Relax, America is not falling apart. Not yet.
Two days ago, I received an earnest query from a friend in Dhaka. He was concerned that the US was showing some signs of becoming dysfunctional. Could it be that the Empire itself may soon become a failed State?
7y ago
Decency vs Banality
Last week we witnessed two extraordinary events. First, President Barack Obama bid farewell to his fellow countrymen. He shed a drop
7y ago
Too late, too little, Mr. President
President Obama's heroics at the fading hours of his presidency may have come too late too little, but it was just enough to ruffle both
7y ago
Let's talk polls and politics
There is some very good news for Bangladesh's ruling party in a poll conducted by the US-based Democracy International. More about that later. Let's for a moment focus on the value of opinion polls.
7y ago
The complicity of silence
There is a genocide taking place in Myanmar. An entire people is in the process of being annihilated. Entire villages have been plundered, mosques have been torched, people have been killed.
7y ago
Coming to grips with an absurdity called Trump
In simplest terms, the victory was a clear rejection of the rural white America of Washington's elitism. These folks, under tremendous economic stress due to globalisation and continuing economic depression, exacted a revenge on the rest of the country.
8y ago
A requiem for the Sundarbans
Why is the Bangladesh government so determined to go ahead with a project that every sane-minded person not affiliated with the government thinks will do more harm than good? In September, I put this question to the members of the delegation accompanying Prime Minister Hasina who was in New York for the annual UN General Assembly. One of them, speaking on behalf of the group, replied with a counter question: Do you think our Prime Minister would do something that would go against our national interest?
8y ago
Exercise in democracy or “Bolirkhela”?
Imagine two heavyset men in the middle of a mud pool lunging at each other. They huff and puff, throw up their arms in the air screaming obscenities – some in earnest, some to stir their supporters.
8y ago
August 8, 2016
Why Donald Trump scares me
Donald Trump has variously been described as “dangerous,” “fraud,” “unhinged,” “racist,” “mentally unbalanced” and “outright nuts.” Vanity Fair magazine's Mark Bowden summed up these epithets in one sentence in a slightly more charitable manner:
July 28, 2016
Remembering Sydney Schanberg
Bangladesh's war of independence had many unlikely heroes, some of whom lived outside of Bangladesh and had no formal connection with the country and its people. Sydney Schanberg, an American journalist working for The New York Times (NYT), was one of them.
July 19, 2016
What more could we have done?
My plane touched down at Dhaka airport at about the time when the joint security operation against terrorists at Gulshan's Holey
June 16, 2016
The Orlando massacre and the “Muslim factor”
When I first saw the news flash scrolling at the bottom of my TV screen, my first thought was, please God, not another Muslim!
June 8, 2016
Ali and the power of dissent
On April 28, 1967, Muhammad Ali, just 25 years of age, stood at the Houston Military Recruiting Office and said he won’t go to Vietnam. “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong, no Vietcong ever called me nigger,” he said and defiantly courted arrest.
May 10, 2016
Silent death, unrecognised
Wednesday, May 4, was a great day for eight-year-old Mari Copeny. At her request, President Obama visited Flint, her home town in Michigan.
April 11, 2016
Enabling minority voices
Mahatma Gandhi had once said, to judge how civilised a nation is, just look at how it treats its own minorities. Going by this yardstick, Bangladesh does not make a passing grade.
March 26, 2016
1971: Our war, their battles
In 1971, during Bangladesh's Liberation War, much of the action was confined to the territory of Bangladesh, but there were battles being fought in locations many oceans away.
March 13, 2016
The Face of New Fascism
I always thought of Donald Trump as a poor entertainer with bad hair and an over sprayed tan. He still is, but he is also the presumptive Republican nominee and could very well end up as the next president of the United States. He is also the face of 21st-century fascism, a phenomenon largely fueled by demographic anxieties of white America and nearly eight years of a black President.
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