Turning over in his grave!
by Mumtaz Iqbal
It’s not often a doting daughter imperils her father’s legacy. Yet that’s precisely what Sheikh Hasina has done.
On 24 December the ostensibly secular AL delivered a stunning thunderbolt. It announced a five-point deal with the rightist Khelafat Majlish (KM).
This certainly was not a marriage not made in heaven. Since it goes against the core principles underlying the AL’s founding, its political manifestoes and innumerable public announcements, Sheikh Mujib will be tuning restlessly—and rightly—in his grave at his daughter’s grave heresy.
Before reviewing the deal’s details, it’s worth examining the nomenclature and manner of announcement. Both smack of devious defensiveness and covert stealth, like thieves operating in the dead of night.
The AL facilely calls the deal a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). Big deal! As if giving an act of apostasy a bureaucratic sounding title—a play on words–– somehow will reduce the stench surrounding it.
AL General Secretary (GS) Jalil went to the Azimpur residence of KM chairman Allama Azizul Haque to sign the MoU on Saturday 23 December. It was as if the elephant was paying homage to a mouse! As an example of singularly obsequious and opportunistic behaviour, this tete a tete must be some kind of a dubious record.
Even worse was the fact that the deal was not discussed by the AL presidium or its core leadership. Is this another example of Hasina’s autocratic and matriarchal leadership style that has so stifled the AL’s growth and made it a sheikhdom, an appendage of the sheikh family?
No one can fault Hasina for lacking chutzpah. Less than 24 hours after the MoU’s signing, she insouciantly and without batting an eyelid told a delegation from the Bangladesh Christian Association she sought ‘blessings of all…build Bangladesh as a secular democratic country.’
This statement’s shocking hypocrisy becomes manifest by looking at four items in the MoU.
One relates to laws that will be enacted allowing certified Hakkani Alems to issue fatwas and banning any other from issuing the same. Certified by whom? Who or what is a Hakkani Alem? What will the fatwas be about? Will they be open-ended or limited to certain specific topics?
This provision opens an unnecessary and divisive can of worms with greater potential for harm than good, and is tantamount to fostering to a parallel legal system. God knows our existing judicial system has problems. But one has to be blind not to see that this license to issue fatwas is like jumping from the frying pan to the fire.
When challenged, GS Jalil offered a novel definition of the fatwa, stating that ‘A decision on any issue is a fatwa’ (Daily Star, 25 December, p.15, column 1). It’s heartening to know that, besides being a veteran politician who can speak simultaneously from both sides of his mouth, the GS is an accomplished philologist!..
Another item relates to initiating steps to ensure government recognition of certificates awarded by Qaomi madrasas. What exactly is meant by recognition? If this equates the certificates with degrees from conventional universities and colleges, then this amounts to further retrogression of an already stressed-out educational system. The self-evident shortcomings with its attendant adverse repercussions inherent in recognition surely will haunt us and future generations.
A third relates to enacting laws acknowledging the Prophet Muhammad as the ultimate and greatest prophet. This is squarely aimed at Ahmadiyyas and emulates what Pakistan did under Bhutto. This legislation is not worth emulating. It sharpened and heightened tensions in Pakistan and spurred religious zealots to harass minorities. Do we really want to go through this profitless exercise?
Similarly, the application of the controversial blasphemy laws in Pakistan has not done the country’s reputation much good internally or externally. Why the AL wants to introduce a similar law here is inexplicable? For one item in the MoU states that criticism of Prophet Muhammad and his disciples or snide remarks will be banned.
The final item of the MoU is the customary and politically correct assertion that no law will be enacted that contradicts with Quranic values, sunnah and shariah. Since this topic has been thrashed to death over the years, there’s not much point in rehashing it again.
Obviously Sheikh Hasina calculated that this MoU will enhance the AL’s prospects of winning the elections. She may be right. We’ll only know this after the elections.
If she wins, her critics will be silenced, especially if post-poll analysis suggests that the KM support may have been a tipping point. Hasina will come out smelling like a rose, for winning is everything!
If the AL loses, then of course the MoU will have turned out to a zero-sum game. For what it may have gained from KM supporters will be lost by defection from its disillusioned secular and minority community fans.
Hasina naturally believes that such defection will be minimal since these fans have nowhere to turn to, and face a Hobson’s choice. By not voting at the polls, they will merely improve the chances of a BNP victory, a nightmare outcome they don’t relish.
That’s why it’s unlikely Hasina will renounce the MoU and apologise, as many prominent citizens and some media have demanded. She must have reasoned that she stands to gain much more tactically through a possible softening the AL’s anti-religious image than losing strategically by compromising the party’s core value. Success creates its own justification!
To go back on the MoU now would be to show a lack of resolution and decisiveness, and even worse, a lapse in judgment that would reflect poorly on Hasina’s leadership.
Sheikh Mujib, consummate politician par excellence, must be marvelling at Hasina’s masterly if crass display of political opportunism.
Simultaneously, he can’t fail but wonder in the short run about the MoU’s electoral efficacy, and in the long run, the impact on his beloved AL, since one of the party’s prized asset—secularism—has been stained by his daughter’s high-risk gambit.
South-South trade boom
reshapes global order
by Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 21: The world’s new economic powerhouses, including India, Brazil, South Africa and China, are largely responsible for a dramatic surge in trade and investments among the 132 developing nations in the global South.
‘The South as a whole is not only richer in absolute terms but their combined economic weight relative to the global economy has also substantially increased,’ says Yiping Zhou, director of the UN’s Special Unit for South-South Cooperation.
According to the latest figures, South-South trade has grown rapidly over the last decade: from 222 billion dollars in 1995 to 562 billion dollars in 2004. The figures for 2005 and 2006 are expected to be significantly higher.
‘This South-South trade is expanding faster than any other trade flows –– at about 11 per cent per year,’ Zhou told IPS.
And it is this ‘spectacular growth achieved by some large developing countries, particularly in Asia, that is allowing many smaller countries to benefit from increased exports of commodities and products that are in great demand in these growth centres,’ he added.
South-South foreign direct investments (FDI) have also increased, from about 14 billion dollars in 1995 to 47 billion dollars in 2003, with figures for 2006 expected to reach beyond 55 billion dollars.
The outgoing UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan points out that trade within the South has risen rapidly. Southern multinational corporations have become providers of capital and technology, and have created jobs and generated wealth.
‘Faster-growing developing countries have also emerged as an important source of investments, (migrant) remittances and development aid,’ he said December 19, addressing a meeting on the UN Day for South-South Cooperation.
Annan said that recent meetings and initiatives, including last year’s South America-Arab Summit and this year’s China-Africa Summit, ‘signal a strong commitment among developing countries to maintain and increase this momentum.’
During the past two/three decades, Zhou pointed out, developing country economies have grown much faster than those of the developed and transition economies.
New patterns of trade, investment and other economic linkages are emerging rapidly, eroding the structures inherited from a colonial past, he added.
‘This reality is also changing the institutional and power structures of the South, presenting before us an entirely different landscape of South-South and, for that matter, also South-North relations politically, economically and culturally.’
Ambassador Dumisani Kumalo of South Africa who chairs the 132-member Group of 77 developing countries, said South-South Cooperation is ‘a crucially important tool for developing and strengthening the economic independence of developing countries and achieving development as one of the means of ensuring the equitable global economic order.’
He said a proposed Global South Development Forum in 2007 will contribute to enlarging Southern policy space and enable the developing countries to expand and diversify cooperation within the South.
It will contribute to promote South-South cooperation on a broad front through dialogue of all major stakeholders. The upcoming forum will also enable developing countries to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) through South-South cooperation, he noted.
The MDGs include a 50 per cent reduction in extreme poverty and hunger; universal primary education; promotion of gender equality; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; combating the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and developing a North-South global partnership for development.
A summit meeting of 189 world leaders in September 2000 pledged to meet all of these goals by the year 2015. But progress towards their implementation has been slow.
Zhou cited several concrete examples of South-South cooperation linked to trade, investments and assistance involving India, Brazil, South Africa and China.
India has already built up significant balance of payment surpluses, and its commitment to Africa’s development was underlined by its pledge to provide 200 million dollars for the New Partnership for Africa’s Development.
India has also provided a credit Line of 500 million dollars to countries in West Africa, in addition to cancelling substantial amounts of debt owed by some of the 50 least developed countries (LDCs), especially in Africa, and described as the poorest of the world’s poor.
Zhou said Brazil has ‘dramatically stepped up its South-South cooperation with Africa’, encompassing many areas, including agriculture, infrastructure, trade and public administration.
The Brazilians have written off more than a billion dollars in African debts. And most recently, Brazil has decided to grant duty-free access to its market for products from the 50 LDCs.
South Africa, on the other hand, has co-financed a two-billion-dollar construction of the Mozal aluminium smelter in Mozambique.
And, under the India-Brazil-South Africa Poverty Initiative –– known as the IBSA Initiative –– the three countries have decided to contribute one million dollars each annually to support South-South initiatives aimed at helping LDCs to reduce poverty, and fight hunger and disease.
Already these three developing countries have also emerged as growing importers of primary commodities, especially metals and minerals, and of energy supplies.
‘Commodity and energy producers in the South are looking more and more to these countries for their markets and for new opportunities of trade, investment and transfer of technologies,’ Zhou said.
Meanwhile, China has revitalised its South-South strategy to give more focus to the economic development of Africa.
With foreign exchange reserves now reaching more than a trillion dollars, China has cancelled about 1.3 billion dollars in debts owed by 31 African LDCs.
By 2009, Zhou predicted, China will double its assistance to Africa; provide five billion dollars in preferential loans and buyer’s credit; and create a five-billion-dollar China-Africa development fund to encourage Chinese firms to invest in Africa.
The Chinese government is also planning to increase the number of zero-tariff products originating from Africa from the current 190 items to 440 items in the next three years.
Inter Press Service (IPS)
A Gandhian affair: Bapu’s human tryst
The Mahatma’s attachment to a beautiful Bengali woman threatened his marriage, reveals his grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi
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For nearly 90 years, Gandhi’s large family – which included, besides his wife, four sons, their wives and children, national leaders, fellow ashramites and freedom fighters and even his biographers – nursed one of the few secrets in his open-book life: a passionate love relationship the Mahatma had with a fiery beauty from Bengal called Saraladevi. She was a dazzling woman, by all accounts – belonging to the cream of Bengal’s aristocratic intellectuals, a niece of Tagore’s, a writer and musician who was hailed in her time as Bengal’s Joan of Arc and goddess Durga come down to earth, and who drew around her a captivated circle of young men willing to fight and die at her instance. That Gandhi was clearly bewitched by her brilliance and beauty was no secret among his own circle of intimates, including C Rajagopalachari, his sons, especially Devadas, and secretary Mahadev Desai, all of whom were worried enough to bring pressure upon him to end the affair for their sake and his. Even his wife Kasturba, one of the most unpossessive women in history, who took without a
batting of an eyelid the series of infatuated women who passed in and out of her husband’s crowded life, was badly shaken by Gandhi’s evident intoxication with the spirited Saraladevi. Strangely – or perhaps predictably – it was the one relationship in his life that even a compulsive confessor like Gandhi barely spoke about, keeping her deliberately out of his otherwise candid autobiography. Now his grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi, breaks the silence and reconstructs in his forthcoming
biography, Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, His People and an Empire, the moving story of the Mahatma’s greatest temptation and how he struggled to overcome it. An extract:
OCTOBER 1919, LAHORE.
But something now happened to Gandhi that he had not bargained for. He felt powerfully drawn to Saraladevi, the 47-year-old Bengali wife of Rambhuj Dutt Chaudhuri, his Lahore host who was in jail at this time.
A niece of Tagore (her mother, Swarnakumari, was one of the poet’s two sisters), Saraladevi was the editor in her husband’s absence of his journal, Hindustan.
Gandhi would have seen her first 18 years earlier in December 1901, when Saraladevi conducted the orchestra for the opening song at the Calcutta Congress session that Gandhi attended. She had composed the song, and 58 singers joined in presenting it. We have no record of any comment about her at that time by Gandhi, but a book that Saraladevi wrote in the 1940s suggests that they may have met during the 1901 session. She thought of Gandhi at the time, she would say, ‘as a possible South African contributor’ to a journal she was editing, Bharati.
She was 29 then. While there is no evidence of anything passing between them at that time, we know from Gandhi’s autobiography (written between 1925 and 1929) that in 1901 he spent some hours with her father, Janakinath Ghosal, one of the Congress secretaries. Evidently Gandhi answered correspondence for which Ghosal had no time, and the secretary ‘insisted on (Gandhi) having lunch with him’. Gandhi found Ghosal ‘talkative’ and also (after discovering Gandhi’s history) embarrassed that he had given Gandhi ‘clerical work’.
Gandhi’s 1901 meeting with Saraladevi may have been cursory, but it is likely that he remembered her. A photograph of her at graduation suggests an impressive appearance. An unusually talented singer and writer, Saraladevi went on to train Bengali youth in militant patriotism, thereby attracting the police’s attention. Earlier she was a Vivekananda disciple, and the Swami is said to have wanted her to accompany him to the West.
In 1905, in Bengal a year of tension over its partition, she married Rambhuj Dutt Chaudhuri of the Punjab, already twice a widower, and an Arya Samajist. This she did at the instance of her parents, who may have felt that in Lahore their daughter would be safe from the arm of Calcutta’s police. At 33, Saraladevi was older than most brides of her time, and her husband apparently called her ‘the greatest shakti in India’.
How much of her career between 1901 and 1919 was known to Gandhi is unclear. When visiting Lahore in 1909, (Henry) Polak [1] stayed in the home of Saraladevi and her husband (where many a visitor to Lahore was put up), but we do not know that Gandhi suggested this arrangement.
On October 27, 1919, within days of his arrival in Lahore, Gandhi would write to Anasuyaben in Ahmedabad: ‘Saraladevi’s company is very endearing. She looks after me very well.’ The following months saw a special relationship that Gandhi called ‘indefinable’ after its character changed in June 1920. In between he had not only overcome his caution regarding exclusive relationships but even thought of a ‘spiritual marriage’, whatever that may have meant, with Saraladevi.
Though at 47 her frame held no lure, to Gandhi she conveyed an aesthetic and political appeal around which Eros too might have lurked. Cultured in both Indian and Western terms, she wrote and spoke well and had, in Gandhi’s view, a ‘melodious’ singing voice. Politically, she could be imagined as embodying not only the prestige of a Tagore connection but also the spirit of the presidency of Bengal, and, in addition, the strand of violence in India’s freedom effort. A merger with her might bring him closer to winning all of India to satyagraha.
Whether or not he consciously toyed with such considerations, they probably influenced him.
In 1933 he would also say (to Father William Lash and E. Stanley Jones [2]) that he had been prevented from ‘rushing into hellfire’ by the thought of Kasturba and because of interventions by his son Devadas, Mahadev Desai and another young relative, Mathuradas Trikamji, grandson of his half-sister, Muliben.
In 1935 he would say to Margaret Sanger [3], after referring to Kasturba’s illiteracy, that he had ‘nearly slipped’ after meeting ‘a woman with a broad, cultural education’ but had fortunately been freed from a ‘trance’. He was speaking of the 1919-20 pull. The remark in the last page of the autobiography about his experiences (after ‘returning to India’) of ‘the dormant passions lying hidden within me’ seems also to recall the 1919-20 period.
Another element may also have been at work: perhaps this ‘endearing’ woman and aesthete who ‘looked after’ him ‘very well’ gave Gandhi an emotional support that he, a man who in his world was always on the give, seldom received but always needed, whether or not he or others in his circle of followers and associates recognised the need. The supremely self-assured founder and general of satyagraha carried more aches in his bosom than he or those around him realised, and if India and truth spoke to him, so did his very human, if also greatly subjugated, self.
Martin Green, who more than others has researched this relationship and the career of Saraladevi, speaks of Gandhi ‘closing the door that had opened before him’ and adds: ‘He and she together would certainly have made an extraordinary political combination.’
Yet Green also notes the unstable nature of the relationship, and of Saraladevi’s personality, which apparently included a ‘sense of being unappreciated’ and contradictory elements of strength and indecisiveness, drive and inertia, feminism and male appeasement. While in some ways a ‘headstrong feminist’, she also supported polygamy if the first wife was infertile.
Gandhi seems to have opposed her; he ‘argued’ with Saraladevi on this question, he would tell Sanger.
Between the end of October 1919 and the middle of February 1920, Gandhi spent some weeks in Delhi but the bulk of the time in the Punjab, travelling to conduct his inquiry (and promote khadi) or working on his report in the Lahore home of the Chaudhuris. Saraladevi often accompanied Gandhi on his travels in the Punjab, spoke or sang at his meetings, wore and championed khadi, and asked the Punjab to absorb the meaning of satyagraha. Both she and Gandhi spoke of their disappointment that many in the province had taken repression lying down.
By the end of December Rambhuj Dutt Chaudhuri was released.
Gandhi would say, in a report for Navajivan written on January 23: ‘Where earlier I had seen a woman, separated from her husband and living all alone, the image of a lioness, I saw today a happy couple.... I saw a new glow on Smt Saraladevi’s face. The face which had been lined with care was today bright with joy.’
By this time the couple’s teenage son Dipak had been sent to Sabarmati, where ashramites questioned the relaxations that Gandhi seemed to propose for the boy. And when, in March 1920, Saraladevi was herself at the ashram, there was criticism of the time Gandhi spent talking with her.
For four to five months—between January and May 1920—Gandhi was clearly dazzled by her personality and seemed to fantasise that Providence desired them together to shape India to a new design.
He wrote to her that he often dreamt of her, and that she was a great shakti. In February 1920 Young India carried a song by Saraladevi on the front page, and Navajivan another poem by her, along with Gandhi’s comment that it was ‘perfect’.
But his son Devadas and others (Desai, Mathuradas and C.R. [Rajagopalachari] were among them) questioned Gandhi and asked him to think of the consequences for Kasturba, people like them and Gandhi himself if he continued the special relationship with Saraladevi. ‘It was their love which chained me so tightly and strongly’ and saved him, Gandhi would say to Father Lash.
An autobiography that Saraladevi later wrote makes no reference to the relationship. Nor does Gandhi’s, though a few letters and recorded conversations reveal his thoughts on it. ‘It was so personal I did not put it into my autobiography,’ he said to Sanger. Rambhuj Dutt Chaudhuri had died in 1923, but Saraladevi and her son Dipak were very much alive when the autobiography was written and Gandhi could not have referred to the episode without hurting her again.
Saraladevi was heart-broken when Gandhi informed her that their relationship could not continue as once thought. The change seems to have occurred in the middle of June 1920, for on June 12, after receiving a telegram from Gandhi, Rajagopalachari wrote to him: ‘Had your telegram. Words fail me altogether. I hope you have pardoned me.’ We can infer that Gandhi’s telegram (its text is not known) signified a change in the relationship to one who had voiced his concern.
Determined to nail down the change, Rajagopalachari wrote Gandhi a strong letter on June 16. Addressed to ‘My dearest Master’, the letter said that between Saraladevi and Kasturba the contrast was similar to that between ‘a kerosene oil Ditmar lamp’ and ‘the morning sun’. Asserting that Gandhi had nursed a ‘most dreadful delusion’, CR added: ‘The encasement of the divinest soul is yet flesh.... It is not the Christ but the shell that I presume to warn and criticise. Come back and give us life.... Pray disengage yourself at once completely.’
The break was made.
Devadas has written that when he was leaving for a course of study in Benares (probably in the summer of 1920), his father ‘suddenly stepped forward and with great love kissed me on the forehead’. Gandhi was showing gratitude, and not just love, to his 20-year-old son. He would say in August in a letter to Kallenbach [4], ‘Devadas is with me, ever growing in every way and every direction.’
And to Saraladevi he wrote on August 23 that Mathuradas and other allies were right to be ‘jealous of his character, which was their ideal’. To deserve their love, which was ‘so pure and unselfish’, he would, he told her, ‘surrender all the world’.
A shattered Saraladevi complained she had ‘put in one pan all the joys and pleasures of the world, and in the other Bapu and his laws, and committed the folly of choosing the latter’.
She demanded an explanation, which Gandhi finally tried to offer in a letter he sent in December 1920:
‘I have been analysing my love for you. I have reached a definition of spiritual (marriage). It is a partnership between two persons of the opposite sex where the physical is wholly absent. It is therefore possible between brother and sister, father and daughter. It is possible only between two brahmacharis in thought, word and deed....
‘Have we that exquisite purity, that perfect coincidence, that perfect merging, that identity of ideals, the self-forgetfulness, that fixity of purpose, that trustfulness? For me I can answer plainly that it is only an aspiration. I am unworthy of that companionship with you.... This is the big letter I promised. With dearest love I still subscribe myself, Your L.G.’
The initials stood for Law Giver, the title with which she had rebuked Gandhi. A brave effort, the letter could not assuage Saraladevi’s feelings. In the years that followed she would criticise Gandhi, at times accusing him of allowing non-violence to break out in hatred, and at other times saying that he possessed a Christo-Buddhist rather than a Hindu frame of mind.
Communication did not cease, however. In the 1940s, at her instance, Gandhi suggested Dipak’s name to Jawaharlal as a possible match for his daughter Indira. That idea did not work out but after Saraladevi and Gandhi were both no more, Dipak married Radha, the daughter of Maganlal Gandhi. Saraladevi and Gandhi had known of this romance. After giving some of her time to the education of girls, Saraladevi turned to spirituality and in 1935 adopted a guru. She died in 1945.
What if anything Gandhi told Kasturba about the episode is not known, but we must assume that she noticed both the attachment and its severance. Others too would have told her, including Devadas, who was devoted to his mother. We must assume also that the relationship shocked and wounded Kasturba while it lasted, and that its ending enhanced her prestige in circles around him. Writing about her in the letter he wrote to Kallenbach after a two-year gap, Gandhi said in August 1920: ‘Mrs Gandhi is at (the) Ashram. She has aged considerably but she is as brave as ever.’
Twelve years later Gandhi would write to Ramdas that he did not want any of his sons ‘to behave towards his wife as I did towards Ba.... (S)he could not be angry with me, whereas I could with her. I did not give her the same freedom of action which I enjoyed.... My behaviour towards Ba at Sabarmati progressively (changed)...and the result was that...(h)er old fear of me has disappeared mostly, if not completely’.
Though Gandhi didn’t mention it, the Saraladevi episode which occurred a year after Kasturba’s life-saving intervention over milk may have contributed to the improvement in his attitude.
1. Gandhi’s English friend from Johannesburg, sub-editor in English newspaper Critic. Gandhi was best man at his wedding with Millie.
2. A 20th century Methodist Christian missionary whose sympathy for the cause of Indian self-determination brought him close to Gandhi and Nehru.
3. Well-known American proponent of birth-control who met Gandhi when she came to India in 1935
4. Hermann Kallenbach, Gandhi’s Jewish friend from South Africa who was an architect until he became his ardent follower
Outlook India Online.
Religion-based politics
I agree with Amartya Sen’s comment about use of religion in politics. People get emotional in the name of religion. People don’t ask any question when someone says something about religion. These are the reasons why millions of people were killed in the name of religion.
We should be extremely cautious when someone tries to incite us in the name of religion.
Waheed Nabi
UK
* * *
2006 is the extension of 1971 and poison is the antidote of poison. Cool-headed killers (for example, Al-Badr cadres in 1971) are much more dangerous than madrassah-educated (illiterate) Razakars.
M Emad
Oxford, UK
Iran sanction
If the US has the right to enrich its nuclear energy then Iran has also got the right to enrich its nuclear energy.
It is a bitter truth that nowadays the UN Security Council is biased towards the US and it has become a toy at the hand of the US. Instead the UN should deal everything neutrally without any fear or pressure from any quarter.
Amzad
DU
Birth of Ayatollahs
While looking for a short-cut to the goal, Awami League should not facilitate the birth of Ayatollahs in Bangladesh. Jamaat wanted to rehabilitate itself climbing on the BNP’s shoulders. It will be sad if bigots succeed in sitting on the Awami League’s shoulders. Jalil has problems as a negotiator. He does not know when to hit the iron and where to stop. Without elaboration, I will say Jalil missed many opportunities in the recent past. Instead of making the Awami League’s position stronger by manipulating the prevailing situation, he made the Awami League weaker. The Awami League should have confidence in the people of Bangladesh.
MH Khan
On e-mail
The US lesson
The politics of Bangladesh is going along the line of ‘if you are not with us, you are our enemy,’ former adviser to the current caretaker government CM Shafi Sami has observed.
Isn’t that the mighty USA teaching us?
A Bangladeshi
Dhaka
Joe Barbera’s death
Each time I see his cartoons, it reminds me of the best year of my life when I was kid.
Thank you Joseph and God bless your soul.
Tahabur Alam
Dhaka
* * *
Joseph Barbera spread happiness throughout the world with his cartoon characters like Tom and Jerry, Flinstones and Scooby Doo.
God bless him.
Sarah Chowdhury
Los Angeles, USA
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Next on Quick Comments
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a. Festivity defies stray clashes as record 4,146 file nominations
b. Amartya-Yunus duo prescribes utilising globalisation to eliminate poverty
c. Nigeria blast kills over 500
d. Saddam to be executed within 30 days
e. Your wishes for 2007: The national elections is scheduled in the January next while political unrest, essentials’ prices, corruption, security, economy, trade and climate change are some of the issues that dominated the domestic and international scene in 2006 and are expected to dominate in the new year as well. There is also the matter of nuclear proliferation, rise of socialism in Latin America, crisis in Sudan and Iraq. What are your priorities in the New Year? What do you hope will happen? What do you think will happen? How do you think the world will change in the next 12 months? How do you think Bangladesh will change in the next one year? What are your hopes and predictions?
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‘Quick Comments’ (letters@newagebd.com, quickcomments@gmail.com) seeks the readers’ instant reaction on different national and international issues. Comments should be brief, not exceeding 150 words. Submissions should mention ‘Quick Comments’ and will be subject to editing for quality and clarity.
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