Editorial
Mr Wolfowitz has come – and gone
Mr Wolfowitz has come and gone. If there was anything of the positive kind we looked forward to getting from him, it simply did not happen. The president of the World Bank, as we have all noted, was generous enough to proffer advice to our politicians. He did it in a polite way, which was again natural given that diplomacy is always a hallmark of contact between nations and between states and donor agencies. Mr. Wolfowitz spoke of the corruption in our country, a subject that has never escaped global scrutiny in the last four years, and told us (as if we did not know already) that it was a drag on our economy. In brief, the World Bank chief gave us the message loud and clear that unless we are able to strike hard at corruption, we cannot expect any enhancement in development funds from his organisation.
The pain, for us, is not in listening to Paul Wolfowitz say all those things about us. Over the years, we have grown quite inured to visitors come from distant regions of the earth to tell us that our house is in bad shape and that we need to get it back in order. American and European diplomats stationed in Dhaka, for some very pertinent reasons, are constantly telling us that we are slipping and that we need to get back up. Of course, there are many in this country who see in such activities a blatant interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. That the world around us has been taking so much of interest in us has certainly more to do with our failures than with our ability to get on with the job that comes with managing a state. With nearly every country around us doing wonders for itself in terms of politics and the economy — one could speak of the powerhouses which China and India have turned into and the vitality that has marked such economies as those of Thailand — it is a matter of deep embarrassment for us that we have fallen so far behind. And we are still in slipping mode, with hardly any sign that we will be in a position to climb out of the rut any time soon. When some of us, therefore, regret the extremely brief nature of Mr. Wolfowitz’s visit, we realise how our own people, those in our own political administration, have contributed to pushing us all into the position of a country inhabiting the backwaters of global politics. The 17 August explosions were on the World Bank chief’s mind. And so were the explosions of a year earlier, 21 August, as he flew into Dhaka. He had already spent a number of days in India and Pakistan, where he went travelling into the interior to oversee the projects sanctioned or aided by his organisation and meeting members of civil society. In those two countries, he promised good dollops of money for projects. Here, he gave us much advice, something we cannot really complain about given the predicament we have placed ourselves in politically as well as economically.
There have been rather too many wake-up calls we have been getting lately from people, especially those come from beyond the mountains and the seas. Exactly how many of those calls have we responded to? When someone like Paul Wolfowitz comes and leaves in such hurried manner, we are all left a little more subdued. The fault is not in our stars. It is in ourselves.
Ahmadinejad, virtue and vice
Iran’s new president has promised to promote virtue and crack down on vice. That is a troubling thought, not because people have any difficulty understanding the difference between the two terms but because in the hands of an arch conservative these terms tend to acquire controversial shades of meaning. One may recall that in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, there was a specific ministry for the promotion of virtue and the elimination of vice. The consequences were far-reaching. Men were forced to sport beards of a specific length and women were compelled to leave education and employment. The rest is known.
What President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad now seems to be ready to burden Iran with is his own idea of how life should be lived. Of course, he has the backing of the clerics who have kept Iran in their thrall since the Islamic revolution sent the Shah packing in 1979. One would have thought that in all these years there would have been at least a whiff of change in the country. The tragedy for Iranians is that the fall of the Pahlavis did not exactly bring them forth into a world of democracy, of the kind we understand in these days of modernity. Men who in post-1979 Iran truly believed the country should have taken a turn towards liberalism were simply hounded out of their positions. One could mention here Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the president appointed by Ayatollah Khomeini and then removed by him. There was too Mehdi Bazargan, the prime minister who soon fell out with the clerics. After that, it was for men friendly to the ayatollahs, such as Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, to speak for Iran at home and abroad. But when Mohammad Khatami won the presidency on a clear pledge of political reforms in 1997, he was simply blocked at every turn by the unelected clerics. He won a second term, but that in the end did not amount to much because by that time the youth and liberal classes he had once inspired had grown disenchanted with him. He has now gone into the sunset with no legacy to speak of.
The new Iranian leader surely has the right to mould society in his, or what he thinks is his, own image. But it is his definition of vice, one that clearly has him waging war against liberal ideas, that alarms people everywhere. Iranians, after all these years, need to re-establish links with the outside world. Taking them into a newer shell of isolation can only be counter-productive for the country.
OUR WORLD
Of cell phones, of hands cupping ears
Back in the old days, we scoured libraries for books, for in those books was raw material we needed for our essays. These days, you only press a button and all the information you need falls easily into your lap. That is not half as exciting as running all across town, in rain or shine, to locate reference works in the libraries. Besides, what the internet does to you is to kill your sense of adventure. It deadens the individual in you, writes Syed Badrul Ahsan
There are a number of things I am not used to. And I am quite sure there are people all over the place willing to share my opinion. Modern gadgets, for instance. It is surely a marvellous experience writing through the computer, but you have to admit that the old days when everything came in longhand are the times we miss hugely. The moving finger, the fine handwriting, almost in the manner of calligraphy, are things we miss, thanks to modernity. In the media, there was once much thrill about writing out editorials in longhand or on the typewriter and then having it all set into print form at the press section. It was hard, gruelling work, on the part of all. There was always the possibility (and all too often the possibility turned out to be a nightmare reality) that things could go wrong. Whole sentences would go missing or words would appear mangled or half-eaten. Even so, it was a time when people related to one another very well. There was little of the impersonal. Interaction was all.
These days, life somehow does not have any more the charm that used to define it in the days we remember. Think about it. We prepared for our school and college-leaving examinations doing all we could to score as many marks as possible. These days, or so we hear, it is all a matter of grades. People of my generation cannot be comfortable with this new way of doing things. With straight marks, it was always a matter of knowing who had beaten whom at an examination, even if it was only by a fraction. With grades, you simply have no way of doing that. Everyone is equal. That is logically impossible. There must be some difference between me and the other person vying for the same rank in class. It is a pity the old system has been so carelessly discarded. Now, the internet is a most useful tool in our lives. It brings the world a whole lot closer to us than what our old methods used to. But reflect, carefully, again on just how much we have lost through the coming in of what lots of people proudly, often unthinkingly, call the information revolution. What revolution? Back in the old days, we scoured libraries for books, for in those books was raw material we needed for our essays. These days, you only press a button and all the information you need falls easily into your lap. That is not half as exciting as running all across town, in rain or shine, to locate reference works in the libraries. Besides, what the internet does to you is to kill your sense of adventure. It deadens the individual in you.
All around you, around me are hordes of people clutching something they call mobile phones or cell phones (I have never quite known what really is the proper term to use here) in their hands and keeping them close to the ear. It is a forbidding sight, something that tells you all these people with hands close to their ears are too busy shaping the future of the world to pay attention to the likes of you. Maybe they are busy, maybe they really believe they are about to create a better world for themselves. But for people like us, the world has only grown worse, has vegetated over the years. Think of that mobile phone again. It is, simply and surely, a huge invasion of privacy. Those who have it know they cannot let go of it, even if there are times when they wish it did not ring. You may be in a market, you may be on a bus going home, maybe you are in the shower —- and there is that mobile phone happily ringing away. You are never free of it. Then again, quite a few cell phone owners know that these gadgets are a perfect way of coming by the art of rude behaviour. And how does that happen to be? You call someone on his cell phone. If he does not wish to answer your call, he simply cuts you off even before you have had a chance to speak to him. There are also those tight-fisted fools who will give you what is known as a missed call and then wait for you to call back. You see, they do not want to spend the kind of money on a call that you would be spending by calling them back. If this is not bad behaviour, what is?
There is a plethora of modernity around us. You might think it makes better, smarter people out of us. It does not, for since the arrival of such questionable modernity there has been a considerable dumbing down in people and institutions. People have nearly forgotten to read books. Cable operators have made sure that families turn into couch potatoes by watching, all night and all day, all those inane programmes on the channels, most of which are manned by people you and I would not touch with a ten-foot long pole. There are too many talk shows, the consequence being much talk and little substance. As for yourself, with that remote controlled thing in your hand, you begin to think the world is yours to survey. And so you go on flipping, leaping and surfing from one channel to another. You are not happy, as that endless pressing of the buttons so clearly shows. You are plainly bored, perhaps even angry. And yet you do not let go of those television channels. You think of putting an end to it and doing some reading. But the very thought of picking up a book and reading it sends fine sensations of apathy down you, all over.
I do not think I will ever possess a cell phone. It will not go with my character. A perpetual kind of hostility will always define our relationship. Besides, with all the flaws already entrenched in my personality, I simply have no wish to develop one more, which is the bad habit of having one of my hands cup one of my ears, day in and day out. Being modern is fine. Being ludicrous is quite another thing altogether.
E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk
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