Reflections

A friend was mine was a devout nationalist. We met at university, but I, along with a few other friends, were secular to the core. 

At one point in a conversation, she asked with great anxiety, “What if the Bengali language disappears!” She spoke with terror.

I didn’t know how to respond. I felt nothing. At the time, like most mortals, I was more concerned about my personal mortality. 

“Death, thou shalt die!” thundered John Dunne (I was an avid reader of poetry). Dunne left me cold; Death 💀 wasn’t going to die; I was. 

Even John Keats’ last words, “I feel the daisies growing over me”, left me cold. 

Camus came closer to the mark. “What is eternity to me in place of the hand of a woman or the caress of flowers 🌸!” Or words to that effect.

But here was N (the first letter of her name) identifying fully with the Bengali language. What good would it do her, I wondered, if the Bengali language survived for aeons, but she was dead 💀 the next day?

And surely, as an intelligent, knowledgeable person, she must have known about how many civilizations, religions and languages have perished from the face of the earth in the last 5,000 years. How many more are destined to disappear ere humanity itself perishes, as it must? Why this forlorn clinging to a spurious vicarious immortality?

Of course, unless the object of your worship is everlasting - in this case, the Bengali language  - you can’t genuflect

before it, you can’t worship it. If the god is going to kick the bucket tomorrow, it’s hardly worthy of eternal reverence. A creature with a limited lifespan just can’t be respected, never mind worshipped. 

“Webster was much possessed by death 💀 and saw the skull beneath the skin,” wrote Elliot, which struck a chord. 

When N loses her skin, and the people above ground babble in Bengali, what would she feel? 

“In me behold the only skull 💀/ From which whatever flows is never dull” wrote Byron on his drinking skull 💀. But life as a posthumous punchbowl did not appeal to me.

I forgot about N for years.

Until a similar anxiety was voiced by a murid of the Atroshi pir.

Our friend, Sam Mills, spent several months at the darbar of the pir for his PhD thesis. 

He used to regale me and Farhana with stories of the darbar. One of them lodged in my memory.

One day, a murid came crying to the Holy Man and prostrated himself.

“Islam thakbe?” he wailed.

The Holy Man, calm of countenance, assured him, “Islam thakbe! Islam thakbe!” (Islam will stay!)

I remembered N, and realized that all religions share the same anxieties. 

“Healthy politics is not gang warfare.” 

But in Bangladesh, politics - at its healthiest - IS gang warfare. 

If I vote, I’m responsible for arson.

If I vote, I’m responsible for immolation.

If I vote, I’m responsible for vandalism.

If I vote, I’m responsible for ruining lives and families.

That’s why I don’t vote. 

Pervez (not his real name) was adept at using a gun. His father was a police 👮‍♀️ officer, and he learned to use a gun at the police shooting range. He wasn’t exactly Billy the Kid, but he wasn’t bad.

(I was a much more humble sharpshooter, wielding a cumbersome .22 rifle - meant more for killing birds 🦢 and busting balloons 🎈 at long distances on a police rifle range than taking out a man. My balloon-busting got me the junior championship at the Rajarbagh Police Line at the age of thirteen. I
never handled the 22, which belonged to my uncle, except to shoot a crow now and then: I was young, bloodthirsty and a missile of any kind changed your psychology: I know, because I once killed a harmless myna with a self-made catapult. It still bugs my conscience. But the upshot is that a piece of artillery, no matter how modest, brings out atavistic impulses. I know.)

To return to Pervez, he slipped out of parental supervision like many university students and entered a new life unsupervised by his folk.

Word got around that he was a latter-day Jesse James.  The Party approached him, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse, and he became a party ‘cadre’ - the assassins, the gunslingers, the murderers, so as not to put too fine a point on it.

Pervez was ready for his new career as hit man. It wasn’t the money alone, or even the glory, but the conviction that he was serving a cause greater than himself - the Leader, the Party, the Nation, the People. He was inoculated against everything base by considerations of transcendence.

The fateful day arrived; he was all
set. He stepped out on his career as 007 of a morally bankrupt political party.

Fate intervened.

His bus had an accident. His family somehow got to find out about his dark rendezvous.

They yanked him out of student politics.

The family never want such a diabolical fate to befall the children.

Today, he is married with two children.

All’s well that ends well?

In most cases, the end is far more tragic, not only for the killer but his victims - as we read in our newspapers.

But Pervez was reprieved by Fate.





I asked our Egyptian guide why they had overthrown Hosne Mobarak.

“Because he was corrupt!” came the reply.

I marveled. To overthrow a leader for merely being corrupt seemed childishness. Clearly, these people had never thought about the state: salus populi, the safety of the people, is the irreducible function of the state. Hobbes is echoed by al-Ghazali: “Better 69 years of injustice than one hour of chaos.”

There was an exception, according to Ghazali: if a “cruel and barbarous sultan” could be removed without civil discord, so be it. Clearly, assassinations would fit the bill; otherwise, obey.

However, the Arab Spring was hardly an ideological movement. 

It was, au fond, an IMF riot. The end of subsidies for bread, higher prices for other essentials, raised the level of inflation. 

On top of that, 50 percent of young people in the Middle East are unemployed even today. 

Economists call this ‘the misery index’: the sum of inflation and unemployment. 

The IMF typically raises the misery index. Consider Indonesia in 1998.

Because of a large current account deficit in Thailand, capital rapidly exited the country, plunging the currency and raising debt levels in the economy for businesses. Unemployment followed; inflation rose.

However, the irrational ‘contagion’ spread to perfectly healthy economies, like Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Suharto of Indonesia made the mistake of taking IMF advice. He reduced spending when he should have jacked it up. Recession followed, and with it, the typical IMF riot.

Several hundred Chinese women were raped by the freedom-loving heroes baying for Suharto’s blood. 

This was how an IMF riot brought down a government of 32 years, one that had created modern Indonesia, and raised it from a congeries of 13,000 islands into a modern, prosperous state.

Joseph Stieglitz wrote a withering indictment at the time of the iMF (“third-rate students from first-rate universities”), an organization that blindly prescribed the same medicine for all economies, healthy or sick - cut spending, reduce the deficit, even when spending is in surplus, as in Indonesia’s case (Mahathir refused to follow the IMF).

In Sudan and elsewhere, we see a similar effect of the misery index couched in ideological terms.

Incidentally, for the mother of all uprisings, the French Revolution, historian Eric Hobsbawm has detailed how riots in Paris were synchronous with bread prices. 

Man cannot live by bread alone, but he becomes delirious and talks big without it. 

Nehru maintained that the English had borrowed only one word from India - loot.

That’s not quite right, but we get his drift. India ran a persistent current-account surplus with England: meaning, India was exporting capital.

In short, loot.

The west looted us, conquered us, screwed us, buggered us, killed us, and stuffed our heads full of nonsense, and we still admire them. 

We look askance at China 🇨🇳, at ‘oriental despotism’, and shudder! 

The Chinese Columbus, Zheng He, a Hui Muslim eunuch, began to conquer states in south-east Asia. Then he stopped because of an imperial - yes, a ‘despotic’ imperial - edict.

But for that, today we’d be wearing pigtails and eating with chopsticks 🥢. Instead, we wear trousers and ties and use knives 🔪 and forks 🍴 and call each other “old boy”.

A benign power, China 🇨🇳 could have conquered the world, but didn’t. And those who did, regard China 🇨🇳 with horror.

And so do we, the brown acolytes. 

(PS It is interesting that the Chinese invented, among many other things, gunpowder, the compass and the printing press, none of which it used, but the west borrowed them, used them and was transformed - by Chinese technology!)

A senior Communist was strolling 🚶‍♀️ down the streets of Dhaka, when he passed a group of street urchins in play, apparently quite happy.

He wheeled round and slapped the closest cheek he could find.

“Don’t you know there’s a class war going on? What are you so happy about?”

By then, the children were considerably less happy, as he had desired.

Clearly, the man was in his senility.

(Being a well-known personage, I cannot reveal his name.)

But in his earlier days, he had inflicted considerably more misery on the collective national cheek in his pursuit, with his crazed comrades, of a class-less socialist Utopia.

By nationalizing the modes of production, and with our golden fiber, jute (at a time when synthetic fibers were stealing the markets), we would turn poverty into unimaginable plenty.

“From each according to his ability to each according to his needs.”

Economists, political scientists, the literati, singers, film-makes, actors, writers, even the feeble-minded, were led by the Piper.

A new religion promised a new paradise; the new Canaan was nigh, overflowing with milk and honey.

The modern Pharaoh will be overcome, and Moses will survey the plains of Canaan.

Exodus again: repeating itself when demagogues conjure Pharaohs, with a victim mentality reinforcing godliness, The Chosen People, hating the Unchosen.

The socialist Utopia turned out to be one of inflation, acute shortages, unemployment...in short, all the amenities found by the devout followers of Jim Jones, who lured a thousand Americans (hardly illiterate peasants) into the jungles of Guyana, the Utopia, Canaan...

Quickly disillusioned, they had no recourse. When a Senator came out to inquire, the game seemed up.

Ever-charismatic, Jones asked his followers to swallow Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.

And to feed their children.

Around 900 obeyed, without force, and poisoned their own offspring.

So this senile gentleman reminds me of Jim Jones, as the Jim Jones of Bangladesh.


Some people still revere Jim Jones, like we still do in this country.







Democracy has produced fascism in India 🇮🇳 , Bangladesh 🇧🇩, Russia 🇷🇺 and Turkey 🇹🇷. Liberal and totalitarian democracy have the same roots.










The meaning of a word resides in the rules for its use in a way of life. Meaning amputated from a way of life becomes merely a word. This is the finding of Wittgenstein and the Sapir-Whorf thesis. It implies that one cannot translate between languages, nor transplant a word to another society which must necessarily be incapable of understanding the meaning. Words are portable; not ideas.

President Jacob Zuma of South Africa gave this definition of democracy: “You have more rights because you’re a majority; you have less rights because you’re a minority. That’s how democracy works.”

His fellow-traveler, Recep Tayip Erdogan, has his own translation: “democracy is like a train; you get off once you’ve reached your destination”.

One is tempted to chuckle, but that would be wrong: mistranslation between languages is inevitable, not an example of the native intellect making a monkey of itself before the speakers of the language.

Dr. Pangloss believed after every rape and disembowelment, this was the best of all possible worlds. Harry K. Thomas, American ambassador to Bangladesh, similarly pronounced that “we are blessed to be living in a democracy like Bangladesh”.

Some of my friends and acquaintances share this Panglossian and Thomistic view of our present and past predicament.

These people are devout: no amount of evidence can dissuade them or pervert their judgements. Decapitated and disarticulated bodies will never sway these modern Leibnizians. They have philosophical proof that all is well. It is the naysayers who cannot see our blessings.

We need more education. More democracy. More rapes and disembowelments.

More! More!

The word ‘secular’ has no meaning in Bengali or Bangladesh - or indeed in South Asia.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, secular means “not having any connection with religion”.

In Bengali, the equivalent is “impartial between religions” - not at all the English meaning.

‘Secular’ is an English word. The meaning of a word lies in the rules for its use in a way of life.

‘Secular’ cannot be translated into Bengali. By secular in this country we mean ‘anti-Islamic’ and ‘pro-Hindu’.

We do not mean the absence of any connection with religion. There’s a hatred for one religion over another.

That’s why democracy in this country pitted the two religions against each other - but one has triumphed largely because westerners think secular means what it does in English.

Economists are poring over data to explain the inexplicable. Unemployment’s down, economy’s up, yet nationalism and fascism are rampant. There’s got to be a rational explanation!

This is called the Drunkard’s Search.

A drunk was looking desperately for something under the street lamp. A woman wondered by and asked what he was looking for.

 
“My keys,” he said, still groping.

“Where did you drop them?”

“Over there,” indicating the darkened alleyway.

“Then why are you looking here?” she asked, flummoxed.

“The light is better here,” came the reply.

Social scientists try to shed light on everything, but sometimes it’s just dark.

The telling title of a recent book from Princeton is “The Seduction of Unreason”.

(Pictured: The Economist, Special Report: The World Economy, October 1 2016, p 4)

“Many home-grown NGOs have sprung up (in the past they tended to depend on foreign charities, with their own agendas (emphasis added)).” - The Economist, October 1, 2016, p 44

Foreign NGOS have their own agendas, as well as foreign-funded NGOS. Bangladesh is a supreme example.

Socrates maintained fervently that you can’t do any good in public, only in private. He never spoke in public, except at his trial. He would speak to one or at most two interlocutors. He claimed he was not a politician, and at the same time that he was the only politician. Alone among Athenians, he had tried to make men good. 

Despite his private instructions, he landed in a heap of trouble.

Found on Twitter:

Everyone loathes Donald Trump,
Including the Ladies he Humps.
I predict you will see,
He’ll begin World War III,
By Tweeting while taking a Dump.







Tahmima Anam speaks for many among the elite of Bangladesh when she lauds Indian democracy, and bemoans our lack of it until 1990. She is chuffed that we had three consecutive elections after the annus mirabiliis - the last two of which have been shown by Walter Mebane and his team at Cornell to be phony! Ms Anam, a writer herself, and a member of a powerful, well-informed family, surely knew that. And so did the rest of the illuminati. And about Indian democracy, the less said, the better: from Nehru, who failed to resign after losing the independence of his country to China, to Narendra Modi, forever associated with an anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat for which America denied him a visa, a set of evermore toxic leaders have ruled India.

 
Nothing laudable there.

Nehru’s bloody legacy was a ‘problem’ he could have solved through plebiscite under the UN. He refused.

If the plebiscite had been held, and the Kashmiris had gone over to Pakistan (NOT seceded from India, for Kashmir wasn’t Indian (then and now)), Nehru would probably have been bullet-addled like Gandhi, and for similar reasons.

What defies comprehension is that Nehru did not resign after the 1962 Sino-Indian military defeat. 

The man had lost the freedom of India and his people (but for Chinese forbearance). No one even asked him to resign, not even the opposition. Paul Edwards, a biographer, said that “in any other democratic country, he and his cabinet would not have survived .”

He set an enduring legacy for his people: The executive is unaccountable; it can get away with anything, a modern Maharaja. 

India is the laughing-stock of South Asia. 

Only Imran Khan, exalted by the military, needs no thugs. Imran Khan is the only gentleman in South Asia.

He doesn’t need thugs; doesn’t commit mass murder, unlike the other two premiers, in South Asia. 

To lose one premier to thuggery may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

“Many home-grown NGOs have sprung up (in the past they tended to depend on foreign charities, WITH THEIR OWN AGENDAS (emphasis added).” - The Economist, October 1, 2016, p 44 (about Latin America)

Foreign NGOS have their own agendas, as well as foreign-funded NGOS. NGOS in Bangladesh are supreme examples.

The word ‘secular’ has no meaning in Bengali or Bangladesh 🇧🇩 - or indeed in South Asia. 

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, secular means “not having any connection with religion”. 

In Bengali, the equivalent is “impartial between religions” - not at all the English meaning.

‘Secular’ is an English word. The meaning of a word lies in the rules for its use in a way of life.

‘Secular’ cannot be translated into Bengali. By secular in this country we mean ‘anti-Islamic’ and ‘pro-Hindu’. 

We do not mean the absence of any connection with religion. There’s a hatred for one religion over another.

That’s why democracy in this country pitted the two religions against each other - but one has triumphed largely because westerners think secular means what it does in English. 

Carlyle had a businessman for a dinner companion one evening, and he finally tired of the great man’s loquacity, and remarked, “Ideas, Mr Carlyle, ideas, nothing but ideas!”

Carlyle replied: “There was once a man named Rousseau who wrote a book containing nothing but ideas. The second edition was bound in the skins of those who laughed at the first.”

Carlyle is a great name in letters, but if he thinks it an encomium to declare that the second binding of a book was made with the epidermis of those who ridiculed the first, then I’m won’t to have a very low opinion of him.

In fact, what the ingenious M. Rousseau bequeathed to France became a template for future totalitarianisms of both the left and right. 

In one of the latter, skins of ordinary men, women and children were used, not to bind books, but to make lampshades, as recalled in the famous line by Sylvia Plath: “My skin glowing like a Nazi lampshade”.

Considerations such as these, no doubt, led Bertrand Russell to pronounce, “Ideas have harmed mankind”. 

Hegel, to his credit, noted that an idea may prove salutary in one society but deleterious in another. The idea of democracy may have proved benign in America or Europe, but has turned out malign in Bangladesh and India. In the former, the people as a whole are persecuted, and in the latter the system oppresses the Muslim minority. Notions from one society must not be heedlessly transplanted to another.





Modi is estranged from his wife, Jashodaben Narendrabhai Modi. She was born in 1952 and married in 1968, at the age of sixteen.

Modi joined the RSS, which values celibacy.

Modi sends a clear signal to India: a woman’s place is in the home (and, in fact, as the Indian economy doubled, the proportion of working women has fallen: even Bangladesh is doing far better.) in India, a woman’s place is in the home.

Even authoritarian Xi Jinping projects his glamorous wife. They represent part of the ideal family.

Why Cambodia needs an opposition,but we don’t.

Anti-Islamic parties are welcome.Cambodia is not a Muslim country: there’s no need to keep the locals down. A “veneer” of democracy is a must. But not here.

Muslims are the new communists. They must be contained.

(pictured: The Economist, October 1 2016, p 28)

Nationalism requires you to think with your large and small intestines. I prefer to use my cerebral frontal cortex. My dog 🐕 doesn’t have one. 

There has been considerable balls-scratching by liberals of late. They’ve been mugged by reality. The recent elections have left them gobsmacked.

This is unbelievable. Why the balls-scratching?

Graham Wallas wrote Human Nature in Politics in 1908 when he was a teacher at the LSE

The book was extensively quoted by Joseph Schumpeter in his classic and oft-quoted (but perhaps not oft-read) book,  Capitalism, Socialism And Democracy, written in the1930s. 

He takes a sledgehammer to the idea of the rational voter 

In economics, the rational individual has been dethroned by behavioral economists, like Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman (the only psychologist to win the Nobel Prize - in economics), Richard Thaler....

Advertisers have long known about the irrational -they’ve made a living from it! (Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders appeared in 1957.)

Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter appeared in 2007 from Princeton.

The balls-scratching is baffling. Ideology is blind. But this is not just blindness, more like madness. Or worse, stupidly.

Or maybe - dare one say it? - irrational.

We think children are smarter than adults (Ekushey February).

At the same time, we are taught since childhood to defer to our elders, who are wiser, and to the educated, who are more knowledgeable.

Clearly, the first idea is alien 👽. Where did it come from?

From our experience under the Raj, in this case from the Romantics, who privileged emotion over wisdom: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting” (Wordsworth). Childhood is superior.

Nationalism is the peculiar offspring of Romanticism: dispense with all knowledge and rationality, and indulge in gut instincts. It reaches its apogee (perigee ?) in the Nazi war cry to “think with the blood”. 

Imran Khan is a gentleman. He can afford to be. He was elevated by the military. He doesn’t need thugs.

The rest of South Asia is a thuggocracy. Every leader is a thug, and usually a murderer. 

They are chosen by the people - of the people, for the people, by the people.

China is attempting to spread influence in Third World countries, like Bangladesh. It’s strategy to enrich the political and business elite is sound. But it won’t get anywhere until it buys the intellectuals. China must appreciate that it has to pay above the going rate because it lacks the soft power of America and Europe. These pay generously, but China must pay more. For the first time since the Soviet collapse, local intellectuals can jack up the price of their loyalty by getting China to compete with the West. Our euphemistically titled civil society knows how to milk a western cow - now they have an eastern cow. With these competing teats, they stand to double their fortunes. It’ll be more and more ghee all round. 

Raghuram Rajan, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India 🇮🇳, was kicked out by Modi for leaning on the oligarchy to repay their loans. The rational Indian voter doesn’t mind being robbed so long as the harmless Muslims are kept under the cosh. Incredible!



The number of voters in India 🇮🇳 is 900 million. The power of the individual vote is 1 / 900,000,000 - an infinitesimally small number (and this is before we take the bureaucracy, the military, corporations, and other interest groups into account). So, what distinguishes the Indian voter from the Saudi non-voter? The Saudi has no illusions. In addition, he/she is not directed to hate their fellow nationals by sulphur-spewing politicians.

The economy of Bangladesh 🇧🇩 is supposed to be in runaway progress. We have even launched a satellite 🛰 into outer space.

So where are the night pictures of Bangladesh 🇧🇩?

Satellite pictures at night reveal almost unerringly the level of development of an economy, and is a reliable indicator in cases of dodgy or flawed statistics.

Night pictures of North Korea 🇰🇵 are used to gauge the feebleness of the economy of the Hermit Kingdom, which issues no data.

Night pictures of Bangladesh 🇧🇩 could be compared with those of, say, Vietnam 🇻🇳 or Zimbabwe 🇿🇼 to see where we stand.

However, there’s the disquieting thought that if such images had been flattering, they would have been splashed all over our newspapers and shared endlessly on social media already. But none has appeared. 

Therefore, one suspects the worst.

Amartya Sen wrote a book extolling Indian democracy called ‘The Argumentative Indian’.

What kind of arguments do Indians have? Do they calmly exchange information, verifying premises against facts, eschewing falsehoods, misperceptions and invalid reasoning? Do they abjure their previously held views in light of discussion and enlightenment? Do they assiduously forswear fallacies, both formal and informal? Do they emerge better people after the reasoned colloquy?

Or do they prefer the sledgehammer taken to a mosque?

“The white race is the cancer of history.”

- Susan Sontag

Coconuts 🥥, beware!





“Women’s bodies are all about storing calories for future offspring, and being seen to store those calories…(emphasis original).”

On reading this line (and other similar lines), how would you react?

If you have a scientific, empirical frame of mind,you’ll be curious and wish to know more.

If you have an ideology (such as feminism), you’ll probably blow your top, insult the writer, smear….

The Economist review of the book Curvology by David Bainbridge had the first approach.

The Independent review of the same book was decidedly of the second genre.

(The subtitle of the book may be does not help: The Origins and Power of Female Body Shape.)

Nor do such throwaway lines as “evolution is not feminist”.

Anti-empiricism is all-pervasive - and rubs against the scientific empiricism of the Enlightenment.

We don’t want to go there, thanks.

My uncle ran for parliament from his constituency in his hometown of Jamalpur.

This was in the ‘80s, when General Ershad was President.

My uncle was a shoo-in. And we were unsurprised when he surged in the polls on television. Then, abruptly, the transmission stopped.

When it resumed, my uncle was losing. 

General Ershad had decided that he must not become MP.

Superficially, this was vote-rigging from the top. But more profoundly, it meant that no matter how many thugs my uncle had employed to stuff the ballot boxes, he would still have lost.

This made the use of thugs irrational.

Today, it is rational. 

It is not that we are poor; all countries were poor. It is not that we are not educated; we have degrees. It is that we are morally bankrupt and intellectually dishonest.

How Shidharta Shankar Roy got rid of student 👩‍🎓 politics in Calcutta (as it was then known) will go down in textbooks 📚.

Ashoke Biswas, a former student of the Presidency College, told me this over a Chinese dinner in Dhaka.

The police 👮‍♀️ swooped on students’ houses at dawn and dragged them out of mosquito 🦟 nets.

They were transported in vans outside town, released and told to run.

They were gunned down in the back.

“Around forty of my classmates are still missing,” he said, reaching for the chop suey. 

The Biddable Intelligentsia 

The average IQ of the Bangladeshi intellectual is woefully low. There does not appear to be an atom of original thought in the Bangladeshi mind. Now, why’s that?

You’d think that the hot shots like Mozaffar Ahmed, Rehman Sobhan, Mosharraf Hossain, Debapriya Bhattacharya, et al., would say something refreshing when they opened their mouths. Why this antipathy towards the intellect?

One tempting answer is authoritarianism. Our culture, it may be argued, does not permit originality. This argument would be stupid. The Muslim civilisation has been around for fourteen hundred years. It has produced men of the highest calibre.

The answer lies elsewhere: in Bangladesh, the intellectual can be bought. He serves the interest of the neocolonial powers. He’s the collaborator to the imperialist.

One striking aspect of the Bangladeshi intellectual is his total silence on Palestine. As a country of 150 million Muslims, one would expect us to show a flicker of solidarity for the Palestinians. There isn’t a glimmer.

One wonders how much money is disbursed by the Israel lobby to the local intelligentsia. I suppose there will never be any research done on the subject, and for obvious reasons.

Mind you, young Bangladeshis don’t start off as imbeciles. But they learn from their university teachers and their elders that they are required to be corrupt. I have taught very intelligent young boys and girls but somehow they later lose their steam. They become socialised.

Tourists to Singapore are stunned by the opulence of the Lion City. But no less, if not more, stunning are the intangibles: peace, the absence of hatred, the absence of politics....

Since independence in 1957, the People’s Action Party (PAP) has been in control. There has been no rabble-rousing for votes in the city-state.

Although led by Lee Kuan Yew, its revered leader till his recent death, I have never seen a picture or statue of the statesman in any of the streets I have driven through. One catches glimpses of the city’s mascot, the Merlion (mermaid + lion) now and then. Happily, there is no personality cult.

On the paper money I have used so far, I have found the picture of Singapore’s first President, Yusuf bin Ishak, hardly a household name, on one side and a social message on the other, such as education.

To Mr. Lee is often attributed the success of Singapore. But a single person can scarcely raise a state to such heights. Leadership is an interaction, not an action - an interaction between leader and follower. Good leaders need good followers, just as bad leaders need bad followers.

Perhaps Confucianism explains Singapore. Indeed, it may well explain the entirety of East Asia. Perhaps.

Clearly, there is more to it than economics. The intangibles that shape a people’s destiny have been given a collective name since antiquity.

It’s called civilization.





I once met a Mennonite when I was an English teacher at Notre Dame College. She didn’t believe in evolution.

“It’s just a theory!”

True, it’s a theory, but not JUST a theory! (The It-Is-Merely fallacy is so common!)

I didn’t ask her if she believed in Adam and Eve, and that the earth was 6,000 years old.

Fr. Banas, the Catholic priest who was director of the English course, told me, sotto voce, that “these people have a very literal interpretation of the Bible”. He himself completely believed in evolution, saying it was absurd not to believe.

The Mennonite was entitled to her disbelief, but when these people acquire power over American foreign policy and maintain, per the Bible, that Jesus Christ will appear in Israel and the Jews will be converted, so the Holy Land must be a Jewish state (going, apparently, against Jewish orthodoxy), that’s when she and her ilk cross the line.






Remember Anna and the King of Siam?

We lapped it up, like kittens over a saucer.

It was subliminal: the message was that America is the teacher, we are the pupils. It was not entertainment, but indoctrination.

The king’s repetition “et cetera, et cetera, et cetera” reinforced our self-perception of a dunce trying to master the language of civilization.

“Why your head higher than mine?” tells us to go horizontal from vertical.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin becomes The Little House of Uncle Thomas, since it’s too much for an oriental to master the meaning of Cabin.

Episode after episode the middle class of this country was beamed messages of inadequacy, incompleteness and inferiority by the national broadcaster BTV, a monopoly we had to watch.

Of course, we lapped it up like kittens.

In South Asia, we are coconuts 🥥: brown outside, white inside. Hong Kongers (especially the young ones) are bananas : yellow outside, white inside. A veritable orchard of post-colonial gardening. 

“History is the graveyard of civilizations.”

Mr Haroon, editor at the highbrow English weekly,  Holiday, was fond of quoting this line.

It was a none-too-subtle hint that Muslim civilization would disappear (hopefully, very soon, from the speaker’s point of view.) And Bengali language and culture would live forever (never mind that, as the editor of an English newspaper, he would not be contributing to its immortality; quite the reverse, perhaps.)

How an individual could hold such a self-contradictory position was beyond me. At the time, I didn’t understand the irrational, so was merely perplexed, not amused.

“To be able to believe two contradictory statements at the same time and still be able to function” is, if I recall my Fitzgerald, “the mark of a first-rate mind.”

No doubt Mr Haroon has a first-rate mind. After all, he edited, sometimes brutally, the pieces I submitted to him.

That Muslim civilization will disappear but the Bengali language endure forever, like Tithonus, was a remarkable proposition.

If humanity survives (which is very unlikely), future generations will no doubt find the current crop of languages and ways of life as mysterious as we find the ancient Sumerian city-states and their religion and language (Mohenjodaro and Harappa might be better examples since the language has still not been deciphered).

They will no doubt look back with horror at some of our present superstitions, like nationalism, just as we look back with horror at the Phoenician and Carthaginian worship of Ba’al and Moloch, of Grecian human sacrifice (immortalized in the offering to the gods of Iphigenia).

Finally, so scientists inform us, the universe will be cold and dead (a prospect eagerly anticipated by the ever-malicious Somerset Maugham).

Mr Haroon, it is safe to assume, won’t be around to verify his prognostication.

I sent my essay ‘Bangladesh, and the Lucifer Effect’ to Himal South Asian. It took them less than a day to reject the piece. South Asian intellectuals will never print the truth.

Honest South Asian intellectuals are as rare as rocking-horse turd .

Demagogue’s playbook:

1. Create an enemy, no matter how fictitious

2 Promise utopia

3 Give stemwinder speeches, arousing hatred and hope

4 Disappoint

He used to come round in the early ‘90s. He was a graduate and liked to boast of his student exploits.

The chief of these - and he swelled like a turkey-cock when recounting them - was beating up fellow students in dormitories with hockey 🏒 sticks because they belonged to the wrong party.

Every blow that caused excruciating 😖 pain gave him exquisite pleasure.

Did he kill anyone? We don’t know.

We were too polite to kick him out of the house. But he must have sensed our hostility for he stopped coming

How can somebody boast of these things? How can they think of themselves as heroes (of the anti-Ershad movement, say)?

What has happened to us? How did we lose our moral compass? How can we get it back?