CYBERNAUTIC RUMINATIONS
That Bangladesh is a growth superstar of Asia looms large in any global economic forum, be it the World Economic Forum or the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. This sustained growth has been largely fuelled by the government’s unapologetic push for digitising all government services to citizens, building an ecosystem for technology startups and incentivising the ICT services industry over the last decade and a half.
In this digital lifestyle, the demarcation between the physical and the virtual has become fuzzy and transmutable.
For other sectors to expand as much as RMG has, they must be given better policy support.
It is disheartening to see that Bangladesh couldn’t find a place in the top third of the ranking in this very telling study.
The onset of the Coronavirus pandemic at the beginning of the year 2020 has affected human civilisation like no other since the Spanish Flu pandemic exactly a hundred years ago.
In the last one year the coronavirus pandemic has infected more than a hundred million and killed more than two million people around the globe—the pandemic is not yet done.
We are brought into this world by our mothers with whom we have an inseparable “biome” connection.
More than two millennia ago, Aristotle, the great thinker and philosopher of the Socratic tradition prophesied, “we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” In light of this hypothesis if we ask ourselves, “are we putting in the best we
Bangladesh is the most densely packed human domicile in the world among nations having more than 10 million people. With more than 1,100 men, women and children per square kilometre, Bangladesh struggles to provide breathing space to her teeming millions.
This epic refrain of Fakir Lalon rings around our collective South Asian conscience every time people of one religious identity inflicts mindless violence on the people of other faiths, like Hindus murdering innocent Muslims in Maharashtra,
Roberto Goizueta, the legendary CEO of the Coca Cola Company, once said that to thrive every business must “get an enemy.”
It is indeed a seminal event in the history of Bangladesh that the UN last year declared Bangladesh eligible to step up to a developing economy from being a Least Developed Country (LDC). Of course the process is gradual and due to take effect in 2024 with a grace period of three years to wean off the special dispensations of the LDC status.
In 1889, Rudyard Kipling crowed: “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” But the East and the West have been mingling even before his time and forever afterwards.
With 12.9 percent of our population still living in extreme poverty and nearly 10 percent of the global population living below the lower poverty line, financial independence is a distant dream for hundreds of millions of people around the world.
One of the biggest civilisational questions dangling in the air is when will machine intelligence overtake human intelligence.
Going from a meeting in Gulshan to another in Motijheel one day earlier this month, I spent nearly two hours on the road which is quite common these days in Dhaka's traffic.
The greatest spectacle in the life of the US president—the annual State of the Union Address before a joint congress—is now uncertain as the continued non-essential-services shutdown of the US government is currently the longest on record at nearly a month.