সুপারিশকৃত লিন্ক: জানুয়ারি ২০১৫

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। […]

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।

৩০ comments

  1. মাসুদ করিম - ১ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (১১:৩০ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Stampede causes 35 dead in New Year celebration

    New Year celebrations in the bund area went astray early late Wednesday night as a stampede resulted in 35 people dead and 42 injured in east China’s Shanghai.

    The accident happened on the Chenyi Square of Shanghai’s bund area at around 11:35 pm.

    A witness said that some coupons that looked like “dollar bill” were being thrown from a building’s third-floor window near the Bund and people standing along the river bank started to scramble for these coupons.

    The city has set up a working team for rescue operations and to deal with the aftermath.

    Cause of the accident is under investigation.

    Xi asks immediate investigation on Shanghai stampede

    Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday asked an immediate investigation on the cause of a stampede during a New Year celebration in downtown Shanghai and urged to prevent such incidents from happening again.

    • মাসুদ করিম - ৩ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (১০:২৯ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

      China demands answers after stampede in financial hub Shanghai

      Chinese state media and the public criticized the government and police on Friday for failing to prevent a New Year’s Eve stampede in Shanghai that killed 36 people and dented the city’s image as modern China’s global financial hub.

      Apart from Hong Kong, which is run as a separate territory, Shanghai is China’s most international and cosmopolitan city, a glitzy home to global companies with ambitions to become a world financial center by 2020.

      The official Xinhua news agency said the government could not shake responsibility for what happened. It asked why there were apparently so few police on duty for the tens of thousands thronging Shanghai’s famous waterfront, known as the Bund.

      “It was a lack of vigilance from the government, a sloppiness,” the news agency wrote.

      Xinhua noted that the crush happened not far from a much trumpeted new free trade zone described as the “pride of the country”.

      “The disaster, which happened in China’s financial hub of Shanghai, served as a wake-up call that the world’s second-largest economy is still a developing country which has fragile social management,” it said in an English-language commentary.

      Shanghai people echoed those complaints.

      “There was not enough policing and planning. It is really sad to see a stampede happen in a big city like Shanghai,” said resident Tang Lifeng, 38.

      The site of the stampede was cordoned off on Friday, with grieving relatives holding a candlelight memorial. Most victims were students in their 20s.

      City officials said one Taiwanese was among the dead. Of the 47 injured, 13 were in critical condition, they said.

      The waterfront has become a New Year countdown site in recent years after authorities brought in performances such as 3D light shows and fireworks. Celebrations in 2013 drew more than 300,000 revelers.

      Police have given few answers, saying an investigation is going on. On Thursday, they did not allow foreign media into a briefing, underscoring concern about negative coverage.

      They have dismissed reports that a rush to pick up coupons thrown from a bar overlooking the Bund was the cause, with focus shifting to overcrowding on a raised viewing area.

      The stampede has prompted unflattering comparisons with India, where stampedes are relatively common, another rapidly developing country and rival that many Chinese feel superior to.

      “I originally thought that stampedes like this could only happen to Indians on pilgrimages,” Cheng Daolin, a manager at a Chinese engineering company, wrote on Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter.

      “In the space of one night, China has become like India, and Shanghai has become like Mumbai,” wrote another Weibo user.

      Censors suppress Shanghai stampede coverage as blame game begins

      Shanghai authorities have brought down a wall of strict censorship on local coverage of Wednesday night’s deadly stampede, as questions mount over how such a tragedy could have occurred in the mainland’s wealthiest and best-managed city.

      Local sources said the censorship was “unprecedented and harsh” and officials were worried that they could be blamed for the stampede that killed at least 36 people.

      A police source said many Huangpu district officials and police were likely to lose their jobs over the incident.

      Huangpu police admitted on Thursday that they underestimated the number of people showing up on the Bund, deploying fewer officers for the event than were needed.

      “A lot of heads will roll” because the tragedy had infuriated state leaders, according to the senior police source.

      The stampede happened at 11.35pm at Chen Yi Square in the Bund area, one of the city’s most popular sightseeing spots, as thousands of revellers thronged to the riverfront to watch a light show.

      At least 49 were injured, including 13 seriously, local health authorities said yesterday. Among the wounded were a Malaysian and another from Taiwan. State media said a Taiwanese person was among the dead.

      Most of those killed and injured in the stampede were young people in their 20s, including college students, the official Xinhua news agency said.

      As exhausted people fell or were knocked down, tripping more behind them, panic quickly spread through the huge crowds, with “young girls screaming desperately for their lives and the sounds of all sorts of curses around”, wrote one eyewitness on social media.

      Survivors described the scene as “hellish”, Xinhua reported.

      Some social media reports initially suggested that the stampede might have been caused by a large amount of banknote-shaped coupons raining down from a nearby building, but Shanghai police dismissed this as the cause of the stampede as only a few people came to pick them up.

      New Year celebrations across Shanghai were cancelled. President Xi Jinping instructed them to “do everything in their power” to help those injured and launch an immediate investigation into the cause of the stampede, according to state media.

      Relatives and victims were under close police guard and local and overseas media were told that they needed Shanghai propaganda department permission to speak to the injured.

      The Communist Party’s propaganda department in Shanghai has issued several notices to local media in the past two days, instructing them on various issues, ranging from the scale of coverage and use of photos to interview protocols, according to three senior journalists.

      “It seems ridiculous that local newspapers were instructed not to use photos showing people mourning for the dead victims,” a senior newspaper editor said.

      The stampede’s cause has not been identified but media and government officials said they expected the authorities to gradually play down the incident by describing it as a simple accident.

      Pundits are also watching to see if the city’s party secretary Han Zheng and mayor Yang Xiong suffer in the political fallout.

      “It is a do-or-die moment for many of the city’s officials now,” a source said. “Shanghai police and the propaganda department are doing their utmost to avoid negative reports.”

      Shanghai’s historic Bund riverfront runs along an area of narrow streets amid restored old buildings, shops and tourist attractions. The China Daily newspaper in February reported that the city’s population was more than 24 million at the end of 2013.

      Last year, 14 people – some of them children – were killed and 10 injured in a stampede that broke out as food was distributed at a mosque in China’s Ningxia region.

      Also last year, six students were killed in a stampede at a primary school in Kunming in the southwest, after the accidental blocking of a stairway corridor.

      Timeline: Shanghai Stampede

      December 31
      8pm People start to gather in The Bund area, China News Service reports, citing the Huangpu district police commander.

      11.30pm A witness hears women and children scream as people are crushed together near Chen Yi Square, and unease starts to spread through the crowd, according to the Southern Metropolis News.
      Police spot unusual pedestrian movements near the square. They detect that “people have stopped moving” and dispatch 500 officers to the scene, China News Service reports, citing the Huangpu district police commander.

      The first police officers arrive on the scene in “five to eight minutes”, Eastday.com quotes a police officer as saying.

      11.34pm A witness sees several people fall on a staircase near the square. where the stampede took place. People nearby try to pull them up but fail as more pedestrians crowd the steps. The situation gets out of control and those on the ground are further pressed together, according to the Southern Metropolis News website, Nandu.com.

      11.35pm The stampede occurs, according to the official account.

      11.40pm Several pedestrians near the stairs shout “Back! Back!”, trying to stop more people flooding in, the Southern Metropolis News Nandu.com reports, citing a witness.

      11.50pm A witness sees “fake money” that had been thrown from a building across the road, Eastday.com reports. The notes turn out to be bar coupons.

      11.55pm The crowd starts to calm down. People help move the injured. out of the stampede area. Some pedestrians try to resuscitate the start to do cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the injured while others clear a way for ambulances, Sina.com reports.

      January 1
      12.31am The Shanghai Public Security Bureau’s official microblog says police officers are evacuating pedestrians after some people fell in The Bund area.

      3am Shanghai party chief Han Zheng  visits the injured at the Shanghai No1 People’s Hospital, China News Service reports.

      4.01am Shanghai government’s microblog announces that 35 people were killed and 42 injured in the stampede. Later updated to 36 dead and 47 hurt.

  2. মাসুদ করিম - ২ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (৩:৫০ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Two-thirds of cancer cases due to “bad luck”: study

    The majority of cancer cases can be explained by “bad luck” rather than the result of environmental factors and inherited genes, a U.S. study said Thursday.

    The study, published in the U.S. journal Science, found that two-thirds of adult cancer incidence across tissues might be caused by random mutations that occur in dividing healthy stem cells.

    The findings, based on a statistical model that quantified how much of three factors — bad luck, the environment and heredity — contribute to cancer development, might help researchers design more effective prevention strategies for different cancer types.

    “Changing our lifestyle and habits will be a huge help in preventing certain cancers, but this may not be as effective for a variety of others,” said coauthor Cristian Tomasetti, assistant professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health. “We should focus more resources on finding ways to detect such cancers at early, curable stages.”

    It was well-known that cancer arises when tissue-specific stem cells make random mistakes, or mutations, when one chemical letter in DNA is incorrectly swapped for another during the replication process in cell division.

    The more these mutations accumulate, the higher the risk that cells will grow unchecked, a hallmark of cancer.

    The actual contribution of these random mistakes to cancer incidence, in comparison to the contribution of hereditary or environmental factors, was not previously known.

    In the new study, researchers analyzed published data on stem cell divisions in 31 different human tissues and compared the data to the lifetime incidence of cancer in those tissues.

    They determined the correlation between the total number of stem cell divisions and cancer risk to be 0.804.

    “Our study shows, in general, that a change in the number of stem cell divisions in a tissue type is highly correlated with a change in the incidence of cancer in that same tissue,” said coauthor Bert Vogelstein, professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

    One example, he said, is in colon tissue, which undergoes four times more stem cell divisions than small intestine tissue in humans. Likewise, colon cancer is much more prevalent than small intestinal cancer.

    Mice, by contrast, have a lower number of stem cell divisions in their colons than in their small intestines. Similarly, cancer incidence in mice is lower in the colon than in the small intestine.

    Using statistical theory, the pair calculated how much of the variation in cancer risk can be explained by the number of stem cell divisions, which is 0.804 squared, or, in percentage form, about 65 percent.

    Further research found that 22 cancer types in 31 tissues could be largely explained by the “bad luck” factor of random DNA mutations during cell division.

    The other nine cancer types had incidences higher than predicted by “bad luck” and were presumably due to a combination of bad luck plus environmental or inherited factors, they said.

    “We found that the types of cancer that had higher risk than predicted by the number of stem cell divisions were precisely the ones you’d expect, including lung cancer, which is linked to smoking; skin cancer, linked to sun exposure; and forms of cancers associated with hereditary syndromes,” said Vogelstein.

    He claimed that cancer-free longevity in people exposed to cancer-causing agents, such as tobacco, may not be due to their ” good genes.”

    “The truth is that most of them simply had good luck,” said Vogelstein, cautioning that poor lifestyles can add to the bad luck factor in the development of cancer.

    “However, many forms of cancer are due largely to the bad luck of acquiring a mutation in a cancer driver gene regardless of lifestyle and heredity factors,” he said. “The best way to eradicate these cancers will be through early detection, when they are still curable by surgery.”

    The researchers noted that some cancers, such as breast and prostate cancer, were not included in the study because of their inability to find reliable stem cell division rates in the scientific literature.

  3. মাসুদ করিম - ৩ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (৮:৪০ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Excavation at Harappan site reveals house plan

    Remains of skeleton, animal bones indicate funeral ceremony at late-Harappan site

    Excavation conducted by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) at the late-Harappan site of Chandayan in Uttar Pradesh has, for the first time, revealed the plan of a house on the Ganga-Yamuna doab, with its mud walls, four successive floor levels and post-holes.

    While these were found in the habitation area, trenches laid in the burial area brought to light 21 Harappan pots, the remains of a skeleton, a broken copper crown placed on the skull, animal bones and remains of a feast, indicating a funeral ceremony.

    “It was a salvage excavation meant to know the site’s cultural sequence,” said A.K. Pandey, Superintending Archaeologist, Excavation Branch-II, ASI, who led the excavation at Chandayan in Baraut tehsil of Baghpat district. He decided to conduct the excavation after labourers digging farmland to collect clay found the crown placed on the skull, a red-ware bowl and a miniature pot last August. The ASI excavated five trenches in December, each of 10×10 metres, with two trenches in the habitation locality and three in the burial area. Mr. Pandey estimated that the late-Harappan site could have existed before 4,000 years.

    The excavation in the residential area revealed a mud wall and post-holes in one trench and four closely laid and successive floors of a house in another trench and pots. They were found at a depth of 130 cm and upwards from the surface level. The posts positioned in the holes would have supported the roof of the house. “The habitation area is significant for the floor levels, and mud walls were occurring in the Ganga-Yamuna doab for the first time,” Mr. Pandey said.

    In the burial site, 150 metres from the residential area, excavations brought to light 21 pots, including deep bowls, dishes, flasks and lids with knobs and cylindrical agate beads. Nearby were the skeleton’s femur and pelvis. These, along with a broken copper crown, were found by labourers digging for clay. The copper crown was embedded with carnelian and faience beads. The orientation of the burial site was from northwest to southeast. The 21 pots might have contained cereals, milk, butter and honey used in the funeral ceremony, Mr. Pandey said.

    Twenty metres from the skeleton, remains of animal sacrifice, other refuse and pots similar to those found in the habitation area were found, suggesting some religious ceremony during the funeral, Mr. Pandey said.

  4. মাসুদ করিম - ৩ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (৯:৪০ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Nepal to join Silk Road Economic Belt through Tibet

    Nepal and China have agreed to revive the old Silk Road that runs from Lhasa to Kathmandu to Patna

    China has taken a firm step to extend the Silk Road Economic Belt to South Asia, by working out a blueprint of connecting Nepal with the Eurasian transport corridor.

    Last month, Nepal formally signed a four-point document endorsing the Silk Road Economic Belt — a pet project of President Xi Jinping for connecting Asia with Europe along a land corridor, with China as its hub. The agreement was signed during a meeting in Beijing of the Nepal-China Inter-governmental Business and Investment Coordination.

    A local media report in Nepal quoted an embassy official in Beijing as saying that Nepal and China “have agreed to revive the old Silk Road that runs from Lhasa to Kathmandu to Patna”.

    Analysts point out that Nepal has joined a project that China has marshalled along with Russia as its core partner, to counter the Washington-led “Asia Pivot” doctrine, which has the containment of a rising China at its heart.

    Under the new Silk Route blueprint, the Chinese want to open up the transportation channel from the Pacific to the Baltic Sea, from which would radiate rail and road routes, which would also connect with East Asia, West Asia, and South Asia.

    China wants to connect with Nepal and South Asia through an extension of the Qinghai-Tibet railway.

    The rail line from Lhasa has already been extended to Shigatse, Tibet’s second largest city, 253 km away. The Chinese plan to build two lines from Shigatse. One would lead to Kerung, the nearest Chinese town from Nepal, from where it would be extended to Rasuwagadhi in Nepal. The other line would head to Yadong on the India-Bhutan border.

    The website ekantipur.com of Nepal reported that visiting Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi urged his Nepalese hosts last week to conduct a feasibility study so that the railway could be extended to Kathmandu and beyond.

    Observers say that both sides visualise the extension of the line from the Nepalese capital to Lumbini.
    India’s sensitivities

    Aware of India’s sensitivities regarding the perceived expansion of Chinese influence, Mr. Wang proposed a Beijing-Kathmandu-New Delhi trilateral development partnership as a confidence building step. “Nepal is uniquely located between two large neighbours. We want Nepal to develop good relations with both the countries,” he observed during a media conference.

    The Chinese Foreign Minister pointed out that relations between China and India are mutually reinforcing, adding that, “Nepal and India are also reinforcing their relations for mutual benefit and we encourage positive interaction.”

    Observers say that the rail connectivity with China will spur the globalisation of the Nepalese economy. Once a rail connection with China is established, Nepalese goods can be transited to the international markets through the Eurasian transportation network.

  5. মাসুদ করিম - ৩ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (১১:৫৭ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

  6. মাসুদ করিম - ৪ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (১০:২১ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Here’s What Could Happen If Hillary Clinton Decides Not To Run In 2016

    It’s hard to imagine Hillary Rodham Clinton not running for president again — and easy to imagine the result of such a decision: political chaos.

    “It would be shocking,” says Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist who is advising Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont Democrat who is considering a presidential campaign himself.

    Early polling shows Clinton in a dominant position. Outside groups have been promoting her candidacy for more than a year. The fundraising juggernaut, EMILY’s List, is well into a foundation for the campaign to elect the nation’s first female president. All that has left the potential field frozen in place and locked down financial donors, endorsements and connections around the country.

    But what if Clinton decided against another campaign? Those considered long-shots would become instant contenders and others planning to skip the race would give it a new look.

    Some whose political fortunes and plans for 2016 could change if Clinton decides to pass on the race:

    ____

    JOE BIDEN

    In any other year, the sitting vice president would have an inside track to the nomination. But Clinton’s dominant standing within the party has marginalized Biden in early 2016 discussion. In a Clinton-free campaign, the veteran of runs for president in 1988 and 2008 would be an early front-runner.

    ____

    ELIZABETH WARREN

    The Massachusetts senator is a favorite of liberal activists, some of whom are trying to “draft” her into running for president — even though she has repeatedly said she is not. Warren’s populist economic approach and calls to rein in Wall Street resonate with many Democrats disappointed by the midterm elections and the gap between the wealthy and the poor. If Clinton decides not to run, Warren is sure to face pressure to fill the void.

    ____

    MARTIN O’MALLEY

    The outgoing Maryland governor has been a workhorse surrogate for fellow Democrats, trying to build a network of financial donors — only to be effectively frozen by Clinton. Even without Clinton in the field, the Republicans’ defeat of his hand-picked successor in Maryland — and sagging poll ratings at the end of his term — would complicate his campaign.

    ____

    JIM WEBB

    The former Virginia senator would bring a bipartisan record to the campaign: He served as President Ronald Reagan’s Navy secretary. He is an accomplished author and decorated veteran, still carrying shrapnel from his service in the Vietnam War. He is independent and at times unpredictable, and his foreign policy outlook and outsider status could shake up the primary with or without Clinton.

    ____

    BERNIE SANDERS

    Few Democrats expect the independent senator from Vermont to make much of an impact if he runs against Clinton, but that has not stopped Sanders from courting college students and liberals in Iowa and New Hampshire. He has maintained a large email distribution list, giving him a way of reaching activists, but is still more likely to shape the debate than compete for delegates no matter what Clinton does.

    ____

    ANDREW CUOMO

    When New York Gov. Mario Cuomo declined to seek the White House in 1991 after a lengthy deliberation, the vacuum helped a relatively unknown Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton. If Hillary Rodham Clinton decides not to run, it could give his son, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, an opening to jump into a race he does not plan to contest. The second-term governor has built a record of accomplishments on marriage equality, gun control and, last month, banned hydraulic fracturing in New York — a move cheered by environmentalists.

    ____

    TIM KAINE

    The Virginia senator has big-time credentials: He’s a Spanish-speaking former Catholic missionary, Harvard Law graduate, former mayor of Richmond, Virginia, and the ex-governor of the state. Kaine quickly embraced candidate Barack Obama and found himself on the short-list for vice president. Instead, Obama put him in charge of the Democratic National Committee and Kaine later succeeded Webb in the Senate. He has backed the pro-Clinton Ready for Hillary super PAC, and would get a serious look if Clinton took a pass.

    ____

    KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND

    The energetic New Yorker holds Clinton’s old Senate seat and has been talked up as a potential heir apparent. A relative newcomer to the national stage, Gillibrand has displayed a strong acumen as a legislator, fundraising moxie, and a down-to-earth sensibility as the constantly juggling mother of two boys. She has championed legislation to remove sexual assault cases from the military chain of command and promoted paid family leave for women.

    ____

    AMY KLOBUCHAR

    The first woman elected to the Senate from Minnesota, Klobuchar has made political trips to neighboring Iowa to help Democratic candidates and the party, moves that always start talk about the White House. A former prosecutor, Klobuchar has built a reputation in the Senate for working across the aisle. On the dinner circuit, she displays a folksy sense of humor that helps her connect with Democratic audiences.

    ____

    HOWARD DEAN

    The former Vermont governor and contender for the party’s 2004 presidential nomination has backed Clinton, giving the former secretary of state an advocate among the party’s liberal wing. As DNC chairman, Dean helped modernize the party’s technological capabilities, laying the ground work for Obama’s successful grassroots campaign in 2008. He’s unlikely to leave the private sector, but may be swayed if Clinton decided to take a pass on another campaign.

  7. মাসুদ করিম - ৭ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (১২:২২ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Will Sri Lanka Elect the Devil It Knows?

    If a Presidential candidate refers to himself as a devil, chances are he’s in trouble. Last week, campaigning ahead of this Thursday’s election, Mahinda Rajapaksa, the incumbent Sri Lankan President, tried hard to endear himself to an audience in the northern city of Jaffna. The crowd consisted almost entirely of Tamils, the island’s largest minority, a community that regards him with suspicion and anger. “There is a saying that the devil you know is better than the unknown angel,” Rajapaksa said. “I am the known devil, so please vote for me.” These two sentences encapsulated the swift and intriguing fall of the once-mighty President.

    In January, 2010, when Rajapaksa last ran for reëlection, the circumstances were quite different. The previous year, his Army had ended a nearly three-decade-long civil war, routing the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.) guerrillas, who had been fighting for an independent Tamil state. As the war ground to a close, it emerged that the Sri Lankan Army was inflicting horrific damage on Tamil civilians, shelling them indiscriminately in the quest to wipe out the L.T.T.E. (Jon Lee Anderson wrote about this in the magazine.) Rajapaksa ignored the mounting talk of war crimes; instead, he styled himself as a hero who could deliver a united Sri Lanka into a peaceful and prosperous future. In a land fatigued by conflict, this was an appealing pitch. The defeated and frightened Tamils, in the north and the east, voted against him, but Rajapaksa still won almost sixty per cent of the popular ballot, relying upon the Sinhalese majority for his support. A couple of months later, his coalition of parties won a hundred and forty-four of two hundred and twenty-five seats in Parliament—a strong enough majority to pass any laws.

    I lived in Sri Lanka for ten months in 2011 and 2012, and I saw Rajapaksa everywhere: on billboards and as looming cutouts, on posters plastered on the flanks of buses, in giant advertisements in the newspaper. In photographs, his hair was always tidily brushed back, his moustache draped thickly across his upper lip, and his jowls smooth and shiny. Even when he smiled, he glowered. His attire was so unvarying—a white shirt and sarong, a maroon sash around his neck, a golden talisman in his hand—that he seemed like a mascot for himself, styled as the protector of Sri Lanka and, in particular, of Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese Buddhists. Once, riding through Colombo, a friend pulled me out of our trishaw and onto a traffic island, where a pillar rose up amid a quartet of stone lions. At the top of the pillar was a gray disk representing the Buddha’s Wheel of Life; at the base was a quotation in Pali: Sukho Buddhanam Uppado (“Joyful is the birth of the Buddhas”). A plaque in Sinhalese explained that the pillar was a monument to Rajapaksa—a tribute to the man who had saved Buddhist Sri Lanka from the Tamil Hindus and Christians who had tried to carve it up.

    Under Rajapaksa, who was first elected in 2005, Sri Lanka has become a troubled, disquieting place. With remarkable obduracy, he has shrugged off internal and international pressure to investigate the Army’s human-rights abuses during the war’s final months. (The United Nations estimates that as many as forty thousand Tamil civilians died in that time.) In fact, in the years since the war the Army has only tightened its hold on the north and the east, policing the people and swallowing their land. Rajapaksa has amended the constitution to remove term limits for the Presidency, marking his intention to linger as long as he can. Many people believe that he has allied himself with Buddhist nationalist groups; he has refused to hold them to account even when, in the past three years, they have turned on Sri Lanka’s Muslims, the country’s other significant religious minority. Last June, one such group, the Bodu Bala Sena (Buddhist Power Force), attacked Muslim homes and shops in southwestern Sri Lanka, killing four people and injuring eighty. With the explicit support of the government and the Army, Buddhist chauvinists have been colonizing—there’s no other word for it—Hindu and Muslim areas, renaming towns in Sinhalese, planting pagodas where there were once temples or dargahs, and rewriting history along the way. On bus rides from Colombo to Jaffna, I saw, on either side of the A9 highway, the quick growth of holy Bo trees and ovoid pagoda domes, all installed, tended to, and guarded by soldiers.

    Rajapaksa’s family has moved into the government wholesale, as if it were an ancestral house; two of his brothers are ministers, another is the speaker of Parliament, and nearly forty other relatives hold various major and minor posts. (When I visited the old Kataragama temple, in the country’s south, the head priest complained that the custodian was transforming its character from Hindu to Buddhist. The custodian, no surprise, was a Rajapaksa.) The family has acquired a reputation for corruption, and for employing squads of thugs to settle scores. Dissent is not well received; journalists and activists live in fear of what is known as a “white-van abduction,” in which they are yanked off the road either to receive physically administered lessons or to vanish altogether. The Committee to Protect Journalists ranked Sri Lanka fourth—behind Iraq, Somalia, and the Philippines, and just ahead of Syria—on its 2014 Impunity Index, a list of countries “where journalists are slain and the killers go free.”

    On occasion, the Rajapaksas have even indulged in straight tin-pot behavior. At one point, the President’s brother Gotabhaya, the defense minister, installed a tank of sharks on his front lawn; another time, a source told me, he decided that he didn’t like the yellow of an awning above a restaurant on a road where he took his morning walks and ordered it changed to white. When a fellow-student complained that the President’s son Namal had passed his law-school exams only because he had been given his own room and a computer with Internet access, the student was allegedly threatened by police and beaten by thugs.*

    The aggregation of all of this misrule chipped away at Rajapaksa’s popularity, prompting him to call this election two years ahead of schedule, apparently still confident about his prospects. (The country’s economy has been growing at a rapid rate.) But then he encountered an unexpected and sturdy rival: Maithripala Sirisena, a minister who last month defected from Rajapaksa’s government and joined an alliance of opposition parties, taking twenty-five parliamentarians with him. “I came out because I could not stay any more with a leader who had plundered the country, government, and national wealth,” Sirisena said. Like Rajapaksa, Sirisena ardently courts the Buddhist right, and he has said that he won’t diminish the strength or the influence of the Army. But he has also promised to address corruption, to permit investigations into war crimes, and to restore the judiciary’s independence—to undo, in other words, many of the effects of the past four years of Rajapaksa’s reign.

    And yet, despite this challenge, Rajapaksa may still win. He became his country’s youngest parliamentarian in 1970, at the age of twenty-four, and he is now a veteran of many elections—“an old fox who can do this in his sleep,” as an Indian politician who knows him well put it. Sirisena, who has never run for President, has had less than two months to organize his campaign, and the coalition behind him is large but frangible. If Rajapaksa triumphs, he will likely hunker down with even greater tenacity, pulling his family closer still. He will bend the state and its machinery even more to the contours of his power, in ways that will bode poorly for Sri Lankan democracy.

    * This post has been altered to clarify allegations made about President Rajapaksa’s son Namal.

    • মাসুদ করিম - ৯ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (১০:৪৪ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

      All you need to know about Maithripala Sirisena

      Sri Lanka’s Maithripala Sirisena was a low-profile minister until he emerged as the best hope for a fractured opposition to topple South Asia’s longest-serving leader, Mahinda Rajapakse.

      The 63-year-old has become an unlikely rallying point for disaffected Sri Lankans since he walked out of Rajapakse’s government a day after sharing dinner with the strongman President.

      He has pledged to abolish the executive presidency within 100 days and return the country to a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy where the police, the judiciary, and the civil service will be independent institutions.

      Rajapakse had removed the two-term limit on the presidency and given himself more powers soon after winning a second term in 2010 in what critics say were signs of growing authoritarianism.

      He vowed to abolish the controversial 18th Amendment to Sri Lanka’s Constitution — which gives sweeping powers to the President in addition to removing the two-term limit on presidency — within 100 days of assuming charge.

      Less than two months before Sri Lanka’s presidential elections, former President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga announced her re-entry to active politics, but not as a candidate.

      Instead, she has chosen to back the common opposition candidate Maithripala Sirisena, who on Friday quit the ruling party to challenge President Mahinda Rajapaksa in the presidential polls. Sri Lanka’s Election Commission on Friday said elections will be held on January 8.

      Addressing the first common opposition press conference in Colombo, Ms. Kumaratunga said: “I am ending my silence after nine years. I have decided to re-enter politics to save the party that has been destroyed by the Rajapaksas,” she said, referring to the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) founded by her father, former Prime Minister S.W.R.D Bandaranaike. Observing that her family was against her decision, Ms. Kumaratunga said: “My son told me ‘don’t go now, Mahinda will kill you.’” However, if she did not support the common opposition, it would be a “betrayal,” she said.

      Mr. Sirisena, a senior SLFP member, served as Health Minister in President Rajapaksa’s cabinet. “But I have not been allowed to run the Ministry,” he said, adding: “The country is heading towards a dictatorship.”

      He vowed to abolish the controversial 18th Amendment to Sri Lanka’s Constitution — which gives sweeping powers to the President in addition to removing the two-term limit on presidency — within 100 days of assuming charge. “And then Ranil Wickramasinghe will be appointed Prime Minister,” he said, thanking the leader of the main Opposition, the United National Party (UNP), for allowing him to contest. Mr. Wickramasinghe’s decision to join the common platform is perceived to be a significant move in the opposition parties’ attempt to mobilise anti-incumbency votes.

      Among other SLFP members who crossed over with Mr. Sirisena was Rajitha Senaratne, who served as Fisheries Minister, and is known for his consistent pro-devolution stance even when part of the ruling coalition.

      The crossover was not unexpected, according to political analysts. “For long discontent has been simmering among the SLFP old guard because of the undemocratic ways of the Rajapaksas,” said a parliamentarian, requesting anonymity.

      President Mahinda Rajapaksa on Thursday declared the presidential elections in which he will be seeking an unprecedented third term. Known to have a considerably strong support base in Sri Lanka’s Sinhala majority-south, Mr. Rajapaksa’s ruling coalition won in the Uva Provincial elections this September by a narrow margin.

      UNP leader Ranil Wickramasinghe will be appointed Prime Minister, he said.

      Matihripala Sirisena had said before the polls that he would not withdraw troops from the island’s Tamil-majority north, as national security would be of top priority to him “as President”

      Sri Lanka’s joint opposition candidate Matihripala Sirisena on Monday said he would not withdraw troops from the island’s Tamil-majority north, as national security would be of top priority to him “as President”.

      Appearing confident of victory in the Sri Lanka’s January 8 presidential elections, Mr. Sirisena told reporters: “I will not allow the country to be divided or allow the LTTE to regroup in Sri Lanka.”

      Militarisation has been a key concern among Sri Lanka’s Northern Tamils, and President Rajapaksa — in whose government Mr. Sirisena served as Cabinet Minister until he defected to be named common opposition candidate — has often cited national security as reason for maintaining the army in the former war zone.

  8. মাসুদ করিম - ৮ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (১০:৩২ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Renowned cartoonists among victims of Charlie Hebdo attack

    The Charlie Hebdo staff killed in Paris included editor Stéphane Charbonnier and cartoonists Cabu, Wolinski and Tignous

    Stéphane Charbonnier, aka Charb, 47

    Charbonnier had been editor of Charlie Hebdo since 2009 and led the paper’s charge against the taboo on depicting the prophet Muhammad, in the name of freedom of expression. He had been under police protection since November 2011, when the satirical weekly published a special edition mocking the prophet and Islam, and a firebomb attack destroyed the paper’s offices. e was a well-known cartoonist who had previously worked for the Franco-Belgian comic magazines L’Echo des Savanes and Fluide Glacial, as well as the communist daily Humanité.

    In 2012, following a further controversy over the magazine’s depiction of Muhammad, Charbonnier told the avant-garde magazine Tel Quel: “I’m not scared of reprisals. I don’t have kids or a wife, I’ve got no car, no credit.

    “It might sound a bit pompous but I prefer to die standing than live on my knees.”

    Jean Cabut, aka Cabu, 75

    One of France’s best-known cartoonists, Cabut published many popular comic books in the 1970s and 80s. The bespectacled, mop-haired caricaturist worked for the majority of the country’s satirical magazines during his career, including Le Canard Enchaîné and the now-folded Hara-Kiri, as well as Charlie Hebdo.

    His talent for instant caricature made him a frequent participant in political television shows, during which he would produce cartoons live.

    He studied art in Paris and his first published work was with the newspaper L’Union de Reims. His creation of the cartoon character Le Grand Duduche, a bespectacled schoolboy, led to publication of a series of comic strip books in the 1960s.

    Georges Wolinski, 80

    The cartoonist Wolinski was a pillar of the French satirical world and had a long association with Charlie Hebdo, having been editor between 1970 and 1981.

    Born in Tunis, the son of a Franco-Italian mother and Polish Jewish father, he was brought up by his maternal grandparents in France.

    During his long career he worked for the majority of French satirical magazines as well as mainstream newspapers and magazines including France-Soir, Libération, L’Humanité, Le Nouvel Observateur and Paris Match. In May 1968, he founded the paper L’Enrag. He received the Legion of Honour, France’s highest distinction, in 2005.

    Bernard Verlhac, aka Tignous, 58

    Verlhac was a prolific cartoonist whose work was published in satirical magazines including Charlie Hebdo and the Franco-Belgian comic magazine Fluide Glacial, as well as French news magazines.

    He began drawing comic strips in 1980 before moving into the press. He was the author of a 2011 book entitled Five Years Under Sarkozy, about the former centre-right president Nicolas Sarkozy, who was a frequent target of the cartoonist.

    Bernard Maris, 68

    Maris was an economist and journalist who wrote the weekly Uncle Bernard column in Charlie Hebdo. The author of a book on Keynes, he graduated in economics at Toulouse, where he became a professor.

    At the time of his death he was teaching economics at the University of Paris-VIII and was on the board of Charlie Hebdo. He was also a frequent television debater on economic issues, on which he had a reputation for being anti-globalisation. He was a former scientific adviser to Attac, the international movement working for social, environmental and democratic alternatives in the globalisation process.

    Earlier in his career, Maris was a lecturer in micro-economics at the University of Iowa in the US and worked at the central bank of Peru.

    Philippe Honoré, aka Honoré, 73

    Honoré, was the artist who drew the last cartoon tweeted by the weekly only moments before the massacre. It shows the leader of Isis, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, presenting his new year message, saying “and especially good health!” Honoré was a self-educated artist who published his first illustration in the regional newspaper Sud-Ouest at the age of 16. He went on to work for major French dailies, including Le Monde and Libération, and had been with Charlie Hebdo since its foundation in 1992.

    Michel Renaud

    A visitor to Charlie Hebdo, Renaud, from Clermont-Ferrand, was a former journalist who founded a cultural festival in his home city in central France.

  9. মাসুদ করিম - ৯ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (২:৩৭ অপরাহ্ণ)

    অধ্যাপক মীজান রহমান: এক নক্ষত্রের মহাপ্রয়াণ

    আমি ডাকতাম মীজান ভাই বলে। অধ্যাপক মীজান রহমান। এই বরেণ্য মানুষটির মূল পরিচয় ছিল গণিতবিদ হিসেবে। শুধু গণিতবিদ বললে ভুল হবে, বাংলাদেশের যে কয়জন একাডেমিয়ার সঙ্গে যুক্ত শিক্ষাবিদ আন্তর্জাতিক খ্যাতি পেয়েছেন, বাংলাদেশকে পরিচিত করতে পেরেছেন দর্পভরে বিশ্বের অঙ্গনে, তার মধ্যে মীজান রহমান ছিলেন অন্যতম।

    ঢাকা বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ের স্নাতক ছিলেন তিনি; এরপর স্নাতকোত্তর ডিগ্রি নিয়েছিলেন ইংল্যান্ডের কেমব্রিজ বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ে (এমএ) এবং কানাডার ব্রান্সউইকে (পিএইচডি)। তারপর সেই ১৯৬৫ সালে কানাডার অটোয়াস্থ কার্লটন বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ে অধ্যাপনায় যোগ দিয়েছিলেন, সেখানে একটানা প্রায় পঞ্চাশ বছর ধরে বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ের ছাত্রছাত্রীদের গণিতের সঙ্গে পরিচয় করিয়ে দিয়েছেন, বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ে সেরা শিক্ষকের সম্মানসহ বহু সম্মানেই তিনি ভূষিত হয়েছেন।

    শুধু শিক্ষক হিসেবে তিনি খ্যাতিমান তা নন, শিক্ষায়তনে সাফল্য পেতে হলে যা যা দরকার, সবই তাঁর ঝুলিতে ছিল। গণিতের বিখ্যাত জার্নালগুলোতে খুঁজলেই যে কেউ পাবেন তাঁর অসংখ্য গবেষণাপত্রের হদিস; পাশাপাশি কিছুদিন আগে গণিতশাস্ত্রের পণ্ডিত জর্জ গ্যাসপারের সঙ্গে লিখেছেন মহামূল্যবান একটি পাঠ্যপুস্তক ‘বেসিক হাইপারজিওমেট্রিক সিরিজ’ (১৯৯০) শিরোনামে, যেটা প্রায় সকল বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়েই গণিতের ছাত্রদের জন্য অবশ্যপাঠ্য পুস্তক হিসেবে বিবেচিত।

    ড. মীজান বার্কলে বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ের নামকরা অধ্যাপক প্রফেসর আলবার্তো গ্রুনবাম এবং নেদারল্যাণ্ডের গণিতবিদ এরিখ কোয়েলিংক প্রমুখের সঙ্গেও গণিত বিষয়ক বহু গবেষণা করেছেন। গণিতে তাঁর অবদান এতটাই বিস্তৃত ছিল যে, ১৯৯৮ সালে কানাডার ওই বিখ্যাত বিশ্ববিদ্যালয় থেকে অবসর নেওয়ার পরেও তাঁকে ‘এমিরিটাস অধ্যাপক’ হিসেবে স্বীকৃতি দেওয়া হয়েছে।

    অধ্যাপক মীজান পরে একই বিশ্ববিদ্যালয় থেকে ‘Distinguished Research Professor’-এর খেতাবও পেয়েছিলেন। উইসকনসিন বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ের অধ্যাপক রিচার্ড এশকি নাকি তাঁকে সিম্বলিক ক্যালকুলেশনের ক্ষেত্রে ‘মাস্টার’হিসেবে ডাকতেন। গণিত বিষয়ে বাংলাদেশের কিংবদন্তির তালিকা কেউ বানাতে বসলে মীজান রহমানকে বাদ দিয়ে সেটা সম্ভব হবে বলে মনে হয় না।

    কিন্তু গণিতের কাঠখোট্টা জগতের বাইরেও তাঁর আরেকটা পরিচিতি ছিল। তিনি ছিলেন সুসাহিত্যিক। তার প্রথম দিককার উপন্যাস ‘লাল নদী’ (২০০১) পড়ে আমি বিস্মিত, আলোড়িত হয়েছিলাম, সহসা আবিষ্কার করেছিলাম এক সমাজ সচেতন প্রগতিশীল সুলেখকের প্রতিচ্ছবি। পরে জেনেছি, এই নিভৃতচারী লেখকের এই একটি নয়, একগাদা ভালো ভালো বই আছে। তার মধ্যে রয়েছে, ‘তীর্থ আমার গ্রাম, ‘প্রসঙ্গ নারী’, ‘অ্যালবাম’, ‘অনন্যা আমার দেশ’, ‘আনন্দ নিকেতন’, ‘দুর্যোগের পূর্বাভাষ’, ভাবনার আত্মকথন’, ‘শুধু মাটি নয়’প্রভৃতি।

    সে সময় লজ্জিতই হয়েছিলাম তার বইয়ের সঙ্গে আগে পরিচিত না হওয়ায়। এর পরে যখনই সুযোগ পেয়েছি মীজান রহমানকে পড়বার চেষ্টা করেছি, নিজ উদ্যোগেই। এক ধরনের দায়িত্ববোধ থেকেই। তাঁর লেখা পড়ে কখনও হতাশ হইনি, বরং আলোকিত হয়েছি নানাভাবে। ভালোলাগা আরও বেড়েছে পরবর্তীতে যখন জানলাম তিনি একজন ধর্মমোহমুক্ত সত্যিকার মুক্তমনা মানুষ, একজন মানবতাবাদী। শুধু তাই নয়, দর্শনের জগতে আমরা যাদের ‘স্কেপটিক’বলি, মীজান রহমান সেই গোত্রভুক্ত ছিলেন।

    সে অনুভূতি আমার আরও দৃঢ় হয়েছে পরবর্তীতে মুক্তমনা ব্লগে প্রকাশিত তাঁর লেখাগুলো পড়ে। তিনি ধর্মগ্রন্থের বাণী কেবল নিনির্মেষ স্তব করতেন না, বরং সময় সময় প্রকৃত অনুসন্ধিৎসু বিজ্ঞানীর মতো ক্রিটিক্যালি দেখতে চাইতেন। তাই অন্য অনেকের মতো তাতে বিগ ব্যাং খুঁজে পাননি, বরং তাতে বহু সময়েই আবিষ্কার করেছেন অপবিজ্ঞান, কুসংস্কার, অসাম্য আর নিপীড়নের দীর্ঘদেহী করাল ছায়া। তিনি কোনো ধরনের অলৌকিকতায় বিশ্বাস করতেন না। অদৃশ্য স্বর্গ-নরকে বিশ্বাস ছিল না তাঁর। তিনি পার্থিব জগতের কথা তুলে ধরে প্রায়ই বলতেন: “আমার স্বর্গ এখানেই”। তিনি আগে থেকেই মরণোত্তর দেহদান করে যাবার কথা বলে গেছেন।

    কোনো এক বিচিত্র কারণে তিনি আমার লেখা খুব মনোযোগ দিয়ে পড়তেন। ব্লগে আমার অনেক লেখাতেই তাঁর মন্তব্য আছে, আছে অফুরন্ত প্রংশসাবাক্য–- যা এখন আমাকে লজ্জিতই করে দেয়। বিডিনিউজ টোয়েন্টিফোর ডটকমের মতামত বিশ্লেষণ বিভাগে আমি ঠিক এর আগে যে লেখাটি লিখেছিলাম, ‘সবই ব্যাদে আছে’ শিরোনামে-– আজ গিয়ে দেখলাম সেখানেও তিনি ছোট একটি মন্তব্য করেছেন। প্রশংসা করেছেন লেখাটির, একমত পোষণ করেছেন লেখাটির অভিমতের সঙ্গে।

    ইমেইল করেও মাঝে সাঝে এই কাজ করতেন তিনি। শুধু তাই নয়। ‘আলো হাতে চলিয়াছে আঁধারের যাত্রী’ নামে একটা বই লিখেছিলাম আমি ২০০৫ সালের দিকে। ‘কী কুক্ষণে’ সেটা মীজান রহমানের চোখেও পড়ে গিয়েছিল। এর পর থেকেই তিনি আমার এ বইটি সবাইকে পড়তে বলতেন। তিনি বলতেন, এই বইটা পড়লে আর মীজান রহমানের লেখা বই পড়ার দরকার হবে না। (পাঠকেরা বিশ্বাস করবেন কিনা জানি না, এই কথাটি তিনি এমনকি তাঁর প্রকাশিত গ্রন্থ ‘শূন্য’-এর ভূমিকায় লিখে দিয়েছেন!)

    মাঝে-সাঝেই আমি দূর-দূরান্ত থেকে ফোন কল পেতাম, মীজান ভাইয়ের উপদেশে নাকি তারা বইটি পড়েছেন এবং আমার সঙ্ যোগাযোগ করেছেন। তাদের মধ্যে সাধারণ পাঠক থেকে শুরু করে এমনকি বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ের অবসরপ্রাপ্ত শিক্ষকেরাও ছিলেন। অজানা অচেনা মানুষের কাছ থেকে এ ধরনের ফোনকল পেয়ে লজ্জায় আমার কান লাল হয়ে যেত।

    তাঁর মতো একজন কৃতবিদ্য মানুষ আমার লেখার এভাবে প্রশংসা করছেন, মানুষকে বলে বেড়াচ্ছেন এটা আমি মানতে পারতাম না কিছুতেই। ফোন করে তাই মৃদু বকুনিও দিতাম ‘এসব ঢং’ করার জন্য। তিনি স্মিত হাসতেন। বড্ড প্রশ্রয়ের সে হাসি। পরের দিকে আমি হাল ছেড়ে দিয়েছিলাম। জানতাম মীজান রহমান এমনই।

    আজ তিনি মারা যাবার পর এখান ওখান থেকে জানলাম, এ কাজটা শুধু তিনি আমার সঙ্গেই করেননি, আরও অনেক লেখকের সঙ্ই করেছেন। ‘ডেইলি স্টার’এর কলামিস্ট মাহফুজুর রহমান ‘মুক্তমনা’র ইংরেজি ব্লগে একটি লেখা দিয়েছেন, ‘A tribute to Dr. Mizan Rahman’ শিরোনামে। সেখানে তিনি বলেছেন, ‘ডেইলি স্টার’এ প্রকাশিত একটি প্রবন্ধ পড়ে অন্য কারও কাছ থেকে ফোন নম্বর যোগাড় করে মাহফুজ সাহেবের বাসায় ফোন করেছিলেন মীজান রহমান, সুদূর অটোয়া থেকে। এর আগে এমনকি চিনতেনও না তাকে। কত নিরহংকারী একজন মানুষ হলে এটা করা সম্ভব!

    শিক্ষা, সংস্কৃতি, মনন এবং চিন্তায় তিনি ছিলেন আক্ষরিক অর্থেই হিমালয়স্পর্শী একজন মানুষ। অথচ কারও চিন্তার সঙ্গে ঐক্য হলে, কারও লেখা ভালো লাগলে তাকে বুকে জড়িয়ে ধরে আপন করে নিতে কুণ্ঠিত হতেন না কখনওই।

    কিন্তু তার মানে এই নয় যে, তিনি কেবল প্রশংসাই করে গেছেন। যেখানে দরকার সমালোচনাও করেছেন বিস্তর। কিন্তু তাঁর শেখানোর পদ্ধতিটাও ছিল তাঁর মননের মতোই মার্জিত, আলোকিত। এ প্রসঙ্গে একটি ঘটনা ‍তুলে ধরার জন্য প্রাসঙ্গিক হিসেবে কবি শামসুর রহমানের লেখা ‘সুধাংশু যাবে না’ শিরোনামের বিখ্যাত কবিতাটা তুলে ধরছি:

    “লুণ্ঠিত মন্দির, আর অগ্নিদগ্ধ বাস্তুভিটা থেকে
    একটি বিবাগী স্বর সুধাংশুকে ছুঁলো
    ‘আখেরে কি তুমি চলে যাবে?’বেলা শেষে
    সুধাংশু ভস্মের মাঝে খুঁজে
    বেড়ায় দলিল, ভাঙা চুড়ি, সিঁদুরের স্তব্ধ কৌটা,
    স্মৃতির বিক্ষিপ্ত পুঁতিমালা।

    স্বর বলে, ‘লুটেরা তোমাকে জব্দ ক’রে
    ফেলে আশে পাশে
    তোমার জীবনে নিত্যদিন লেপ্টে থাকে
    পশুর চেহারাসহ ঘাতকের ছায়া,
    আতঙ্কের বাদুড় পাখার নিচে কাটাচ্ছ প্রহর,
    তবু তুমি যেও না সুধাংশু।’

    আকাশের নীলিমা এখনো
    হয়নি ফেরারি, শুদ্ধাচারী গাছপালা
    আজও সবুজের
    পতাকা ওড়ায়, ভরা নদী
    কোমর বাঁকায় তন্বী বেদিনীর মতো।
    এ পবিত্র মাটি ছেড়ে কখনো কোথাও
    পরাজিত সৈনিকের মতো
    সুধাংশু যাবে না।”

    গত বছরের জানুয়ারিতে দেশে সংখ্যালঘু জনগোষ্ঠীর উপর নিপীড়ন বৃদ্ধি পাওয়ায় কবি শামসুর রাহমানের ওই কবিতার চরিত্র ‘সুধাংশু’কে টেনে এনে আমি প্রবন্ধ লিখেছিলাম, ‘সুধাংশু তুই পালা’ শিরোনামে। আমার লেখায় হতাশা আর বিরক্তি প্রকাশ করে লিখেছিলাম, দেশের যা অবস্থা– এখন আমি রোমান্টিক কবির মতো ‘এ পবিত্র মাটি ছেড়ে কখনো কোথাও, পরাজিত সৈনিকের মতো সুধাংশু যাবে না’ বলে অহংকার করি না, বরং প্র্যাকটিকাল হয়েই ভাবি– ‘আমার কাতর মিনতি বন্ধু সুধাংশু, এখনই তুই পালা’।

    এর কিছুদিন পরেই মীজান রহমান আমার লেখাটির প্রত্যুত্তরে মুক্তমনায় লিখলেন:

    “না, তারা যাবে না কোথাও।”

    স্পষ্ট করেই বললেন মহামূল্যবান কিছু কথা, যা আমি নতমস্তকে শিরোধার্য করে আছি আজও:

    ‘‘আমরা মুসলমান জাতি নই, আমরা হিন্দু জাতি নই, বৌদ্ধ বা খ্রিস্টান জাতি নই, চাকমা বা সাঁওতাল জাতিও নই, আমরা ‘মানবজাতি’। আমরা একটি বাঙালি জাতি। আমাদের জাতিসত্তা এক, আমাদের নৃতাত্ত্বিক পরিচয় এক, আমাদের বর্ণগোত্র সব এক। এমনকি আমাদের ধর্মও এক— সেই ধর্মের নাম ‘মানবধর্ম’। এই মানবধর্ম শব্দটি যাদের অভিধানের অন্তর্গত নয়, এই শব্দটি যারা উচ্চারণ করার ক্ষমতা নিয়ে জন্মায়নি বা উচ্চারণ করতে অনিচ্ছুক, তারা আমাদের দেশে অবাঞ্ছিত, অনাদৃত। দেশ যদি কাউকে ছেড়ে যেতেই হয় তাহলে সংখ্যালঘুরা ছাড়বে না— হিন্দু-বৌদ্ধ-খ্রিস্টান-চাকমা-সাঁওতালরা ছাড়বে না। ছাড়বে যাদের উপস্থিতি আমাদের পথের চলাকে বারবার, বার বার, প্রতিহত করেছে, আমাদের জাতীয় সম্মানকে খর্ব করে দিয়েছে, আমাদের জাতীয় পতাকাকে, জাতীয় সঙ্গীতকে, জাতীয় উচ্চাকাঙ্ক্ষাকে অপমান করেছে, তারা।’’

    আদ্যোপান্ত মানবতাবাদী ঋজু বাঙালি-এই হচ্ছেন মীজান ভাই। বয়সে আমার বাবার থেকেও বড়। কিন্তু আমাদের কাছে উনি সব সময়েই ছিলেন ‘মীজান ভাই’। আমার স্ত্রী বন্যা অবশ্য আরও অনেক আগে থেকেই তাঁকে চিনতেন। তাঁর বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ের শিক্ষক ছিলেন তিনি। তিনি ছিলেন কানাডার সকল মুক্তমনা এবং প্রগতিশীল তরুণ-তরুণীদের কাছে একেবারে ছায়ার মতোন। মণিকা রশীদ, লুৎফুন্নাহার লতা, ভজন সরকার, সাদেরা সুজন, ফেরদৌস নাহার, শফিউল ইসলামদের একেবারে কাছের মানুষ ছিলেন মীজান ভাই। ছিলেন বাঙালিদের আড্ডার মধ্যমণি।

    মীজান রহমানের কিছু দিক ছিল যা হয়তো এমনকি তার কাছের মানুষেরাও অবহিত নন। তিনি সম্ভবত ছিলেন কানাডার প্রথম বাংলাদেশি অধ্যাপক। তিনি শুধু গণিতবিদই ছিলেন না, মুক্তিযুদ্ধের সময়টিতে সেখানকার প্রবাসী বাংলাদেশিদের সংগঠিত করেছিলেন, তাদের দিয়ে তহবিল গঠন করে কোলকাতায় বাংলাদেশের হাইকমিশনারের কাছে পাঠানোর ব্যবস্থা করতেন। প্রবাসে জনমত গঠন, বাংলাদেশে পাকিস্তানি গণহত্যার সঠিক চিত্র তুলে ধরে পশ্চিমা দেশগুলোর সরকারকে চিঠি পাঠানোসহ স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধে পরোক্ষভাবে অনেক গুরুত্বপূর্ণ অবদান রেখে গেছেন তিনি। তাঁর লেখালেখিতে মুক্তিযুদ্ধের প্রেরণা ছিল স্পষ্ট। এমনকি মুক্তমনায় যে লেখাগুলো পোস্ট করতেন, সেগুলো তিনি শেষ করতেন ‘মুক্তিসন’ উল্লেখ করে।

    তিনি ভালো রান্না করতেন। তবে সেটা যত না শখে, তার চেয়েও বেশি বোধ করি ‘জীবনের প্রয়োজনে’। অনেকেই হয়তো জানেন না, মীজান রহমানের স্ত্রী মারা যাবার আগে দীর্ঘদিন পক্ষাঘাতগ্রস্ত অবস্থায় শয্যাশায়ী ছিলেন। মীজান রহমান তখন একা হাতে সংসার সামলেছেন। বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ে ক্লাস করিয়েছেন, বাসায় ফিরে এসে রান্না করেছেন, স্ত্রীকে খাইয়েছেন, তাঁর যাবতীয় পরিচর্যা করেছেন। শুধু তাই নয়, তাঁর ছোট দুই ছেলেকে একা হাতে মানুষ করেছেন। তাঁর দু’ছেলে, বাবু এবং রাজা, বলা যায় মীজান রহমানের হাতেই মানুষ হয়ে বাড়ির গণ্ডি ছেড়েছেন। এ ধরনের অনুপম দৃষ্টান্ত বাঙালি সমাজে খুব বেশি দেখা যায় না।

    ছিলেন মনে-প্রাণে আমূল নারীবাদী। প্রথাগত জেন্ডার-রোলে বিশ্বাস ছিল না তাঁর। রান্না করা, বাচ্চা মানুষ করা যারা মেয়েদের কাজ মনে করতেন, মীজান রহমান কেবল তত্ত্বে নয়, ব্যবহারিক প্রয়োগেও এই সমস্ত আপ্তবাক্য ভুল প্রমাণ করে গেছেন। তাঁর সামনে নারীদের অপমানসূচক কোনো কথা বলা যেত না, তা যতই হাস্যরসে বলা হোক না কেন। কতবার আমার স্ত্রী বন্যাকে খোঁচাতে গিয়ে মীজান ভাইয়ের চোখরাঙানি খেয়েছি তার ইয়ত্তা নেই।

    আন্তঃধর্ম বিয়ের খুব বড় সমর্থক ছিলেন মীজান ভাই। এ নিয়ে কোনো আনুষ্ঠানিক কথাবার্তা না হলেও তাঁর ‘বায়াস’ টের পেতাম। আমাকে এবং আমার স্ত্রী বন্যাকে তাঁর ভালোলাগার একটা বড় কারণ আমি বুঝি, তাঁর দৃষ্টিতে আমরা ধর্মীয় সংকীর্ণতা অতিক্রম করে জীবন সাজাতে পেরেছি। আমাদের কাছে এটা তেমন বড় ব্যাপার না হলেও পরে জেনেছি, এ ধরনের অন্য সকল দম্পতিও মীজান রহমানের খুব প্রিয়। তাঁর মধ্যে কোনো সংকীর্ণতা ছিল না। আসলে চিন্তায়-মননে তিনি এতটাই অগ্রগামী ছিলেন যে, অনেক প্রগতিশীল তরুণদেরও লজ্জায় ফেলে দিতে পারতেন।

    আর তাঁর লেখালেখি নিয়ে নতুন করে আর কী বলব? তাঁর গদ্যরীতির দারুণ ভক্ত ছিলাম আমি। তাঁর ভাষা ছিল খুব আধুনিক, ঝরঝরে। ‘শূন্য’ নামে একটি বই লিখেছিলেন, ২০১২ সালে। গণিতের বিষয়াদি নিয়ে বই। কাজেই অনেক কাটখোট্টা হবার কথা। কিন্তু মীজান রহমানের লেখনীর গুণে হয়ে উঠল ঠিক বিপরীত। ২০১২ সালে বই মেলায় প্রকাশিত বিজ্ঞান এবং গণিতের বইগুলোর মধ্যে ‘শূন্য’ বইটিকে অন্যতম গুরুত্বপূর্ণ বই হিসেবে আমি বিবেচনায় রেখেছিলাম। শুধু তাই নয়, বইটি সেটি পড়তে গিয়ে এবং রিভিউ করতে গিয়ে বুঝেছিলাম যুগপৎ বিজ্ঞান এবং বাংলা সাহিত্যে এমন বই দুর্লভ। আর পাশাপাশি তিনি বোধকরি ছিলেন বাংলা ব্লগ-জগতের সবচেয়ে বয়োজ্যেষ্ঠ ব্লগার। চিরতরুণ মীজান ভাই ছাড়া বিরাশি বছর বয়সে আর কেউ কি এভাবে বাংলায় ব্লগ করে গেছেন?

    আমার সঙ্গে একটা বই লেখার কথা ছিল তাঁর। তার মতো সফল একাডেমিশিয়ান এবং সুসাহিত্যিকের আমার মতো ছাপোষা কারও সঙ্গে কিছু লেখার কথা নয়। কিন্তু লিখলেন। বিপুল উৎসাহে প্রায় পাঁচশ পৃষ্ঠার একটা বই লিখে শেষ করে ফেললেন। পাণ্ডুলিপি শেষ করে আমরা দু’জন মিলে বইটার শিরোনাম দিলাম, ‘শূন্য থেকে মহাবিশ্ব’। প্রচ্ছদও হয়ে গেল। বইটা নিয়ে দারুণ উচ্চাশা ছিল তাঁর। কথা হলেই শিশুর মতো উৎফুল্ল হয়ে উঠতেন। পাণ্ডুলিপি গত বছরই জমা দেওয়া হয়েছিল। কিন্তু বইটি দেখে যেতে পারলেন না। শুদ্ধস্বরের প্রকাশক টুটুলকে প্রায়ই ইমেইল করতেন বইটার ব্যাপারে। হয়তো বুঝতে পেরেছিলেন তাঁর সময় ফুরিয়ে আসছে দ্রুত। বইটি শেষ পর্যন্ত দেখে যেতে পারলেন না। শূন্যেই হারিয়ে গেলেন প্রিয় মীজান ভাই।

    আজ হোক, কাল হোক বইটি হয়তো বেরুবে, কিন্তু আমি আমার ‘যদ্যপি আমার গুরু’ মীজান ভাইকে কোথায় খুঁজে পাব? কোন্ ঠিকানায় পাঠাব আমি বইয়ের প্রকাশিত কপিগুলো?

  10. মাসুদ করিম - ৯ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (৩:১৭ অপরাহ্ণ)

    France | Present Company

    This article from the January 2015 print issue was published before the killing of twelve people at the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hedbo.

    SARAH OUSSEKINE REMEMBERS very well the morning of 6 December 1986. She was getting ready for her first day on a new job when she heard on the radio that a student had been killed in Paris the previous night, at a protest in the city’s Latin Quarter against proposed university reforms. “I had no idea then that they were talking of my brother,” Oussekine told me when we met in early October. “He was at a jazz club, not the protest.”

    Sarah’s brother, Malik, was twenty-two years old. As it later transpired, he had left a club shortly after midnight, and been chased and beaten unconscious by two motorcycle-mounted officers from a unit sent in to break up the demonstration. An ambulance eventually took him to a hospital, where he died within a few hours. Outrage followed: 400,000 people attended Malik’s funeral, protests against the killing shook all of France, motorbike police squads were disbanded and the proposed reforms binned.

    Malik Oussekine is widely remembered in France today as a symbol of state violence against the country’s minorities. Though the exact circumstances of his death are still disputed, it is highly probable that his ethnicity played a part in the assault. Then, as now, racial profiling by the police is frequent, as is the use of disproportionate force. Yet, in much of the media and the public mind, blame is shifted away from the police and onto the victims of such practices—minorities, who are often considered predisposed to crime and violence, and seen as threats to mainstream French society.

    This is particularly acute in the case of French Muslims—whether adherents of Islam or simply citizens of Muslim parentage—who many in the country see as practitioners of a regressive culture at best, and closeted extremists at worst. France’s Internal Ministry estimates the community’s population at between five and six million, though others place the number at least twice as high (French law forbids census counts by religion). France’s immigrant-origin citizens, the majority of them Muslims with roots in Africa, are marginalised; a 2013 study by the Labour Ministry found that 22 percent of African-origin citizens were unemployed, compared to only 8.8 percent of the total population. Many French people hold integration up as a solution to this marginalisation, while accusing immigrants of lacking either the will or the ability to adopt conventional, secular societal values. But that belief ignores the complex realities and identities of many French Muslims, whose stories suggest that France’s heated national debate on integration is distracting from questions of discrimination.

    “Most know my brother Malik as the son of Muslim immigrants, but few know that he was training to become a Catholic priest,” Oussekine told me when we met in October in Saint-Denis, a Parisian suburb. We were at her office, a small apartment from which she runs Voix d’Elles Rebelles—Voices of Rebels—a feminist group that assists women of immigrant origin facing sexism, violence or racism. She said the policemen who attacked Malik got away with no more than suspended prison sentences—for a term of five years for one, and of two for the other. “Now I channel all my anger into positive action,” she said.

    Oussekines’s Algerian father and grandfather fought for France in the First and Second World War respectively. This was before a bloody war led to their country’s independence from France in 1962. Her father was among the many from former French colonies in north and sub-Saharan Africa who settled in France as construction workers during a thirty–year economic boom that lasted until 1975. These immigrants were segregated into hastily built suburbs, or banlieues, most of which came to be, and remain, dominated by poor minority communities. France’s colonial hangover generates hostility towards its citizens of immigrant origin, and this has been further reinforced by an increasing confluence of patriotism and Islamophobia.

    Many second-generation immigrants adopted new names to improve their prospects of getting jobs and renting housing. Oussekine, who is now fifty-five, started using her current name when she was eighteen, in place of her given name, Nassera, which she was told sounded “too Arab.” The change still rankles. “I am French,” she said, “but why should I have to sever myself from my personal history to aspire to some pre-fixed notion of French-ness? I’m not a practicing Muslim, but should that even matter? In France, integration means forced assimilation.”

    A few weeks later, I met Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, a feminist sociologist of Algerian origin, at a restaurant near her Paris home.Guénif-Souilamas is a co-author of the book Les féministes et le garçon arabe—Feminists and the Arab Boy—which argues that the French Muslim man is construed in the national imagination as “triply foreign” to modernity: foreign to the republican ideal of rational secularism, to French ethnicity, and to egalitarian feminism. Over lunch, she told me that in arguing for universal emancipation and trying to “do what’s good for Muslim girls and women,” white French feminists propagate notions of a uniform modernity similar to those once used to justify colonial subjugation. Guénif-Souilamas said that dynamic still exists in France today—that by presenting Muslims as emblems of regression and public disorder, the state legitimises an inordinate preoccupation with security.

    According to Guénif-Souilamas, Muslim women are commonly seen as passive victims of backward cultural practices, with no agency of their own. As a result, the matter of their dress has become hugely politicised. In 2004, the government banned hijabs, or headscarves, which are worn by only a small minority of Muslim women and girls, from all public schools. Then, in 2011, it banned the niqab, or full-face veil, worn at the time by no more than a few hundred in France, from all public places. Guénif-Souilamas said that middle-class white feminists focus excessively on valorising a kind of femininity promoted by glossy lifestyle magazines, taking it as a basic women’s right that everyone ought naturally to aspire to. What many fail to understand, she added, is that for some women wearing the scarf or veil is a radical method of “repoliticising feminism, or of reaffirming their postcolonial identities.”

    I spoke with one of them on a warm evening in late September, at a trendy café by Paris’s Canal Saint-Martin. Two weeks earlier, I had spotted a young woman in the metro wearing a brown hijab and carrying a matching leather bag, typing furiously into a smart phone. I asked if we could meet. She agreed, on the condition that I not reveal her name.

    “Wearing the headscarf earns me respect and brings me peace,” the nineteen-year-old told me. She insisted that her parents, affluent Moroccan immigrants, allowed her complete freedom, and nobody forced her to dress as she did. “I have to save my body for my future husband,” she explained. She refused to eat or drink anything, and had insisted on meeting away from her own neighbourhood, a banlieue north of Paris. The summer holidays had just ended, and I noticed that, like many of the other people around us, she had a tan. She told me she had gotten it in Morocco, at a women-only pool that allowed her to sunbathe in a bikini away from men’s eyes. She said she found that “cool.”

    The young woman is studying engineering at one of France’s top universities—not to become an engineer, she told me, but to “serve as an educated mother and wife.” It angered her that her mother never wears a hijab because, she said, her mother is ashamed of her own roots, and overly eager to conform to French ideals of integration. She said neither of her parents is strictly religious, though they do observe Ramadan. She began praying when she was sixteen, and started wearing the hijab at seventeen. She told me she gets all her religious teaching from “wise men” on the internet.

    Stories such as these have been setting off alarm bells in France recently. My interviewee fit the profile of the roughly six dozen young women known to have left France to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Nearly all reported cases have involved children of non-religious parents, who were indoctrinated online. These recruits have surprised many who initially assumed their extremist drift was connected to religious orthodoxy among French Muslims. The young woman told me she detests the media “because they only tell lies.” As we walked towards a metro station, chatting about Bollywood films, I asked what it meant for her to be French. “I love cheese,” she said, laughing.

    Humour sometimes helps diffuse the tensions surrounding Muslims’ place in French society. Some of the country’s funniest and best-known stand-up comedians are of immigrant origin. One of them, Sophia Aram, was born to Moroccan migrants, and spent her first twenty years in the banlieue of Trappes, west of Paris. We met at a bistro near her home in Paris, in mid October. Aram has no qualms about being an unwed mother and an atheist, even though her father is a devout Muslim “whose religion has never come in the way of French values.” She co-hosts a live radio show, where she recently joked about the young women who “met god on Facebook last week” and set out to wage jihad.

    On the show, Aram often pokes fun at people invited onto a preceding news programme, while sitting right across from them. In March 2011, she launched into Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front party and daughter of the party’s infamously racist founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Speaking about Marine’s autobiography, released in 2006, Aram laced her monologue with rich irony. “When I read your book, I realised you were insulted, mocked, rejected all your life because of your name,” she said, drawing a parallel to Muslims facing discrimination because of theirs. Then she turned the rhetoric of integration on one of its most high-profile practitioners. “When I told your story to my aunty Fatiha, she started crying,” Aram said, before switching to a heavily Arabic-accented voice and deliberately distorting Marine’s name. “‘Ah la la! Poor Marylene Li Pen. Everyone rejected her. That’s why she joined the National Front … Marylene Li Pen has a problem of integration. She should try harder to understand French values. In our country, we can liberate ourselves from the imperiousness of our fathers.’”

  11. মাসুদ করিম - ১১ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (১১:১৯ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    চাষী নজরুল ইসলাম আর নেই

    জাতীয় চলচ্চিত্র পুরস্কার ও একুশে পদকজয়ী নির্মাতা চাষী নজরুল ইসলাম রাজধানীর একটি হাসপাতালে চিকিৎসাধীন অবস্থায় মারা গেছেন।

    রোববার ভোর ৬টার দিকে তার মৃত্যু হয় বলে ল্যাবএইড হাসপাতালের সহকারী মহাব্যবস্থাপক সাইফুর রহমান লেনিন জানিয়েছেন। দীর্ঘদিন ধরে ক্যান্সারে আক্রান্ত এই নির্মাতাকে শনিবার সকাল থেকে লাইফ সাপোর্টে রাখা হয়েছিল।

    স্বাধীন বাংলাদেশের প্রথম মুক্তিযুদ্ধভিত্তিক চলচ্চিত্রের পরিচালক চাষী নজরুল ইসলামের বয়স হয়েছিল ৭৩ বছর।

    সকাল ৯টার দিকে তার মরদেহ কমলাপুরে জসীমউদ্দিন সড়কে নিজের বাসায় নেওয়া হয়েছে বলে জাতীয়তাবাদী সামাজিক সাংস্কৃতিক সংস্থা-জাসাসের যুগ্ম সাধারণ সম্পাদক শামসুদ্দিন দিদার জানিয়েছেন।

    তিনি বলেন, সর্ব সাধারণের শ্রদ্ধা নিবেদনের জন্য বেলা ১টা পর্যন্ত বাসায় তার মরদেহ রাখা হবে। এরপর ল্যাবএইডের হিমঘরে রাখা হবে মরদেহ।

    চাষী নজরুল ইসলামের দুই মেয়ের একজনের স্বামী ম্যানিলা থাকেন জানিয়ে দিদার বলেন, তিনি ফিরলে সোমবার বিক্রমপুরে পারিবারিক কবরস্থানে এই চলচ্চিত্র পরিচালকের দাফন হবে। আর আগে সকালে এফডিসি ও জাতীয় প্রেসক্লাবে শ্রদ্ধা নিবেদনের পর জাতীয় মসজিদ বায়তুল মোকাররমে তার জানাজা হবে।

    ১৯৪১ সালের ২৩ অক্টোবর শ্রীনগর থানার সমষপুর গ্রামে মোসলেহ উদ্দিন খান ও শায়েস্তা খানমের ঘরে জন্ম হয় চাষী নজরুল ইসলামের। চার ভাই ও তিন বোনের মধ্যে তিনি ছিলেন সবার বড়।

    গত মাসের শুরুতে গুরুতর অসুস্থ হয়ে অধ্যাপক সৈয়দ আকরাম হোসেনের তত্ত্বাবধানে ল্যাবএইড হাসপাতালে ভর্তি হয়েছিলেন ‘ওরা ১১ জন’র নির্মাতা।

    ১৯৬১ সালে ফতেহ লোহানীর ‘আছিয়া’ সিনেমার সহকারী পরিচালক হিসেবে চলচ্চিত্রে আসেন চাষী নজরুল ইসলাম। এরপর পরিচালক ওয়াহেদ-উল-হকের সঙ্গেও বেশ কিছু দিন সহকারী পরিচালক হিসেবে কাজ করেছেন তিনি।

    মুক্তিযুদ্ধভিত্তিক প্রথম পূর্ণাঙ্গ চলচ্চিত্র ‘ওরা ১১ জন’ পরিচালনা করেন ১৯৭২ সালে। ছবিটি ব্যাপক প্রশংসা পায়।

    এরপর ‘সংগ্রাম’, ‘ভালো মানুষ’, ‘বাজিমাত’, ‘বেহুলা লক্ষিন্দর’, ‘পদ্মা মেঘনা যমুনা, ‘হাঙর নদী গ্রেনেড’, ‘হাসন রাজা’, ‘মেঘের পরে মেঘ’, ‘শাস্তি’ ও ‘সুভা’র মতো সিনেমা নির্মাণ করেছেন তিনি।

    ১৯৮২ সালে বুলবুল-কবরী-আনোয়ারাকে নিয়ে ‘দেবদাস’ নির্মাণ করেছিলেন চাষী নজরুল ইসলাম। শরৎচন্দ্র চট্টোপাধ্যায়ের বিয়োগান্ত এই কাহিনী নিয়ে ২০১৩ সালে আবার শাকিব খান-অপু বিশ্বাস-মৌসুমীকে নিয়ে নির্মাণ করেন চলচ্চিত্রটি।

    ১৯৮৬ সালে ‘শুভদা’, ১৯৯৭ সালে ‘হাঙর নদী গ্রেনেড’ চলচ্চিত্রের জন্য তিনি শ্রেষ্ঠ পরিচালক হিসেবে জাতীয় চলচ্চিত্র পুরস্কার পান। ২০০৪ সালে পেয়েছেন একুশে পদক।

  12. মাসুদ করিম - ১৩ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (৯:৫৬ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    The Surprising History of the Pencil

    by Maria Popova

    What medieval smuggling has to do with the atomic structure of carbon.

    Having previously explored such mysteries as who invented writing and how sounds became shapes, it’s time to turn to something much less mysterious, a seemingly mundane yet enormously influential tool of human communication: the humble pencil.

    “Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak,” states the first of Margaret Atwood’s 10 rules of writing. “But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.” But even though the pencil has fueled such diverse feats of creative culture as celebrated artists’ sketchbooks, Marilyn Monroe’s soulful unpublished poems, Lisa Congdon’s stunning portraits, and David Byrne’s diagrams of the human condition, it has only been around for a little over two hundred years. In the altogether fascinating 100 Essential Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know: Math Explains Your World (public library), John D. Barrow tells the story of this underrated technological marvel:

    The modern pencil was invented in 1795 by Nicholas-Jacques Conte, a scientist serving in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. The magic material that was so appropriate for the purpose was the form of pure carbon that we call graphite. It was first discovered in Europe, in Bavaria at the start of the fifteenth century; although the Aztecs had used it as a marker several hundred years earlier. Initially it was believed to be a form of lead and was called ‘plumbago’ or black lead (hence the ‘plumbers’ who mend our lead water-carrying pipes), a misnomer that still echoes in our talk of pencil ‘leads’. It was called graphite only in 1789, using the Greek word ‘graphein’ meaning ‘to write’. Pencil is an older word, derived from the Latin ‘pencillus’, meaning ‘little tail’, to describe the small ink brushes used for writing in the Middle Ages.

    But the history of the pencil, like that of many seminal innovations, has a dark side:

    The purest deposits of lump graphite were found in Borrowdale near Keswick [England] in the Lake District in 1564 and spawned quite a smuggling industry and associated black economy in the area. During the nineteenth century a major pencil manufacturing industry developed around Keswick in order to exploit the high quality of the graphite.

    And yet the pencil industry blossomed:

    The first factory opened in 1832, and the Cumberland Pencil Company has just celebrated its 175th anniversary; although the local mines have long been closed and supplies of the graphite used now come from Sri Lanka and other far away places. Cumberland pencils were those of the highest quality because the graphite used shed no dust and marked the paper very well.

    Plain as it appears, however, the pencil has evolved significantly since its invention:

    Conte’s original process for manufacturing pencils involved roasting a mixture of water, clay and graphite in a kiln at 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit before encasing the resulting soft solid in a wooden surround. The shape of that surround can be square, polygonal or round, depending on the pencil’s intended use — carpenters don’t want round pencils that are going to roll off the workbench. The hardness or softness of the final pencil ‘lead’ can be determined by adjusting the relative fractions of clay and graphite in the roasting mixture. Commercial pencil manufacturers typically market 20 grades of pencil, from the softest, 9B, to the hardest 9H, with the most popular intermediate value, HB, lying midway between H and B. ‘H’ means hard and ‘B’ means black. The higher the B number, the more graphite gets left on the paper. There is also an ‘F’, or Fine point, which is a hard pencil for writing rather than drawing.

    Barrow offers the science behind an oft-cited trivia factlet:

    The strange thing about graphite is that it is a form of pure carbon that is one of the softest solids known, and one of the best lubricants because the six carbon atoms that link to form a ring can slide easily over adjacent rings. Yet, if the atomic structure is changed, there is another crystalline form of pure carbon, diamond, that is one of the hardest solids known.

    For the mathematically-minded, Barrow offers a delightful curiosity-quencher:

    An interesting question is to ask how long a straight line could be drawn with a typical HB pencil before the lead was exhausted. The thickness of graphite left on a sheet of paper by a soft 2B pencil is about 20 nanometers and a carbon atom has a diameter of 0.14 nanometers, so the pencil line is only about 143 atoms thick. The pencil lead is about 1 mm in radius and therefore ? square mm in area. If the length of the pencil is 15 cm, then the volume of graphite to be spread out on a straight line is 150? cubic mm. If we draw a line of thickness 20 nanometers and width 2 mm, then there will be enough lead to continue for a distance L = 150? / 4 X 10-7 mm = 1,178 kilometers.

  13. মাসুদ করিম - ১৮ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (৪:৪৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Oldest “Tibetan Tripitaka” manuscript protected in Yushu

    Thirty-three-year-old Daisang is the proud owner and protector of the handwritten manuscript of the “Tibetan Tripitaka”, a book with over a thousand years of history. It is said that it is by far, the oldest and the most complete version of the “Tibetan Tripitaka” manuscript collected by a Tibetan family.

    Daisang is one of the descendants of the noted Dongcang family – called the protectors of the “Tibetan Tripitaka” – in Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai Province.

    The origin of the Dongcang family dates back to the period of King Gesar (1038-1119). One of their ancestors was the senior general of King Gesar, Nyima Jiangcai, who owned the “Tibetan Tripitaka” manuscript a thousand years ago.

    The “Tibetan Tripitaka” manuscript was written on Tibetan black paper, birch bark, or cow leather by gold powder, silver powder, cinnabar and ink. The parts of the scripture written with gold and silver powder could amount to over 200 volumes.

    The “Tibetan Tripitaka”, with a massive collection of 232 volumes of classic Buddhist scripture,is universally recognized as an encyclopedic text in Tibet. It is composed of two parts – Gangyur and Dangyur.

    Gangyur refers to a collection of teachings of Sakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism, which were recorded by his disciples after his death. It was translated into the Tibetan language from the Sanskrit language of ancient India, starting in the 7th century. And Dangyur is a collection of annotations and papers on Gangyur by Indian and Tibetan Buddhist masters, scholars and translators. It covers philosophy, logic, literature, linguistics, arts, astronomy, medicine, architecture and the calendar calculation.

  14. মাসুদ করিম - ১৯ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (১১:৩২ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

  15. মাসুদ করিম - ২০ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (৩:৩৬ অপরাহ্ণ)

    China’s President Xi Jinping gets 62 per cent pay rise, to $2,440 per month: Report

    Chinese President Xi Jinping and the other six members of the Communist Party’s elite Politburo Standing Committee have been given 62 per cent pay rises, the state-run media said on Tuesday, as civil servants get their first increases since 2006.

    Mr Xi’s basic monthly pay will go up to 11,385 yuan (S$2,440) from 7,020 yuan, the China Daily said, citing announcements by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.

    At the bottom of the scale, the lowest-ranked civil servants have seen their pay more than double to 1,320 yuan.

    Increasing numbers of officials are quitting over low compensation, the paper said, but it pointed out that basic salaries make up just one component of civil servants’ monthly compensation. Additional allowances are also provided based on their positions and duties, it said, though it did not provide breakdowns or amounts.

  16. মাসুদ করিম - ২০ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (৩:৩৬ অপরাহ্ণ)

  17. মাসুদ করিম - ২০ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (৪:১০ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Cunning snails drug fish with insulin then eat them

    It’s a murder plot played out both in fiction and real life. But now the first known case of murder using insulin has been seen in the natural world, and in a humble mollusc no less.

    Cone snails are master hunters, carrying a cocktail of neurotoxins. Most have a lightning fast venomous dart that snags and paralyses unsuspecting fish. But some use their stretchy mouths to slowly capture and eat fish whole (see video above). Given how much quicker a fish is, you might wonder how the snails manage to do this.

    It now seems the fish don’t put up a fight against the engulfing mouth because they have hypoglycaemic shock. Cone snails that use this technique – Conus geographus and Conus tulipa – spray a cocktail of toxins including an unusual type of insulin into the water to confuse and weaken the fish, letting them eat them whole.

    Insulin is a hormone used throughout the animal kingdom to remove excess glucose from blood. But if you have too much insulin, your glucose levels drop and you become disoriented, confused and you can eventually lose consciousness and die.

    The cone snails appear to subvert insulin’s normal physiological role to use it as an offensive weapon.

    Natural killer

    Although insulin has been used in dozens of real, and fictional, murders nobody has seen it used as a venom in the natural world.

    So when Helena Safavi-Hemami from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and her colleagues found that some cone snails produce insulin in their venom, they were taken aback. “It was very surprising to us since it had never been shown before and people have worked on animal venoms for decades,” says Safavi-Hemami.

    The team delved further and found genes that produce the insulin are expressed at high levels on the tip of the venom gland. Last year, Richard Lewis from the University in Queensland in Australia showed that part of the gland is used to spray venom into the water.

    Safavi-Hemami’s team also found that the insulin produced by the cone snails for use on fish is different from the one it uses to manage its own sugar levels. For one thing it’s the smallest insulin molecule ever seen. For another, it is much more like insulin used by fish than that seen in molluscs.

    When the team injected it into zebrafish, it elicited hypoglycaemic shock. When they added it to water in which the fish swam, the fish immediately became sluggish, moving around much less than normal.

    Small but fast

    The small size of the weaponised insulin molecule could explain how it works so fast, says Safavi-Hemami.

    And if the weaponised insulin is unusually fast-acting or potent, she says, it could help researchers understand how small changes in insulin molecules affect their function, and potentially lead to better treatments for diabetes.

    The team is now analysing the genes in the cone snail that code for the insulin to figure out whether the snails developed the weaponised insulin from scratch or evolved it from the mollusc’s own insulin.

    “It’s believed that vertebrate insulins have evolved from ancestral invertebrate genes,” says Safavi-Hemami. “Whether this is also true for the insulin we found cannot be answered yet.”

    Lewis says the work provides good evidence that insulin is used to attack fish.

    “Although precisely how it is used for defence and predation requires confirmation with direct experimentation,” he says, noting his team is currently doing that work.

  18. মাসুদ করিম - ২০ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (৫:০৯ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Terror attacks drive Pakistan coffin boom

    Northwest Pakistan has been gripped by a raging Islamist insurgency for more than a decade, but a grim economic lifeline has emerged from the tragedy for some enterprising locals — a boom in coffin sales.

    Coffins are not part of traditional Islamic death rites in Pakistan, where corpses are normally bound in a funeral shroud and laid upon a rope-cord bed at the time of burial.

    But when it comes to the mutilated victims of gun, suicide bomb and IED attacks, whose bodies are often in pieces, there is often little choice but to gather the remains in a box.

    Jehanzeb Khan, a 60-year-old former hardware store owner in the city of Peshawar, was a pioneer of the industry.

    “I used to sell two to three coffins in the early days of the business,” Khan, who began making in coffins in the 1980s, told AFP at his workshop.

    Back then, his clients were mostly Afghan refugees from the Soviet invasion who needed coffins to take bodies back on long road journeys home, or ultra-religious families who wanted the corpses of their women to remain in purdah, away from the eyes of unrelated men.

    But business began to pick up after a homegrown Islamist insurgency centered in the northwest began to take root in 2004 following the US invasion of Afghanistan, with militants seeking shelter in Pakistan’s restive tribal areas.

    The Pakistani government says more than 50,000 people have since been killed in gun, bomb and suicide attacks, and Peshawar’s coffin-sellers are struggling to keep up with demand.

    “People see coffins being used for dead bodies in hospitals after blasts, but now they’re buying them even for those who die peacefully at home,” said Khan.

    Deluxe coffins

    Khan, who now has competition from around 40 other vendors in this city of 4.5 million, sells around 15 coffins a day.

    He aims to keep a reserve stock of 80 in case of major attacks, like last month’s Taliban massacre at a military-run school in Peshawar which killed 150 people, mostly children. Khan’s shop handled 60 orders after the attack.

    Other vendors like 23-year-old Shehryar Khan cater more to the army and paramilitary forces, for whom the trend has also caught on.

    “We make special coffins for the military. They demand good material, better wood and handles on the coffin,” said Khan, explaining that while an ordinary model costs $30, his deluxe units cost around $100.

    “Twice or three times a year we have to manufacture a very special coffin when a senior military officer dies. We use expensive cedar wood, good quality foam and velvet cloth for this piece, and sell it for around 35,000 rupees ($350),” he added.

    24-hour service

    Islamic teachings stipulate that a burial must take place as soon as possible, normally by sunset the same day.

    As such, Shehryar Khan keeps staff on duty at all hours.

    “I sleep in the shop in night,” his salesman Niaz Ali Shah told AFP.

    “The ambulance drivers know this, and whenever somebody needs a coffin they drive straight to our shop.”

    Sporting a black beard and a round cap on his head, 31-year-old Shah has been working with Khan for four years and says he sees his job as a religious obligation.

    “We share others’ grief. They come to us crying. We sell them coffins and it reminds us that we also have to die. This life is temporary,” he said.

    Jehanzeb Khan admits the business can take a depressing toll on those who profit from it.

    The horrific Taliban school assault left him “devastated”, he said.

    “There have been attacks in this city which broke my heart in the past, but this was much more terrible and worrying. They were all our own children, our young children.”

    The Al Khidmat trust, an Islamic charity which provides coffins to the poor and unknown victims of attacks, says not all of the vendors are as scrupulous.

    “There are businessmen who increase prices of coffins in emergencies whenever there is a big attack in the city,” said Khalid Waqas, the charity’s vice president.

    “Some people get unjustified profits, even in the most tragic of times.”

  19. মাসুদ করিম - ২৭ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (১০:০০ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    The uncommon man: R.K. Laxman (1921-2015)

    “Since childhood I do not remember wanting to do anything else except draw,” R.K. Laxman says in his autobiography, The Tunnel of Time. And he has done very little else in over five decades as a cartoonist. From objects that caught his eye as a child outside the window of his room, to “the pretentious dignity of Mrs. Gandhi to the grumpy face of Narasimha Rao.” Famous for his acerbic cartoons lampooning political figures, Laxman at one point said, “What politics is all about today. Blah-blah-blah. The day that stops and the quality of our leaders improve, I will have to retire and go away.”

    Fortunately for the world, politicians remained consistent enough. But he also complained of present-day leaders that, unlike those of an earlier generation, “they all look the same today.” Lalu Prasad and Jayalalithaa were the two exceptions, he said. Nehru, Morarji Desai, Indira Gandhi and the others of that time had personalities which made them a joy to draw. The present crowd lacked personality!

    Some of the cartoons out of the 1960s and 1970s would be alive and meaningful if reproduced today without a date. Like the one where a policemen is reporting to his superiors saying, roughly, that there had been looting, rioting, stone-throwing and “then the situation took a turn for the worse” and there was — looting, rioting, stone-throwing. So too, the innumerable cartoons on price rise that he did in the early decades — they would be as alive today as they were then.

    But it was not always politics that inspired him. “As a child I drew objects that caught my eye outside the window of my room — the dry twigs, leaves and lizard-like creatures crawling about, the servant chopping firewood and, of course, and number of crows in various postures on the rooftops of the buildings opposite.”

    The man known as R.K. Laxman was born Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Laxman on October 24, 1921 in Mysore. The youngest of six brothers, Laxman had as his older brother, the legendary R.K. Narayan, the creator of Malgudi. Admonished by one of his siblings never to copy from the many magazines that he used to read in the house, Laxman impressed his school teacher with a drawing of a peepul leaf. He later drew a caricature of his father sitting in an armchair, using a piece of chalk on the ground, much to his parent’s horror. Laxman inspired his brother’s writing instincts early in life. R.K. Narayan’s Dodu, the Money Maker, based on Laxman, won him a literary award. In an essay in Frontline (issue of January 18-31, 1992) Laxman writes: “I did not know that Narayan was a writer, till one day the postman delivered a magazine called The Merry Magazine. An announcement in it said that Narayan had won a literary prize for his short story, Dodu, the Money Maker. The story was about a boy struggling for financial independence from his elders so that he could buy groundnuts from an old woman selling them under a tree — whenever he felt like it. I was excited because the plot had a remote suggestion of my own activities and needs as a boy of eight. Besides, the hero bore my name!”

    Later he sketched for his brother’s stories which were published in The Hindu, and his novels too. While Narayan worked his way towards becoming India’s leading writer, Laxman was busy sketching. “While all this was going on, my own creative urge was driving me in another direction. I used to visit, with sketch-pad and pencil in hand, the crowded localities of Mysore like the Town Hall compound, the city square, public parks and the vegetable market in order to sketch people in action, study their faces, their dresses, their postures and other characteristics. My sketch-book was filled with drawings of whatever caught my fancy including the local railway station, weather-beaten houses, ruminating cows, meditative donkeys, schoolchildren, lawyers, passengers at the bus terminus and so on,” he writes in the Frontline essay, which was titled O, brother!

    It was in The Hindu, too, that Laxman saw the name of Sir David Low, the political cartoonist from Evening Standard, London, who has inspired people around the globe. Laxman was much struck by his work and it was a high point in his life to meet him while working at The Times of India in Mumbai in 1952.

    While the death of his father, a headmaster, early in life was a setback, Laxman, never one for school, chose drawing and painting as special subjects. He later became a cartoonist for a popular Kannada magazine called Koravanji, published from Bangalore. His sketches were displayed along with prominent painters from Mysore and he managed to win an award for pencil drawings of his nephew, called Glimpses of Thumbi. He sketched his brother’s stories while still at the Maharaja’s College, Mysore, studying politics, economics and philosophy. He drew political cartoons for Swatantra, edited by Khasa Subba Rao. For six months he was part of an animated film unit at Gemini Studios in Madras before shifting to Mumbai.

    Thanks to failing in Kannada he could not continue his studies for a while, something which broke his heart. Consolation came again from his brother Narayan who became an English novelist despite failing an entrance examination in the subject. Now averse to college degrees, Laxman decided on a Diploma in Fine Arts and applied to J.J. School of Arts in Mumbai. To his dismay he was told that he did not have the talent to qualify. Much later, after he made his name as a cartoonist in The Times, the same J.J. School of Arts felicitated him, as a chief guest, much to his amusement. Laxman did not forgive the Dean, though he thanked him for the rejection saying he had become a cartoonist as a result and was not languishing in some advertising agency writing jingles.

    After trying his luck in various newspapers, he was finally introduced to the Editor of Blitz in Mumbai. Some of Laxman’s earliest work on arriving in Mumbai was done for R.K. Karanjia’s weekly publication. Laxman never forgot that break and Karanjia’s table would, decades later, often sport the original of a Laxman cartoon that Karanjia had liked. Laxman was to write a tribute to that relationship in Blitz’s 50th anniversary issue in 1991. One of the classics that adorned Karanjia’s table was the cartoonist’s take on the exit as Maharashtra Chief Minister of the late Babasaheb Bhosale. Bhosale was Chief Minister for less than 14 months — with every week bringing rumours of his removal. Dissidents seeking his removal were advised by the High Command that the “time was not right” just yet. Laxman had the rotund Bhosale as a large and rather nervous-looking Ganesh idol about to be immersed by a rowdy bunch of Congressmen — with one senior leader asking them to wait as the time was not right just yet.

    He joined the Free Press Journal in 1946 as a political cartoonist, where his colleague was none other than a young Bal Thackeray, also an admirer of David Low and an aspiring political cartoonist. Darryl D’Monte, former resident editor of The Times of India, Mumbai, recalls a popular story at that time that Thackeray started the Shiv Sena because Laxman was a better cartoonist.

    He did a variety of jobs for the paper, far beyond what the salary justified, including producing a political cartoon every alternate day. “I used to sit bent over my drawing board for nearly ten hours a day,” according to Laxman (from R K Laxman: The Uncommon Man – Collection of works from 1948 to 2008, by Dharmendra Bhandari, 2009).

    Laxman later left the Free Press Journal over differences with his bosses and came to The Times of India in 1947 on a princely salary of Rs. 500 doing illustrations for the Illustrated Weekly of India and comic strips for a children’s magazine. Ironically, The Times’ editor did not initially encourage Laxman’s genius as a political cartoonist and his first cartoon appeared in the Evening News of India, the group’s tabloid. Soon, his cartoons made it to The Times of India’s front page, where they stayed for decades. He became the paper’s chief political cartoonist. His ‘You Said It’ series of pocket cartoons took shape later, and he was even offered a post at the Evening Standard in London.

    Laxman was married to the writer Kamala and has a son Srinivas, who had worked with The Times of India. Every morning, he would drive up in a black Ambassador to the imposing Times office with Srinivas sitting next to him. He would walk up the stairs to his office and had no use for the lift. A brisk, no-nonsense man, Laxman in his white, short-sleeved crisp shirt and black trousers was as much a trademark of the newspaper as was his cartoon of the Common Man with a moustache and spectacles. His devastating humour trashed politicians while looking at the pathetic plight of common persons who still do not have the basic necessities. His humour did not always make you laugh: it was often grim, ironic, and impaled politicians for their generally corrupt and exploitative ways.

    “Laxman established a routine at work that remained consistent throughout his brilliant career. He would wake up at around 7 a.m. and be at the drawing board in his office at 8.30 a.m. every morning. From 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., he would read newspapers, concentrating on news items, political analyses, editorial commentaries and opinions. From 2 pm to 5 pm, he would torment himself, waiting for the muse of satire to oblige him with an idea for the next day before the deadline. “It was like shooting a movie,” according to him, “choosing a suitable setting, selecting the characters and compressing the script into a brief caption.” He swiftly sketched the idea in pencil, used ink and brush, wrote the caption and added final details. By then Laxman would have put in eight to ten hours of continuous work.” (From R K Laxman: The Uncommon Man – Collection of works from 1948 to 2008).

    Darryl D’Monte, who has worked with Laxman at The Times of India, recalls there was a lead story on the ceiling on agricultural land being lifted. He had sent a cartoon showing a slab being lowered on a bewildered farmer. “I thought it was too literal, but Laxman called it back and quickly drew a politician sitting on the slab looking down at the farmer triumphantly. It was just that touch, that genius for converting a literal illustration into really something that made you smile. It was the pocket cartoon and common man that people identified with. He has done so many illustration, it’s an amazing output of work,” Mr. D’Monte adds.

    Laxman talks about his work in The Tunnel of Time: “As was my habit, I put my legs up on the table and scoured each page, mulled over possible ideas, cogitating, pondering, contemplating, rejecting and choosing. After deciding on my subject I weighed its potential relevance in the paper the next day visualising its graphic possibilities. I mentally formulated the entire cartoon down to the carved legs of the furniture, if it happened to be that kind of setting, the pictures or graphs on the wall, the view outside the windows, the pattern on the curtains, the designs on the carpet and last but not least, the clothes, stance and physical attributes of the politicians I was satirising. Then came the punch line…”

    Laxman has held exhibitions of his favourite subject of crows and the Ganesha. His cartoons have been compiled into several books. Apart from being an acerbic cartoonist, Laxman also wrote novels. The first one, The Hotel Riviera, was inspired by his move to a hotel from his paying guest lodgings. He visited London to draw caricatures of David Low, Graham Greene, Bertrand Russell, J.B. Priestly and T.S. Eliot.

    His love for crows was abiding. “As far back as I can remember from childhood, the crow attracted me more than any other bird because it was so alive on the landscape. In our garden it stood out against the green of the trees or the blue of the sky, against the red earth or the cream compound wall. Other birds are afraid and get camouflaged. But this canny scavenger could look after itself very well indeed. As a three-year-old I observed it carefully, my hands always itching to sketch its antics. My mother noticed that I was becoming rather good at drawing crows and encouraged me because the crow is the avian mode of transport for Saturn, Lord Saniswara of the Hindu pantheon. By drawing his mount was I averting his evil eye? Of course, I ignored this religious interpretation. For me looking at the crow affords pure aesthetic pleasure,” he said (in a Frontline interview titled ‘Of crows… and cartoons’, published in the issue of January 18-31, 1992).

    Laxman’s association with The Times of India, spanning over five decades, must rank as something of a record of its kind. His ‘Common Man’ cartoons are in many ways a better chronicle of some aspects of India’s independent history than the “first draft of history” that newspaper front pages are said to be. Political upheavals, space research, price rise, joblessness, life on the footpath, slum-dwellers, changing cities, water scarcity — those were just a few amongst thousands of subjects he covered. But the travails of the everyday citizen were those he returned to quite often. Yet, Laxman’s Common Man never spoke out in his cartoons. The cartoonist was to say in 2002 of his Common Man: “He remains the same and has not spoken a word. Quietly watching the world, he represents the silent majority of India, who have no voice.”

    Laxman also kept a sharp eye out on what the newspapers were writing, often complaining about silly errors which he would circle with a thick black pen. Those dropping in on him at his office would be regaled with the stories behind those errors. Another thing you would find him doing if you dropped in unannounced at his cabin was Laxman drawing crows. He may well have done hundreds of sketches of crows, which he considered “a most intelligent bird.” Crows, he would also point out, were the subject of many tales in Indian folklore. As he said once, “Crows are very intelligent creatures and that’s my art. Not cartooning. I love my crows. I draw them whenever I find the time.”

    The citation as part of the Ramon Magsaysay award, which Laxman received in 1984, said: “The preface to an early volume, reprinted in six editions, gives the flavour of his occupation: ‘A cartoonist works for an industry in which time is of the essence. The Damocles’ sword of deadline rules his days, which for him follow one another in a bewildering order of importance: tomato shortage, nuclear threat, five-year plan, potholes, corruption, monsoon forecast, adulterated drugs, prohibition and mission to the moon ….” Laxman’s trademark is his portrait of the Common Man — a small figure with a bulbous nose, caterpillar eyebrows, the bushy hair behind the ears below a bald pate, and a moustache like a brush. His dress is unchanging — a dhoti, long shirt and checked coat. His mien suggests a determined staying power. As his creator wrote: “You cannot do away with the Common Man. They have tried it for centuries and not succeeded… he is the mirror image [of millions of readers]… the conscience that pricks the evildoer, the social offender, the practitioner of all those trades which we might have liked to practice but for fear of the police, if not of God.”

    He was winner of many awards, including the Padma Bhushan in 1973 and the Padma Vibhushan. Laxman suffered a stroke in 2003 but that did not put him out of action. He continued working with one hand, although the lines were not as sharp, and the Times sent someone home to pick up the cartoons. He had moved to Pune since a while with his wife. People invariably connected with the Common Man, and Laxman’s work represented the bewilderment of the poor, contrasting it with the corruption of the ruling classes. His work will always bring a smile or draw a laugh and make you realise the grim irony and unchanging nature of the world we live in.

    Colossus of cartoons

    Sensitivity to surroundings, sharp wit and sound judgement spur the creativity in celebrated cartoonist R.K. Laxman.

    R.K. LAXMAN, a name to reckon with in the realm of Indian cartoons was in the twin cities recently for the Humour India-2002 (a national annual festival of humour and satire) jointly organised by the A.P Department of Culture and A.P Crowquill Academy. He was conferred the `Life-time achievement award’ along with few others of his ilk.

    In an exclusive t�te-�-t�te, Laxman exchanged his views on present day politics, newspapers, youth and the country in general. His sharp wit bears the unmistakable stamp of a dyed-in-the-wool humourist. His keen gaze takes in everything. The minutest movement cannot miss his eye; his sharp observations, as he watches – strangers strolling across the lobby of the hotel, or in animated conversation with each other, hostesses flitting across in a flurry, new arrivals checking in even as guests check out – are down-to-earth, with a serrated edge as the situation demands.

    For, R.K. Laxman is no mean cartoonist who is out to etch funny figures for a living! There’s no denying that he is a thorough professional. Yet, he cannot be framed within the narrow boundaries of his profession nor can he be dismissed of as just another humourist. Here is an intellectual whose keen interest in human nature has led him to decipher, delineate and describe the oddities in men and women placed in varied positions.

    His receptive, razor sharp mind absorbs literally everything in his fellow-beings including their idiosyncrasies and the environment and recreates them at leisure into a cartoon that depicts man as the most ridiculous of Nature’s creations. “I don’t look at the world the way everyone does. I enjoy watching people go up and down the corridors of life from my corner wondering where streams and streams of human population is heading and for what. It makes me depict them the way I do,” he says.

    Laxman has no hassles about his own greatness nor a sense of superiority over others who are not able to see things as he sees them. He is already the recipient of four such life-time achievement awards. “What is a life time achievement? Drawing?” he chuckles. The conferring of titles makes no impression on a man of his calibre who has carved a niche for himself in the hearts of millions of readers of newspapers and magazines way back.

    Attributing the origin of cartoon drawing as an art to Britain, Laxman says, “We acquired this art from the British during the Raj.” On his own evolution as a cartoonist, he says, “As a child, I had a penchant for drawing and over the years perfected this skill. As a student in middle school I used to draw cartoons for a Kannada magazine called Koravanji and later for My India, an English periodical of those days. I’ve had no masters, no guidance, no training schools. I am a self-taught, self-made and shall I say a self-drawn man?”

    An alumnus of the then famous Maharaja College, Mysore, Laxman graduated with philosophy, economics and politics, which perhaps gave him the right mixture of understanding, estimating and enlarging the peculiarities of human nature with his tongue in his cheek. On the future of cartoons, Laxman is candid. “Cartoon as an art is dying. There is no originality in the cartoons of today. They boil down to being rubber stamps with a caption. It doesn’t tickle your sense of humour (if you have one) nor does it provide food for thought. It is the political events that dictate the punch in a cartoon. What passes off, as politics today is nothing but criminal activity. All that you get to read in newspapers is politically motivated murders, brutality and criminalisation of governance. Reporting is thriving on sensationalism and crime. Newspapers have lost their relevance devoid of punch in editorials and main articles. Cartoons have turned into mockery without sense,” he comments having been in the field for ages now and a witness to the changing political scenario.

    “No polarisation is healthy,” he says on the communal cauldron that hangs like a Damocles’ sword over the country. “Only unity is a healthy phenomenon.” But then can he see at least a flicker at the end of the tunnel? “Not really. There is no leadership in this country. The likes of Narendra Modi will help,” he says with sardonic humour. “At least in India some of us are aware as to where we are heading but the US is unaware of where it is going!” he says as an after-thought. Laxman has reservations on the brilliance of our techno-whiz kids, the youth who are all geeks with appalling general knowledge. “I have nothing against the pursuit of technical excellence but should it be at the cost of simple general knowledge? We, as youngsters, during our times were quick-witted abounding in general knowledge about everything around us! Today the so-called techno-savvy youngster draws a blank when asked a plain question about his neighbourhood!” If this generation is to be called smarter than the forefathers, God bless them!

    The environmentalist in Laxman came to the fore when he vociferously denounced the commercial hoardings that strike a visitor to Hyderabad like nothing else. “There are two things that have made the twin cities ugly: hoardings and loud music. Those monstrous hoardings blocking every structure have ruined Hyderabad. The city seems to be sick with commercial hoardings screaming consumer durables’ advertisements. They distract the attention of the commuters and overshadow the ambience of anything and everything. Should concern for commercial advertisements bypass all aspects of aesthetics in this city?” he questions.

    Music in posh hotel foyers, dining halls, and auditoriums are more of irritants than soothers, he opines. But then, loud music is the `in’ thing with pop, jazz replacing soulful Indian tunes. With that he comes down heavily on the television, which has put audio entertainment (radio) in the attic. Admitting the added advantages of the telly, he is sore over the frequency of commercial breaks again, which mar emotive continuity to a narrative. “I pity the public who have lost the nerve to protest and put an end to such inconveniences,” he says. The fact that trivial things too attract his attention and shape his opinion goes without saying. That though a veteran, Laxman’s sensibility has not been dimmed by age. He is still at his creative best only because he is sensitive to his surroundings, sharp with his wit and sound in his judgement.

    RANEE KUMAR

    • মাসুদ করিম - ২৮ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (৮:০৮ অপরাহ্ণ)

      The philosopher cartoonist

      I came to R.K. Laxman indirectly. My childhood world was the world of R.K. Narayan, his elder brother. Narayan had created the wonderful world of Malgudi. Not only was Malgudi a magic world, Narayan has created my favourite childhood character Swami, who was my double.

      The second thing I loved as a child were crows. Crows to me were the geniuses of the avian world. A crow exuded intelligence; he was a living fable. No wonder, Aesop could not do without him. Crows had the black satiny elegance that made them look like academic dons. A congregation of crows always reminded me of academics in convocation gowns. I loved their intelligence and what I sensed was a rascally sense of humour. I felt parrots were pompous, pigeons disgusting and peacocks officious, but crows were the true citizens of nature, at home anywhere and everywhere.

      For me, only one man could draw crows, capture their sense of life, their everydayness, their humour, their ability to adjust anywhere and sustain an everyday enthusiasm for life. He was Narayan’s brother, Laxman. Laxman came to me doubly blessed, as the illustrator of crows and as the brother of R.K. Narayan.

      The real history of Laxman begins at The Times of India, when the common man was born. No cartoon character was as helpless and vulnerable as the common man. The only rival would be Charlie Brown. The common man looked at the world in silence. The only thing that spoke was his spindly body, which often folded like a chair in moments of drama. His wife was a harridan, in control of the world. For one, silence was a substitute for speech, as he looked at the bewildering order of the world; for the other, gossip and speech ordered the world. They were a brilliant pair. One was as garrulous as a fish wife and the other, endearing in his silence.

      Yet, the common man was survivor, commentator, spectator to the world called India, where every citizen and every politician was a potential caricature.

      Laxman’s creativity was phenomenal. It had to be so. A whole nation waited every day for his comments. One went to work or to school feeling that if the common man could survive the world, its travails and eccentricities, any citizen could. In that sense, Laxman’s common man was an Indian rendering of the New Testament: Blessed are the meek, they shall inherit the earth. The little munshi-like mouse of a man, with his unforgettable coat and apology for a moustache, probably had the biggest fan following in India.

      Laxman had no sense of bite or acid. O.V. Vijayan was sharper as a political cartoonist and more deeply critical. Keshav was quirky and Sudhir Dar of the Hindustan Times often triggered the nonsensical giggle. Laxman was gentle. Indeed, his cartoon even humanised the person who, in real life, looked like a caricature. I am thinking of Indira Gandhi in particular. Her patrician parrot’s beak of a nose and trademark hair made her look like a formidable and loveably intolerable aunt who ran a nation. His cartoons made each of them loveable and everyday, and yet improbable. I think he loved each of his creations, endowed each with his own loveable gentleness, such that no one felt hurt because of his work. One felt grateful that one had come alive once more under his magical hands.

      There was a simplicity to the man and yet, there was nothing simplistic about him. The cartoon reduces a character to its eccentric fundamentals, literally reinvents him so that he feels reborn.

      Laxman, to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes, had the genius to “err on the other side of simplicity”. I read in a book, the title of which I forget, about the UN Secretary General U Thant. A cartoonist who loved to dub his characters had called a politician, his ferocity, a globetrotting athlete, his velocity, a smart journalist, his precocity, but when it came to U. Thant, he called him his simplicity. The common man had a touch of U. Thant, a Buddhist sense of waiting quietly for the world to unfold.

      His admirers today often call Laxman a political cartoonist. I always feel that the label was inapt and a misnomer. For a Nehruvian like me, Shankar’s Weekly was replete with political cartoons. Vijayan was political; Laxman just looked at the world and its idiosyncrasies. Indeed, he socialised and humanised the political, endowing it with humour, and other life-giving qualities. He could make the powerful appear quietly silly and thus convey truth to power. Also, the common man’s wife conveyed a greater sense of politics and the political than most politicians did. To coin a word, he robbed politics of its “seriousity”, gave it an everydayness. He could have turned Jawaharlal Neheru’s rose into a cactus and Nehru would have loved him no less. I think every subject of his became an instant fan and collector. Instead of banning the cartoon as in recent times, the subject wanted to be the proud possessor of it. Even Laxman’s gangsters, who usually appeared at budget time, had a loveable quality, like a pair of silly Beagle Boys.

      Laxman’s politics emerged in a deeper, subtler, more philosophical or ethical way. The iconic common man and his stature conveyed the artlessness and helplessness of citizenship, of watching the world loyally like a spectator, even if half its moves puzzled you. The common man never got bored; he always seemed awed and surprised, as if he was discovering the world every day.

      Laxman’s impishness came out best in his treatment of science. He turned scientists into boys, little inventors happy with the largesse of the state. Science in his eyes became a quixotic world where scientists remained as puzzled as citizens. In looking at the urban world, he was a particularly subtle commentator. I remember one of his cartoons where a relieved citizen walks happily out of a traffic jam saying, “I’ve solved the parking problem. I just sold my car.”

      Laxman’s cartoons were everyday miniatures of genius, each producing a laugh. The archive of these drawings made him one of the great commentators of urban life. In that sense, Laxman, cartoonist extraordinaire, was one of the greatest philosophical figures of modern life. For him, the cartoon had to be life-giving, so that life in India could be liveable.

  20. মাসুদ করিম - ২৭ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (১১:৫৩ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Obama hails ‘new era’ for US-India ties

    New Delhi unlikely to align with Washington: experts

    India and the US have signaled a “new era” in their relations after President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Narendra Modi signed a number of new deals as Obama was the guest of honor at India’s Republic Day celebrations in New Delhi Monday.

    While some say the US intends to use India as a wedge to contain China, most experts agree that New Delhi will not take sides.

    Obama is the first US president to attend India’s Republic Day parade after accepting an invitation that is one of the biggest honors a country can bestow on a foreign leader.

    Obama, who has visited India twice after taking office in 2009, a first for a sitting president, signed a breakthrough deal in a long-stalled nuclear pact with Modi on Sunday during his three-day visit to the country.

    “Deeper ties with India will be America’s top foreign policy priority,” Obama said at a joint press conference with Modi.

    Obama also expressed US support for India in its bid for a permanent seat at the United Nations Security Council.

    Stressing that both India and the US are committed to working together to address common interests in the Asia-Pacific, Obama said that the two sides “will jointly develop defense technologies.”

    “Obama’s strategy is quite clear. He wants to split the relations between China and India, as well as India and Russia, in an effort to fulfill his strategy of a “re-balance” in Asia,” Zhou Fangyin, a professor at the Guangdong Research Institute for International Strategies told the Global Times.

    The US is courting India to become an ally in South Asia to contain China by supporting economic and military development, Zhao said.

    Obama and Modi emerged from their talks on Sunday with a 10-year framework for defense ties and deals on cooperation that included the joint production of drone aircraft and equipment for Lockheed Martin Corp’s C-130 military transport plane.

    Other deals ranged from an Obama-Modi hotline – India’s first at a leadership level – to financing initiatives aimed at helping India use renewable energy to lower carbon intensity.

    “Obama keeps pushing India to boost ties with US in coalition to counter the so-called ‘China threat’ as the US has already become frustrated with the slow pace of New Delhi’s economic reforms and unwillingness to side with Washington in international affairs,” Zhao said.

    However, analysts agreed that India is not likely become an ally of the US as it follows its long-standing nonaligned diplomatic strategy.

    “Moreover, boosting the economy is Modi’s top priority and he knows he needs China to boost the economy in terms of investment and technology,” Zhao said.

    Fu Xiaoqiang, a research fellow from the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, echoed Zhao.

    “India always wants to play a more important role in international affairs, for which it needs US support. But the government knows that a coalition with the US could be problematic for Sino-India relations,” Fu said.

    Zhao added that Modi is taking advantage of the differences between various global powers. “Modi inked many economic cooperation deals with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who visited the country in September [2014], so it is impractical to become US ally to contain China,” he noted.

    Twelve agreements were signed during Xi’s India visit, including a Chinese commitment to invest $20 billion in India in the next five years.

    A commentary from the Xinhua News Agency on Monday noted that Sino-Indian relations are not expected to be “significantly” impacted by Obama’s visit.

    “The ongoing Obama trip in India may succeed in propelling the US-India relationship forward, it could hardly change the ground reality that India also needs China as a crucial cooperation partner,” the commentary read.

    Xi sent congratulatory messages to his Indian counterparts on Monday, pledging closer ties between the two neighbors. China is willing to make concerted efforts with India to lift their strategic cooperative partnership oriented to peace and prosperity to a higher level, Xi said

    China hopes the development of US-India relations can promote mutual trust and cooperation between countries in the region as well as benefit regional stability and prosperity, foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said at a media briefing on Monday.

    Hu Zhiyong, a research fellow with the Institute of International Relations at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times that Modi, unlike former Indian leaders, often “unconsciously” sides with the US in international affairs because he is eager to demonstrate the “important role” of India as one of his achievements.

    “He might be somehow carried away by Obama’s promise [of a UN seat]. But he should realize that Sino-Indian relations should be more important and the two countries have many chances to cooperate in the economy and maintaining regional stability,” Hu said.

    He said it is unlikely US-India relations will see a breakthrough any time soon, and Obama’s visit is more symbolic than making any real impacts.

  21. মাসুদ করিম - ২৭ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (১২:৫৮ অপরাহ্ণ)

    When medieval knights take over Rishon Lezion

    In international medieval fighting tournament, Israelis fail to impress on the field of battle, but crowds more interested in customs and swords than in scores.

    The banal location of the World Medieval Fighting Championship, held last Tuesday at a sport center in Rishon Letzion, didn’t seem to bother the hundreds of people who bought tickets to the event. They comfortably settled into their seats with their popcorn and hot dogs to watch brutes in medieval armor striking one another with ancient swords and axes.

    Outside, next to a stand selling daggers at 250 shekels (about $63) and up, was a booth were you could fill out a form to become an organ donor. “We were joking about how we deliberately placed the booths next to one other,” said the woman in charge at the organ donation stand. And then there were the people milling around in period costume, even though they weren’t competitors.

    In addition to their fMiddle Ages attire, Daria Morgolis of Kiryat Ono and Gennady Nizhnik of Jerusalem casually sported fox carcasses on their shoulders, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. ”I didn’t buy it at the supermarket,” quipped Nizhnik, who heads the Kingdom of Jerusalem club, which is devoted to researching the Crusader period and which every year reenacts the Battle of the Horns of Hittin near the Sea of Galilee. He plays the role of Raynauld of Chatillon, the Crusader leader who was defeated by Saladin in the year 1187.

    An archaeologist by profession, Nizhnik views the tournament through the lens of history. “All of the costumes here are historical reconstructions based on archaeological findings,” he says, adding that his costume is that of a resident of the region in the 12th century, made on a handloom. Although I couldn’t verify it, he also claimed that his underwear was from the period.

    Nizhnik said that on his most recent tour of army reserve duty in the the south Hebron hills, he took his sword with him and practiced with it, to the delight of his colleagues at the base. “Instead of a bulletproof vest, I wore armor,” he said.

    Daria Morgolis is the wife of the head of the Israeli World Medieval Fighting team, Michael Morgolis. Her costume is from 15th century Germany. I ask her what she finds attractive in such an unfortunate period. Shooting me a furious look, she replies: “We live in a plastic world. Everything is made in China. This is how I feel the spirit of the period. It’s a chance to get away from your cellphone and look people in the eyes.”

    Despite the Israeli flags and national pride, it’s worth noting that all of the warriors on the Israeli side are originally from the former Soviet Union and their practice sessions are held in Russian. “Israelis are also invited to participate, but they don’t manage to train three times a week. I don’t know why,” says Nizhnik. Morgolis adds that Israelis think about money, but there’s no money in medieval combat.

    The dressing rooms are full of knights leaning against walls in full, heavy armor, joking among themselves. And with them are several women dressed in something that I would peg as a fancy handkerchief. If there weren’t cellphones charging on a nearby wall outlet, I would have sworn I had gone back in time.

    In one corner is 34-year-old Ilya Gubernikov of Netanya, outfitted in 14th century Eastern European armor. His steel armor cost him about $1,500, he says, and he has invested thousands of dollars in his unusual hobby over the long haul. The sport is not dangerous, he insists. “Soccer is more dangerous. We don’t want to cause disabilities and we don’t sharpen the swords. Otherwise the sportsmen in this field would quickly be gone.”

    Outside are standard-bearers from the seven participating countries — Ukraine, France, Belarus, Russia, Denmark, Estonia and, of course, Israel. They are joined by a court jester and several blond girls with silly hats. The event is kicked off by a young man playing bagpipes. And the competition is under way.

    From my perspective, it’s the most boring part of the spectacle, but the crowd seems to enjoy it a lot. The Israelis aren’t terribly lucky, however, and despite verbal support for the local team, the Israeli fighter is beaten by a Ukrainian from the city of Donesk, which has been split by real battles.

    After the referee declares the Ukrainian the winner, the defeated Israeli sits in stunned silence for the remaining matches. Then comes a battle between an Israeli and a truck driver from France, who brandishes an ax. Another knockout sustained by the Chosen People. After a few blows, emergency medical personal come to the Israeli’s rescue.

    The person who comes to the rescue of our national honor is Ira Rogozovsky. In real life, she works security at Ben-Gurion International Airport and under her armor is a police sergeant’s shirt. She competes against a huge Belarussian woman named Daria who loves Irish dance and who prevailes in the match. “It’s violent but tasteful,” comments a nearby lass who is being hugged by a knight.

  22. মাসুদ করিম - ২৭ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (১:০৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

    The Holocaust footage that even shocked Hitchcock

    The master considered his Holocaust documentary his great contribution to the war effort, but production abruptly ceased in a real-life thriller detailed in a new HBO film.

    Alfred Hitchcock’s genius lay in building tension through the unseen – what lurked just beyond the camera lens, in the shadows, across his victims’ terrified faces: that tip of a knife edging into the shower.

    But when he agreed to direct his first and only documentary – about the liberation of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and other camps for a film to be titled “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey” – he had to throw subtlety out the window.

    The goal was instructed by his friend and filmmaker Sidney Bernstein, who was in charge of film projects for the Allies’ psychological warfare division in London: Don’t dance around the culprit but unflinchingly indict him. Show the full extent of the Nazis’ atrocities.

    It was a mission Hitchcock took on with zeal, leaving Hollywood in 1945 to do his part for the war effort. But even he wasn’t prepared for the harrowing images he would soon screen.

    Viewer beware: Once seen, the graphic images cannot be unseen. Even those who have sat through all nine-plus hours of Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” or watched Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog” might not forget what Hitchcock put on display. We see body parts strewn in piles, punctured skulls dotting empty fields, corpses thrown like mannequins into mass graves, survivors with skeletal frames and hollowed eye sockets staring into the camera.

    It’s devastating to watch even by today’s standards – that’s why many have hailed it as a masterpiece. But shockingly, the British and American governments withdrew their support and consigned the unedited reels to the archives of London’s Imperial War Museum.

    No reason was given for the abrupt decision to cease production. The footage was shelved for three decades; it wasn’t until 2010 that the Imperial War Museum began a four-year effort to reconstruct Bernstein’s complete vision.

    The story of this elusive film is the subject of “Night Will Fall,” which airs on HBO globally on Tuesday for International Holocaust Remembrance Day. (It debuts a day earlier in the United States.) Directed by Andre Singer and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, “Night Will Fall” isn’t so much a film about the Holocaust as about the politics of documenting the Holocaust, and how the rapidly shifting postwar climate prevented the original from being completed.

    It was hardly the Hollywood ending Hitchcock had hoped for.

    “The fact that he rarely mentioned the film or his role in postwar years is an indication of how difficult he found this task. By the time Hitchcock joined the team, all the footage had been shot and gathered,” says Singer.

    “His creative role, therefore, was to help the editors and scriptwriters turn this into a compelling indictment of the atrocities found in the camps. He spent a month in London working on the project and was reported to have been nauseated and shocked by what he saw.”

    Present at the liberation

    He wasn’t alone.

    In the HBO documentary, Singer interviews servicemen who liberated the camps and shot the footage, still reeling from what they had witnessed. Nearly all become teary-eyed, recounting the stench as they approached the camps, the brutality of what they encountered and the shreds of human beings clinging to life.

    One veteran, recalling the bones and bodies, completely chokes up, unable to finish his sentence, as Singer’s camera lingers on his face. The trauma still haunts him.

    But the men never spoke of it, and neither did Bernstein, then a young soldier who felt an obligation not just to his country, but to his people.

    “Until the material was declassified in 1984-85, we never knew it existed or that he’d been at Bergen-Belsen, working on this film,” says Bernstein’s daughter Jane Wells, who coproduced the film along with with Brett Ratner and Sally Angel, and at the time was working at the network her father founded, Granada Television. “It was a complete surprise.”

    Director Billy Wilder went through five reels of footage – a sixth was recently discovered that the Russians shot when they liberated Auschwitz. The footage produced “A Painful Reminder,” which aired on Granada in the 1980s. Only then did Bernstein open up about his experience, saying that not being able to complete his film was “the biggest regret of my life.”

    But the British film pioneer, who died in 1993, was tight-lipped about his war days.

    “It was a taboo subject,” says Wells, founder of Three Generations, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping survivors of trauma share their stories. “I found out subsequently that those who were present at the liberation were completely shut down about it in the years afterward. Today we would label it post-traumatic stress disorder, but at the time, even the 1980s, we weren’t even thinking in those terms. Not even survivors knew the term PTSD.”

    Though Wilder’s film featured a few new interviewees including Bernstein, survivors and liberating soldiers, it didn’t pry into the behind-the-scenes politics that plagued the original film. That’s what makes “Night Will Fall” a true Hitchcockian thriller.

    It plays like a detective story set against a historical backdrop, delving into the psychology of the players behind the scenes and the issues that confront us today. And the list is long: what constitutes genocide, a graphic image’s power in manipulating public opinion, the guilt of those who remain silent in the face of insurmountable evidence, freedom of expression, and how governments use and conceal information to suit their agendas.

    As “Night Will Fall” asserts, the original footage wasn’t totally without use. It provided vital evidence against the Nazis in postwar tribunals, helping to incriminate the SS and German government for crimes against humanity.

    So why wasn’t Bernstein, who also enlisted future U.K. Labour party cabinet minister Richard Crossman to write the film’s powerful script, allowed to finish his masterpiece?

    “This is a difficult but important question,” says Singer, who points to various political motives in “Night Will Fall.”

    “There was only one piece of available documentation about why the film was shelved, from the British Foreign Office in August 1945. That said, showing the film was not a good idea since [following the Nuremberg trials and the start of the Cold War], showing it in Germany … was no longer useful.

    “Germany was in ruins, the Soviet Union was already a perceived enemy and the British wanted the Germans to pick themselves up and help restore normalcy to the country. Further humiliation was therefore no longer a good idea.”

    From barbed wire to Haifa harbor

    A further complication was the British and American unwillingness to accommodate refugees seeking asylum in the United States and pre-state Israel. Was anti-Semitism then partly to blame for thwarting the film’s completion?

    “Although I have no documentary evidence, it seems beyond coincidence that three weeks after the installation of a new virulently anti-Zionist foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, his ministry should send a memo to the film team to stop production,” says Singer, the son of a Jewish Romanian refugee mother and a non-Jewish German journalist father.

    “The difficulties the British were already having with the people still in the camps looking for a new home are well recorded, and anything that encouraged more migration to Palestine was something the government wanted to avoid.”

    The theory certainly holds, though it seems incredible that the British army, whose men were too traumatized to speak of what they had witnessed, would turn such a cold shoulder so soon after the liberation.

    Indeed, the image of hundreds of refugees swarming a fishing boat trying to dock in Haifa is a stark contrast to the gaunt faces behind barbed wire or survivors laying supine staring blankly.

    One of those faces belongs to Branko Lustig, a child at Bergen-Belsen too weak to get up when the British arrived. He thought he heard trumpets and figured they were from angels heralding his arrival in heaven. Actually, they were bagpipes from the liberating Scottish soldiers, he recalls, smiling, in the film. Lustig, a Croatian film producer, was one of Steven Spielberg’s producers on “Schindler’s List.”

    But Singer also found elusive figures from Hitchcock and Bernstein’s original film, among them newly liberated twins marching by the Auschwitz block where they had been the subjects of Josef Mengele’s notorious experiments.

    At the front of the line – and in shocking clarity – are sisters Eva Kor and Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, little wisps of girls who miraculously survived. In interviews now, they recall their liberation in exalted terms.

    “The contrast between the soldiers and the survivors is arresting,” says Angel. “The liberators were traumatized, seeing hell, whereas the survivors were seeing heaven. It was the absolute reverse for each side.”

    Another striking contrast is the footage of soldiers filming locals living within walking distance of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, oblivious to the horrors. In Bernstein’s original film, the camera pans the German countryside as a narrator speaks – with full irony – of the spa-like surroundings where German soldiers could recover from the front. In typical Hitchcock style, women in Bavarian garb smile for the camera, the very image of German vim and vigor.

    Then Singer cuts to shots of the locals being forced to visit the camps after the Germans were defeated. You see them confidently striding up to the camp before they are made to walk through, burying their faces in their collars, wincing with horror, even fainting. The Allies also forced German locals to assist the cleanup and burial process – and documented that, too.

    The birth of DP camps

    The point, of course, was to provide any potential Holocaust denier with the irrefutable truth and to make sure every German felt complicit. The camera showing the Allies filming the Germans witnessing the piles of corpses dispels any notion that they weren’t aware of what happened.

    To further prove that point, Singer used atrocity footage.

    “The balance of how much and how to use it in the film was the hardest thing to wrestle with. I did not want to use it gratuitously just to shock, but I realized that, however painful, it is in the end impossible to make people really grasp the enormity and horror of that era without seeing the results of Nazi barbarity,” Singer says.

    “Alongside witnesses who either saw, filmed or were victims of these events gives – at least to me – an immediacy and intimacy that I find rare in historical description. This was an attempt to make this story feel part of our living history and not just a distasteful event in the distant past.”

    Singer then shows something fairly unique in Holocaust documentaries – how quickly the troops turned concentration camps into displaced-persons camps where survivors convalesced and tried to rebuild their lives, married and had children.

    You see women survivors – nurtured back to health within weeks of liberation – sifting through bins of clothes and shoes brought in by war-relief efforts as the narrator speaks of the power of female vanity. Yes, that aspect is sexist and outdated, but the universal message is the triumph and resilience of the human spirit and how quickly life can be restored.

    In any case, the film wraps on a more cautionary note – the camera pauses on shots of corpses that German civilians walk past. The narrator says: “Unless the world learns the lessons these pictures teach, then night will fall.”

    Its relevance today seems eerie.

    “The coincidence with France and anti-Semitism really followed from a desire to give the last survivors and witnesses of the events a chance – possibly their last – to tell new generations about their experiences,” says Singer. “I wanted my generation and my sons’ generation to feel this was part of them and not dusty history. The events in Europe only make it more important we absorb it and learn from it.”


    Alfred Hitchcock holocaust film to go on general release 70 years after suppression

    German Concentration Camps Factual Survey shows first scenes of Nazi concentration camps but was shelved by the British government in 1945

    An Alfred Hitchcock film showing the first harrowing scenes of Nazi concentration camp and suppressed by the British government is to go on general release to the public almost 70 years after it was made.

    The German Concentration Camps Factual Survey was shot at 14 sites in 1945 and was to be the official documentary of the Nazi atrocities that had occurred there.

    But the film, described as “of great historical importance”, was shelved amid fears it was too politically sensitive until it was reassembled by experts at the Imperial War Museum (IWM).

    Those behind the restoration will announce later this year that they now plan to release it to the public, either in cinemas or on DVD.

    The move coincides with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps, which revealed the full scale of the holocaust atrocities.

    It comes as more than 2,400 events will be held across the country on Tuesday to mark the Holocaust Memorial Day.

    Senior political and religious leaders and celebrities will join survivors at a national commemorative event in London while 70 specially designed candles will be lit around the UK and at Auschwitz.

    The documentary film was produced by Granada Television founder Sidney Bernstein on the orders of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force.

    Alfred Hitchcock was described by Bernstein as the film’s “director” after he spent a month overseeing the editing of it.

    It had been compiled by combat and newsreel cameramen at ten concentration camps and four other sites discovered in Austria, Germany and Poland.

    It shows graphic details of the horrors discovered there including warehouses full of human hair, toys, suitcases and teeth.

    In one scene, a narrator looking at a mountain of tangled spectacles asks: “If one in 10 men wear glasses, how many lives does this heap represent?”

    The plan had been to show the film in Germany so the public there would acknowledge what had been done in their name.

    But by September 1945 the political mood had changed in Britain to one of reconstruction and the film was shelved.

    Some footage has featured in other films, including Night Will Fall, which was released last year and tells the story of the making of the original.

    The full reassembled film has featured in a limited number of film festivals in the last year but in April, the IWM will announce plans to release it to the general public for the first time. Discussions are ongoing on what that will involve.

    The announcement will coincide with the anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen camp in northern Germany, which features heavily in the film.

    Diane Lees, director general of IWM, has described the film as “of great historical importance – as a record of the atrocities, the concentration camps and of Allied policy on how this subject might be used as a powerful weapon of propaganda in Germany after the fall of the Third Reich.”

    Olivia Marks-Woldman, Chief Executive of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, said: “The footage from German Concentration Camps Factual Survey gives us an insight into the sickening conditions Allied troops encountered when liberating the Bergen-Belsen camp.

    “The films ends with the sentence ‘Unless the world learns the lessons these pictures teach, night will fall’.

    “This Holocaust Memorial Day we all have a responsibility to remember and to try to learn those lessons.”

    At the national holocaust commemorative event in London on Tuesday, there will be readings from Sir John Hurt, Michael Palin, Keeley Hawes, Christopher Eccleston, Adrian Lester, Natasha Kaplinsky, Sarah Lancashire and Laurence Fox.

    Performers will include cellist, singer and conductor Simon Wallfisch, grandson of 89-year-old Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a surviving member of the women’s orchestra in Auschwitz.

    Seventy candles designed by sculptor Sir Anish Kapoor to mark the occasion will be lit at the commemorations in London, around the country and at Auschwitz.

    Other events will take place at community centres, schools, libraries, museums, arts venues, prisons, railway stations and places of worship.

  23. মাসুদ করিম - ২৭ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (৫:৩১ অপরাহ্ণ)

    How the world teaches the Holocaust – or ignores it

    Research comparing high school textbooks in 139 countries and territories shows that just 57 countries describe Holocaust directly.

    High school textbooks in China apply the language and imagery of the Holocaust to Japan’s Nanjing massacres of 1937, while Japanese textbooks use similar language to depict the devastation caused by atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, according to a recent study comparing the way textbooks in 139 countries and territories teach the Holocaust – or ignore it.

    Twenty-eight countries make no reference to the Holocaust in their curricula, including Western countries like New Zealand and Iceland as well as Bolivia, Thailand and Muslim areas including the Palestinian territories, Egypt and Iraq, the study found. In some of these countries, curricula do not stipulate specific content for history education.

    The research, conducted by Germany’s Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research and published by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, was released ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday, which commemorates the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

    The study found that the curricula in countries like China and India show that historians “‘tragedize’ their own pasts by conspicuously re-contextualizing vocabulary customarily used to describe the Holocaust, including ‘terrible massacres,’ ‘killings,’ ‘mass murders,’ ‘atrocities’ and ‘extermination,'” writes Eckhardt Fuchs, the deputy director of the Georg Eckert Institute.

    Another country that uses typical Holocaust terminology to describe local atrocities is Rwanda, in textbook descriptions of the genocide of 1994. In India, references to the Holocaust vary widely, depending on the political context in which the textbooks were published.

    For instance, a textbook published when the federal government was under the control of the Left Front, an alliance of leftist parties, associates Germany’s territorial expansion with European colonialism in Asia, while one that reveals sympathies with the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and its attempts to establish an undivided India through militarization, industrialization and the “sons of the land” – ideals that echo those of the Nazis – doesn’t mention the Holocaust at all.

    The textbooks in 57 countries, including the United States, Canada, Brazil, Germany, Poland, France and Turkey, describe the Holocaust directly, using the words “Holocaust” or “Shoah.”

    Fifty-four countries, including Norway, Algeria and Peru, provide only the context in which the Holocaust may be taught (for instance, by referring to World War II or National Socialism) or address the Holocaust only to achieve an educational objective that is not specifically related to the Holocaust, as Mexico, Colombia and Argentina do.

  24. মাসুদ করিম - ২৯ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (১০:৩২ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    Greece’s new finance minister Yanis Varoufakis: Contrary, radical and a reluctant politician

    On Jan 27, Greece’s newly-elected anti-austerity Syriza-led government named Yanis Varoufakis its finance minister.

    The 53-year-old left-wing economist has always been contrary.

    An economist who has worked in universities in Greece, Britain, Australia and the United States, he gained a wide following for his trenchant criticisms of the euro zone policy.

    Also known as Dr Doom, Varoufakis was one of the first to warn of the risk that Greece could default on its massive debts, which have now swelled to more than 315 billion euros. The approach earned him his apocalyptic nickname.

    He is a vocal critic of the conditions imposed by creditors in return for the 2010 bailout and he argues the country’s shattered economy will never recover until they are relaxed.

    He has also been urging Greece to default on its debt since the beginning of the financial crisis, and is likely to take a hard-line stance when he haggles with international creditors over Greece’s €240-billion (S$367-billion) bailout.

    The prolific blogger, who has a child with his partner in Australia, adapted famous lines from poet Dylan Thomas to describe his party’s victory: Greek democracy today chose to stop going gently into the night. Greek democracy resolved to rage against the dying of the light.”

    Quotable quotes like this are a dime a dozen for the media-savvy polyglot:

    On the bailout

    Varoufakis once called the bailout terms imposed on Greece by its international creditors “fiscal waterboarding” that risked converting Europe into “a form of Victorian workhouse”.

    On joining the Euro

    He says it was a mistake for Greece ever to join the euro but that it is too late to leave now: “The last line in Hotel California explains where we are: you can check out any time, but you can never leave.”

    Radical ‘accidental’ economist

    He has described his approach to economics as that of “an atheist theologian in a middle-ages monastery”.

    He says on his blog that he is an ‘accidental economist who switched from studying economics to mathematics because the mathematics used in economic models was “third rate”. He later did a PhD in economics.

    Reluctant politician

    He describes being in a position of power as “scary” in an interview he gave to BBC’s Channel 4 on Jan 23, but says this is a good thing.

    “Even in universities…I always believed that any colleague of mine who wanted to be head of department or dean should be disqualified immediately. Because you should only be doing this reluctantly as a public service. So we are reluctant candidates for power; unfortunately history and this crisis has forced us upon centre stage” he said.

    Also a reluctant “gamer”

    Varoufakis’ appointment has even caught the attention of gamers and technology websites. He was the economist-in-residence at computer game company Valve, the maker of digital games platform Steam, from 2012-2013.

    The economist admitted that the last time he played a computer game was “Space Invaders in 1981 or so”, but was drawn by the promise of being able to study “an economy where every action leaves a digital trail”. He wrote on his blog that this could sharpen his understanding of “how real economies tick”.

    Refuses to stop blogging

    After being appointed as finance minister, he announced on his blog that he would not heed advice to stop blogging: “The time to put up or shut up has, I have been told, arrived. My plan is to defy such advice. To continue blogging here even though it is normally considered irresponsible for a Finance Minister to indulge in such crass forms of communication.”

    And even promised ‘juicier’ posts: “Naturally, my blog posts will become more infrequent and shorter. But I do hope they compensate with juicier views, comments and insights.”

  25. মাসুদ করিম - ৩১ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (১:৪৫ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Bengal just got older by 22000 yrs

    Multi-disciplinary research led by a city-based archaeologist has confirmed the presence of humans in the Ayodhya hills of Purulia about 42,000 years ago, a finding that pushes Bengal’s archaeological calendar 22,000 years back.

    Bishnupriya Basak, who teaches archaeology at Calcutta University, sealed the findings after more than 12 years of intensive exploration and excavation of 25 stone-age sites she had discovered between 1998 and 2000 while working with the Centre for Archaeological Studies & Training, Eastern India.

    The breakthrough came when Basak, 47, returned to the forests of the Ayodhya hills in 2011 to build on her findings using a technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) that establishes the antiquity of tools of a particular age.

    Before Basak’s discovery, the earliest evidence of human presence in Bengal was at Sagardighi, in Murshidabad. The tools found there were dated to approximately 20,000 years ago.

    “This is an extraordinary development and a breakthrough in the otherwise hazy chronology of eastern India. It marks a welcome trend in research. In this day and age, multi-disciplinary initiatives are indispensable,” said Gautam Sengupta, former director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India.

    In the subcontinent, the earliest evidence of microlith-using cultures — hunter-gatherer populations that made and used the types of light stone implements found in the Ayodhya hills — is in Metakheri, Madhya Pradesh. They date back to 48,000 years ago.

    Microlithic tools found at Jwalapuram, in Andhra Pradesh, are from 35,000 years ago and those discovered in Sri Lanka are from 25,000 years ago.

    Basak’s discovery was reported recently in the fortnightly research journal Current Science (Vol. 107, No. 11687).

    The 47-year-old had conducted part of her research under police protection in the midst of Maoist insurgency in the region, her bold quest yielding 4,000-odd microlithic tools from excavation sites at Mahadebbera and Kana alone. Mahadebbera is located 500 metres northwest of Ghatbera village, in the catchment area of the Kumari river. Kana is around the same distance northwest of Ghatbera.

    “From 2007 to 2011, I couldn’t even go near the sites because Maoist insurgency had escalated. But I returned in 2011 and with the help of the police camping there, I managed to finish my work. It was very difficult and not something people expected of a woman, but I am well rewarded,” Basak told Metro.

    The experts who collaborated with Basak include S.N. Rajguru, a veteran geo-archaeologist who formerly taught at Pune’s Deccan College, Pradeep Srivastava and Anil Kumar from the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Dehradun, and Sujit Dasgupta, formerly of the Geological Survey of India.

    Current Science states that the microlithic tools excavated from the colluvium-covered pediment surface in Kana are from “42,000 (plus or minus 4,000) years before the present” and “between 34,000 (plus or minus 3,000) and 25,000 years before the present in Mahadebbera”.

    In the subcontinent, most microlithic sites are reported from alluvial context, sand dunes or rock shelters. There are very few late Pleistocene colluvial sites. Colluvium is the material that accumulates at the foot of the hill ranges — a mix of sediment, gravel and pebbles, all brought down the hill slope through natural gravitational flow. When they form a stable surface, as in the Ayodhya hills, they are a good location for prehistoric populations to settle.

    According to geoarchaeologists, the Ayodhya discoveries hold the key to research in several fields, from environmental studies to palaeontology.

    “The OSL technique we used helps date sediment samples in which the tools occur to a time they were last exposed to the sun before burial or sealed by later deposits. Our samples were collected from 0.50-1.85 metres below the surface in specially-made steel/iron cylindrical tubes, making sure no light entered the trench during the process. In most cases, we had a plastic black sheet covering the top of the trench and the samples were usually collected early morning or around dusk,” Basak said.

    Metakheri had been dated using the OSL method while the tools found in Jwalapuram required dating through a technique called AMS radiocarbon dating. Since there was no presence of carbon in the Ayodhya samples, the OSL method was the only reliable option, Basak said.

    The samples had been first sent for pre-treatment and chemical analysis to the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, where senior scientist Pradeep Srivastava dated them as belonging to the Late Pleistocene period, roughly in the bracket of “42,000-25,000 years before the present”. The rocks from which these tools had been made were identified by the Geological Survey of India as “chert and felsic tuff”.

    At Sagardighi, a team led by the late Amal Roy had found microliths made of agate, chert, chalcedony and quartz. They were not scientifically dated, though. The antiquity of the tools was assumed to be 20,000 years ago on the basis of geological factors.

    Subrata Chakraborty, professor of prehistory at Visva-Bharati, said accurate dating had long been a problem in Bengal because of inadequate infrastructure.

    “There is no institutional set-up for accurate scientific dating in Bengal.”

    The 4,000-odd Ayodhya microliths include blades and backed tools. Micro blades are small — maximum length up to 4cm — parallel-sided tools that are very sharp and suitable for cutting. Backed microliths are those that are further retouched and attached to bows, arrows and spears to hunt small animals and birds.

    An intriguing facet of the discovery is that no trace of the raw material used in these tools was found in the near vicinity, suggesting that the early hunter-gatherers had travelled quite a distance to get their stones. Such instances are, of course, not uncommon even among living hunter-gatherers.

    Geo-archaeologist Rajguru said the Ayodhya discoveries had opened a whole new chapter in Bengal’s history.

    “We can, for instance, assert that Bengal was very much a part of the climatic changes during the last glacial period. So far it had been assumed that Bengal was always humid with plenty of rainfall. Now we have evidence that the whole of the Rahr region also experienced the dry climate that was caused by the period’s peak in glaciation. We also know that the sea level must have been lower by about 100 metres.”

    Rajguru, who has been a mentor to Basak, added: “Let this instance of sustained perseverance in the face of all odds and collaboration of skills and expertise across boundaries be an example and encourage many others to follow suit.”

  26. মাসুদ করিম - ৩১ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (৯:০০ অপরাহ্ণ)

    হাইমাট Heimat হাইমাট

  27. মাসুদ করিম - ৩১ জানুয়ারি ২০১৫ (৯:১২ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Ireland’s heroine who had sex in her baby’s tomb

    Maud Gonne played a public role in the struggle for Irish independence, but her life also included private tragedy. Her grief over a child who died at the age of two inspired an unpublished poem by W B Yeats – and she was so desperate to reincarnate the boy that she had sex in his tomb.

    Actress, activist, feminist, mystic, Maud Gonne was also the muse and inspiration for the poet W B Yeats, who immortalised her in some of his most famous verses.

    After the Free State was established in 1922, Maud Gonne remained a vocal figure in Irish politics and civil rights. Born in 1866, she died in Dublin in 1953.

    But for many years in her youth and early adulthood, Maud Gonne lived in France.

    Of this part of her life, much less is known. There is one long-secret and bizarre episode, however, that has now been established as almost certainly true.

    This was the attempt in late 1893 to reincarnate her two-year-old son, through an act of sexual intercourse next to the dead infant’s coffin.

    Maud Gonne was English by birth. Her father, Thomas, was a captain in the British army, and during part of her childhood the family lived in Ireland. This was where her interest in Ireland began.

    Later Maud was sent to be educated by a governess in France. There was also a rich aunt who introduced her to society in Paris. She was barely out of her teens when her father died, and not long afterward she began a relationship with a right-wing French politician called Lucien Millevoye.

    “Millevoye was obviously a replacement father figure,” says Yeats scholar Deirdre Toomey. “He was 16 years older than she.”

    Millevoye was a follower of Gen Georges Boulanger, a hardline nationalist who in the late 1880s briefly looked like he might be the future leader of France.

    Boulangistes like Millevoye were obsessed with recapturing the lost eastern territories of Alsace and Lorraine. But Millevoye was also strongly anti-English, and he encouraged Maud Gonne in her own growing hostility to the Crown in Ireland.

    Maud had been travelling regularly to Ireland, learning at first hand of the rent strikes and evictions in the countryside. She was increasingly sure her future lay in opposing the English interest in Irish politics.

    Then on 30 January 1889, in Bedford Park, London, there took place the famous meeting between Maud Gonne and the young poet William Butler Yeats.

    Yeats was immediately overwhelmed. According to his biographer R F Foster, Maud Gonne appeared to Yeats “majestic, unearthly… Immensely tall, bronze-haired, with a strong profile and beautiful skin, she was a fin-de-siecle beauty in Valkyrie mode”.

    It was the start of a mutually obsessive relationship that would last half a century. But what Yeats did not discover until very much later was that less than three weeks before this momentous first encounter, Maud Gonne had given birth to a baby boy.

    The baby was called Georges, he was born in Paris, and he was Lucien Millevoye’s.

    Gonne – a complicated character if ever there was one – initially kept Georges’ existence secret from Yeats. When he did find out about the baby, she insisted that he was not hers but adopted.

    “It is surprising how naive Yeats seems to have been over Gonne’s child,” Toomey says. “He must have wanted to believe that what she said was true about it not being hers.”

    But two-and-a-half years later Georges was dead. It is not certain how he died, but it was probably meningitis.

    When Yeats met Gonne next, it was in Dublin in October 1891 and she was shattered. By a strange twist, she arrived in Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire) on the same mail boat that brought the body of the just-dead Irish politician-cum-hero Charles Parnell.

    People thought her tears were for Parnell, but they were for Georges.

    Over the next two years, in Dublin, London and Paris, a grief-stricken Gonne was drawn into the occultist and spiritualist worlds that were already of deep importance to Yeats.

    Writing many years later in his memoirs, Yeats recalled that Gonne repeatedly asked his circle of friends about the reality of reincarnation. One friend – the writer and mystic George Russell – assured her that it was indeed possible to recreate a dead child’s soul if the parents went about it in the right way.

    And so the story leads to a white stone mausoleum in the cemetery of the small riverside town of Samois-sur-Seine, 50km (30 miles) south-east of Paris.

    Maud Gonne used to rent a house here, to get away from the bustle of Paris and when Georges died, she had him interred in the town’s graveyard.

    Having inherited a large sum of money on the death of her father, she paid for a memorial chapel – the biggest in the cemetery. In a crypt beneath, the child’s coffin was laid.

    In late 1893 Gonne re-contacted Lucien Millevoye, from whom she had separated after Georges’ death.

    She asked him to meet her in Samois-sur-Seine. First the couple entered the small chapel, then opened the metal doors leading down to the crypt.

    They descended the small metal ladder – just five or six steps. And then – next to the dead baby’s coffin – they had sexual intercourse.

    How do we know this?

    The evidence comes from Yeats. In his posthumous memoirs – not published till 1972 – he wrote that Gonne herself told him the story.

    “Gonne and Yeats were always extremely close,” says Yeats scholar Warwick Gould.

    “And I cannot imagine any reason why she would have made the story up. It is too bizarre and too personal. But it accords with what we know of her interest in reincarnation.”

    On a Child’s Death

    In 1893 Yeats wrote a poem that was never published. It is called On a Child’s Death, and it is clearly inspired by Maud Gonne’s dead son, and her consequent grief – though when he wrote it Yeats still thought Georges was adopted. Scholars say it is of uneven quality, which is why Yeats did not want it to be part of his canon.

    You shadowy armies of the dead

    Why did you take the starlike head

    The faltering feet, the little hand?

    For purple kings are in your band

    And there the hearts of poets beat;

    Why did you take the faltering feet?

    She had much need of some fair thing

    To make love spread his quiet wing

    Above the tumult of her days

    And shut out foolish blame & praise.

    She has her squirrel & her birds

    But these have no sweet human words

    And cannot call her by her name:

    Their love is but a woodland flames

    You wealthy armies of the dead

    Why did you take the starlike head.

    On A Child’s Death was reproduced with the permission of Caitriona Yeats

    The purpose of the act was to recreate the baby’s soul in the new baby that she would conceive with the same father. By having sex next to the corpse, it was hoped that the process of metempsychosis – the transmigration of the soul – would be made easier.

    Whether the soul of Georges transmigrated is a matter for metaphysicians. What is certain is that in August 1894 Maud Gonne had another baby.

    This was her daughter Iseult. Maud Gonne brought up the child as her own, but their relationship was always odd. Later she refused to call her “daughter” in company, instead describing her as a “kinswoman” or “cousin”.

    As an adult Iseult had an affair with Ezra Pound and married the controversial Irish-Australian novelist (and Nazi sympathizer) Francis Stuart. She died a year after her mother, in 1954.

    Maud Gonne, meanwhile, converted to Catholicism (much to Yeats’ dismay) and in 1903 married the Irish soldier and Republican, John MacBride.

    With him she had her third child, who grew up to be the Irish politician, IRA leader, international statesman and Nobel peace prize winner Sean MacBride.

    John MacBride was shot by the English in the Easter Rising of 1916. Sean MacBride lived until 1988.

    The Gonne mausoleum in Samois-sur-Seine was long forgotten. Few knew the story of Maud Gonne’s dead baby – almost no-one knew the story of the secret sex.

    Occasionally Yeats scholars would come to pay a visit out of curiosity. But in the town – once the generations had moved on – they had never heard of Maud Gonne.

    Interest in the cemetery resided solely in its other famous occupant – the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt.

    Today though, there is a small resurgence of interest. Intrigued by the mausoleum, local councillor Josette Dufour conducted her own research and has now written a short monograph on the Georges Gonne story.

    The mausoleum no longer belongs to the Gonne family. Though the plot was bought by Gonne “in perpetuity”, in practice the freehold had to be renewed – and it wasn’t.

    But inside the Grecian-style edifice, there are still the metal doors in the ground.

    Josette Dufour provided a key for the padlock. And there in the crypt, on a small trestle – lies the coffin of baby Georges. It is in fact a double-coffin, because for transport from Paris the law stated that the original coffin had to be encased in another.

    On the lid are some crumbling flowers made of papier-mache or some other material. And a plaque bears his name: Georges Gonne. Born January 11 1889. Died August 31 1891.

    When she died in 1953, Maud Gonne’s will bore no reference to Iseult.

    But she asked to be buried with Georges’ baby-shoes in her coffin.

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