BangladeshWeb Blogs

The eye of the intensifying cyclone Nargis was positioned uncomfortably close to Bangladesh for almost a week. It hovered over the Bay of Bengal near our coast long enough for us to send all kinds of warning signals to alert lives on the storm’s path. On the flip side, it was long enough for us to subconsciously think about the potential loss of lives and livelihoods that this cyclone is capable of brining to our nation. Further destruction over the one that we are still recovering from that was left by a similar storm named Sidr six months ago in November of 2007 taking 3000 lives.
 
Thanks God, mighty nature spared us this time. It may have spared precious lives of thousands, bumper harvest, further spiraling cost of essential commodities and much more. It’s an uncanny sense of relief that’s mixed with pain as cyclone Nargis spared us but changed her course at the end and lashed on our neighbor Myanmar. The death toll is 4000 so far – most of these victims as well as the survivors already in a state of suffering from almost 5 decades of human rights abuse and suppression of civil society and democracy by the military junta. My heart goes out to those victims and the survivors.

Recently launched rail link between Dhaka and Kolkata was exciting enough for you? How about rail link between Dhaka and London which is set to open later this year? This tantalizing news is no hoax for the travel enthusiast and modern day adventurers.

I was very excited about the Moitree Express that connects Dhaka and Kolkata and I would definitely go on a ride next time I get a chance. Even though it is slow (roughly a full day) especially considering that a flight can take me to Kolkata from Dhaka in less than an hour, I can only imagine how much more exciting this trip can be on a train people watching and sightseeing.

The Dhaka London train journey as compared to Dhaka Kolkata sounds like a Moitree Express in a concentrated steroid. Though, I seriously doubt that I will ever have that kind of time to experience that enticing journey. The 23 day trip will cover about seven thousand miles of railway of the old Silk Roads through Istanbul, Tehran, Lahore and Delhi.

Related Links:
The Daily Star - Rail line to link Dhaka with London by this year.
Mark Smith - Train travel in Bangladesh.

প্রতি বছর পহেলা বৈশাখ আসে আমাদের ঢাকা শহরকে আনন্দ আর উৎসবে মুখরিত করে তুলতে। শুধু ঢাকা শহর কেন, পহেলা বৈশাখ আনন্দের বন্যা নিয়ে আসে প্রতিটি মানুষের দারপ্রান্তে – এপার থেকে ওপার বাংলাএ। কেন যেন মনে হয় পহেলা বৈশাখের রংরুপ প্রতি বছর যেন আরো বেড়েই চলেছে, নব বর্ষের ব্যাপ্তি যেন আরও বিস্তৃত হয়েই চলেছে। কালের বিবর্তনে চিরাচরিত উৎসবের সাথে যোগ হয়েছে নতুন উৎসবের কিন্তু বছরের এই সময়ে ব্যাক্তিগতভাবে আমাকে সবচেয়ে বেশি আকর্শন করে রমনার বটমুল আর ঢাকা ইঊনিভার্সিটির চারুকলা প্রাঙ্গন।

এ বছরের নতুন আকর্শন – মৈত্রী এক্সপ্রেস, দীর্ঘ প্রত্যাশিত ঢাকা-কলকাতা রেল যোগাযোগ। যদিও নামের সাথে এক্সপ্রেস শব্দটি বেমানান কারন ঢাকার সেনানিবাস থেকে কলকাতার চিতপুর পর্যন্ত ভ্রমন সময় ধরা হয়েছে ৮ ঘন্টা এবং তার সাথে যোগ করতে হবে অতিরিক্ত ৫ ঘন্টা অভিবাসন আর শুল্ক সংক্রান্ত কাজের কারনে। উপরন্ত এই রেলটি ধাকা-কলকাতা পথে যাতায়াত করবে সপ্তাহে মাত্র দুদিন। জানিনা এই রেল যোগাযোগ ব্যবসা-বানিজ্য সম্প্রসারনের জন্য কতটা লাভজনক হবে যেখানে সাম্প্রতিককালে বিমান আর নৌপথের ব্যাপক উন্নতি হয়েছে এবং আরো হতে চলেছে। কিন্তু বলাই বাহুল্লো যে এই রেল যোগাযোগ দুই বাংলাকে নাগালের আরো কাছে নিয়ে আসবে সাধারণ মানুষদের আনেকের জন্য।

বিবিসি আলোকচিত্র প্রতিবেদন – ঢাকা-কলকাতা রেল
আরো ছবি দেখতে চাইলে এখানে ক্লিক করুন

It is bad enough to have a problem and it’s even worse to deny that the problem exists. While watching the news last week, I unexpectedly caught a clip of general Moin touring the Dhaka’s Kawran Bazaaar market to survey the food shortage and price hikes that is widespread in the country and making a remark that there is no crisis. Of course, this is far from reality considering the price increase of essentials that we have seen in the last one year. Price of rice alone doubled in this period and the poor (which makes up the majority in Bangladesh) are ending up spending 70% of the income on food alone.
 
I recall another comment made by the general recently that advised his fellow countrymen to alter their eating habits and eat more potatoes (which had bumper production this year) with rice in order to alleviate the shortage. Though this statement contradicts the previous one – given one claims we have a problem and the others claims not, I will leave that argument out for now. The argument here is that, it not easy to alter food habit for anyone. The poor people in Bangladesh have one luxury of having rice with their two meals and for many that is the only thing that they can afford on their plates – please don’t take that away. We ought to exhaust all options before suggesting to give up the only luxury for millions of Bangladeshis. How about rechanneling the food distribution and putting all energy in the short-term to make sure the ‘Jono Shadharon’ have the highest priority on food at an affordable price. Yes, BDR Najjo Mullo stations are one way but way more needs to be done.

For long-term solution, enough resources and necessary attention for the growth of the agriculture sector needs to given priority. If India with economic growth rate of over 8% for the last five years only had meager 2.5% growth in agriculture in the same period in a free flowing democracy; what chance we have under ‘democracy on-hold’ to overcome this problem in the long-term?

News 1
 
Biman's board has decided to procure four Boeing 777-300ER and four 787-8 aircraft as part of the fleet overhaul.
 
Boeing will hand over the 463-seat 777-300ERs between July and August 2013 and the 294-seat 787-8s between July-December 2017.
 
It's the first time in Biman's 35-year history that the national flag carrier is purchasing aircraft directly from the manufacturer and it's being done transparently.
 
Civil Aviation Minister Mahbub Jamil said – BBC News.
 
Comment - One of key things needed in order thrive in a very competitive but lucrative aviation industry in Asia is newer and more efficient planes and Biman is finally making the right move in this regard. We will have to wait and see how transparent the transaction and procurement goes as the Mahbub Jamil claims it would.
 
News 2
 
Biman Bangladesh Airlines Ltd has taken out a lease on a Boeing 747-200 from a Nigeria based airlines in a bid to minimise the disruptions in flight schedules – The Daily Star.
 
Comment – I am not sure where Nigeria as a nation ranks as far as aviation safety but I do know that it is one of the worst. Nigeria’s freewheeling aviation culture and industry is synonymous to words like rampant crash and poor maintenance. I read somewhere that your heart is in your mouth when flying by air in Nigeria. I don’t understand why Biman is opting to meet their interim need of aircraft from a nation with one of the worst aviation records when they have decided to buy brand new aircrafts from one of the best aircraft manufacturers.

After 4 months of mobilization and procurement and 8 months of rigorous data collection, the voter registration and ID cards are done!
 
Obviously we all know that the above statement isn’t true based on the latest report on voter ID preparation status. It’s not a wishful thinking but that’s exactly what all the newspapers reported based on what was projected exactly a year ago.
 
You have to love the online news archive that most of our newspapers implemented few years ago. You can find this news from the archive here and here and also here.
 
Based on the report submitted by the eight-member committee formed by the interim government to assess the cost and time it would take to achieve this important task, the voter list would be done by now. At least, we would be very close to being done but the reality of course is far from it.

Today marks the third month since devastating cyclone Sird leveled many lives and livelihood in coastal Bangladesh. Three months have passed yet over a million people are still living in inadequate makeshift shelters. How long will it be before these people are rehabilitated and brought back onto their feet?

BBC photo journal: Bangladesh cyclone recovery

Making do
Thousands of people across Bangladesh are still picking up the pieces after Cyclone Sidr.
The southern part of Bangladesh was particularly battered by the cyclone on 15 November last year.
Even now, three months on, the poor especially are just having to make do.
Some have tried to rebuild their homes, but others are dispirited and don't have the energy to rebuild.
Continue…

Languages evolve and that’s how it develops and enriches itself. There is a clear difference and a fine line between evolutions influenced by ‘pop culture’ and one that is influenced by time and context. Regardless what’s influencing it; changes clearly indicate that the language is progressing and not one that is dying. Our dearly loved Bangla Bhasha (language) is a progressing language and we should encourage that development. However, all of us should have the aspiration to not “slaughter” the basic framework in sentence building, spelling and pronunciation especially the ones who are regarded as public figures, journalists, reporters, writers, speakers, artists, educators etc.

There is a good editorial on today’s Daily Star on this topic even though I beg to differ on certain things in the editorial like cohesion in speaking the language (of course we can have difference and should have difference otherwise the language will not evolve), reference to using 1/11 like 9/11 in the US (it is absolutely OK to adopt and correlate). Here is the editorial:

All these years after the Language Movement, it makes sense to ask what we have lately been doing with Bengali, or Bangla as many would like to call it. That sense of inquiry becomes rather important, indeed acquires urgency of a sort, considering that in a very large number of instances the Bengali language has been getting pretty mangled and, in the end, muddled altogether.

Think of a time, in school, when the stress, on the part of our teachers, was on a clear enumeration of the language, with the appropriate emphases on pronunciation and the like. We were taught the proper grammatical use of the language. We came home from the classroom knowing that no matter how much of a dialect we employed in our interaction with our families, in terms of a formal use of Bengali it was always standard language that we needed to keep going in our interaction with broader society. More…

Critics of Bill Gates and company (Microsoft) are plenty especially in the world of technology. Technologists including myself have had aversion of Microsoft over the years after repeatedly seeing some of their products conferred as the de facto standard by the IT governance over other significantly better products from their competitors - simply because Microsoft was and is the leading player in the field. There are many cases when small players with their innovative products trying to compete with Microsoft, either went belly up or were simply eaten by them. No matter what we say – Bill Gates and Microsoft had a significant role in shaping the technology world as we know it today. Many good things came out of Microsoft that redefined technology over and again.

Bill Gates is now seen more as a philanthropist than an entrepreneur technologist as he gets ready to retire from his day to day activity at Microsoft in June of 2008 to devote fulltime to his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates, a perfect practitioner of capitalism, is now pondering upon the thought on how to take the benefit of capitalism to those at the bottom of the pyramid. He has been talking about it for quite sometime now but his ideas were sketchy. Even at the speech that he delivered at the graduating class of Harvard in June of 2006, he touched on his fuzzy logic on “creative capitalism” and how it can work for the poor. Well “fuzzy logic” works well in solving many complex problems in computing but not so in alleviating poverty. His vision on “creative capitalism” may no longer be fuzzy as he delivers his speech at World Economic Forum in Switzerland today. His ideas are beginning to look more like the masterminds on this front - C.K. Prahalad and our very own Muhammad Yunus.

Read the article "Bill Gates Issues Call For Kinder Capitalism" by Robert A. Guth of the Wall Street Journal:

Free enterprise has been good to Bill Gates. But later today, the Microsoft Corp. chairman will call for a revision of capitalism.
In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the software tycoon plans to call for a "creative capitalism" that uses market forces to address poor-country needs that he feels are being ignored.

Outgoing Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates talks to The Journal's Rob Guth about his concept of creative capitalism. (Jan. 23, 2008)
"We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well," Mr. Gates will tell world leaders at the forum, according to a copy of the speech seen by The Wall Street Journal. More…

I finally became a Blackberry wearing drone after denying its supremacy over my Windows Mobile PDA for years. Just when I stepped into the world of Blackberry few months ago, I was wondering if I could use my Blackberry device in Bangladesh. The disappointing answer was NO at that time but not so anymore as Grameenphone (GP) just announced the availability of Blackberry devices and services in Bangladesh.

In the west especially in North America, it is unimaginable to see corporate executives and IT professionals without Blackberry. As emails replace phone calls to be the primary mode of communication in the corporate world, nothing works as seamlessly as Blackberry to make those email messages available to you like phone calls at all times. Whether it is getting a message from big wigs on a critical mission, a message from co-workers for a run to Starbucks, a message to your subordinate to give a pat on the back or a system generated message on something going haywire somewhere – it is done through Blackberry in many companies in the North American corporate world.

Bangladesh will not be the first in this region to get Blackberry services – Blackberry is available in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka for a while now. Blackberry services is not common or an economically practical option among regular users even in North America and that’s why they are primarily targeted towards corporate world. It will be interesting to see how well it is received by the business class of Bangladesh as GP can simply rule out the MPs and corrupt government cronies, lucrative would be customer groups.

Related Links:
The Bangladesh Journal - Blackberry service to be offered in Bangladesh by GP
BlackBerry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia