বিভাগ/বিষয় নিরপেক্ষ

সুপারিশকৃত লিন্ক: ডিসেম্বর 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।

২১ comments

  1. মাসুদ করিম - ২ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (৯:৫৩ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    পশ্চিমবঙ্গে সারদা-তৃণমূল চিটফান্ড কেলেঙ্কারি দিয়ে যার শুরু বিজেপির কলকাতা দখলের উচ্চাকাঙ্ক্ষা কি সাম্প্রদায়িকতার পৈশাচিকতা ফিরিয়ে আনবে দেশভাগের দাঙ্গার শহরে? পরন্জয়গুহ ঠাকুরতা লিখছেন

    Polinomics: Didi vs Dada

    It’s an all-out war now between Didi and Dada. The chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, had the temerity to question: Who is Amit Shah? The reply came on Sunday, at a public rally in the heart of Kolkata. The president of the Bharatiya Janata Party retorted that he, a small BJP worker, would lead his party to drive the Trinamool Congress out of Bengal. Rhetoric aside, the political tussle between the two portends ill for the state that has seen relatively harmonious Hindu-Muslim relations since it witnessed the worst-ever communal riots in the history of South Asia during the 1940s.

    Few could have imagined the twists and turns of politics in this part of eastern India since different agencies of the Union government launched a concerted two-pronged offensive against the state government and the Trinamool Congress: by inquiring into the recent incidents in Bardhaman district and by cracking down on individuals close to the ruling dispensation for their alleged involvement in the Saradha chit — that should be “cheat” — fund scandal. The right-hand man of Prime Minister Narendra Modi couldn’t have been more direct when he claimed that slush money from the Saradha group had not merely funded the chief minister’s close associates but was also fuelling terrorism by infiltrators from Bangladesh.

    These divergent issues have been intertwined in such a manner that one fears that there will be more violence in Bengal, in particular clashes between Hindus and Muslims. One would like to be proved wrong. The fact is that Bengal has a long and tragic history of communal tension which is well documented. But what is often forgotten is that the poor and gullible in the state have frequently fallen victim to financial sharks for the better part of the last four decades. The activities of the Overland group may be fairly fresh in people’s minds, but few outside Bengal remember Shambhu Mukherjee, one of the promoters of Sanchayita group, who committed suicide under mysterious circumstances after the dubious dealings of his group were exposed and legal action taken.

    There is something common about the way in which these so-called Ponzi schemes operate. The promoters of such schemes, like Sudipta Sen of the Saradha group, have no political affiliation but curry favour with whoever is in power. Thus, even if they supported the Left Front until a few years ago, thereafter they switched allegiance to the Trinamool Congress. In Orissa and in Assam, their associates were close to chief minister Naveen Patnaik of the Biju Janata Dal and chief minister Tarun Gogoi of the Congress, respectively.

    Emphasising that the former mentors of the Saradha group were with the Left Front, Ms Banerjee can benefit only to a limited extent. Similarly, by repeatedly harping on the fact that the investigations being conducted by the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforcement Directorate in the Saradha scam and the National Investigation Agency in the Bardhaman episode, are politically motivated, will help Ms Banerjee gain political mileage only up to a point.

    The next two years are crucial for the Bengal chief minister. Her party has become ridden with factions. The anti-social elements who had ditched the Communists and joined her party are beginning to desert her for the BJP. Anti-social elements, like financial sharks, are typically opportunistic and go with whoever is in power or who is perceived to be likely to come to power. Hence, Bengal’s goons and scamsters shifted their allegiances from the Left Front to the Trinamool Congress over the last four years as the former became weak. Now that the BJP is on the rise in the state, a section of the anti-social elements are again switching sides in the view that the BJP will become strong in the state and may even come to power.

    The fact that the saffron party nearly trebled its vote share in the state from six per cent in 2004 to 17 per cent four years later has made it evident that the BJP is the Trinamool Congress’ principal political opponent. The Left is yet to recover from its ignominious defeat three and half years ago in the Assembly elections and its further humiliation in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The Communists are still licking their wounds, unable to evolve political strategies to counter the Trinamool Congress and the BJP, while the Congress is still sitting on the margins.

    The urban middle classes who had supported Didi are disillusioned by what they perceive as her inability to provide coherent administration. Her theatrical style is no longer attractive to the so-called bhadralok intelligentsia. Her hope is that the Muslim peasantry in rural Bengal will stick with her. And she is probably right. The BJP realises this and is going all-out to spread the Hindu agenda of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Mr Shah’s speech in Kolkata made references to infiltrators from Bangladesh that are clearly aimed at reaffirming the agenda of the RSS. An estimated 27 per cent of Bengal’s population is Muslim and in large parts of the state this proportion is close to one-third or higher. The BJP will clearly intensify its political activities in all but these areas where the minority community has a substantial presence.

    Riding on the back of the continuing euphoria about Mr Modi’s ascendancy to power in New Delhi, various “service agencies” of the Sangh parivar — that are focused on adivasis and the underprivileged lower castes — were lying low are expanding by holding events. As Tariq Thachil of Yale University astutely pointed out in an article about the activities of organisations like the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram and Seva Bharati: “…service work — which was not without an ideological edge — was uniquely well suited for the BJP’s need to recruit the poor and retain the rich”. (Curiously, the Left too had attempted a similar strategy in the late-1970s and 1980s under Jyoti Basu.)

    It serves the political interests of both the Trinamool Congress and the BJP to polarise Bengal along communal lines. The writing on the wall appears ominous. I hope I’m wrong.

  2. মাসুদ করিম - ২ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (১০:১৪ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    With cement in short supply, Gaza reconstruction could take over 30 years

    Housing minister says Gaza needs 8,000 tons of cement a day to meet demand; Israel allows only 2,000 in a day.

    Three months after the war in Gaza, Sadeeqa Naseer still lives in a bomb site. Air strikes turned the two upper floors of her three-storey apartment building in the Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun into a rubble-strewn ruin.

    Thirty-five people shelter on the ground floor, where holes blasted in the wall by tank shells have been covered over only by plastic sheeting that does little to keep out the cold wind and driving rain of the fast-approaching winter.

    Someone managed to extend an electric cable from a nearby building, providing just enough power to run a fridge and keep a single lamp on during the night. But there is no cement to rebuild, and no one can get a bulldozer to clear the rubble. Men were chipping futilely at concrete slabs with hammers.

    “Who could live here?” asks Naseer, 60, who said she had received no aid from the United Nations or anyone else.

    Since the July-August war between Israel and the Hamas Islamists that run Gaza, in which more than 2,100 Palestinians and 70 Israelis were killed, barely any progress has been made rebuilding the shattered territory, despite donors pledging $5 billion. Israel tightly monitors the import of construction materials and equipment into Gaza, arguing that otherwise it could be used to rebuild tunnels used by Hamas militants who control the strip to carry out attacks.

    Palestinian officials and critics of Israeli policy say that has made it impossible to rebuild, leaving 40,000 of the strip’s 1.8 million residents in temporary shelter and thousands more facing winter in barely habitable ruins.

    “The cement and gravel are being regulated as if they were a nuclear weapon,” said Sari Bashi, co-founder of Gisha, an Israeli organisation which monitors access to Gaza and says only a tiny fraction of cement needed to satisfy demand is reaching the strip.

    An Israeli government official said Israel was willing to help in any way to ensure reconstruction in Gaza moved forward rapidly, but it also wanted to be sure that Hamas was not rebuilding its militant infrastructure.

    Unluckiest minister

    “I am the unluckiest housing minister in the world,” said Mufeed al-Hasayna, a businessman who spent most of his career in New Jersey before joining a technocratic Palestinian government formed this year to unite Hamas-run Gaza with the West Bank.

    According to Hasayna, Gaza needs 8,000 tonnes of cement a day to meet demand. A new system set up with the United Nations to comply with Israeli requirements lets through at most 2,000, he said.

    At that rate, reconstruction would take more than 30 years, said Hasayna, one of four members of the unity government based in Gaza rather than the West Bank. “We have 18,000 fully destroyed buildings and about 50,000 partially destroyed ones,” he said. “Gaza before the war needed about 70,000 apartments a year to keep pace with population growth. Now after the war, Gaza needs 150,000 new apartments.”

    Since the war, electricity has been partially restored so that power is now cut for only eight hours a day. Sewage and water treatment plants are mostly working again, although there is still almost no drinking water.

    But in terms of clearing the vast mountains of rubble and mangled steel, rebuilding homes and patching up smashed roads, bridges and other infrastructure, next to nothing has happened.

    The biggest difficulty is moving reconstruction materials and other equipment into Gaza. Egypt has largely kept its border with Gaza closed, so any goods must be transferred from Israel, which has two crossings open: one for goods, one for people.

    To satisfy Israeli demands for precise tracking of all cement, the United Nations came up with a strict mechanism that involves video and GPS monitoring of materials, which can only be transferred to vetted suppliers.

    For ordinary Palestinians who do not have access to the official supplies, if they can find any cement at all, they can buy it only from the black market at more than $50 a bag, more than seven times the normal price.

    Clearing away rubble is all but impossible, with little access to diggers and bulldozers.

    Hasayna, the housing minister, signed an agreement with the U.N. Development Programme and the Swedish government last week to equip and hire local contractors to clear and recycle rubble from northern Gaza. It has yet to start on a big scale.

    The men chipping away at the concrete slabs outside Sadeeqa Naseer’s ruined apartment sell any steel and aggregate they can extract. But they have made little progress with hand tools.

    “Thirty-five people are living in conditions that are not tolerable with the help of anyone but God,” says Naseer. “We want our house to be rebuilt before cold and sickness kill us.”

  3. মাসুদ করিম - ৬ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (১১:০২ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    রাজশাহীতে প্রাকৃতিক হিমাগারের উদ্বোধন

    রাজশাহী নগরীতে দেশের প্রথম প্রাকৃতিক হিমাগারের যাত্রা শুরু হয়েছে।

    শুক্রবার চকপাড়ায় এ হিমাগারের উদ্বোধন করেন বাংলাদেশ ব্যাংকের গভর্নর আতিউর রহমান।

    বাংলাদেশ ব্যাংকের সামজিক দায়বদ্ধতার আওতায় রাজশাহী বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ের উদ্ভিদবিজ্ঞান বিভাগের অধ্যাপক এম. মনজুর হোসেন এটি তৈরিতে কাজ করেছেন।

    ৩০০ টন ধারণ ক্ষমতার এই হিমাগারটি তৈরিতে ১৪ লাখ টাকা ব্যয় হয়েছে বলে সংশ্লিষ্টরা জানান।

    আকাফুজি গবেষণা নার্সারিতে নির্মিত এই সংরক্ষণাগারের নামকরণ করা হয়েছে সাবেক সাংসদ ও মুক্তিযোদ্ধা শাহ সিরাজুল ইসলাম চৌধুরীর নামে- শাহ সিরাজুল ইসলাম চৌধুরী প্রাকৃতিক সংরক্ষণাগার।

    উদ্বোধন শেষে গভর্নর বলেন, প্রকৃতির দান আর মানুষের জ্ঞানের সমন্বয় হচ্ছে এই অনবদ্য সৃষ্টি। একে হিমাগার না বলে প্রাকৃতিক সংরক্ষণাগার বলাই ভালো।

    হিমাগারের উদ্ভাবক অধ্যাপক এম. মনজুর হোসেন বলেন, গাছ শিকড়ের মাধ্যমে পানি তুলে পাতার মাধ্যমে বাষ্পীভবন প্রক্রিয়ায় নিজেকে ঠান্ডা রাখে। এজন্য গাছের পাতা খরতাপের ভেতরেও ঠান্ডা থাকে।

    এ প্রাকৃতিক প্রযুক্তিকে এই সংরক্ষণাগার তৈরিতে ব্যবহার করা হয়েছে জানিয়ে তিনি বলেন, এতে প্রকৃতির বাতাসকে কাজে লাগানো হয়েছে। এখানে যে কয়টি ফ্যান লাগবে তাও চলবে সৌরশক্তির মাধ্যমে।
    অধ্যাপক মনজুর হোসেন জানান, সিরাজুল ইসলাম চৌধুরী ১৯৯৩ সালে তার পাঁচ বিঘা জমি এই গবেষণার কাজে ব্যবহার করতে দিয়েছেন। সেই জমিতেই হিমাগারটি নির্মাণ করা হয়। কিন্তু নির্মাণকাজ শেষ হওয়ার কয়েকদিন আগে তিনি মারা যান।

    বাংলাদেশ ব্যাংকের রাজশাহীর নির্বাহী পরিচালক জিন্নাতুল বাকেয়ার সভাপতিত্বে অনুষ্ঠানে আরও বক্তব্য রাখেন রাজশাহী বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ের সহ-উপাচার্য চৌধুরী সারোয়ার জাহান, বরেন্দ্র বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ের উপাচার্য এম ওসমান গনি, বাংলাদেশ ব্যাংকের নির্বাহী পরিচালক মাহফুজুর রহমান, রাজশাহী জেলা প্রশাসক মেজবাহ্ উদ্দিন চৌধুরী, রাজশাহী বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ের উদ্ভিদবিজ্ঞান বিভাগের চেয়ারম্যান একেএম রফিউল ইসলাম, মুক্তিযোদ্ধা মোহাম্মদ আলী, কৃষক মোস্তাফিজুর রহমান প্রমুখ।

  4. মাসুদ করিম - ৭ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (৫:৩৬ অপরাহ্ণ)

    অভিনেতা খলিলের জীবনাবসান

    পাঁচ দশকেরও বেশি সময় বাংলাদেশের চলচ্চিত্র অভিযাত্রার সঙ্গে থেকে চিরবিদায় নিলেন অভিনেতা খলিল উল্লাহ খান।

    রোববার বেলা ১১টার দিকে রাজধানীর স্কয়ার হাসপাতলে গুণী এই শিল্পী শেষ নিঃশ্বাস ত্যাগ করেন। তার বয়স হয়েছিল ৮০ বছর।

    গত কয়েক বছর ধরেই ফুসফুস, লিভার ও কিডনির জটিলতায় ভুগছিলেন অভিনেতা খলিল। গুরুতর অসুস্থ অবস্থায় কয়েকবার হাসপাতালেও ভর্তি হতে হয় তাকে।

    তার ছেলে মুসা খান বিডিনিউজ টোয়েন্টিফোর ডটকমকে জানান, হাসপাতাল থেকে তার বাবার মরদেহ মোহাম্মদপুরের বাসায় নিয়ে যাওয়া হয়েছে। সবার শ্রদ্ধা নিবেদনের জন্য বিকালে কফিন এফডিসিতে নিয়ে যাওয়া হবে।

    সেখানে জানাজা শেষে খলিলের মরদেহ আবার বাসায় ফিরিয়ে নেওয়া হবে। এশার নামাজের পর আরেকবার জানাজা পড়ে মোহাম্মদপুর কবরস্থানে তাকে দাফন করা হবে বলে জানান মুসা।

    খলিলের মৃত্যুর খবরে দেশের সাংস্কৃতিক অঙ্গনে নেমে আসে শোকের ছায়া। অভিনয় জগতের অনেকেই স্কয়ার হাসপাতালে ছুটে যান। প্রধানমন্ত্রী শেখ হাসিনার প্রেস উইং থেকে ফেইসবুক পেইজে তাৎক্ষণিকভাবে শোক জানানো হয়।

    ১৯৩৪ সালের ১ ফেব্রুয়ারি সিলেটের কুমারপাড়ায় জন্মগ্রহণ করেন খলিল উল্লাহ খান। এমসি কলেজ থেকে স্নাতক ডিগ্রি নিয়ে ১৯৫১ সালে যোগ দেন আনসারে।

    ৫৪ বছর ধরে প্রায় আটশ’ সিনেমায় অভিনয় করেছেন খলিল, যার শুরুটা হয়েছিল টিভি নাটকের মধ্য দিয়ে। ১৯৫৯ সালে জহির রায়হান পরিচালিত ‘সোনার কাজল’এ অভিনয়ের মধ্য দিয়ে তার সিনেমায় পদার্পণ।

    তার অভিনীত উল্লেখযোগ্য চলচ্চিত্র ‘প্রীত না জানে রীত’, ‘সংগম’, ‘ভাওয়াল সন্ন্যাসী’, ‘ক্যায়সে কঁহু’, ‘জংলি ফুল’, ‘আগুন’, ‘পাগলা রাজা’, ‘মিন্টু আমার নাম’, ‘ওয়াদা’ , ‘বিনি সুতার মালা’, ‘বউ কথা কও’, ‘কাজল’।

    ১৯৬৬ সালে এস এম পারভেজ পরিচালিত ‘বেগানা’ সিনেমায় প্রথমবারের মতো খলনায়কের চরিত্রে অভিনয় করেন তিনি। এরপর বহু সিনেমায় তাকে খলচরিত্রে দেখা গেছে। ইতিহাসনির্ভর ‘ফকির মজনু শাহ’ সিনেমায় নাম ভূমিকায় অভিনয় করেও তিনি ভূয়সী প্রশংসা পান।

    ১৯৬৫ সালে ‘ভাওয়াল সন্ন্যাসী’ চলচ্চিত্রের মাধ্যমে খলিল আত্মপ্রকাশ করেন পরিচালক হিসেবে। ‘সিপাহী’ ও ‘এই ঘর এই সংসার’ নামে দুটি সিনেমার প্রযোজনাও করেছেন তিনি।

    বহু টিভি নাটকে অভিনয়ের জন্যও দর্শক খলিলকে মনে রাখবে বহুদিন। শহীদুল্লাহ কায়সারের উপন্যাস অবলম্বনে নির্মিত ধারাবাহিক নাটক সংশপ্তকে তার অভিনয়ে ‘মিয়ার বেটা’ চরিত্র দর্শকনন্দিত হয়।

    বাংলাদেশ চলচ্চিত্র শিল্পী সমিতির সাবেক সভাপতি খলিলকে ২০১২ সালে জাতীয় চলচ্চিত্র পুরস্কারে আজীবন সম্মাননা দেওয়া হয়।

    চলতি বছর ১০ মে সেই পুরস্কার বিতরণী অনুষ্ঠানে অসুস্থ অভিনেতা খলিলের হাতে সম্মাননা ক্রেস্ট তুলে দিয়ে প্রধানমন্ত্রী শেখ হাসিনা বলেছিলেন, “তার আজীবন চিকিৎসার দায়িত্ব আমি নিলাম। তিনি আমাদের অনেক দিয়েছেন। এখন তাকে দেওয়ার পালা।”

  5. মাসুদ করিম - ৯ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (৫:৩৫ অপরাহ্ণ)

    ‘Theatre is a white invention’ says leading actress Dame Janet Suzman

    Theatre is “a white invention” and in the DNA of white people but not others, one of Britain’s most respected actors has said.

    Dame Janet Suzman was responding to Meera Syal, the Asian writer and actress who last week appealed to the theatre industry to do more to cater for Asian audiences.

    “Theatre is a white invention, a European invention, and white people go to it. It’s in their DNA. It starts with Shakespeare,” she said in comments reported by The Guardian.

    The 74-year-old actress, who has played an extensive range of leading parts in Shakespeare’s dramas and was made a dame in 2011 for her services to drama, was asked about Ms Syal calling for theatres to cater for Asian audiences.

    She said: “Catering is probably the correct word. It’s as if one was ordering food for a special wedding where the tastes are different.

    “Some people are vegetarians and some are not. I don’t know what to say. Until the Asian writers make plays that will appeal, how can one say that?

    “Stuff’s going on at the National [Theatre], which is an adaptation of that brilliant novel written by a white woman about the slums of [Mumbai]. If that’s catering, then it’s brilliantly catered for. East is East, which is bloody well thought through. But it’s up to writers to do it.”

    Ms Syal told The Guardian in response: “I don’t think I’ve ever heard any single race or culture claim theatre as their invention before.

    “The sharing of stories between performers and audience stretches across every single civilisation beginning with the oral tradition of re-enacting folk tales or religious myths.

    “But this shouldn’t be an argument about what theatre is or who ‘invented’ it. This is a more profound discussion about the relevance of the stories we tell and for whom we tell them.”

    Dame Suzman, the ex-wife of former Royal Shakespeare Company director Sir Trevor Nunn, has been a vocal opponent of racism. Born in South Africa, her aunt was the anti-apartheid campaigner Helen Suzman.

  6. মাসুদ করিম - ১৪ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (৯:২৬ অপরাহ্ণ)

    The old world charm

    A few faint images cross your mind when you talk of Champaner: a strategic trade route, the capital of arguably the most influential sultanate, a graceful example of urban landscaping, mesmerizing Muslim and Jain architecture. But the loudest of all images is that of a ransacked, deserted city. In Champaner, history speaks in its ruins. A city which grew from a town of moderate importance to become the capital of an influential sultanate, flourished for decades only to be attacked, ransacked and left deserted and lost to wilderness, all in one century.

    Champaner has everything of the old world charm; there are mosques, an old palace, a fort, a step-well and ancient streets you can walk on. Along with the hill fort and temple of Pavagarh it is now called the Champaner and Pavagadh Archaeological Park. An hour’s journey from Vadodara, brings you to this UNESCO World Heritage site.

    Champaner has a fairytale history. It was founded by the Rajput king Vanraj Chavda of the Chavda Kingdom in the 8th Century. The neighbouring city Pavagadh worked as a buffer area between Mandu and Gujarat, and a key strategic point on trade routes emanating from Gujarat to whole of India. After flourishing for years under the Rajput rulers, Champaner was captured by Mahmud Begda in 1484. He renamed the city Mohammadabad and moved the capital from Ahmedabad to here. In 1535, the city was captured by Humayun, and since the Mughals had control over both Gujarat and Malwa then, the city no longer enjoyed the status of a strategic buffer area. This marked the start of decline of Champaner and rise of Ahmedabad. When it was rediscovered by British, only 500 people inhabited the city.

    Twenty years under the reign of Mahmud Begda gave this city models of urban planning to speak of. Being a capital and a strategic center, the city has huge fortifications. We entered through stoned road with huge ramparts on both sides. These ramparts led to mosques that still stand sound, with some wounds of history. The mosques of that bygone era lied unassumingly in the middle of the ruins of the citadel. One such elegant piece is the Jami Masjid. The intricate carvings in the pillars, walls and the mehrabs can give rise to many an artist. . One interesting thing about the mosque is the eclectic mix of Persian and Hindu style of design in the walls and the frescos. An evident piece is the kalash, a Hindu religious symbol on the mehrabs.

    Our next halt was the Shehar ki masjid, contrary to its name which indicates it been a civilian place, it was the mosque reserved for the royal family. A little plain in design, the mosque is constructed on a raised plinth and the central arched entrance is planked by two minarets. At some distance in a secluded corner are the Nagina Masjid and the Kamani Masjid. Kamani Mosque is different from other mosques of Champaner as it follows the arcuate style (column and arch) indicating that it was built towards the end of sultanate period in Gujarat when this style had started gaining popularity.

    Uphill enroute holy Pavagarh trail, is the Pavagarh Fort, located on the summit of the abrupt hills. The wide fortification walls, which once ran upto six kilometers, now stand in ruins with remains of variable height extants. Between the southern and the northern Gate, one can still find the patterns of the urban planning. In these complexes, one can find streets, civil baths, town patterns and even rows of shops, all having lived through the vagaries of time. The whole area is now an excavation site and the ASI never misses finding some rare jewels here. There are also graveyards, mausoleums and even richly decorated temples in these ruins.

    As one moves uphill, following the Patha (pilgrim’s route) leading to the ropeway to the Kalikamata temple, one comes across many architectural structures that were forerunners of the architectural styles adopted later. The elements indicate a fine import of Hindu design in the Muslim architectural ideology. Unlike the present mosques styles, some tombs are almost all square in plan, with a dome resting on columns.

    Another elegant structure on the hills is the seven arches (saat kamaan) of which only the six arches remain. Built from yellow sandstone in arch form, this served as a military base. One thing that makes Champaner stands out among all its contemporaries is the adroit townsman-ship, which one can still trace in the ruins. Arranged in a circle with the Jami Masjid in the center, the water arteries run upto all nine gates of the city. Over hills there are evidences of large reservoirs and earthen beams which drained into these reservoirs to collect the rain water running downhill. This entire series of arteries and water reservoirs, eventually ended into the largest lake, the bada talao, on the plain below the city. The big mosques like the Jami masjid also had elaborate water harvesting structures in their compounds.

    We headed towards the bada talao, where another beautiful, dilapidated structure draped in bright orange of the dusk, was waiting for us. Even though only the walls remain of Khajuri mosque, this structure deserves a long stay.

    With my feet tapped in the bada talao, I looked at the Pavagarh hill, and the mystery draped in the evening mist. I saw a small town spreading across the floor of valley and trailing up the bare hills, with a lake in the middle and ruins of a fort looking down at it as guardian; the setting seemed a miniature painting of a place inextricably caught in the web of history; tucked on the horizon.

    The author is a blogger at handofcolors@wordpress.com

  7. মাসুদ করিম - ১৬ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (৪:৪৮ অপরাহ্ণ)

  8. মাসুদ করিম - ১৭ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (১০:৫৮ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Life on Mars more likely? Curiosity discovers methane, other organic chemicals

    The Curiosity rover has found traces of methane and other chemicals on Mars marking the first “definitive detection” of organic matter on the Red Planet. Researchers however say it doesn’t immediately prove living organisms exist on Mars.

    The NASA rover has ‘sniffed’ the atmosphere in the Gale Crater a dozen times over a 20-month period since its landing – and a pair of readings taken about a year ago produced a “tenfold” spike in the levels of methane, researchers revealed in a paper published by the Science magazine. NASA has said this indicates that the methane came from a “localized” source, which researchers are still struggling to determine.

    “This temporary increase in methane – sharply up and then back down – tells us there must be some relatively localized source,” said a member of the Curiosity rover science team Sushil Atreya, adding that there are “many” possible sources.

    “Organic molecules can be made by chemical reactions that don’t involve life, and there is not enough evidence to tell if the matter found by the team came from ancient Martian life or from a non-biological process,” said the official press release from NASA.

    But some scientists did not wish to hedge bets, particularly as other organic elements were discovered by Curiosity’s onboard laboratory in a drilled sample taken from a site that scientists believe billions of years ago was a lake.

    READ MORE: Ancient Mars had massive lake, was potentially a wet planet

    “We think life began on Earth around 3.8 billion years ago, and our result shows that places on Mars had the same conditions at that time – liquid water, a warm environment, and organic matter. So if life emerged on Earth in these conditions, why not on Mars as well?” said Caroline Freissinet of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, which is overseeing the progress of Curiosity, which landed on the surface of Mars in August 2012.

    While the finding does not immediately prove there was life at Gale crater, it does show that the ancient environment was saturated with “building blocks” for life.

    “We will keep working on the puzzles these findings present,” said John Grotzinger, Curiosity project scientist of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “Can we learn more about the active chemistry causing such fluctuations in the amount of methane in the atmosphere? Can we choose rock targets where identifiable organics have been preserved?”

  9. মাসুদ করিম - ১৮ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (১:৫৬ অপরাহ্ণ)

    The Potato Song and other gems from journalist P Sainath’s new archive of rural India

    The People’s Archive of Rural India, to be launched this week, aims to be a repository of photos, videos and reports on the everyday lives of Indian villagers.

    Journalist P Sainath created a stir when he quit The Hindu in July to take a break. Now he is back with a new project dedicated to the subject of his journalistic passion: rural India.

    On Saturday, Sainath will launch the People’s Archive of Rural India, a website that aims to be a “living journal and an archive” documenting the “everyday lives of everyday people” across the under-represented hinterlands of the country.

    The archive, which Sainath set up largely with his savings, contains thousands of photographs, videos, audio essays and textual reports on rural India that will be uploaded on the site over time. Most of the photographs and videos aim to document ordinary people at work, showcasing the diverse rural occupations that often escape the urban eye.

    A series of “talking albums”, for instance, tell the stories of people in specific occupations through photos and accompanying voiceover. The videos feature rural residents talking about their lives, cultures and hardships. As a rule, the reporter remains invisible in each video.

    One of the more ambitious projects in the archive is the section called “Faces”, which seeks to collect portraits of at least three representative people (a man, woman and child) from each of India’s 629 districts. Some of the portraits capturing the country’s diversity are already on the site:

    Contributors are also in the process of uploading thousands of independent and official reports about rural India, to serve as a resource for students and researchers. All the content will be freely available under Creative Commons, as long as it is not used for commercial purposes.

    Three days before the archive’s launch in Chennai, Scroll.in spoke to Sainath about his new venture.

    How did the idea of the archive germinate?
    This is my 35th year in journalism and for the past 22 years, I have been a full-time rural reporter. Absolutely everything about rural India fascinates me – it is simply the most complex part of planet earth, with 833 million people and more than 700 languages. Besides the tremendous linguistic diversity, there is also occupational diversity. If you were to list about 100 people in rural India, you would come up with at least 300 different occupations practised between them, because people often have to do different jobs seasonally to survive. There are occupations still alive in India that do not exist anywhere else.

    Rural India does two things for me – I never get bored, and every day I learn how little I know. No one really knows, for instance, how many types of weaving or pottery there are in India.

    So from a very early stage I started thinking of creating a physical archive of rural India, but soon realised that it would be a ridiculous idea. Around 2011, Neville Roy Singham [founder of open-source software company Thoughtworks] suggested an online archive, which I was already thinking about. At that time, Professor Ananya Mukherjee [chair of political science at York University, Toronto] gave me fantastic ideas of how the material of such an archive could be used for teaching and learning.

    We properly started working on the archive only in early 2013, with over 300 volunteers contributing their time without asking for any pay.

    What is the aim of the archive?
    I don’t wish to romanticise rural India. It has beauty and many things to cherish, but it is also brutal, regressive and barbaric. Among other things, we have seen more than 300,000 farmer suicides since 1995, just according to government figures. Rural India is in the midst of a very brutal transformation, and the nature of the transformation seems to be strengthening the regressive and the ugly. The Haryana khaps, for instance, are growing stronger, while things that are worth preserving, like traditional knowledge of cultivation or crafts, are being wiped out.

    One-third of India that is urban is fast losing connection with the remaining two-thirds. The media, too, does not write about it – there has been no full-time reporter on rural India besides me. So one aim of the archive is to address this gap in journalism. It is both a living journal and an archive.

    Archives are typically owned by states and have been used to suppress, hide or censor information. We have specifically called ours a people’s archive – it is not private or corporate property and we hope for crowd funding. We want people to see the site and decide whether they want to contribute or not.

    Who has contributed to the archive’s content so far?
    We are a voluntary idealism-driven site, and the journalists, tech experts and even accountants who worked on it have worked on the archive without seeking money. Around 20 journalists have travelled around the country for this on their own money. They have their own jobs to do, but they took this up as an avocation. It also tells you how much the space for good journalism has shrunk in corporate media.

    Technically, anybody can contribute to the archive as long as it is quality work. But the site is heavily curated, because we are not Wikipedia. Our only mandate is to cover the everyday lives of everyday people.

    Fount of reports

    The archive intends to serve as a repository of reports on rural India, and many of the articles already on the website are older reports previously published in mainstream newspapers. This story, which first appeared on P Sainath’s personal website in June, is an endearing tale of a one-teacher school in the heart of Kerala’s tribal district where students are passionate about English:

    The Potato Song
    (by P Sainath, courtesy People’s Archive of Rural India)

    “English” said the children in the class. We had just asked what their favourite subject was. Not the smartest question to pose in an Indian classroom. If the first two kids say “English,” then every tyke in the room will likely say the same. When you see the first two victims give an answer without being punished for it, you know this is the way to go.

    But this isn’t just any place. It’s the single-teacher Integrated Tribal Development Project school in Edalippara. It’s located in Kerala’s remotest and only tribal panchayat, Edamalakudi. And nowhere outside the school can you hear English spoken. It’s hard to find any boards, posters or even signage carrying that language. Yet it was, the children said, their favourite subject. Like many other schools, this one in Idukki district runs Classes 1-4 combined in a single room. Headed by a truly wonderful teacher, severely underpaid, heavily overworked, battling impossible conditions, but dedicated to her flock.

    And there is a dissenter. “Maths,” said one brave little fellow, standing up. Show us your math, we demanded, placing him on the burning deck. He did, puffing up his tiny chest and racing through tables 1-12 without a pause for breath or applause. I think he was into a second round when we had to put a lid on him.

    We turned to the separate bench near teacher with five young girls, obviously the intellectual elite of the class. Their special seating arrangement suggested as much. The oldest might have been 11. The rest were nine years old or less. The boy had put his math where his mouth is, we pointed out. Now it was their turn to deliver on the claim of English being their favourite subject. Let’s listen to some English, then, girls.

    They were a bit shy, as anyone might be finding their classroom invaded by eight unknown and strange-looking men. Then teacher S. Vijaylaxmi said: “Sing them a song, girls.” And they did. We all know that adivasis can sing. And these five Muthavan girls sang beautifully. Perfectly in tune. Not a syllable out of sync. They were still shy. Little Vaidehi kept her head low and looked at her table rather than at her audience. But they were terrific. The lyrics, however, were off the wall.

    It was an ode to a potato.

    They do grow yam somewhere in the Idukki hills. But I’m not sure the potato is grown anywhere within a hundred kilometres of Edalippara.

    Anyway – and you can listen to it yourself – the song went:

    Potato, Potato
    Oh, my dear Potato
    I like the potato
    You like the potato
    We like the potato
    Potato, Potato, Potato

    Post by Masud Karim.

  10. মাসুদ করিম - ২১ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (১০:০৬ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    কবি অরুণাভ সরকার: নগর বাউলের প্রস্থান

    অরুণাভ সরকারকে চিনি ঢাকায় আসার পর থেকেই, সেই মধ্য আশিতেই। প্রেসক্লাবে কিংবা কবিতার আসরে দেখা হতো। তেমন ঘনিষ্ঠতা হয়নি বয়সের কারণেই। তাঁর ‘খোকনের অভিযান’ পড়ে এত মুগ্ধ হয়েছিলাম যে তাঁকে খুঁজতে বেরুলাম। অবশেষে শিশু একাডেমিতে গল্পকার বিপ্রদাশ বড়ুয়ার ঘরে পেয়ে গেলাম একদিন। সেখানে তুমুল আড্ডা। তাঁকে ছোটদের জন্য আরো লিখতে অনুরোধ করলাম। কিন্তু তিনি বরাবরই কম লিখতেন।

    নিজের চরিত্রের সঙ্গে মিশ-খাওয়া কবিতার বইয়ের নাম নগর বাউল। এরপর কেউ কিছু জানে না আর নারীরা ফেরে না—সাকুল্যে এই তিনটি কবিতার বই তার। পত্রপত্রিকায় ছড়ানো ছিটানো রয়েছে অজস্র কবিতা। কিন্তু কবিতার তিনটি বই দিয়েই তিনি কবিখ্যাতি ধরে রাখতে পেরেছেন। কবিতাগ্রন্থের সংখ্যাবিচারে শহীদ কাদরী, হেলাল হাফিজ, আবুল হাসানের মতোই অবস্থা তাঁর। ছোটদের জন্য লিখেছেন বেশি কিছু গ্রন্থ। সাংবাদিকতা নিয়েও তাঁর দুটি বই আছে। একটি বাংলাদেশ প্রেস ইনস্টিটিউট থেকে, একটি বাংলা একাডেমি থেকে। পেশায় ছিলেন পুরোদস্তুর সাংবাদিক। ইংরেজি পত্রিকাতেই কেটেছে গোটা সাংবাদিক জীবন। প্রাতিষ্ঠানিক শিক্ষায় বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়-পাঠ পেরোনোর সুযোগ না পেলেও ইংরেজি ভাষাটা ভালো জানতেন। একই সঙ্গে বাংলাটাও জানতেন। এব্যাপারে ওয়াহিদুল হকের সঙ্গে তাঁর অবস্থানকে তুলনা করা যায়। একই হাতে বাংলা ও ইংরেজি শুদ্ধ করে জানার মানুষ আমাদের সমোজে খুব বেশি কি আছে?

    শেষদিকে বাংলা ভাষার ভুল ব্যবহার নিয়ে তুমুল উদ্বিগ্ন ছিলেন। দুটি বইও লিখে ফেললেন। বিভিন্ন সভাসমাবেশে তাৎক্ষণিক দাঁড়িয়ে খ্যাতিমান বক্তাদের ভুল বাক্যবিন্যাস নিয়ে সমালোচনা করে বসতেন। অনেক বড় বড় কবি-লেখককে তুলোধনো করতে দেখেছি। এমনকি মাইকেল-রবীন্দ্রনাথ-রফিক আজাদ-আল মাহমুদ প্রমুখের ভুল শব্দ ভুল বাক্য নিয়েও তিনি প্রকাশ্যে বেশ গালিগালাজ করে বসতেন। কিন্তু আমাদের মতো নবীশদের জন্য তা থেকে ভাষাশিক্ষার সুযোগ ঘটলেও তাঁর আক্রমণের ভঙ্গিতে অগ্রজদের প্রতি অশ্রদ্ধা প্রকাশ পেত বলে আমার ভালো লাগত না। একদিন সাহস করে কথাটা পেড়েই ফেললাম। সে কী রাগ? আমাকে তো খেয়েই ফেলবেন যেন! বললাম যে দাদা, ভাষার শুদ্ধতা রক্ষায় আপনার এই জেহাদকে আমি সম্মান করি, কিন্তু আক্রমণের হাতিয়ারকে একটু মোলায়েম করুন। তিনি রেগেমেগে উঠে চলে যেতেন। পত্রিকার পাতায়ও এইসব নিয়ে লিখতেন। একসময় খেয়াল করলাম যে, তাঁর যুক্তি ঠিক থাকলেও, তত্ত্ব ঠিক থাকলেও প্রয়োগের ক্ষেত্রে তাঁরও কিছু ভুল হয়।

    তিনি নারায়ণগঞ্জ থেকে প্রকাশিত ‘ড্যাফোডিল’ এবং ঢাকার ‘নতুনধারা’য় বানান নিয়ে লিখলাম। পড়ে আমার ভেতের বেশকিছু প্রতিক্রিয়া হলো। আমি লিখে পাঠাই কবি ফরিদ কবিরের কাছে। তিনি যথারীতি সেটি ছাপালেন ‘নতুনধারা’য়। প্রতিক্রিয়াটি ছির এমন–

    কবি অরুণাভ সরকারের ‘এই সব ভুলভ্রন্তি’ নামের নিবন্ধের প্রথমাংশ পড়েছি পক্ষকাল আগে ওয়াহিদ রেজা সম্পাদিত ‘ড্যাফোডিল’-এ (বর্ষ ৩৩, সংখ্যা ৪৩, ফেব্র“য়ারি-এপ্রিল ২০১০), ‘শিক্ষার এই হাল’ নামে। বিসর্গের বদলে কোথায় বিন্দুচিহ্ন হবে এই কথাটি তিনি চমৎকারভাবে তুলে ধরেছেন (ড্যাফোডিল, পৃ. ১২ এবং নতুনধারা, পৃ. ১৭)। এ-ধরনের ভুল যাঁরা করেছেন, ‘এঁদের কি সামান্য শিক্ষাও নেই?’ বলে প্রশ্ন তোলার যে ভঙ্গি, সেরকম ভঙ্গি তো অরুণাভ সরকারের লেখা পড়েও কেউ করতে পারেন। তিনি লিখেছেন, ‘স্ত্রী লিঙ্গে ষু হয় না, হয় সু। প্রিয়তমাসু অথবা প্রিয়তমেসু।’ কথাটি ঠিক নয়। স্ত্রী লিঙ্গে হয় আসু এবং পুংলিঙ্গে হয় এষু। তাই হবে প্রিয়তমাসু এবং প্রিয়তমেষু। কিংবা শ্রদ্ধাস্পদেষু এবং শ্রদ্ধাস্পদাসু। কেবল সু বা ষু বদল হয় না, এর আগে আ এবং এ-ও বদল হয়। এখন এই ভুল সূত্র দেয়ার জন্য কি কবি অরুণাভ সরকারের ভাষায় প্রশ্ন তুলব? নিশ্চয়ই নয়। কারণ তিনি আমাদের নমস্য। সৈয়দ শামসুল হকের ভুলের ক্ষেত্রে যেমন তিনি মনে করেছেন ‘লেখনিস্খলন আর অন্যদের বেলায় মূর্খতা (‘এঁদের কি সামান্য শিক্ষাও নেই?’)। আমরাও মনে করি, একটু ভুল তাঁর হতেই পারে। কিংবা ধরে নিতে পারি এটি নিতান্তই লেখনিস্খলন। অরুণাভ সরকারের এধরনের লেখা আমরা আগেও পড়েছি। এক লেখা একাধিক স্থানে প্রকাশ না করে নতুন নমুনা ধরে আলোচনা করলে বাংলাভাষায় ভুলের প্রবণতা কমে যাবে বলে আমার বিশ্বাস। আশা করি তিনি এই ধরনের লেখা চালিয়ে যাবেন। আমরা তাঁর স্কুলে ভর্তি হতে চাই। কিন্তু গালিগালাজ করতে থাকলে শেখানোর উদ্দেশ্যটাই মাঠে মারা যাবে! নিশ্চয়ই শিক্ষক সেটি শিক্ষার্থীর চেয়ে বেশি ভালো জানেন।

    যেদিন ছাপা হয়, তার পরদিন সকালে আমরা ঢাকার বেশ কয়েকজন কবি জড় হয়েছি জাদুঘরের সামনে। ওখান থেকে বাসযোগে আমরা টাঙ্গাইল যাবো। কবি মাহমুদ কামালের আমন্ত্রণে। রিক্সা থেমে বাসের দিকে এগোতেই দেখি কবি অরুণাভ সরকারের স্ত্রী আজিজা সরকার। বৌদিকে নমস্কার জানাতেই বললেন, তপন, অরুণের শরীরটা খুব খারাপ। তুমি নাকি ওর বিরুদ্ধে কী লিখেছ। কালকে অনেকেই ফোন করে তাকে জানিয়েছে। সে খুব ক্ষেপে আছে তোমার উপর। ওর সামনে পড়ো না।’ বহুত মুসিবত তো!। এক গাড়িতে যাবে, এক অনুষ্ঠানে যাবো, সামনে না পড়ে তো উপায় নেই। দেখি, একটু দূরে দাঁড়িয়ে সিগারেট টানছেন। সাতপাঁচ না ভেবে আমি তাঁর সামনে গিয়ে নমস্কার জানিয়ে পত্রিকাটি মেলে ধরি। আর বলি, দাদা, আমার উপর রেগে আছেন কেন অন্যের কথা শুনে? পড়ে দেখুন। ভুল করলে শিখিয়ে দিন।’
    তিনি পত্রিকাটি হাতে নিয়ে পড়লেন। কিছুক্ষণ চুপ থাকলেন। তারপর বললেন, ‘তুমি ঠিকই লিখেছ তপন। আমার এতটা রেগে যাওয়া ঠিক নয়। তাছাড়া আমার ভুলও যখন বের করেছ, তাহলে এসব নিয়ে লেখার আগে তো আরো ভাবতে হবে।’ যাক, হাঁফ ছেড়ে বাঁচলাম। একসঙ্গে টাঙ্গাইল গেলাম, ফিরে এলাম। সারাদিন একসঙ্গে কাটালাম। তবে এরপর আর অন্যের বানান ভুল ধরলেও গালাগালি করতেন না। ভুল ধরিয়ে দিতেন। আমার প্রতি তাঁর এউ উদারতায় আমি খুব কৃতজ্ঞতা প্রকাশ করি।

    আমি যখন বাংলাদেশ প্রেস ইনস্টিটিউটে চাকরি করি, তখন তিনি প্রায়ই সেখানে যেতেন। ডিজি-ডিরেক্টরদের সঙ্গে আড্ডা দিতেন দীর্ঘক্ষণ। আমার ঘরেও আসতেন। একদিন খুব হাসতে-হাসতে আমাকে বললেন, ‘আমার প্রতিবেশীদের থেকে সাবধান!’ আমি তাঁর কথার অর্থ যখন বুঝতে পারি, তখন আর সাবধান হওয়ার সুযোগ ছিল না। তিনি তখন আরো অনেক কথা বলেছিলেন। যা এখন অপ্রাসঙ্গিক বলে উহ্য রাখা যায়।
    বাংলা একাডেমিতেও অনেকবার এসেছেন। পুরস্কার পাওয়ার পরে একদিন বললেন, তপন পুরস্কার না পেলেও চলত, কিন্তু টাকাটা খুব দরকার ছিল। খুব অভাবেই কেটেছে তার শেষের দিনগুলো। পত্রিকার চাকরিতে অনিয়মিত ছিলেন। ফুসফুসের যন্ত্রণা ছিল। অনেকেই শেষদিকে তাঁর চিকিৎসার জন্য এগিয়ে এসেছিলেন। আর্থিক সহায়তাও করেছেন কেউ কেউ। তবে তা যথেষ্ট ছিল না।

    সাংবাদিকতা তার পেশা হলেও কবিখ্যাতি ছিল যথেষ্ট। কবিতার জন্য বাংলা একাডেমি সাহিত্য পুরস্কার পেয়েছেন। টাঙ্গাইল সাহিত্য সংসদ পুরস্কার পেয়েছেন। কিন্তু তার চেয়ে বড় পুরস্কার পেয়েছেন মানুষের ভালবাসা। সবাই ভালবাসতেন অরুণাভ সরকারকে। সংসারের টানাটানি ছিল বলে শুনেছি। কিন্তু হাতে টাকা থাকলে দুহাতে খরচ করতে পিছপা হতেন না।

    কবিতায় তিনি ষাট দশকীয় সরলতাকেই অঙ্গীকার করেছিলেন। কোনো ভাঙচুরের ঘোষণা কিংবা নিরীক্ষার নামে নতুন কিছু না করেও যে কবি হওয়া যায়, অরুণাভ সরকারই ছিলেন তাঁর জ্বলন্ত উদাহারণ। ”নারীরা ফেরে না” কাব্যের নামকবিতায় লিখেছেন-
    যাওয়া বলে কিচ্ছু নেই, সবই ঘুরে-ফিরে আসা
    শূন্যতায় মাথা কুটে ফিরে আসে সমস্ত সংলাপ
    সব শী্ত্কার চী্ত্কার
    বিশাল রণপা-য় চেপে
    প্রাচীন গোধূলি ফিরে আসে,
    নীলিমা-ভ্রমণ শেষে ফেরে পাখি,
    নদী, তারও গতি নয় শুধুই সাগরে
    সেও মেঘে মেঘে ঝরনার নিকটে ফিরে যায়।
    তবু
    একবার চলে গেলে
    নারীরা ফেরে না। কী সোজাসাপটা উক্তি, কিন্তু কী সহজিয়া দর্শন তিনি লালন করতেন, এই কবিতায় তা ফুটে উঠেছে সাবলীল ভঙ্গিতে। চৈতন্যের ভাবদর্শনে একদিকে নারী আর সবকিছু প্রকৃতি—এই বোধের প্রকাশ রয়েছে এই কবিতায়। নারীর প্রতি গভীর বিরাগের ভাষ্যে রচিত হয়েছে গভীর বিশ্বাসের কথাও।

    গত বছর ফেব্ররুয়ারিতে ‘কালি ও কলম’ পত্রিকায় ‘স্বচ্ছকাচ’ নামের এক কবিতায় তিনি লেখেন—
    প্রজাপতি মাথা কোটে জানালার কাচে
    প্রজাপতি স্বচ্ছতা জানে না
    স্বচ্ছতা জানে না বলে মাথা কোটে
    ভাবে, ওই তো রয়েছে তার কাঙ্ক্ষিত আকাশ
    এক্ষুণি সে উড়ে চলে যাবে।

    আকাশ আকাশে থাকে
    জানালায় থাকে স্বচ্ছ কাচ
    প্রজাপতি মাথা কোটে স্বচ্ছতায়, কাচে
    প্রজাপতি স্বচ্ছতা জানে না বলে মাথা কোটে।
    প্রজাপতি মাথা কোটে জানালার কাচে।

    খুবই পরিচ্ছন্ন কবিতা। অযথা ধোঁয়া ছড়িয়ে দুর্বোধ্য বানানোর চেষ্টা নেই। পাঠককে ধোঁকা দেওয়ার অপচেষ্টা নেই। নিজের জীবনের মতোই সহজ ছিল তাঁর কবিতা। ২০১৩ এর শীতে তিনি লিখেছিলেন—
    এসো, আর বিন্দুমাত্র বিলম্ব করো না
    আকাশে এখন কোনো সোনা
    নেই, বহু আগে
    ঝরে গেছে। রাগে
    গর্জাতে গর্জাতে উত্তরের বায়ু
    ছুটে আসে। ত্বক চাটে। পরমায়ু
    টেনে ছিঁড়ে খায়
    অন্ধকারে, থাবায় থাবায়
    তাই এসো, আর কোনো বিলম্ব করো না।

    তিনি কাকে ডেকেছিলেন, পরের শীতে তিনি বিন্দুমাত্র দেরি না করেই নিজেই চলে গেলেন কার কাছে? নারীরা ফেরে না বলে তিনি যে ঘোষণা দিয়েছিলেন, আজ তো তিনিই চলে গেলেন আর ফিরবেন না বলে? হয়তো শারীরিক প্রত্যাবর্তন আর হবে না, কিন্তু তাঁর কবিতার হাত ধরে তিনি ফিরে ফিরে আসবেন। আমাদের ‘নগরে বাউল’ ছিলেন তিনি, নাগরিক মায়া কাটিয়ে তিনি চলে গেছেন মোক্ষধামে। কবি অরুণাভ সরকার, বিনম্র শ্রদ্ধা।

  11. মাসুদ করিম - ২১ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (১১:০৬ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    সোনালী স্বপ্ন জাগিয়ে চলে গেলেন বিজ্ঞানী মাকসুদুল

    পাটের জিনোম সিকোয়েন্স উন্মোচনের গবেষণায় নেতৃত্ব দিয়ে বাংলাদেশকে সোনালী আাঁশের সুদিন ফেরানোর স্বপ্ন দেখিয়েছেন যিনি, সেই বিজ্ঞানী মাকসুদুল আলম আর নেই।

    তার ছোট ভাই জাপান-বাংলাদেশ ফ্রেন্ডশিপ হাসপাতলের পরিচালক মাহবুবুল আলম জানান, বাংলাদেশ সময় রোববার ভোরে যুক্তরাষ্ট্রের হাওয়াইয়ের কুইন্স হাসপাতালে চিকিৎসাধীন অবস্থায় মাকসুদুলের মৃত্যু হয়। তার বয়স হয়েছিল ৬০ বছর।

    মাকসুদুল লিভার সিরোসিসে ভুগছিলেন। শেষ দিকে লিভারের সঙ্গে তার ফুসফুসও ঠিকমতো কাজ করছিল না। সর্বশেষ ম্যানোয়ার ইউনিভার্সিটি অব হাওয়াইয়ে শিক্ষকতা করছিলেন এই মেধাবী জিনতত্ত্ববিদ।

    শেষ ইচ্ছা অনুযায়ী হাওয়াই মেমোরিয়াল পার্ক সিমেট্রিতে মাকসুদুলকে দাফন করা হবে বলে পরিবারের পক্ষ থেকে জানানো হয়েছে।

    ২০১০ সালে তরুণ একদল বিজ্ঞানীকে নিয়ে তোষা পাটের জিন নকশা উন্মোচন করে আলোচনায় আসেন মাকসুদুল আলম। ওই বছর ১৬ জুন জাতীয় সংসদে দাঁড়িয়ে দেশবাসীকে সেই সুখবর জানান প্রধানমন্ত্রী শেখ হাসিনা।

    মাকসুদুল ও তার সহকর্মীদের পরের সাফল্যের খবরটিও আসে প্রধানমন্ত্রীর মুখ দিয়েই। ২০১২ সালের ২৯ সেপ্টেম্বর তিনি জানান, মাকসুদুল ম্যাক্রোফমিনা ফাসিওলিনা নামের এক ছত্রাকের জিন-নকশা উন্মোচন করেছেন, যা পাটসহ প্রায় ৫০০ উদ্ভিদের স্বাভাবিক বিকাশে বাধা দেয়।

  12. মাসুদ করিম - ২১ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (১১:১৮ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

  13. মাসুদ করিম - ২৩ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (৫:৫২ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Michael Henry Heim Translation Prize

    This is the inaugural year of the Michael Henry Heim Translation Prize, founded to honor the great translator and translation activist, and to promote his idea of “collegial translation,” encouraging scholars in a range of social science fields to seek some training in translation, making them able to translate their international colleagues’ work. Of course, professional literary translators are generally equipped to translate work on various topics, but in many fields specialized terminology is used, and a full understanding of crucial contexts and controversies may not be immediately transparent to an outsider, even one who “studies up.” In 2006, Heim co-authored the American Council of Learned Societies’ Guidelines for the Translation of Social Science Texts, now available in several languages, as part of ACLS’s Social Science Translation Project.

    The Heim Translation Prize is awarded annually by the journal East European Politics & Societies and Cultures (EEPS) for the best collegial translation of a journal article from an East European language into English. Awardees are selected based on the significance of the original work, the quality of the translation, and the contribution the translation is likely to make to dialogue across scholarly communities. The Prize Committee is composed of the journal’s editors and invited referees (experts in the subject matter, in the art of translation, or both). This year’s prize was just awarded to Jennifer Croft for her translation of Roma Sendyka‘s “Miejsca, które straszą (afekty i nie-miejsca pamięci)” (”Sites That Haunt: Affects and Non-Sites of Memory”). The award comes with a $500 prize and a copy of the 2014 book The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim & A Life In Translation. The winning article will be published in EEPS.

    The deadline for next year’s competition is Sept. 1, 2015. Information on submitting a translation can be found here.

  14. মাসুদ করিম - ২৩ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (১১:০৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Nearly 300 heritage sites hit by Syria war: UN

    Nearly 300 cultural heritage sites have been destroyed, damaged and looted in Syria since its conflict broke out in 2011, the U.N. said Tuesday in a report citing satellite evidence.

    Among the areas exposed to major damage were UNESCO world heritage sites such as Aleppo, where settlements have been in place for 7,000 years, and the fabled desert Greco-Roman oasis of Palmyra.

    “Looting, destruction from aerial bombardment and other explosions, as well as infrastructure construction at cultural sites significantly threatens the heritage to future generations of these historic structures and objects,” the U.N. said in a statement.

    The report focused on 18 areas, of which six are UNESCO-listed: the Old City of Aleppo; Bosra; Damascus, the Dead Cities of northern Syria; Crac des Chevaliers and Palmyra.

    Detailed analysis of satellite imagery of 290 locations at these sites showed 24 of them had been destroyed, 104 severely damaged, 85 moderately damaged and 77 possibly damaged.

    The United Nations said the report was “alarming testimony of the ongoing damage that is happening to Syria’s vast cultural heritage” and called for efforts to scale up their protection.

    The satellite images were put together by UNOSAT, a Geneva-based U.N. institute.

    “It is very sad for Syria as well as the world that this is happening,” said UNOSAT director Einar Bjorgo.

    “Humankind is losing hundreds and thousands of years of heritage,” he told AFP.

    “Perhaps some of it can be rebuilt, but what is looted may be lost, unless it resurfaces and is given back.”

  15. মাসুদ করিম - ২৪ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (১০:২৭ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    শিশুসাহিত্যিক এখলাসউদ্দিন আহমদ আর নেই

    বিশিষ্ট শিশুসাহিত্যিক ও ছড়াকার এখলাসউদ্দিন আহমদ আর নেই।

    বুধবার ভোর ৪টায় রাজধানীর স্কয়ার হাসপাতালে মারা যান তিনি। তার বয়স হয়েছিল ৭৪ বছর।

    এখলাসউদ্বিদনের ভাগ্নিজামাই লেখক আলী ইমাম বিডিনিউজ টোয়েন্টিফোর ডটকমকে জানান, মস্তিষ্কে রক্তক্ষরণের কারণে গত প্রায় একমাস ধরেই হাসপাতালে ছিলেন এখলাসউদ্দিন। অবস্থার অবনতি হওয়ায় গত পাঁচদিন ধরে তাকে নিবিড় পরিচর্যা কেন্দ্রে রাখা হয়েছিল।

    ১৯৪০ সালে কলকাতায় জন্মগ্রহণকারী এখলাসউদ্দিন আহমদ ষাটের দশকে ‘টাপুর টুপুর’ নামে শিশু-কিশোরদের জন্য একটি মাসিক পত্রিকা সম্পাদনা করে সাড়া জাগিয়েছিলেন।

    সব্যসাচী লেখক সৈয়দ শামসুল হকের লেখা প্রথম কিশোর উপন্যাস ‘সীমান্তের সিংহাসন’ প্রথম প্রকাশিত হয়েছিল সেই ‘টাপুর টুপুর’ পত্রিকাতেই।

    শিশুসাহিত্যে অবদানের জন্য ২০০০ সালে সরকার এখলাসউদ্দিন আহমদকে একুশে পদকে ভূষিত করে।

    এছাড়া ১৯৬২ সালে পশ্চিমবঙ্গ যুব উৎসব পুরস্কার, ১৯৭১ সালে বাংলা একাডেমি পুরস্কার, ১৯৮৩ সালে আলাওল সাহিত্য পুরস্কার, ১৯৮৬ সালে অগ্রণী ব্যাংক শিশুসাহিত্য পুরস্কার, ১৯৯৯ সালে শিশু একাডেমি পুরস্কার পেয়েছেন তিনি।

    ‘এক যে ছিল নেংটি’; ‘হঠাৎ রাজার খামখেয়ালী’; ‘কাটুম কুটুম’; ‘ছোট্ট রঙিন পাখি’ তার প্রকাশিত বইয়ের মধ্যে উল্লেখযোগ্য।

  16. মাসুদ করিম - ২৭ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (২:৫৪ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Using Nazi settings and DNA tests, Jewish photographer quashes ‘the fiction of German blood’

    Frankfurt-born New York photographer Marc Erwin Babej pictures contemporary Germans against Nazi backdrops to create ‘hyper-heroic, quasi-fascist aura’ images.

    Rainer Hoess, the grandson of Rudolf Hoess, the Kommandant of Auschwitz, stands at the barbed-wire fence of Buchenwald concentration camp. The tattooed numbers belong to Auschwitz survivors who have become friends over the years.

    Aminata Belli, a German woman who looks more African than Aryan, poses outside the 1939 monument glorifying German colonialism in Africa, located next to the former Lettow-Vorbeck barracks in Hamburg.

    And outside the “Torch Bearer” monument at the former Nazi Elite School Vogelsang stands the German actor Robert Dölle, looking every bit the frightening fascist with his bald head and black leather Waffen Elite coat favored by the Gestapo. The only thing is that his origins are 94 percent European Jewish, 2 percent Middle Eastern and 2 percent Caucasian (the remainder comprises trace amounts of other ethnic origins.) He also happens to be the photographer’s cousin.

    That photographer is Marc Erwin Babej, a born-and-bred German living in New York who has just completed a series of thought-provoking images called “Mischlinge” that are purposely meant to stretch and strain the definition of what it means to be German today. Babej’s exhibit of 60 photographs, many of them shot on the grounds of Nazi-era war monuments and Third Reich training schools and retreats, are deliberately shot with an aura of Leni Riefenstahl, the photographer and director who made one of the Hitler’s most notorious propaganda films, “Triumph of the Will.”

    In a Skype interview, Babej explains why the iconic but twisted work of Riefenstahl was the reference point he had in mind from the start, and which he wanted to reference as part of the exhibition.

    “The idea was what would it look like if I took Germans of today, many of whom don’t look German, and photographed them in the style of Riefenstahl? And what if we do that and set them in monumental architecture from the Nazi era? My next thought is that it shows Germans today in this uneasy coexistence of past and present, and so what if in addition to that I submitted them to an ethnicity test? So I came up with the idea of testing everyone’s DNA and doing that and publishing the results along with the pictures,” he explains, noting that each person who was photographed was asked to spit into a vial and submit it for testing, so that their DNA results could be included in the captions accompanying their photos.

    “The sum total would be a parallel universe in which the issue of German identity would be made visible. And I was just curious if all that would communicate visually, and as to what that would look like.”

    That curiosity has been with him almost as long as he can remember, or at least since age 8 or 9, he says, when he learned with some mixture of fascination and horror about Nazi Germany’s infamous “Mischlinge” categories set up by the Nuremberg Laws. These declared that having even one Jewish grandparent made you a mischling – literally, a mongrel. “It’s a very loaded word and I’m using it very intentionally,” he says.

    Babej’s own mother is a Holocaust survivor: She was seven years old when the war ended, and had been interned for several years with her mother in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The fact that Babej’s grandmother was a physician kept her from being deported to the death camps further east. After the war the family remained in communist-ruled Czechoslovakia; they defected in 1965 and moved to West Germany.

    Babej, born in Frankfurt in 1970 and raised in Bad Homburg just north of Frankfurt, grew up feeling both Jewish and German, a sometimes uneasy mix. At 16 he left for boarding school in America, then went to Brown University, and has lived in New York City ever since.

    Nazi backdrop

    Showing up in Germany and asking to pose subjects in front of monuments and former Nazi headquarters was a strange and storied venture.

    “Getting permission to photograph this was a challenge,” Babej explains. “The authorities are rightly afraid that neo-Nazis will take advantage of these places to do a propaganda shoot. I had to explain that I’m Jewish and the son of a survivor. And I’m also a German – I’m not just out to make Germans look bad. But to take two Germans dressed in bikinis and say, I’d like to pose them front of your V-2 rockets – well, people had to work on getting comfortable with that. But in the end everyone I asked got behind the idea, and as it turns out, the work will be exhibited in many of the locations where it was shot.”

    These include the museums at the former Nazi party training school at Vogelsang, at the former SS Castle Wewelsburg, at the Peenemünde Historical Technical Museum and Dokumentation Obersalzberg, in Hitler’s alpine retreat.

    One of the many things that makes the project so unusual is that it’s not just about posing today’s Germans against the backdrop of the Nazi past, but demonstrating just how multi-ethnic Germany has become. And was, naturally, during the Nazi era as well.

    “Through the DNA tests I confront people with the fact that none of us are so ethnically pure, so why are some people still obsessed with the fiction of ‘German blood’? What should define Germany are liberal democratic values, not ethnicity,” he says.

    Babej got a masters degree in journalism from Columbia University and then went on to work as a marketing strategist. He writes a marketing column for Forbes and an art column for Der Spiegel. But he is relatively new to the arts photography scene, being largely self-taught aside from working with the photographer Roger Ballen, his “friend and mentor.” Part of what makes the images so artistically sharp and chilling was his choice of cameras, which paired up the body of a top-flight digital camera with a lens that could have been used in Riefenstahl’s day.

    “I shot it with a digital B&W Leica M Monochrom – it has no Bayer filter so you get more sharpness, more light sensitivity … I used for most of the work lenses from the time that Riefenstahl did her work. It essentially means combining 85-year-old lens designs with contemporary digital technology.”

    What emerged are photos that have what he describes as a “hyper-heroic, quasi-fascist aura,” images that play with our sensibilities, leaving us unsure of whether we want to laugh or recoil. That, says Babej, is part of the idea. “The point is for people to have enough cognitive dissonance to start thinking.”

    Marc Erwin Babej’s work is represented by Corridor Contemporary in Tel Aviv. “Mischlinge” will premiere from Jan. 24 until Feb. 28 at m2a Galerie in Dresden.

  17. মাসুদ করিম - ২৯ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (১০:০২ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Lebanon: From melting pots to a mosaic

    After all the bloody wars, Lebanon has become a country where you constantly question yourself about your affiliations, origins and relationships with the state. According to Amin Maalouf in his book “On identity,” the individual’s identity cannot be compartmentalized as it is the condition of our common humanity. One cannot have conflicting identities since he has only one made up of many components. Thus, each one of us has different cultural approaches, allegiances and visions within his or her only one identity.

    Distrust has been undoubtedly directing the individual’s negative perceptions, alienation and fear of the “other.” This drives the individual to have a powerful feeling of belonging to a community group, mainly political and religious, and a tendency to satisfy his needs through this group. Each community group in Lebanon is a nation in itself that has its own vision, laws and expectations of the state. The expanding roles and laws of such groups that guarantee its individual’s interests have undermined the role of the state. Years of battles over power have legitimized terrorism and violence as far as they ward off any threat on each group.

    Nowadays, it is very common for a person to stress his religious allegiance and regard it as the central factor in his identity since it is the most deep rooted, and the only one capable of fulfilling so many essential needs. Religious groups are the melting pots for individualism as they constitute enabling environments that satisfy the needs of the public for identity, sense of belonging, spirituality, as well as actions and revolts. Religion in Lebanon is not merely a function of individual preference reflected in ceremonial practice of worship but a phenomenon that determines social and political identification. Hence, politicizing religions and sects to become the governing system that distributes power, benefits and posts has deteriorated the civil state’s components.

    The “Taif Accord” that ended the Civil War in 1989 constituted a road map for abolishing “sectarianism” and building a civil state. The political reforms and phases of eradicating sectarianism in Article 2 stress on the value of the individual as a citizen who has rights and obligations in a nonsectarian civil state. Major steps were proposed to hinder sectarianism such as the establishment of the national council that proposes the adequate means of abolishing sectarianism, employment in public entities based on capacities and specialization and removal of the religion and sect from the identity card. In addition, the establishment of a senate that includes representatives of all religions in Lebanon and deals with strategic religious issues might be a turning point in the political system by eliminating the religious groups’ interference in the political system.

    On another level, a nonsectarian Parliament will be elected to represent all Lebanese citizens as individuals and not religious groups. If such reforms are implemented, they would transform our melting pots into a distinguished mosaic of individuals’ unique identities. The question remains: Who is [seeing to it that] such reforms [remain only] naïve dreams?

    The destructive impact of wars have scattered our visions and fragmented several diversified civil movements and parties. Unfortunately, the young generation is being taught different “truths” due to the exclusivity of our history.

    The lack of a common vision for our history has enforced hatred, sectarianism and segregation, leaving no chance for national reconciliation and peace building. Moreover, Lebanese youth are surrounded by political and sectarian attitudes through technology and media tools. The advancement in technology has a fundamental effect on our visions, allegiances and identity due to the uncontrollable flow of data and knowledge.

    Thus, such progress should be used in a peace-building process by disseminating inspiring national messages instead of sectarian ones for religious mobilization.

    Individualism has been proven in the latest Arab transitions as a striking power that can topple regimes and transform entire societies. However, we are eagerly searching for it in Lebanon amid all the conflicting aspirations and visions for our state that is yielding to multiple Lebanese nationalisms and features for the state.

    For this reason, we need a transformational leadership capable of building a shared vision and shifting the communities’ concern from dividing to sharing power. When talking about transformational leadership, we cannot but mention late former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was able to represent the aspirations of all Lebanese people and regain their trust through concrete short- and long-term development outcomes. He empowered people to be active citizens committed to building a civil state and created a thread of affiliations that strongly links each individual to the state.

    Having a transformational leadership in regaining individualism within a broad national vision might appear a theoretical and philosophical matter beyond any realistic achievement. However, the identity issue is the logical daily concern of anyone who is committed to cause a change, and the right path for any change-maker starts by asking the right questions even if their answers are hard to be found.

  18. মাসুদ করিম - ২৯ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (১১:৩৪ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Iran’s methanol potential rival for US shale gas

    Deputy Head of National Petrochemical Company (NPC) has predicted Iran would become a serious rival for the US shale gas productions in near future.

    Mohammad Hassan Peyvandi told reporters that Iran is the only country in the world that possesses all necessary capacities for developing petrochemical industry.

    “Having been situated at the Persian Gulf, proximity to Indian and Chinese markets, as well as ease of access to gas and liquid feed are some of the advantages Iran’s petrochemical industry enjoys compared to any other country,” he added.

    Peyvandi expressed hope that once the half-finished methanol projects are seen through in the next five years, Iran’s methanol production capacity will reach 25 million tons per year, thus turning the Islamic Republic into one of the biggest and most influential countries in the world’s methanol market.

    “The export of the US shale gas products requires creating transport capacities and preparing petrochemical units in European countries. It would be much cheaper for these countries to import from Iran and the Middle East instead of the United States,” he added.

    Currently, Iran has the capacity to produce 60 million petrochemical products per year. Launching some 60 projects in the next year will increase the production capacity up to 180 million tons per year, as predicted by deputy head of NPC.

    Iran’s petrochemical industry consumes 5 percent of the country’s gas and liquid carbohydrates, producing more than 41 million ton products and contributing to 40 percent of the non-oil exports.

  19. মাসুদ করিম - ৩০ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (১২:০৮ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Secret files shed light on first Thatcher-Gorbachev talks

    Classified documents made public Tuesday shed light on the political courtship between Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev — whom she famously declared she could “do business” with.

    After Gorbachev’s first official visit to Britain in 1984, four months before he became Soviet leader, Thatcher praised his “charm and humour” as both sides sought to improve East-West relations.

    The warmth of their relationship even survived one of the most notorious defections of the Cold War — double agent Oleg Gordievsky, who had been head of the KGB’s London station, in 1985.

    The documents were released by the National Archives in London under the 30-year rule, which allows previously secret government files to be made public three decades on.

    Thatcher, who died in 2013, wrote to then US president Ronald Reagan following Gorbachev’s visit.

    “He is relatively open in manner and intelligent. He is affable and has some charm and humour,” she wrote. “I certainly found him a man one could do business with. I actually rather liked him.”

    Despite that positive impression, Gorbachev was also subjected to the “Iron Lady’s” legendary sharp tongue.

    “He was clearly not used to the sort of rigorous questioning which he got from me on things like human rights in the Soviet Union,” she added.

    British officials also were struck by his vivacious wife Raisa, who at one point on the trip dropped in to royal jeweller Mappin and Webb to buy some gold earrings set with diamonds and rubies.

    Less glamorously, she also sent a book of 500 Belarusian potato recipes to Britain’s agriculture minister after the trip, following a conversation the pair had on the subject.

    “If you have anyone who reads Russian and has a fondness for potatoes, we would be happy to lend it,” wrote senior agriculture ministry civil servant Ivor Llewellyn to Downing Street colleague Len Appleyard after receiving the book.

    – ‘Values different from ours’ –

    Gordievsky’s defection to Britain — he shook off KGB agents trailing him in Moscow and boarded a train to Finland before being taken over the border in the boot of an embassy car — threatened to cast a major shadow over improving East-West relations.

    The files contain a string of documents about Gordievsky under the codename HETMAN — the title used for Cossack military commanders — including a letter from Thatcher to Reagan informing him of the defection on September 6, 1985.

    Britain was concerned about Gordievsky’s welfare without his family and pushed for his wife and two daughters to be quietly allowed to leave the Soviet Union and join him.

    The MI6 foreign intelligence agency even got word to their Soviet counterparts that there would be a high-profile mass expulsion of KGB agents from London identified by Gordievsky if they did not agree.

    But Moscow did not budge.

    On September 7, amid a wave of tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions, Thatcher wrote to Gordievsky and told him that Britain would not be pushing Moscow for his family to be returned.

    “We had to face up to the reality of the kind of people with whom we are dealing and the fact that their values are very different from ours,” she wrote.

    “Please do not say that life has no meaning. There is always hope. And we shall do all we can to help you through these difficult days.”

    Gordievsky’s family eventually joined him in 1991, but the years of separation had taken their toll and the marriage soon broke down.

    The next recorded correspondence between Thatcher and Gorbachev after Gordievsky’s defection came when he sent her early birthday wishes on October 12 and suggested that their cooperation should continue.

  20. মাসুদ করিম - ৩১ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (১২:৫৮ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Empire of the pig

    China’s insatiable appetite for pork is a symbol of the country’s rise. It is also a danger to the world

    PIG number 5422 saunters into the pen, circles its few square metres and mounts a plastic stand. The farmer cleans the animal’s underside, feels around and draws out what appears to be a thin pink tube around 30cm long. He begins to massage. Pigs elsewhere snort, grunt or squeal, but the alpha pig is unmoved. Soon he has filled a thermal cup with more than 60 billion sperm. Around 150 pigs will owe their short, brutish lives to this emission.

    A malty smell hangs in the air at the Fuxin Breeding Farm in Jiangxi province in central China, 10 hectares of low concrete barns and fields beside a small reservoir, which is home to around 2,000 pigs. The business was started four years ago by 31-year-old Ouyang Kuanxue. Mr Ouyang’s friends say he was destined to be a pig farmer—he was born in the Chinese zodiacal year of the pig—but his own explanation is more prosaic: when he came back to Pingxiang, his hometown, in 2003 after studying management at university in Beijing, he could not think what else to do. His grandfather was a coalminer who kept a few pigs. His father already had 100. He decided to expand.

    Now the whole family is involved: together they have three farms with a total of around 5,000 swine. Mr Ouyang’s younger brother is in charge of production; his sister-in-law runs the office. The past year has been hard for them and other pig farmers, Mr Ouyang says, because pork prices have been low and feed expensive. But this lean year followed many fat ones. Mr Ouyang drives a Volkswagen SUV; his wife has a new Audi, wears a Cartier bracelet and runs two nail bars; they own an apartment in a new block in the local town. Mr Ouyang has a panoply of pig-related news feeds on his phone. Still, when he goes out for dinner with friends, he tends to avoid pork.

    A brief history of Chinese pork

    The family’s good fortune is emblematic of China’s flying pig market over the past 35 years. Since the late 1970s, when the government liberalised agriculture, pork consumption has increased nearly sevenfold in China. It now produces and consumes almost 500m swine a year, half of all the pigs in the world. The tale of Chinese pigs is thus a parable of the country’s breakneck economic rise. But it is more than symbolic: China’s lust for pork has serious consequences for the country’s economy and environment—and for the world.

    Pigs have been at the centre of Chinese culture, cuisine and family life for thousands of years. Pork is the country’s essential meat. In Mandarin the word for “meat” and “pork” are the same. The character for “family” is a pig under a roof. The pig is one of the 12 signs of the Chinese zodiac: those born in that year are said to be diligent, sympathetic and generous. Pigs signify prosperity, fertility and virility. Poems, stories and songs celebrate them. Miniature clay pigs have been found in graves from the Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD). Historians think people in southern China were the first in the world to domesticate wild boars, 10,000 years ago.

    For centuries sacrificial pigs—and the eating of pork—featured prominently in all forms of commemoration and festivity. At the autumnal Double Ninth Festival (on the ninth day of the ninth lunar month), male elders gathered at their ancestors’ tombs and slaughtered a pig as a symbol of that forebear’s ongoing provision for his descendants. When an estate was in financial trouble, pigs were the last expense to go, says James Watson, an anthropologist at Harvard University, because if the autumn rites were neglected, the ancestor would die a second, terrible death, a final expiration of his spirit.

    Almost every rural home once had a pig, not least because, well into the Communist era, the animals were part of the household recycling system. They consumed otherwise inedible waste and were valued for their manure (even Mao Zedong was a fan of the “fertiliser factory on four legs”). And their meat has always been central to Chinese cooking: it has “the perfect flavour for Chinese cuisine,” reckons Fuchsia Dunlop, a food writer and cook. Nothing is wasted. Pigs’ faces are served whole as a gourmet treat; their brains, says Ms Dunlop, are “soft as custard, and dangerously rich”. The appeal is medicinal as well as culinary: the innards are ascribed therapeutic benefits.

    From trotter to tail, the Chinese eat the whole hog. Still, for much of China’s history, pigs were a luxury consumed only rarely, sometimes extremely rarely. That has changed dramatically.

    Everything but the squeal

    Lei Xiaoping, the manager of Mr Ouyang’s farm, eats pork for every lunch and dinner these days—swine from the farm that have died in a fight or are too small to sell. He is not squeamish about guzzling pigs he has reared himself. After all, as a child Mr Lei (now aged 51) ate pork only three times a year.

    Even before the revolution of 1949, most people in China got only 3% of their annual calorific intake from meat. Pork soon became scarcer still. Tens of millions died in the famine that followed Mao’s Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early 1960s. For decades after that peasants would rub pork fat around their woks to give their vegetables a meaty hint, says Ms Dunlop, before putting the fat away to use on another occasion. As recently as the early 1990s many Chinese mostly subsisted on a diet of vegetables bought at street markets.

    For Mr Lei, as for many of his countrymen, the years of deprivation are well within living memory. Not surprising, then, that eating meat has become a symbol of triumph over hardship, as much a part of China’s transformation as the towering skyscrapers and glistening cities. Grandparents who once went hungry stuff their grandchildren with the treats they lacked—and top of the list is pork. The average Chinese now eats 39kg of pork a year (roughly a third of a pig), more even than Americans (who typically prefer beef), and five times more per person than they ate in 1979.

    The most obvious impact has been on the pigs themselves. Until the 1980s farms as large as Mr Ouyang’s were unknown: 95% of Chinese pigs came from smallholdings with fewer than five animals. Today just 20% come from these backyard farms, says Mindi Schneider of the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. Some industrial facilities, often owned by the state or by multinationals, produce as many as 100,000 swine a year. These are born and live for ever on slatted metal beds; most never see direct sunlight; very few ever get to breed. The pigs themselves have changed physically, too. Three foreign breeds now account for 95% of them; to preserve its own kinds, China has a national gene bank (basically a giant freezer of pig semen) and a network of indigenous-pig menageries. Nevertheless, scores of ancient variants may soon die out.

    But China’s pigs are far from the only victims of their popularity. Demand for them worries the Communist Party, underpins what will soon be the world’s biggest economy and threatens Amazon rainforests.

    This little piggy stayed home

    The Chinese eat so much pork that when its price goes up, the cost of other things rises, too. For the Communist Party, therefore, keeping affordable meat on the table is vital, not least for the stability of the economy. In 2007, for example, an estimated 45m pigs died in China from “blue ear pig disease”. Pork prices rocketed; the annual rate of increase of the consumer price index (sometimes known as the “consumer pig index” because of the creature’s prominent role in it) hit a ten-year high. Panic buying ensued. There were reports of customers being injured in a crush on a supermarket escalator when rushing to buy cheap chilled pork in Guangzhou, and a general pork-buying frenzy across China. Imports doubled.

    In response the party established the world’s first pork reserve, some of it in frozen form and some the live, snorting variety. This aims to keep pork affordable and reasonably priced: when pigs become too expensive, the government releases some of its stock onto the market; if they become too cheap, the reserve buys more porkers to keep farmers in profit. Other pro-pork policies include grants, tax incentives, cheap loans for farms and free animal immunisation—all intended to boost intensive pig farming and to keep plates loaded high with Chinese pork. According to Chatham House, a London-based think-tank, the Chinese government subsidised pork production by $22 billion in 2012. That is roughly $47 per pig.

    Yet even the Communist Party can no longer control every aspect of this vast industry. That is partly because the appetite for pork is now so great—and growing so fast—that sating it depends on places far beyond China’s borders. Chinese pigs, in turn, are reshaping the environments of faraway countries.

    The Communist Party prizes self-sufficiency in food. Most of the pigs China eats are indeed home-grown. But each kilogram of pork requires 6kg of feed, usually processed soy or corn. Given the scarcity of water and land in China, it cannot feed its pigs as well as its people. The upshot is that Chinese swine, which previously ate household scraps, increasingly rely on imported feed.

    Ms Schneider reckons that more than half of the world’s feed crops will soon be eaten by Chinese pigs. Already in 2010 China’s soy imports accounted for more than 50% of the total global soy market. From a low base, grain imports are rising fast as well: the US Grains Council, a trade body, predicts that by 2022 China will need to import 19m-32m tonnes of corn. That equates to between a fifth and a third of the world’s entire trade in corn today.

    As a result, land use is changing drastically on the other side of the world. In Brazil, more than 25m hectares of land—parts of which were once Amazon rainforest—are being used to cultivate soy (Chinese companies have not signed up to the “soy roundtable”, a voluntary association, the members of which agree not to buy soyabeans from newly deforested land). Entire species of plants and trees are being sacrificed to fatten China’s pigs. Argentina has chopped down thousands of hectares of forest and shifted its traditional cattle-breeding to remote areas to make way for soyabeans. Since 1990 the Argentine acreage given over to that crop has quadrupled: the country exports almost all of its whole soyabeans—around 8m tonnes—to China. In some areas farmers harvest two or three crops a year, using herbicides that have been linked to birth defects and increased cancer rates.

    All these imports have made China ever-more exposed to global commodity prices. China has responded by buying land in other countries, some of which is used to grow feed crops or to raise pigs that are sold onto the domestic market at preferential prices. China itself is secretive about these purchases, but the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a Canadian think-tank, calculates that it has bought 5m hectares in developing countries; others think the total is higher. When Shuanghui, China’s largest pork producer, bought Smithfield Foods, an American firm, in 2013, it acquired huge stretches of Missouri and Texas. As demand for pork rises, China’s porcine empire is sure to expand.

    Pigging out

    Feeding the pigs is not farmers’ only concern. Their greatest fear is disease: growth slows when a pig gets sick, and, even more worryingly, swine on modern Chinese farms tend to be genetically similar (many are half-siblings), so when one gets ill, much of the herd may succumb. Farmers routinely add small doses of antibiotics to their feed, and this, too, has daunting knock-on effects. In America and Europe such practices are associated with the emergence of “superbugs”, bacteria in animals and humans that are resistant to most antibiotics. In 2009 pigs exported from China to Hong Kong were found to harbour one such bug. The mainland government acknowledged the problem, yet the use of antibiotics, hormones and growth-promoters is barely regulated.

    These drugs pass into the wider food chain partly via sizzling plates of pork, and partly through the 5kg of manure that the average pig produces a day. This once-desirable substance is now a critical problem for China. Though large swathes of land have been set aside to contain it, they are poorly managed. The billions of tonnes of waste China’s livestock produce each year are one of the biggest sources of water and soil pollution in the country, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. The 16,000 dead pigs that were dumped in the tributaries of the Huangpu river, a source of Shanghai’s tap-water, after a virus outbreak in 2013, were a lurid indicator of a seeping national problem.

    Porcine waste also contributes to emissions of methane and nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Intensive swine-farming is much more polluting than smallholding. So, as well as depriving Earth of the natural cooling function of the rainforests they displace, Chinese pigs contribute to global warming more directly. Greenhouse-gas emissions from Chinese agriculture increased by 35% between 1994 and 2005. The global expansion of livestock production is one of the primary causes of climate change, says Tony Weis of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, responsible for almost a fifth of emissions produced by human activity.

    So although its proliferating pigs are a resonant symbol of China’s prosperity, they are also a menace. A few in China—a very few—are beginning to question the benefits of eating more and more pork. Meat consumption is beginning to plateau among the very rich; health scares have boosted sales of organic food, though it still accounts for a tiny share of agricultural production. Vegetarianism is growing, but is generally thought eccentric. The ambition of most Chinese continues to be to devour as large a slice of the pork pie as possible. In much of the rich world meat consumption is stable or falling but in the Middle Kingdom it soars unrestrained. Forget the zodiac: in today’s China, every year is the year of the pig.

  21. মাসুদ করিম - ৩১ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (১:০০ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Map Showing Where Today’s Countries Would Be Located on Pangea

    The supercontinent of Pangea formed some 270 million years ago, during the Early Permian Period, and then began to break up 70 million years later, eventually yielding the continents we inhabit today. Pangea was, of course, a peopleless place. But if you were to drop today’s nations on that great land mass, here’s what it might look like. (Click on the image to view it in a much larger, high resolution format.) The map’s creator is Massimo Pietrobon, someone who playfully describes himself as “a famous explorer and cartographer of Atlantis,” and who has taken on other experiments with maps in the past. When someone claimed that the scale of certain countries wasn’t exactly right, Massimo was quick to confess on his blog, “Yes, it’s just a trial, it can be better.” But it’s a creative start.

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