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That many students resort to unfair means at SSC and HSC is nothing new, but the matter of the involvement of teachers in such activities has always been somewhat vague. Of course, we have had reports in the past informing us of the student-teacher link to supply notes in the exam hall, but recently a newspaper has brought the issue out in the open along with a photograph of teachers caught in the act. Obviously, this brings the whole education system into disrepute once more and, understandably, the humiliation is even more as the involved persons are not school teachers but lecturers belonging to the higher secondary education system. These teachers were caught when they went to the house of a student to supply the answer sheets in return for bribes. Now, if college teachers are involved in such acts, what kind of education can we expect at the pre-tertiary level?
   There may be an argument that the incident happened far away from the capital in a remote village in Jessore, but surely we are not gullible enough to believe that similar episodes do not happen in the city or elsewhere. The difference is that in the city most guilty parties never get caught.
   So, if we accept that the whole education scene is plagued by such events, what sort of picture do we get? Naturally, not a healthy one. As we focus on this event, we would like to refer to other forms of maladies afflicting the education system, such as the recent leakage of the questions of BCS examination and the illegal entry of students to the university about seven years ago. These episodes may not be related but they form an invisible bond that is based on the changing attitude of society towards education, and this change is fuelled by a desire to get an easy way out. A student resorting to unfair means and taking the help of corrupt teachers may find an easy way out of the local education system. But what kind of citizen will he or she be and how would the teacher justify the nobility of his profession? A deeper observation will reveal that the involvement of teachers in this unethical practice is in fact a reflection of a society that is slowly but steadily losing its moral fibre. Will the teachers in Jessore be given exemplary punishment or will they be allowed to go after the event becomes stale? Regarding past events, we have never heard how teachers involved in exam related malpractices were handled and so it is logical to assume that they were allowed to go with only verbal admonition.
   As we ask the authorities to take stern measures in this case, we also ask them to look into the matter of the payment of teachers. Unarguably, if the teachers had been paid properly, profit from a crooked path would not have appealed to them.

Speak up, for Suu Kyi

Come Sunday, Aung San Suu Kyi will be sixty. In the past fifteen years, she has gone through sustained suffering as the leader of the democracy movement in her country, Myanmar or former Burma. The tragedy is that even as the world has gone by, no one on the global stage has seen fit to do about Myanmar what has so cheerfully been done about other places on earth. The need to bring about democracy or regime change has been felt intensely in such places as Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti and countries that were once part of the former Soviet Union. But where the fate of Myanmar is concerned, the interest that was shown in the early part of the 1990s about change in the country has largely worn off.
   In these past many years, the military junta in Yangon has steadily consolidated itself. Even a relatively moderate voice on its team (by the army’s standards) was dismissed last October and is now in prison. As for Suu Kyi, she remains isolated from the rest of the world through a rigorous internment programme imposed on her by the regime. There is here a big question of morality involved. The unalterable fact of Myanmar’s recent history is that Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy won an overwhelming victory at the elections arranged and presided over by the army in 1990, two years after a democracy movement was launched. That the triumphant politicians were not permitted to take over, indeed that the results were eventually subverted by the military, remains a disgrace not only for Myanmar but for the outside world as well. It should have been the job of the world, especially the western powers, to push the military into retreating to the barracks by handing the country over to its elected politicians. Ironically, it is the reverse that has been happening. Western nations have carried on brisk trade with the regime. Within the region, ASEAN (of which Myanmar is a member) has conveniently looked away from the repression that has been going on in Yangon. It is, from any perspective, a matter of deep shame that no nation in Asia or elsewhere has thought it necessary to haul up the Myanmar junta on the issue of democracy. Of course, the fact that the next ASEAN summit will be chaired by the junta in Yangon has now created quite a few noticeable jitters in the region. But that is not enough. The world needs to come in much more vigorously than it has in the matter of exerting pressure on the regime to go for change.
   In the last decade and a half, Aung San Suu Kyi has led a lonely life. She has come by a Nobel Prize for Peace but was unable to receive it in person. When her husband Michael Aris died in 1998 in Britain, she made the conscious decision not to attend his funeral out of fear that she would not be allowed back into her country. Suu Kyi goes on making sacrifices, of the kind that do all good men and women proud. The time has arrived to speak up for her again.

You hear a lot of people talking about things black or white these days. The way they mention these two colours makes you feel that anything that is black is evil and anything that happens to be white has something of purity about it. But, of course, they are right to a certain extent. When you have so many people in Bangladesh coming by and possessing so much black (translate that as unearned or corrupt) money, you realise why we have so many problems before us. There are individuals around us who, years ago, gave us little sign of doing anything exceptional in future for themselves. We thought they were too mediocre to do anything anyway. And they were indeed mediocre. And today? All those mediocre people have beaten you and me in the rat race we call life. They are proud owners of property. They have wonderful children who go to English medium institutions. Their wives, growing fat and fatter all the time, nevertheless think their beauty is unmatched. We will let these women make themselves happy, for in their happiness lies ours.
   But the men in their lives? We know who these men are. They have souls of the deepest black, for they have come by their money in the darkest alleys of life. Now the finance minister, who only weeks ago fulminated against the idea of turning sin into virtue, haram into halal, has admitted his inability to live up to his determination. He has given these black men, or men with black souls, a chance to turn their ill-gotten gains into things of religious purity. That should be fine with us. There is, after all, such a thing as forgiveness, an opportunity to the sinner to find the road to sainthood. And anyone who wishes to be a saint, we have been told over and over again, is attired in raiment of the purest white. That being the idea, these men with black money today deserve a chance, or so you think, of a makeover. They can become good, clean people with everything white in their hearts. But just as you begin to think that the finance minister deserves a chance to prove to us that black can really graduate to white, you are told with cruel alacrity that a foreign company has just made available to one of our ministers of state the gift of an expensive black car. Assuming the report is true, that will surely go down as one of the blackest deeds in the history of corruption in this country. Why must men with black souls actually receive gifts of black cars? There are the white ones, pink ones, blue ones, grey ones. Why did no one think of a pick from all that wonderful collection? But, as they say, never mind. It is not for us lesser mortals to know what majesty resides in the blackness of things.
   If you have noticed, there are tens of thousands of men and women in this country who have been put into a very black mood because of the way the police, and lots of other people, have been treating a young woman named Bidisha. The lady herself has been going black and blue through all that intense grilling at the hands of the law enforcers; and all of that has happened because her husband, known for the way he mistreated us all in nine of the blackest years of our history, filed a case of theft against her. Sit back and think. Only a few years ago, the former president and his lady fashioned rosy dawns for themselves together. All of that has now dwindled into this huge black hole in their lives. For us, for you and me, it is none of our concern. But how do you remain unaffected when such dark things are being done to a woman only because her power to do things is infinitely lesser than the power of others to inflict maximum damage to her personality? Think of all the black things that certain newspapers have been doing to her. There are the dark whispers of the police making available to these media organisations tantalising photographs of Bidisha, the objective clearly being to scandalise the country with images of her ‘wayward’ behaviour. And the police, if you really wish to know, have seized these pictures through raiding an apartment, that which Bidisha and her husband shared, in the absence of the couple. But what kind of black-hearted men are these journalists who do not at all go red in the face about printing these images? Even lewdness has its limits. But these newsmen will do anything to ensure a sale of their journals. They know that it is a beautiful twilight out there before them, but that is no reason for them not to tar that intense beauty with black.
   It is strange how the spirit of things black can get into the bloodstream of people and work its way into politics. Deng Xiao-ping, a man you and I have known, once committed the cardinal sin of telling China’s toiling masses that it did not matter if a cat was black or white as long as it caught mice. On its own, it was something of a profound remark. But once you study it from the point of view of politics (and Chinese politics was in revolutionary ferment in those heady days of the late 1960s), Deng’s prescription was an incendiary one. He was wilfully blurring the distinction between black and white, between capitalism and socialism. Naturally, he paid a price. He was purged, then rehabilitated. He was purged again, and rehabilitated again. In Chinese history, if you really have the time to look into things, there have been some very real moments of blackness. The flight of Lin Biao and his subsequent death in Mongolia have never been explained. The rise of Hua Guo-feng, a man of harmless whiteness, owed itself to the need in post-Mao China to beat back the black, dark forces led by Jiang Qing, the once upon a time actress who ended up marrying Mao.
   But black, do not forget, is also beautiful. The idea has stemmed from the Civil Rights movement which Martin Luther King, Jr. initiated in America in the 1950s. It was the humiliation of a black woman, Rosa Parks, in a racially defined bus that sparked the move towards black empowerment. And then there was Eldridge Cleaver, with his Black Panthers. Not long ago, an insightful look into history came our way when Alex Haley gave us part of the tale of Black America in his seminal work Roots. Since that day, we have equated such historical events as the rise of black majority rule in Africa with the scent that wafts out of black roses. Beautiful black women have won Oscars and Wimbledon and have positively radiated sunny beauty through modelling. When the boxer Muhammad Ali struggled against the Vietnam draft in 1967, it was fundamentally a battle pitting black defiance against an arrogant administration. We loved Ali. He was bold, he was black and he was one of us.
   In the past many weeks, some people have done all they could to blacken the reputation of Michael Jackson. All his life, the singer has tried giving his skin a glow of white (note how the ubiquitous umbrella gives him protection from the cruelty of the sun) and here are these people who say he has a black core in his heart. One day last week, though, the law said clearly that all the black deeds Jackson had been accused of were false. It had actually been a conspiracy with a rather heavy tinge of black. Suddenly, life turned, yet once more for Michael Jackson, into clarity resplendent in white.
   There is that faint trace of grey always coming between black and white, if you have cared to notice. In the world of the Orwellian, that distinction disappears when pigs and men drink to one another, even as the horses, chickens, goats and cows look on in amazement through the window in the cold night. For you, for me, the problem is yet one of separating the men with black money from the men with white money. Or has everything really turned into a hazy, indefinable mix of things?
   E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk