It was once a Third World Country posterchild

A few years ago, I met with an activist environmental lawyer from Bangladesh.  Syeda Rizwana Hasan was the first one from Bangladesh that I met since my graduate school days.

Always excited to meet with accomplished people from my old part of the world, I talked with her about her work.  And then I asked her a lot about Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

In 1970, when Bangladesh was still East Pakistan, "Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, won a landslide victory in national elections. The Pakistani leadership was reluctant to accept the results because it did not want an East Pakistani political party heading the federal government."

West Pakistan, now Pakistan, was the center of all the economic, commercial, and military power. The West Pakistan government and its people couldn't care about the Bengali-speaking fellow-citizens who were thousands of miles away, separated by India.  The last thing they wanted to grant was autonomy to the Bengali-speaking Pakistanis.

As the demand for Bengali autonomy grew, the Pakistani government launched Operation Searchlight,“ a military operation to crush the emerging movement. According to journalist Robert Payne, it killed at least 7,000 Bengali civilians – both Hindus and Muslims – in a single night.

On March 26, Bangladesh was declared independent and the liberation war began.

The US, mad with its supremacy and in a Cold War against the USSR, sided with West Pakistan's leaders and military.  As we review history, I wonder how many times we ever sided with the good guys!

When refugees started spilling over to India in the millions, India's prime minister, Indira Gandhi, decided to employ the military against the West Pakistani forces in East Pakistan.  In less than two weeks, the West Pakistani forces surrendered.  India's military chief, S.H.F.J. Manekshaw, became a household name.  We kids thought he was the greatest ever!

In no time at all, the Nixonian realpolitik Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, labeled Bangladesh as a "basket case."

Nick Kristof writes about how much Bangladesh has developed over the 50 years, and how we in the US can learn from it.

Life expectancy in Bangladesh is 72 years. That’s longer than in quite a few places in the United States, including in 10 counties in Mississippi. Bangladesh may have once epitomized hopelessness, but it now has much to teach the world about how to engineer progress.

Kristof continues:

Bangladesh invested in its most underutilized assets — its poor, with a focus on the most marginalized and least productive, because that’s where the highest returns would be. And the same could be true in America. We’re not going to squeeze much more productivity out of our billionaires, but we as a country will benefit hugely if we can help the one in seven American children who don’t even graduate from high school.

That’s what Biden’s attack on child poverty may be able to do, and why its central element, a refundable child tax credit, should be made permanent. Bangladesh reminds us that investing in marginalized children isn’t just about compassion, but about helping a nation soar.

I wonder what Kissinger has to say about Bangladesh now.  But then, who cares for Kissinger, right?

With women like Syeda Rizwana Hasan, Bangladesh is now well on its way to even surge past India.

Well, it has.

A few months ago, the IMF reported that Bangladesh had moved ahead of India in terms of per capita income.  Boy did that cause quite some issues for the Modi-toadies who believe in the superiority of Hindus!

We all can learn a lot from the 50-year old Bangladesh success story.

I am handsome. Really?

During my teenage years, I was convinced that I was not one of those guys with charming looks who instantly won girls over.  Had I known then the word "nerd," I would have instantly connected with that emotion-laden word.  In addition, almost every other week, like clockwork, a big fat zit would appear on my nose.

We never talked about feelings those years.  I did not even know it was possible.  All I knew was that I felt sad sometimes.  And perhaps was even on the verge of tears--but, of course, boys don't cry!  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder is all baloney, I decided.

I was not exaggerating much when I blogged a few months ago on life if one is not the object of dreams.  As I wrote there, I bet there are many among us who worried, or worry even now: "What if I were nothing but an ugly pile who could not, and would not, attract anyone?"

Of course, the pressure to look good is immensely worse on girls and women.  Even on older women.  A few years ago, when I told my mother that she ought to walk more, and get some sun on her for the essential vitamin-D, my father immediately jumped in and said that she could easily go for short walks in the morning after having coffee.  Seems logical, right?

My mother had a response that I could not have imagined.  She said that she had to look presentable when stepping out, and that meant she could do only after showering (or, take a bath, as they say in the old country.)  To her, going for a walk was not all that simple a thing as stepping out of the house.

A young Irish woman writes about the "embarrassment I felt as a teenager about not fitting some ideal of beauty."

Yes, we have all been there in some manner.  She then makes an important point about the contemporary "inclusivity ": "somewhere along the way, the message of inclusivity went from “every kind of person can be beautiful” to “every person is beautiful," which she argues is "actively harmful."

Wouldn’t it be freeing to admit that most people are not beautiful? What if we stopped prioritizing pleasing aesthetics above so much else? I wonder what it would be like to grow up in a world where being beautiful is not seen as a necessity, but instead a nice thing some people are born with and some people aren’t, like a talent for swimming, or playing the piano.

Quite an interesting way to think about it.  We say some are good at swimming, while others---like me--swim like a rock.  We state it as a fact.  The truth.  Why can't we be the same way about appearances?  Hmmm ...

In another part of the world, in Bangladesh,  a 29-year-old photographer documents the pressures on women in Bangladesh to be attractive through a unique series of photographs like the one that I have included in this post.

The women in Habiba's photos look bright and colourful but their faces are entirely covered, representing a loss of the inner self even though outwardly the women have made great efforts to look beautiful.
Habiba wants to draw attention to how much of themselves Bangladeshi women have to compromise to make others happy.

Life is complicated in so many ways!

Source

Shooting and hacking far away on the other side of the planet

Of course we are all mortals.  Which is why we worry about everything all around us.  If we were eternal, then we would not care. Not even a bit.  As Dana Gioia put it:

One of your primary experiences of reality is to be mortal.  A human life is a linear structure of time in your natural world which repeats itself so every spring everything is new again except for you. If you are a Christian and you also believe there is the eternity.  There is a level of existence outside of the linearity, outside of the natural cycle so time becomes a reality and a paradox.  ... If we were not mortal, if we did not exist in time, you would have forever and nothing would matter

Life matters because we do not live forever.

It becomes even more troubling when this mortal existence is unnaturally ended, which is increasingly the case in India's siblings--Pakistan and Bangladesh.  In the essay in the New Yorker profiling the Pakistani novelist/writer/journalist Mohammed Hanif, I came across this:

Last April, Sabeen Mahmud, a close friend of Hanif’s who ran a local event space called the Second Floor, was planning a panel discussion involving Baloch leaders. Worried that the I.S.I. would react badly, she turned to Hanif for advice. He told her that it would be very risky, but Mahmud decided to go ahead anyway.
Hanif was out of town the night of the discussion, but he followed it on Twitter, and was relieved when it came to an end without incident. A few minutes later, he got a call from a friend: gunmen had pulled alongside Mahmud’s car and opened fire, killing her and wounding her mother. “It really shook me,” he said. “I used to think, like Sabeen, that we were really small fry. Who the hell cares about a hundred and twenty people sitting in a room talking, a bunch of like-minded losers?” Mahmud’s death was a measure of how much things had changed in Pakistan. 

And today in the news, reports that yet another activist--Khurram Zaki--was shot dead in Karachi by unidentified gunmen.  Zaki was forty:

This was the third high-profile killing of a rights activist in Karachi in recent years and pointed to the immense dangers faced by activists in a country troubled by religious extremism and intolerance. Last year, Sabeen Mahmud, the director of a popular arts center in Karachi, was gunned down in the city after she hosted an event on human rights abuses in southwestern Baluchistan Province. Parween Rahman, a social justice activist, was killed in 2013.

Miles away, on the other side of India, a Sufi leader was the latest who was hacked to death in Bangladesh:

Similar attacks on intellectuals, secular writers and others have taken place over the last two years in Bangladesh. The attacks have seemed to increase in recent weeks, with a Hindu tailor being hacked to death last month, as were two gay rights activists, among others. Several of the assaults have been claimed by the Islamic State or by a branch of Al Qaeda, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist websites. An English professor was hacked to death, also in Rajshahi, last month, in an attack that was claimed by the Islamic State and that police said they believed was connected to Islamist militants.

I--and, hopefully you too--worry about these because we--and that includes you, too--are mortals. Mere mortals.

Mama said there'll be days like this. But, ... curry college?

A student asked me the other day if I had any quick curry recipe that I could share with him--he likes to cook not only for himself but for his wife and four kids as well.  I went all professorial on him in order to explain that there is no single curry.   "The curry powder in the grocery store is merely one combination of spices" I clarified.  "You can create many different mixes of spices, which is what Indian cooking is all about" I encouraged him.

The idea of "curry" goes back to the British in India.  Not only did they take it back to Britain, they spread it far and wide.  Even to Japan:

katsu curry dates to the Meiji era of the late 19th century, soon after the opening of Japan’s borders. Japanese trade with the West led to a national fascination with foreign flavors and textures — a kind of reverse-twist culinary version of the Japonisme that gripped Europe around the same time. (There was until recently a curry museum located in Yokohama, one of Japan’s most prominent ports.)

The world, as I blogged quite a while ago, is one big curry pot, it seems!

Over the decades, curry has become huge in Britain.  How significant is the Indian (curry) restaurant business?  Get this; it "produces twice as much revenue as Britain’s steel industry." The curry taste has spread so much in Britain that they are tremendously short of chefs who can work the magic in restaurants:

Staff shortages are common among all types of restaurants, but they are particularly worrying for those specializing in curry.
Indian restaurants employ about 100,000 people and generated 4.2 billion British pounds, or about $6.3 billion, in sales last year, accounting for about a fifth of the entire restaurant business, according to data compiled by Karan Bilimoria, a member of the Parliament’s curry committee and the creator of Cobra beer.   

There is now a "curry committee" in the British Parliament!  I suppose you can even mess with Texas, but you can't mess around with curry in Britain ;)

Even more fascinating is this:

Mr. Bilimoria is also leading efforts to build “curry colleges” across the country with the aim of expanding the Indian restaurant business

"Curry College."  And you thought you had seen and heard it all!

Even the Brexit discussions include talking about how it will affect the curry business:

At a debate held at the House of Commons two weeks ago, Mr. Scully said the curry industry would benefit from Britain leaving the European Union. It would give Britain “more flexibility to control our borders and tackle some of the unintended consequences of immigration from outside the E.U.,” he said. “Things such as bringing curry chefs over might benefit.”

I tell ya, everyday there is plenty out there that makes it such a fascinating life.  Too bad it will all end soon! ;)

Naturally, the curry chef crisis leads to discussions on immigration--whether or not to let people in, especially when the Indian restaurants want to serve "authentic" dishes from India that the British are apparently demanding, now that they know that the "curry" is a cheap imitation of the awesome food in the Subcontinent:

“But it wasn’t really Indian food,” Ms. Collingham said. “These Indians had learned what the British in India would eat and served it back in Britain.”
Now, new Indian restaurants are trying to move beyond curry, she said, but tighter rules are choking the culinary exchanges that come with immigration.
Mr. Bilimoria agreed. “Should we expect our curry to be cooked in Delhi and flown over to us?” he asked. “No,” he said. “We need chefs right here.”

I am now drooling for the different "curries" that my mother makes.

No,, it's not what you think ;)
I clicked this earlier in the summer, when driving through Brookings and Gold Beach.
Those towns are in Curry County, here in Oregon.

Obama as Nixon, and Kerry as Kissinger? They just talk and look better!

So, there is the US seemingly flailing over the Syria issue. With Iran, there are problems. North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba have been needling the US for quite a while. And then there are the likes of Russia and Brazil with whom it is a dysfunctional relationship.

Overlay all the recent revelations of the NSA spying operations. And the drone-based killings in far away lands.  Think about the long-running Guantanamo issue.

Add to this the interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and the very strange relationship with Pakistan and Egypt.

All set?

Now, try to put together a statement on what America stands for.

Confused?  You can't seem to figure out what exactly is the ideal for which America carrying is the torch?

There is a vast divide between the ideals that we think America represents and the reality of America, right?

This is not new at all. It has always been this way.

In my early years, back in the old country, I was dead set against the US because I could not understand how America could talk all glorious things and act like a jerk.  Which is why my parents were quite shocked when they came to know that I had decided in favor of graduate schooling in the US, with an even larger goal of making America my home.

It is just that I had made my peace with the fact that all the countries act like jerks and that there is no saintly country.

One of my earliest experiences with the disconnect between the American ideal versus the American realpolitik was during the 1971 India-Pakistan wars that led to the birth of an independent Bangladesh.  It was a simple question that my young mind had: if America is all for democracy, then wouldn't America support India instead of supporting Pakistan?

A simple question, a simplistic one, that only kids might have, right?  But, often we overlook those simple bottom-lines.  I suppose as adults we lead lives full of contradictions that we automatically begin to discount the conflict between the ideals and the reality.  How depressing that this is, also, a part of growing older and "wiser!"

All those memories of my growing up years in India seem to have been dusted off by this wonderful book-review essay by Pankaj Mishra, who writes about "Nixon, Kissinger, and the Bangladesh genocide." (sub. reqd.)

It jolts me, yet again, even after all these years, to read about the language that Nixon and Kissinger used, which reflects their attitudes towards the people of the Subcontinent, its leaders, and their priorities. Indira Gandhi was a "bitch," Indians are "such bastards" and "a slippery, treacherous people" and more.

How unfortunate that Kissinger is praised as a statesman, and even Nixon too!  As Shakespeare wrote, "For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men."

It is not only that they made such comments, but made them when the US ambassadors stationed in India and Pakistan were sending them cables that Pakistan was destroying democracy and committing genocide. Mishra offers this Nixon quote from one of the books he reviews:

Biafra stirred up a few Catholics. But, you know, I think Biafra stirred people up more than Pakistan, because Pakistan they're just a bunch of brown goddamn Moslems."

"For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men."

And what was the larger purpose that Nixon and Kissinger were aiming for?  Even as Nixon dismissed Pakistanis as "brown goddamn Moslems" he was using the Pakistani dictator-general Yahya Khan as "the principal intermediary between Beijing and Washington, personally conveying to Chinese leaders the Americans' desire for a closer dialogue."

Nixon and Kissinger are celebrated for opening up to China.  You know, the Asian country of Mao that was a champion for democracy and human rights!  "It is like Nixon going to China" is now a phrase to describe major policy shifts.

"For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men."

In wrapping up the essay, Mishra writes:

[Many] postwar Administrations, Democratic as well as Republican, violated American ideals of democracy and human rights while pursuing what they saw--mostly wrongly--as national interests.

We have this profound image of America as a symbol for democracy and human rights. Time and again, we are reminded that reality has nothing to do with the symbol.

More from Mishra:

Obama was expected to restore an ethical sheen to post-9/11 foreign policy, but he has intensified drone warfare in Yemen and Pakistan, pursued whistle-blowers, and failed to close down Guantanamo.  It is difficult to imagine him risking Israel's security by taking a hard line against the Egyptian generals--especially not while he weighs the appropriate response to Syrian war crimes, copes with the human costs of Iraq occupation and of the intervention in Libya, seeks peace with honor in Afghanistan, re-starts peace talks between Israel and Palestine, and controls the fallout from Edward Snowden's revelations.

Who cares for the millions of real people who get killed, tortured, driven out of their homes, in the process, right?

Aren't you happy that you are also older and "wiser?"

More on the Bangladesh factory catastrophe ... clothes cheaper than food!

In an earlier post, I noted the logic that if we as consumers want to pay nothing more than $14 a shirt, then it can happen only with the kind of conditions that led to the catastrophe in Bangladesh.  The New Yorker's James Surowiecki's point is the same:

The problem isn’t so much evil factory owners as a system that’s great at getting Western consumers what they want but leaves developing-world workers toiling in misery.

How much have American consumers benefited from textile manufacturing in countries that are desperate for economic growth and development that will bring in jobs?

U.S. consumers have become accustomed to spending relatively little on clothing compared with other items—and getting a lot for their money. Americans last year devoted just 3% of their annual spending to clothing and footwear, compared with around 7% in 1970 and about 13% in 1945, according to Commerce Department data.

The decreasing proportion of the annual spending doesn't mean we buy less clothes.  It is the other way around: we buy a lot more clothes than ever before but at remarkably low prices:

"Apparel prices are lower in absolute terms now than they were in the 1990s," says Dean Maki, an economist at Barclays

Compare this fashion expense with food:

Since 1990, clothing prices in the U.S. have risen just 10% compared with an 82% jump in food prices during the same period, according to Jessica Tenvose, an economist with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiles the Consumer Price Index. If adjusted for inflation, clothing prices would show a decline.

Our fickle sense of fashion, and an appetite for attire, means that the market works in overdrive to make that happen. That led to flexible manufacturing processes, writes Surowiecki:

Flexible supply chains are great for multinationals and consumers. But they erode already thin profit margins in developing-world factories and foster a pell-mell work environment in which getting the order out the door is the only thing that matters. Locke says, “Often, the only way factories can make the variety and quantity of goods that brands want at the price points they’re willing to pay is to squeeze the workers.” Suppliers in the garment industry rarely have contracts that last more than two seasons. “If you don’t deliver on time,” Locke says, “you don’t get the next order.” The problem is made worse by the fact that many of these factories are simply poorly run, with managers who generally have little training. This means that profits are smaller and there’s less money to pay workers or to invest in better conditions. And since in many developing countries, including Bangladesh, labor unions are frowned upon, there’s no one to speak up for workers in these factories. So safety becomes an afterthought at best.

Now, it is not that I want us American consumers to apologize and feel sorry for such trends.  Instead, as I noted in that post, if only we are willing to pay a few more cents per shirt, which can then go a long way to both pay higher wages and to enforce occupational safety.

In my post, I agreed with the following quote:

Real reform will mean paying a lot more than $14 for a shirt.

US and European retailers are working on responses to this crisis in their own ways, and I am sure soon they will work out a mutually agreeable set of conditions.  Meanwhile, the Bangaldesh government is also responding:

April's collapse of the eight-story Rana Plaza, one of the world's worst industrial accidents, has put pressure on Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's government to address concerns about working conditions in Bangladesh. Ms. Hasina's administration said on Sunday that it planned to soon raise the minimum wage in the sector from $38 per month, about a quarter of China's wage. It closed 18 garment factories for safety violations last week and is planning broad inspections of other facilities.

And that is exactly what Surowiecki also had to say:

Even so, while there is much that companies can do themselves, the real lesson of the past two decades is that if labor standards are actually to improve government has to play a role. Private power alone won’t cut it: as long as consumers and companies insist on the lowest price and endless variety, there’ll always be factories that are willing to cut corners to get the business.

We have a long way to go.  But, in our haste to do something good, I hope we will not drive out the manufacturers from Bangladesh; that will be terribly counter-productive because as horrible as the situation is, it will be worse if these jobs didn't exist.  

Saira Banu, a seamstress from a factory in Rana Plaza who suffered broken ribs in the collapse, says she would like to quit. But Ms. Banu, who is in her 20s, says she doesn't want to return to a previous job as a housemaid, an informal position that isn't covered by a minimum wage and pays about $20 per month. "I'd like to find alternative work," she said. "But I don't know what I can do."

As my dissertation adviser once remarked in class, only the rich can afford to be unemployed.

Caption at the source:
Rozina Akter, a seamstress injured in the factory collapse, said she will go back to work as soon as she can, adding, 'Not all buildings will collapse.

The Bangladesh clothing factory disaster and us. Not the US, but us

We consumers want to pay the lowest price possible for whatever we want to buy.  The market works, and works furiously, to get us products at those low prices.

This drive for low prices has led to China's rise as the world's factory.  In an earlier post, I wondered whether China's "cheap" manufacturing is worth all that.  I noted there:

We consumers all over the world are not willing to pay anything towards maintaining the environment, leave alone improving its quality.  Simultaneously, we seem to be addicted to inexpensive goods that come from China.  Even from a simple economic understanding, we can hypothesize that somebody is paying a price that we are not.

In China's case, there is one huge price that we already paying the piper: the effect on the natural environment.  Smoke and smog, and erosion, and more.

China's economic growth and development means that slowly wages have risen there, which then has spread the "cheap" manufacturing elsewhere, to poorer countries like Bangladesh.  Unlike China's environmental cost that we don't pay for because it is largely out of our sight, the drive towards lower and lower prices is a lot more visible in Bangladesh.  The latest was the collapse of the multi-level factory that has resulted in a body count that has already exceeded 550!

As consumers, we might be able to ignore the impacts on China's environment, but the loss of human lives in Bangladesh makes us pause, at least for a while, forcing us to re-evaluate our drive towards low prices.  What is the cost breakdown of the typical t-shirt manufactured in one of those factories?

Twelve cents!

To get prices that low, workers see just 12 cents a shirt, or two per cent of the wholesale cost. That’s one of the lowest rates in the world—about half of what a worker in a Chinese factory might make

But, those twelve cents are also why these jobs exist in Bangladesh.  This low wage is:

a major reason for the explosion of Bangladesh’s garment industry, worth $19 billion last year, up from $380 million in 1985. The country’s 5,400 factories employ four million people, mostly women, who cut and stitch shirts and pants that make up 80 per cent of the country’s total exports.

We forget that Bangladesh is one awfully poor country.  Matt Yglesias writes while situating "Bangladesh's GDP per capita in the context of American history":

It's common to compare Bangladesh to America's own sweatshop era in the late-19th century, but Krugman shows that Bangladesh is actually much poorer than that.

Yes, Bangladesh can do a lot more than it currently does to enforce labor regulations and occupational safety protocols.  But, ultimately,

Real reform will mean paying a lot more than $14 for a shirt.

We consumers have the power to influence favorable working conditions and lives for Bangladeshi workers, or workers anywhere, for that matter.  But, we have to be ready to put our money where our mouth is:

Babul Akhter, president of the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation, said buyers have a responsibility to check the safety and security of those making the clothes they order, but most overlook this.
Abdus Salam Murshedy, former president of Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, adds: "The buyers and brands look for the most competitive offer. We cannot pay appropriate wages [to workers] unless we get proper prices for the orders."

It is easy to criticize "those greedy corporations" when they are merely responding to us greedy consumers!

As I noted in another post, it is bizarre that human life in some parts of the planet is held more valuable than human life elsewhere:

I find it terrible that a human life is not the same anywhere on the planet.  There seems to be a collective ennui when it comes to the loss of the lives of humans who were doing nothing but tending to their daily lives in some parts of the world.  The innocent civilians who die by the hundreds and thousands in many, many countries of the world do not make it even to the back pages of the papers, leave alone the front pages.

This Bangladesh incident will slowly move away from the front pages to some obscure spots, and will eventually disappear.  Soon it will be the holiday shopping season and we consumers will line up outside the locked stores for the early bird prices.  We will trample fellow-humans as we rush to pick up that remarkably low-priced product from China or Bangladesh.

The customer is always right!


New Portable Sewing Machine Lets Sweatshop Employees Work On The Go

An Iraqi-Indian Jew wins the Indo-Pak war over Bangladesh?

Something new everyday is a terrible understatement in my life.  Every day is yet another revelation of how little I know about the world and, yet, how much I pontificate at this blog and elsewhere!

Yesterday, after getting mighty disappointed that a prominent public intellectual, and a fellow Indian-American to boot, had engaged in plagiarism, and that too perhaps not the first instance, I kept jumping through hyperlinks and ended up reading this piece.  The story of Jack Jacob "born into Calcutta’s Baghdadi community, bluffed the Pakistanis into surrendering 93,000 troops in 1971."  How can such a teaser not pique my curiosity, eh!

Jack Farj Rafael Jacob, wildly accomplished and widely respected, is best known for his decisive role in the 1971 Bangladesh war. Indians and historians generally agree that his courage, strategic thinking and hutzpa changed the course of South Asian history.

So, why "hutzpa" and not "chutzpah" I don't understand.  Is "hutzpa" the accepted way to spell it in English in Iaraeli publications? 

Anyway, how did Jacob write history in that war in 1971?

Jacob, then chief of staff of the Indian Eastern command, knew that a protracted war, of which he was the Indian commander, would claim countless more lives. As the war began, trudging through swamp terrain, his troops enacted a daring plan to capture Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan

Two weeks into the war, Pakistan’s commander in East Pakistan, Gen. A.A.K. Niazi, invited Jacob to lunch to discuss a cease-fire. Jacob wrote up an “instrument of surrender” document for his counterpart and flew with it across enemy lines, unarmed and accompanied only by one staff officer.

Niazi was given a stark choice: Surrender unconditionally and publicly, and receive the protection of the Indian Army for all minorities and retreating troops, or face an Indian military onslaught. Jacob gave Niazi 30 minutes to decide.

Niazi agreed to the terms. The next day, 93,000 Pakistani soldiers surrendered. Jacob had but 3,000 Indian troops, 30 miles away, behind him.

Multitudes were likely saved by this surrender, still studied by military students. Recognizing his role, last month the Islamic Republic of Bangladesh awarded Jacob a certificate of appreciation for his “unique role” in the formation of the nation.

 How fascinating.  An Indian, descended from Jews who had emigrated from Iraq, plays a decisive role that saved thousands of Hindu and Muslim and Sikh and Christian lives--odds are slim that there was even another Jew in that war neighborhood.  

But then, the skeptical mind that I have wondered about the possibility that a story like this might be too good to be true.  So, following the same "trust, but verify" rule that I suggest to students (which most don't care for anyway!) I ended up reading this, in which I found the following couple of sentences to add that much more to Jacob as a person:

Now, like then, he lives alone (apart from loyal staff). The governors’ mansions he once occupied were grander than his modest flat in the capital, with its piles of books—mostly on military affairs—on the living room table. He serves tea in exquisite china, salty crackers on the side. He has never married. “I did not remain single by choice,” he says, “I tried twice, but failed.” The first of his former loves now lives in Jerusalem. The other, The One, still tugs at his heart, the memories like postcards, vivid yet flat.

 The more I read the piece, the more I now wonder if the Israeli publication had plagiarized extensively "borrowed without citing" from here, which is dated June 2012.  Even the photograph is the same; I suppose Jacob could have shared his stock portrait photograph with the reporters.  But, ...

Oh well, why get distracted from a wonderful story about an Iraqi-Indian Jew and his decisive role in the Indo-Pak war that gave birth to Bangladesh!

India opens up with Pakistan--East and West

The report in the WSJ, from where I got the chart, adds:

There is huge room for growth in trade. In the year ended March 31, India exported $2.33 billion of goods to Pakistan. In the same period, Pakistan sold goods valued at $332.5 million in India, according to Indian government statistics.
By comparison, two-way trade between India and China, New Delhi's largest trading partner, is valued at more than $60 billion annually.

What a different story this would have been had these two countries not been caught up with the Kashmir issue and literally battled over it!

Meanwhile, Bangladesh-- the old East Pakistan--and India are finally getting around to the land and border issues that have confounded mapmakers; the hassle of enclaves:

EVER since Bangladesh achieved its independence in 1971, struggles over territory and terrorism, rather than the exchange of goods and goodwill, have dominated its relations with its mega-neighbour. Forty years on, both countries appear to be nearing an agreement to solve the insoluble—by swapping territory.

The planned exchange of parcels of each other’s territory is concentrated around some 200 enclaves. These are like islands of Indian and Bangladeshi territory surrounded completely by the other country’s land, clustered on either side of Bangladesh’s border with the district of Cooch Behar, in the Indian state of West Bengal. Surreally, these include about two dozen counter-enclaves (enclaves within enclaves), as well as the world’s only counter-counter enclave—a patch of Bangladesh that is surrounded by Indian territory…itself surrounded by Bangladeshi territory.

In a healthy sign:

For the people of the two tiny Bangladesh enclaves, history recently took a new turn. The iron gates of the Indian corridor connecting them with the mainland will now remain open round the clock.

On October 19, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina declared the Tin Bigha Corridor formally open for 24 hours, heralding the end of nearly 64 years of captivity for its inhabitants. The right to unrestricted movement through the corridor was virtually open from September 8 when the two countries signed an agreement during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Bangladesh.

Whatever the reasons, it took nearly four decades to see the full implementation of a historic agreement signed between Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1974 — three years after Bangladesh emerged on the world map dividing Pakistan with active Indian assistance.

Now, if only the Kashmir issue can be resolved!

Poverty in America: Eat our heart out, Bangladesh!

I am not sure, however, what the bottom line is that Trudeau wants to get across to readers.  Is he pointing out the fact that we have poverty?  Or that our poor are better off than the poor in Bangladesh?  Or that ... oh well!

In any case, if you prefer a few words to compare the poor in the US versus the poor elsewhere, then let me quote from a previous post:

The typical person in the top 5 percent of the Indian population, for example, makes the same as or less than the typical person in the bottom 5 percent of the American population. That’s right: America’s poorest are, on average, richer than India’s richest — extravagant Mumbai mansions notwithstanding.

BTW, I thought Bangladesh was no longer the poster child for poverty, and that it was Somalia or Ethiopia :(

How good ideas can be easily hijacked: microcredit

A few years ago, in an upper division course, I started including essays and news articles on microfinance as an innovative approach to economic development in the poorer countries of Asia and Africa.  It helped a lot when Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank were recognized with the Nobel Prize for the pioneering efforts in micro finance and rural development.  Students seemed to be excited too--one of them a week or so after the class discussions sought my permission first to talk to the rest of the class about kiva.org that she had "discovered" on the web and used it ...

Slowly the idea spread in India.  And it was only a matter of time before a few Indians also decided to corrupt it as any good idea is almost always distorted in that country.  A classic example is Gandhi's message of civil disobedience and satyagraha, and fasting until corrective measures are implemented.  Within a few years of his death, every third rate politician started launching satyagrahas, and fasting photo-ops for every trivial pet cause one might imagine.  The end of the Gandhian ideas, so to say.

So, why should micro finance be exempt from such corruption in order to pursue most ulterior self-interests of profits, right? And that has what has happened in India over the last few years.  Unfortunately!  Yunus wrote in the NY Times:

I never imagined that one day microcredit would give rise to its own breed of loan sharks.

I am surprised that Yunus didn't know his fellow South Asians any better :(

Microcredit has morphed into the ugly loan shark modes, with all the typical attitudes that we knew about them.  The Hindu's caption for the photo below is:

There were reports of suicides, allegedly due to extreme harassment by loan recovery officials from MFIs. A family mourns one such death reported from Rolakal village, Nalgonda, Andhra Pradesh last October. Photo: Singam Venkata Ramana

Once again, it is a screw-the-poor, which is a tragic irony in a culture that talks a lot about helping the poor.  More on this in my earlier postings in the context of "Peepli Live"

As Yunus writes:

The kind of empathy that had once been shown toward borrowers when the lenders were nonprofits disappeared. The people whom microcredit was supposed to help were being harmed. In India, borrowers came to believe lenders were taking advantage of them, and stopped repaying their loans.
Commercialization has been a terrible wrong turn for microfinance, and it indicates a worrying “mission drift” in the motivation of those lending to the poor. Poverty should be eradicated, not seen as a money-making opportunity.

Even while disagreeing with Yunus' argument, David Roodman has this important observation:

Credit is not an ordinary product. It is weighed down by millennia of baggage, for the good reason that it can do real harm. It is like a drug in that it is potentially healthy in small doses, but also potentially addictive. So it stands to reason that sellers of this product must take unusual steps to counteract its special problems of reputation and risk.

Things have taken quite a nasty turn, and Yunus is being compelled to defend those ideas and himself:

[In] his native Bangladesh Mr Yunus’s reputation is under attack. His supporters fear that the government plans to remove him from Grameen Bank, the microlender he founded, and take it over. In late December Mr Yunus had to issue a statement denying claims by some in the Bangladeshi government that he had resigned from his post as the managing director of Grameen. ...
Mr Yunus denies all the charges against him but has made powerful enemies among Bangladesh’s politicians. During a period of rule by a military-backed caretaker government a few years ago, he announced the formation of a political party, a project he soon dropped. Some reckon Sheikh Hasina is miffed that Mr Yunus and Grameen got the Nobel prize. It remains unclear how far the government, which already has three seats on Grameen Bank’s board, will go. Some fear that if the government succeeds in taking Grameen over it could turn its sights on other successful outfits, like BRAC. Bangladeshi microlenders can no longer consider themselves safe from the country’s messy politics.

The strange story of Yunus doesn't end there; he was hauled before the court, but not for any wrongdoings related to Grameen:

The current defamation charges against Yunus stem from comments he made in an interview with French news agency AFP four years ago, in which he reportedly criticized politicians and said they were only in "power to make money." The remarks came shortly after a military-backed interim government took over amid deadly political violence in Bangladesh.
A leftist politician in Mymensingh filed the defamation case on January 21, 2007, with a local magistrate court after Yunus' interview was published in local media.
The court last month asked Yunus to appear after a judicial probe found enough evidence to support the allegations, court inspector Md. Shahid Sukrana told CNN.
Nazrul Islam Chunnu, who filed the case, is a politician and district joint general secretary of the socialist party JSD. He charged that Yunus branded politicians as "corrupt and greedy" and said the politicians were "devoid of ideologies."
If Yunus is convicted of the charges, he faces a maximum two years in prison and/or a fine, said a court official.

That is right--all because Yunus aired in public the truth that is well known that politicians are corrupt and greedy!  How dare he, eh!

A Fistful Of Dollars: The Story of a Kiva.org Loan from Kieran Ball on Vimeo.

Bangladesh in Eugene: Syeda Rizwana Hasan

With a twist to an old saying about Mohammed and the mountain, Bangladesh came to me right here in Eugene, in the form of Syeda Rizwana Hasan.

My meeting with Rizwana Hasan is a remarkable testament to the global interconnectedness that characterizes our contemporary lives.  Hasan, who is associated with the Eugene-based Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW,) was in town as an invited keynote speaker for the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference (PIELC).

Rizwana Hasan has a lengthy track record as an activist environmental attorney in Bangladesh, and in 2009, was one of the recipients of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize.

Hasan focuses on the ship-breaking industry’s impacts on humans and the environment.  Ships are sent to the junkyard after two or three decades of useful service, similar to how we condemn used cars.  There is a lot to salvage and reuse from these retired ships—from engines and compasses to furniture to cranes, and not to forget the steel and wood.  Ship-breaking, as one can therefore imagine, is labor-intensive.

Often, this also means that laborers toil away in conditions that can be quite dangerous and dirty.  The occupational and environmental problems related to ship-breaking arise because of the wide range of materials that are used to build a ship in the first place.

South Korea and Taiwan used to be the global leaders in ship-breaking.  But then they developed and became rich, which then sent the industry towards other low cost locations.

Thus, the labor-intensive nature along with potential for unfavorable impacts on workers and the natural environment logically leads this activity to be situated at the docks of poor countries.  Alang, situated on India’s western coast, and relatively close to Mumbai, is home to one of the largest ship-breaking operations where a bulk freighter is completely dismantled in about a month.  Karachi is Pakistan’s headquarters in this industry, and in Bangladesh it all happens at Chittagong.

This is now boom time for ship-breaking because the Great Recession has idled many ships, and a record number of the older ones are now headed to these maritime graveyards.  According to news reports, in 2009, scrappers “bought 1,014 ships with a combined carrying capacity of 31.5 million deadweight tons” which was twice the 2008 numbers.  

Rizwana Hasan is not opposed to the ship-breaking industry per se.  But, she wants the ships' owners and their countries of origin to properly take care of toxic materials before the vessels reach Bangladesh.  Further, Hasan worries—and she has enough evidence for this—that while Bangladesh and other countries might have laws that address labor conditions and environmental impacts, rare is the case when such laws are actually applied.

Thus, starting in 2003, Hasan has brought these issues to the attention of Bangladesh’s Supreme Court and has been gaining victories for nature and the laborers.  Last year, the court closed down 36 ship-breaking yards that were not in compliance with the environmental laws. A remarkable success, indeed, for Hasan and her team.

During the few minutes I chatted with Hasan, I asked her not about the ship-breaking industry but about the latest legal update from Bangladesh—the death sentence for the assassins of the father of that nation, Mujibur Rahman.  

In 1971 Bangladesh came into existence, after having been East Pakistan since 1947 when the British Raj ended.  I told Hasan about the comic books I had read as a kid that told the story of Mujib—as he is popularly referred to—and his fight for Bangladesh’s freedom.  In a horrific re-telling of Julius Caesar’s death, in 1975, Mujibur Rahman, along with most of his family, was assassinated by his associates.  Two of his daughters survived only because they were away in Germany—one of them is the current prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina.

Rizwana Hasan noted that it took 35 years for the justice system to even try the assassins and, therefore, it should not surprise anybody that environmental justice is not easy to pursue in Bangladesh.  It is simply incredible that Hasan continues to maintain a positive and constructive outlook despite such a bleak and realistic assessment of Bangladesh’s politics and the courts.

And, it is even more incredible that I met with Rizwana Hasan right here in Eugene!

Syeda Rizwana Hasan

There is a good possibility that I will get to meet with Syeda Rizwana Hasan, and I have been doing my homework to get ready--in case I do get to say hi to her.  Yep, being a student is a lot of fun :)

It is always humbling to read about people like Hasan.  The YouTube clip I have embedded here says a lot about Hasan's work.  In 2009, she was a recipient of one of the most prestigious awards in environmental leadership--the Goldman Environmental Prize:

The Goldman Environmental Prize is the world's largest award for grassroots environmentalists. Awarded annually since 1990, the Prize is given to environmental heroes from the six continental regions of Africa, Asia, Islands & Island Nations, Europe, North America and South & Central America.

The Prize is announced in April every year, to coincide with the international celebration of Earth Day. It includes a trip to San Francisco to accept the cash award of $150,000 per winner.

Kashmir: India, Pakistan, and China

Israel-Palestine two state solution: wishful thinking?

Recently, the former prime minister of Britain, Tony Blair, recalled his meeting with the former president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, when both were in power.  When Blair asked Musharraf what help he would like, Musharraf replied, “a peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.” Musharraf’s comment underscores the global geopolitical implications of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. 

It is an interesting irony that a Pakistani president highlighted the urgency of Israeli-Palestinian peace, given that Pakistan and India have not been at peace with each other since their creation as a two-state solution to the Hindu-Muslim issues.  So, when a two-state solution is often called for to put an end to violence in the Middle East, I wonder if we might be able to learn from the creation of India and Pakistan.

As World War II ended, it was clear that it was only a matter of time before the British Raj also came to an end.  The British government, and the leaders in India, realized that they had to figure out a solution to the increasingly incompatible political options when it came to the issue of a separate homeland for India’s Muslims, who were the largest minority group.

While historians continue to debate on the true intentions of the various entities involved, the result was a two-state solution—India and Pakistanwere carved out as two independent countries in August 1947. 

The creation of Pakistan was a rather strange case of a two-state solution because of the contrast with other “stan” countries.  While Afghanistan, for instance, means the land of Afghans, and Kazakhstan refers to the land of Kazakhs, Pakistan does not mean it is the land of “Pakis” because there is no ethnic group of that name.  Pakistan was a name concocted to emphasize the different ethnic groups and territories: Punjab, Afghans Kashmir, Indus, and Sind.

Furthermore, Pakistan was to be composed of two territories—West Pakistan and East Pakistan—that were almost 2000 miles apart and separated by India in between.  In such a formulation, the very absence of “Bengal” in the acronym ought to have been a warning sign on the coming breakup of the country.  After all, East Pakistan was what was referred to as East Bengal in the latter days of the Raj, where Bengali-speaking Muslims were the overwhelming majority.  Thus, I suppose it was no surprise when the Bengalis of East Pakistan wanted to be free from the domination by “Pakis” of West Pakistan, which is what happened in 1971 when the independent Bangladesh came into existence.

And then, of course, the unresolved tensions over Kashmir, with both India and Pakistan claiming the territory as their own.  This territorial turf war continues on to this day, which almost triggered a nuclear-war in 1998.

The parallels with the Israeli-Palestinian tensions are not that dissimilar.  A two-state solution is being proposed, but even now the Palestinian territories are in two separate geographic areas that are not contiguous—West Bank and the Gaza Strip—with Israel’s political boundaries in between the two.  And, there are serious differences of opinions regarding Jerusalem—very similar to the Kashmir question.

Tensions between East and West Pakistan escalated after the two-state solution was implemented.  However, in the Palestinian case, over the last couple of years Gaza and West Bank have been operating pretty much independent of each other, controlled and administered by political rivals—Hamas and Fatah. 

A two-state solution did work, for instance, when the two countries of Slovakia and the Czech Republic were created out of Czechoslovakia.  But, the geopolitics there did not have the kinds of political and personal intensity that characterizes the Indo-Pak situation, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Similarly, the collapse of the Soviet Union, which led to the birthing of new countries, like Estonia, was to a large extent nothing but a reversal to roots—after all, Estonia was gobbled up by the Soviet Union that was intent on expanding its sphere of influence and, therefore, Estonia’s independence was not really a “two-state solution.”

A two-state solution has not delivered peace and prosperity for India and Pakistan, with disagreements and violence continuing on even after almost 62 years.  I, therefore, worry that a two-state solution bringing about everlasting Israel-Palestinian peace might be wishful thinking.  But, in the absence of any other option, here is to hoping that it will pave the path for stability and peace sooner than later.

Sweatshop labor in Bangladesh

Yet another fantastic report from the Onion


New Portable Sewing Machine Lets Sweatshop Employees Work On The Go

Field Marshal Manekshaw

Field Marshal S.H.F.J. Manekshaw was quite a legend when I was a kid. Even though I barely understood then why India and Pakistan were at war over East Pakistan, it was Manekshaw more than Indira Gandhi who impressed me more. Not because I was fond of war games or playing with toy guns. But, there was something neat about Manekshaw and did he exude charm!
According to the BBC, Field Marshal Manekshaw also said that India lost a golden opportunity to solve the Kashmir issue once and for all at the Shimla summit with Pakistan which was held soon after the 1971 war. It is unfortunate that Kashmir continues to be far from the peaceful and heavenly place it ought to be.

Anyway, am glad that Manekshaw and many of his fellow Parsis chose India, over Pakistan, when the countries became independent. Nothing against Pakistan. If he had opted for Pakistan, then Manekshaw would not have spent his retired life in Tamil Nadu, and dad would not have had the chance to shake his hands.

Yet another old soldier fades away. Goodbye, ol' chap.