Brighton Rock” was brilliant, his directing of “Gandhi” was stunning – Richard Attenborough was one of the greats of cinema.”

    Actress Mia Farrow tweeted: “Richard Attenborough was the kindest man I have ever had the privilege of working with. A Prince. RIP ‘Pa’ – and thank you.”

    Chris Hewitt from Empire Magazine told BBC News Lord Attenborough had a “huge impact” on cinema, describing him as a “universally beloved” figure.

    Tribute was paid to the Labour peer from his party.

    “Lord Attenborough made an enormous contribution to our country and to the film industry both as an actor and a director. His films will be loved for generations to come,” it said.

    “He believed passionately in social justice and the Labour Party and was a vocal campaigner against apartheid. He will be sadly missed. Our thoughts are with his family and friends.”

    Obituary: Richard Attenborough

    During a career spanning 60 years, the irrepressible Richard Attenborough became one of Britain’s best-known actors and directors: a man of charm, talent and old-fashioned liberal principles.

    What one writer described as “an apparently unquenchable appetite for doing good”, Attenborough himself attributed to his upbringing in Leicester.

    Richard Samuel Attenborough was born on 29 August 1923.

    He and his brothers David, the television naturalist, and John were brought up by fervently do-gooding parents – their father was principal of University College, Leicester.

    Both father and mother were Labour Party activists whose commitment extended to adopting two Jewish refugee girls from Germany when World War II broke out.

    Attenborough inherited a belief in the importance of community and society. Apart from a brief flirtation with the Social Democrats he was a lifelong member of the Labour Party, and much of his work reflected his political beliefs.

    He made his film debut while still a drama student in 1942, playing a cameo role as a cowardly young stoker on a naval destroyer in Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve.

    Over the next 30 years – interrupted by three years’ service in the RAF – he became a star and one of Britain’s most reliable character actors.
    Christmas fixture

    His most astonishing performance was his chilling portrayal, in 1947, of the teenage hoodlum and murderer Pinky in Brighton Rock.

    On stage he was part of the original cast of Agatha Christie’s long-running whodunnit, The Mousetrap.

    He later became a fixture of a score of British television Christmases as Bartlett in 1963 prison camp drama The Great Escape.

    In 1964 he won a best actor Bafta for his portrayal of the downtrodden husband of a deranged spiritualist in Seance on a Wet Afternoon.

    The award also recognised his performance as a martinet sergeant major facing a native uprising in Guns at Batasi.

    His greatest skill as an actor was the sympathetic embodiment of ordinary though never mundane men in extraordinary circumstances.

    It served him especially well in 1971 when he played the mass murderer John Christie – outwardly normal, in reality a psychopath – in 10 Rillington Place.

    He was knighted for his efforts in 1976. But he had become frustrated with acting, in which he only ever interpreted other people’s work.

    He began producing films, then making them. “Becoming a director enabled me to do things I couldn’t do as an actor,” he said.

    He was a film-maker with a mission, believing popular cinema had a capacity to make the world a better place.

    His greatest achievement was his 1982 epic Gandhi, starring Ben Kingsley as the outsider hero whose moral courage and sense of purpose enabled him to change the world.

    Political statements

    Gandhi won eight Oscars, including best actor and best director. But it took Attenborough 20 years to raise the money to make it.

    He mortgaged his house, sold possessions and took roles in films he described as “terrible crap” to help pay for what became an obsession.

    Along the way he directed other films. There was a version of Joan Littlewood’s anti-war satire Oh! What a Lovely War. There was Young Winston, about Churchill’s early years, and the war epic A Bridge Too Far.

    After Gandhi came his adaptation of the musical A Chorus Line. It was followed by Cry Freedom, the story of the murdered South African black activist Steve Biko and Donald Woods, the white journalist who took up his cause.

    Like Gandhi, Cry Freedom was a box office and critical success. Like Gandhi, it was anti-racist, anti-imperialist and impeccably liberal, as well as a strong, eminently watchable drama.

    Both films wore their political hearts on their sleeves. And both were occasionally criticised for being overblown, overlong, sentimental and even patronising.

    Some of his films were flops. His 1992 biopic of Charlie Chaplin failed to make money, while Grey Owl, about a pioneering Canadian Indian environmentalist who turned out to have been born in Hastings, went straight to video in the US.

    His final film, 2007’s Closing the Ring, was judged to be a muted finale to a distinguished directorial career.

    But Shadowlands, released 14 years earlier with Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger, was a commercial and critical success.
    Committees full of ‘darlings’

    The story of children’s writer C S Lewis and his late love affair with American poet Joy Gresham was an unashamed and astonishingly effective tear-jerker.

    It befitted a film by a man who was himself famous, even notorious, for weeping in public.

    Late in life Attenborough resumed his own acting career in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park in 1993, the year he became a life peer.

    He also starred as Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street and had a cameo role in 1998’s Elizabeth.

    As well as being one of Britain’s foremost actors and directors, Lord Attenborough was also one of its most active public figures.

    His vast entry in Who’s Who listed more than 30 organisations of which he was or had been a director, trustee, fellow, chairman or president.

    They included the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the British Film Institute, Capital Radio, Channel 4, the Tate Gallery, the Muscular Dystrophy Group and Chelsea Football Club.

    He put down his habit of addressing everyone as “darling” to serving on so many committees with so many famous people he was never able to remember their names.

    At a Downing Street seminar in the early 1980s on the parlous state of the British film industry, the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher expressed deep concern.

    “Why wasn’t I told?” she asked. “Darling, you never asked,” Attenborough is said to have replied.

    His personal life was apparently irreproachable. His marriage to the actress Sheila Sim was one of the longest-running in showbusiness.

    They wed in 1945 and had three children, including the theatre director Michael Attenborough.

    Tragedy struck the family in 2004 when the Asian tsunami killed his 14-year-old granddaughter Lucy Holland, as well as his daughter and her mother-in-law, both called Jane.
    Charming but determined

    Lord Attenborough broke down in tears as he paid tribute to them at a service in London’s Southwark Cathedral the following year.

    He went on to channel his energies into supporting the Khao Lak Appeal, in aid of a Thai village struck by the tsunami. The appeal raised more than £1 million.

    Lord Attenborough had great charm and immense energy and knew how to use both. The public saw a gregarious theatrical extrovert, but beneath the gush there was a determined and decisive man.

    Throughout an extraordinarily busy life he remained passionately committed to his chosen craft of film-making.

    And he always believed films should be more than merely entertainment – while never forgetting that before they could do anything else, they had to entertain.

  14. মাসুদ করিম - ২৭ আগস্ট ২০১৪ (৯:৩৬ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Rare photos of pre-Holocaust Jewish life to go online
    U.S. Holocaust Museum and International Center of Photography in New York announce joint creation of digital database.

    A vast U.S. archive of photographs of pre-Holocaust Eastern European Jewish life is being made available to the public and researchers.

    The International Center of Photography in New York and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday announced the joint creation of a digital database to facilitate access to photographer Roman Vishniac’s archive.

    Vishniac was a Russian-born Jew who moved to Berlin in 1920. He documented the rise of Nazi power and its effect on Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe.
    The database includes all of Vishniac’s 9,000 negatives, most of which have never before been printed or published.

    The photography center and the museum are asking scholars and the public to help identify the people and places depicted in the images.

  15. মাসুদ করিম - ২৮ আগস্ট ২০১৪ (৯:০০ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Rangpur, Barisal divisions home to highest number of poor Poverty Maps launched

    About 18 per cent of the country’s population live below poverty line with Rangpur and Barisal divisions having the highest number of the poor, according to the Poverty Maps 2010.

    The document also said the least number of poor people live in Chittagong division. The government released the Bangladesh Poverty Map 2010 at a city hotel Wednesday. State minister for finance MA Mannan launched the Poverty Map.

    The map is the third generation of poverty maps in Bangladesh, an important statistical instrument for estimating poverty incidence up to sub-district (upazila) levels.

    The Bangladesh Poverty Map 2010 and the Bangladesh Extreme Poor Poverty Map 2010 show the incidence of poverty (percentage of people living below the upper poverty line) and the incidence of extreme poverty (percentage of people living below the lower poverty line) respectively in each upazila. The zila and upazila estimates of poverty have been produced by applying a Small Area Estimation technique on data from the 2010 Household Income and Expenditure Survey and the 2011 Population Census.

    The maps were developed in a joint exercise by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), the World Bank and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).

    The document shows although overall 17.6 per cent of the total population of the country live below poverty line, Rangpur is the hub of 27.7 per cent poor people followed by Barisal 26.7 per cent, Sylhet 20.7 per cent, Rajshahi 16 per cent, Dhaka 15.6 per cent and Khulna 15.4 per cent.

    “The poverty map is an essential planning tool that provides powerful visuals to identify poor areas with greater accuracy,” said Mr Abdul Mannan.

    He said it will also provide inputs for the Seventh Five Year Plan, keeping in view the targets proposed under Vision 2021.

    While Bangladesh has made impressive economic and social gains over the past decade, poverty levels continue to be a challenge with around 32 per cent of people living below the poverty line in 2010. These maps show that poverty rates vary considerably according to location, with pronounced inequalities at the division, district (zila) and sub-district (upazila) levels.

    “With these latest poverty maps, we have responded to demand from policy-makers, researchers and development partners,” said Statistics and Informatics Division Secretary Nojibur Rahman.

    It will also facilitate the ongoing efforts to prepare database of the poor people across the country, he added.

    BBS Director General Golam Mostafa Kamal said, “The latest poverty maps provide disaggregated poverty estimates to better understand the geographical variations in poverty incidence.”

    Experts say recognising the geographical and regional variations and spatial inequality in growth and poverty allows for more effective targeting of policy interventions based on local conditions. Poverty maps can become an important instrument for prioritisation of policy interventions and resource allocations.

    “Comparing poverty maps with maps of social and other indicators that are correlated with poverty helps identify key impediments and bottlenecks that poor people face,” World Bank Lead Economist Salman Zaidi said.

    “I hope the government will find the poverty maps helpful to plan better targeted interventions.”

    The maps show that the northern and southern districts, apart from Barisal, have a high prevalence of poverty and low primary school completion rates.

    Similarly, poverty appears to be high in chronic disaster-prone areas, such as the districts along the Jamuna River where communities are repeatedly affected by river erosion and flooding, and in the south-west which is prone to cyclones, tidal surges, salt water intrusion and water-logging.

    “These poverty maps also provide a good indication of where the most food insecure areas of the country are. In Bangladesh, with well-functioning markets, people’s purchasing power remains the most important factor in their access to food,” said WFP Representative Christa Räder.

    There are more than 55 per cent poor people in the 10 upazilas of Dhaka division and four per cent extreme poor people live in the 10 upazilas.

    On the other hand, 50 per cent extreme poor people live in six upazilas of Chittagong, and less than four per cent poor below poverty live in the six upazilas. In the 11 rich upazilas of Rangpur division, the rate of poverty is the same of the national average and in 60 upazilas, the poverty rate is 60 per cent.

  16. মাসুদ করিম - ২৮ আগস্ট ২০১৪ (৯:১৫ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    The myth of love jihad

    In its orchestration and inflammatory appeal, the current campaign shares similarities with Hindu revivalist projects in the 1920s in UP

    “Love jihad” — a term floated by some Hindu organisations — has got firmly fixed on the agenda of the RSS and its rightwing affiliates like the Dharma Jagran Manch, even though the Uttar Pradesh unit of the BJP has formally dropped the phrase from its political resolutions. The last month has witnessed an aggressive, systematic campaign around “love jihad”, and in the coming days there are plans to hold continuous “awareness” rallies in UP against this alleged movement to forcefully convert vulnerable Hindu women to Islam through trickery and marriage. Portentously, this present movement has an uncanny resemblance in its idiom, language and symbols to an “abduction” and conversion campaign launched by the Arya Samaj and other Hindu revivalist bodies in the 1920s in UP, to draw sharper lines between Hindus and Muslims. This historical dimension brings out in sharp relief the orchestrated and fabricated nature of love jihad.

    Romance, love and marriages, particularly those cutting across caste and religious boundaries, have always implicitly challenged certain customs and norms, and aroused deep passions. Simultaneously, religious conversions have traditionally been, and continue to be, one of the common expedients of those on the margins of Hinduism to reject hierarchies and reconfigure social boundaries. The inter-meshing of romance, marriage and conversions has often produced increasing worries, deeply politicised representations and everyday violence, framed around the bodies of women. When Hindu assertion reaches new heights, as happened in UP in the 1920s, and again is happening in the present scenario, the Hindu woman’s body particularly becomes a marker to enthrone communal boundaries in ways more aggressive than before.

    The 1920s in UP witnessed a flurry of orchestrated propaganda campaigns and popular inflammatory and demagogic appeals by a section of Hindu publicists against “abductions” and conversions of Hindu women by Muslim goondas, ranging from allegations of rape, abduction and elopement, to luring, conversion, love and forced marriages, although the term “love jihad” was not used at the time. Drawing on diverse sources like newspapers, pamphlets, meetings, handbills, posters, novels, myths, rumours and gossip, the campaign was able to operate in a public domain, and to monopolise the field of everyday representation. Pamphlets with provocative titles like “Hindu Auraton ki Loot”, which denounced Muslim propaganda for proselytising female preys, and “Hindu Striyon ki Loot ke Karan”, an Arya Samajist tract showing how to save “our” ladies from becoming Muslim, appeared at this time. The love jihad campaign of today, too, is using similar tropes.

    The tales of the 1920s and of 2014 have certain common strains. Both campaigns are critically tied to a number-crunching politics and claims of Hindu homogeneity. In 1924, a pamphlet titled Humara Bhishan Haas, published from Kanpur, constructed a picture of the terrible calamity of declining Hindu numbers due to increasing conversions of Hindu women to Islam. It claimed that a number of Aryan women were entering the homes of yavanas and mlecchas, reading nikah with them, producing gaubhakshak children, and increasing Muslim numbers. Hindu organisations of today, too, have claimed, without any evidence, that forced conversions of Hindu women in the name of love are part of an international conspiracy to increase the Muslim population. The issues at stake here are not only to construct a picture of a numerical threat from Muslims but also to lament the supposed decline in the number of Hindus and mourn the potential loss of child-bearing Hindu wombs.

    Campaigns like this are also predicated on exclusionary principles, which survive through constant and repetitive references to the aggressive and libidinal energies of the Muslim male, creating a common “enemy other”. They underwrite an exclusivist grammar of “difference” in the intimate regimes of love and marriage. Simultaneously, images of the passive, victimised Hindu women at the hand of inscrutable Muslims silence and erase female subjectivity and desire. Any possibility of women exercising their legitimate right to love, choice and conversion is marginalised. In June 1924, in Meerut, handbills and meetings claimed that various Hindu women were being lured and their pure bodies being violated by lustful and sexually charged Muslim men. The present campaign too, while focussing its anger on the Muslims, derives its emotional impact from the victim. It is impossible for Hindu groups to conceive that a Hindu woman can voluntarily elope or convert. While each case of violence against women, structured by larger patriarchal structures, whether within or outside a community, has to be trenchantly condemned, in this case every romance, love, elopement and marriage between a Hindu woman and a Muslim man is also rewritten by Hindu organisations as forcible conversion. There appears to be a consensus among Hindu groups against any exercise by women to convert as individuals, sans familial and community approval. Perhaps it might be better to see these women not so much as “vulnerable victims”, but as “risk-taking subjects”.

    It is also assumed that the mere act of marrying and staying with a Muslim ensures that the woman is leading an unhappy and dreadful life. Fears of elopements and conversions also show the need felt not so much to protect the “Hindu kanya”, but to facilitate the domination of disciplinary regimes over a woman’s actions and choices. Such actions by women produce daily policing and everyday violence along the alliance model of sexuality, where, through the arrangement of marriages, relations and boundaries of religion are policed. Invocations and related concerns with Hindu female purity allow Hindu male virility and prowess to reassert itself.

    As in the 1920s, today again conversions of Hindu women are represented as a general phenomenon. Different events are made to appear as following a similar pattern — a narrative of luring by a Muslim male in the name of love, and of Hindu female victimhood. Hate speech is repeatable speech, drawing its strength from stereotypes. In replication and reiteration lie its strength, its ability to renew itself and its authority as supposed truth. In the love jihad campaign, representation, performance and events feed into each other, providing one of the primary sources of communal power.

    Moreover, in comparison to the 1920s, new dimensions have been added to the love jihad issue. In the wake of terrorist threats and Muslim fundamentalism, anxieties have been created of a global Islamist conspiracy and foreign hand in such conversions. It appears that when confronted with the phenomenon of conversion from Hinduism to Islam, especially by Hindu women, certain kinds of Hindus lose their logical faculty. The politics of cultural virginity and a myth of innocence are combined with a perceived “illegitimacy” of the act, leading to rants of violation, invasion, seduction and rape. These politicised entanglements generate an “intimate politics”, an embodied struggle, in which Hindu communal agendas are reformulated through women.

    Besides, such a hate campaign, while providing glue for claims to Hindu homogeneity, also underwrites certain fears and anxieties of some Hindu organisations. For all its limitations, some of these women are “breaking rules” through the highly ritualised act of individual religious conversion, guided in many cases by inter-religious romance and love marriages.

    These localised and embodied practices of women can be a strategic manoeuvre with social ramifications. Ambedkar upheld inter-caste marriage as one way to annihilate caste, since it produced fissures in the maintenance of caste purity and control over women’s sexuality. Perhaps inter-religious marriages, too, can be a way to produce cracks in orthodox Hindu mandates and create ripples in codified definitions. Such an exercise of choice, even when partial, can perhaps also aid a transformative politics of intimate religious rights.

  17. মাসুদ করিম - ২৮ আগস্ট ২০১৪ (৯:৫৭ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Tech helps cut rice fields methane emission 43pc

    Bangladesh can earn carbon credit, says expert

    Bangladeshi rice fields can fetch carbon credit by reducing emission of greenhouse gases in the fields through modern farm technologies like UDP and AWD, experts at a workshop Tuesday said.

    The International Fertiliser Development Centre (IFDC) under the Accelerating Agriculture Productivity Improvement (AAPI) project of the USAID, in collaboration with the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) and the Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU) organised the two-day national level workshop titled ‘Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions from Rice Field: Finding Mitigation through Urea Deep Placement (UDP) and Alternative Wetting and Drying (AWD) Technology’.

    The inaugural session of the workshop was held at the Milky auditorium in the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council (BARC) in the city. The workshop will end today with a field visit to the BRRI’s GHG Laboratory in Gazipur.

    Methane (CH4) is one of the key greenhouse gases (GHG).

    Scientists, related to the AAPI’s project, which will conduct feasibility study on measuring GHG emission in rice fields, pleaded for adapting UDP and AWD as these technologies could help Bangladeshi rice fields reduce methane emission by 43 per cent. This reduction in emission can be sold as carbon credit in the international market, they said.

    Agriculture Minister Begum Matia Chowdhury, while speaking as the chief guest, said UDP is a win-win technology that reduces urea use by one-third while increase rice yield up to 15 per cent.

    “If the technology is widely adopted, there would be huge savings of urea fertiliser in the country,” she said.

    She said: “To promote the UDP technology, the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) is working together with the IFDC.”

    She also said significant achievement has been made in some districts in respect of area coverage under the UDP technology in rice cultivation.

    Dr. Reiner Wassmann, Senior Scientist and Coordinator of Rice and Climate Change Consortium, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the Philippines, presented the keynote paper styled ‘Assessing the Suitability of Mitigation Options in Rice Production Derived from Bio-physical Considerations and Stakeholders’ Perceptions’.

    The paper said the AWD has CH4 mitigation potential of about 43 per cent.

    The adoption rate as well as the actual mitigation effect of the AWD is strongly dependent on the incentives and constraints of the farmers, the paper said.

    “Thus, it is imperative to know how stakeholders’ perceptions and attitude are towards technologies like AWD or UDP,” according to the paper.

    Talking to the FE, Mr Wassman said the positive experiences of the Philippines can be applied in Bangladesh.

    He said the chances of uptake of mitigation technologies could greatly be enhanced if farmers could be compensated for changes in farming practices.

    The IRRI scientist said in most irrigation schemes, farmers have no immediate revenue from lower water consumption or using climate smart technologies. So, additional incentives from carbon credits could be a pivotal step for large-scale implementation.

    Agriculture Secretary Dr SM Najmul Islam, BRRI Director General Dr Jiban Krishna Biswas, Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) Director General Dr Md Rafiqul Islam Mondal, USAID Mission Director Janina Jaruzelsky, Resident Representative of IFDC Ishrat Jahan, AAPI Deputy Chief of Party Dr Yam Kanta Gaihre among others spoke while Executive Chairman of BARC Dr Md Kamal Uddin chaired the programme.

    Changing climate could eat up 27pc paddy output by 2050, says study

    The climate change effect might eat up more than 27 per cent of the paddy yield in Bangladesh by 2050, experts said Wednesday.

    Besides, the rising natural calamities like salinity, flash flood, stagnant flood, tidal flood, drought, cold, heat could also reduce paddy yield by nearly 64 per cent within 2070, they said.

    Director General of Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) Dr Jiban Krishna Biswas said that due to the multilateral consequences of climate changes, per hectare yield of paddy can decline to 4 tonnes in 2030 from 5.5 tonnes now.

    He was speaking at the concluding ceremony of the two day long workshop styled “‘Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions from Rice Field: Finding Mitigation through Urea Deep Placement (UDP) and Alternative Wetting and Drying (AWD) Technology'” as the chief guest.

    The ceremony of the workshop held at the BRRI Auditorium in Gazipur, organised jointly by the International Fertiliser Development Centre (IFDC) under the Accelerating Agriculture Productivity Improvement (AAPI) project of the USAID, BRRI and Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU).

    Dr Jiban Krishna presented a paper which showed that due to increasing trend of natural calamities like salinity, flash flood, stagnant flood, tidal flood, drought, cold, heat caused by climatic changes paddy production at per hectare will fall to just 2 tonnes within 2070 from the present output.

    The study is prepared considering the pattern of minimum and maximum temperature of last 30 years—from 1975 to 2008.

    It showed the minimum temperature, in last 30 years, has increased in all months except in January and November.

    While maximum temperature also increased in all months except January during the period.

    The study also takes in account the rainfall pattern of the country from 1975 to 2005, the paper said.

    However, the research revealed that 2.0 million hectares of total rice areas have been affected by flash flood submergence.

    “Flash floods can result in yield loss up to 100 per cent depending on different climatic and agronomic factors,” it showed.

    It also showed 2.0 million hectares areas have been affected by drought both in dry and wet season.

    Natural calamity is causing 5 per cent average yield decline annually worth US $23.9 million, the paper said.

    Dr Jiban Krishna said that to cope with the changing climatic condition, we will have to adapt time befitting technologies.

    Developing new seed varieties suitable to different climatic condition based on various agronomic zones of the country, adapting technologies like UDP, AWD, IPM (integrated pest management) can combat any catastrophe, he said.

    However, Dr Biswas informed the newsmen that the BRRI is going to release some new stress tolerant rice varieties within few weeks.

    Meanwhile, the IFDC (under AAPI) with the collaboration of BRRI and BAU has taken a project to measure and mitigate green house gases (GHG) from rice fields.

    Ms Ishrat Jahan, Resident Representative, IFDC Bangladesh and Project Coordinator and Chief of Party of the AAPI provided an over view of some salient research findings on reducing nitrogen losses in Bangladesh through UDP and AWD technologies.

    She said UDP can reduce urea use by one-third while increase rice yield up to 15 per cent.

    Dr Md Shahjahan Kabir, Director, BRRI, Dr Reiner Wassmann, Senior Scientist and Coordinator of Rice and Climate Change Consortium, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), AAPI Deputy Chief of Party Dr Yam Kanta Gaihre among others also spoke.

  18. মাসুদ করিম - ৩০ আগস্ট ২০১৪ (২:৪৯ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Notable Historian Bipan Chandra Dead

    Noted historian Bipan Chandra died today at his residence here after prolonged illness.

    He was 86.

    “He had not been keeping well since last few months. He passed away at 6 AM,” his family said.

    A Padma Bhushan awardee, Chandra had donned multiple roles including that of chairperson of the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Member of the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the Chairman of the National Book Trust (NBT).

    Considered to be a specialist in economic and political history of India, Chandra had authored several books including The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism, In the Name of Democracy: The JP Movement and the Emergency, Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India and The Making of Modern India: From Marx to Gandhi, among others.

    The left leaning author had founded the journal Enquiry and was a member of its editorial board for a long time.

    Born in 1928 in Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh, Chandra studied at the Forman Christian College, Lahore, Stanford University, US and the University of Delhi.

    He worked as the Reader at Hindu College of Delhi University and then became the professor of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

    Chandra’s text books on History have been taught in schools and colleges in the country for a long time.

    Chandra served as sectional President and then the general president of the Indian History Congress in 1985, was also awarded ‘Itihas Ratna’ on his 86th birthday in December this year, by the Asiatic Society of Bihar.

    A number of leaders and scholars expressed grief over the demise of the veteran historian.

    “The cremation will take place at 3 PM at the Lodhi Road electric crematorium,” family said.

    Lamenting his death, Congress leader Digvijay Singh tweeted, “My condolences to the Family of Historian Bipin Chandra. One of the most eminent Historian of India. May his soul rest in peace.”

    Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Nabam Tuki also wrote on Twitter, “Bipin Chandra an Indian historian passes away. May his soul Rest in Peace.”

    “Sad to hear about the passing away of noted historian Prof Bipin Chandra. May his soul rest in peace,” said Congress leader Naveen Jindal, in his tweet.

    Chiki Sarkar, publisher at Penguin Books also mourned his death and said his books have been read by generations of readers.

    “Sad to hear of bipin chandra’s death – he was one of @PenguinIndia most respected and successful authors whose books on Indian history have been read by generations of readers. We mourn his passing,” Sarkar tweeted.

    Bipan Chandra books in Flipkart

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