Life, Dreams and Reality -- Sohel's Blog

For Rohingyas refugees, this scandalous episode in Thailand where hundreds of them feared dead and dumped into sea and hundreds of them more were let loose in the sea without food or any basic amenities, to starve to death, aren't new. Even the military government in Myanmar doesn't acknowledge the existence of them , "There is no so-called Rohingya ethnic minority group in our history before or after our independence" , and the Thai government has entrusted the very military to conduct investigation on one of its own rank, as if mockeries to justice have no bound, no shame. Here is an observation from The Economist : "while soldiers act with impunity and royalist rioters get soft treatment, the country’s anachronistic lèse-majesté law is enforced rigorously. America and its allies long turned a blind eye to such stains on Thailand’s reputation, because King Bhumibol and his army were staunch anti-communist allies. Recalling that relationship, next month Americ...

Saturday mornings bring that sought after relief after any grueling hard work week for many. World economy's bloom and gloom stories are not appealing with a cup of morning coffee, but can sure provide necessary knowledge to protect one's own and loved ones. The following news story published in The Globe and Mail may not be comforting, however, it can illuminate reality from illusion. "Canada's recession is spreading from the car factories to the coffee shops, reinforcing the case for Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's $40-billion stimulus program and adding to the risk that he may have to do more. The baristas, shopkeepers, financial planners, technicians and consultants that make up Canada's services industries are starting to feel the same malaise that has gripped factories and exporters for the better part of a year, new government figures show. Output by the services sector — which accounts for 70 per cent of Canada's $1.2-trillion gross domestic produ...

While the world economy is falling into whirlwind recession, the abysmal depth of depression not seen since the infamous 1930s, the world doesn't need unnecessary tensions between China and America. "In a written response to questions from senators debating his confirmation, Mr Geithner accused China of “manipulating” its currency and promised that the Obama team would push “aggressively” for Beijing to change its policies. The sharp tone and use of the legally-loaded term “currency manipulation” ricocheted through financial markets as investors shuddered at the prospect of a Sino-American spat in the midst of a global slump." Is there any truth on following speculation? "American policymakers have long pushed Beijing to accelerate the appreciation of the yuan, arguing that China’s exchange-rate policy played a big role in creating the global imbalances and that—both for the sake of China’s economy and the rest of the world—the currency needs to strengthen." May...

Elizabeth Alexander's inauguration day poem was indeed memorable. Her somber recitation of each line describing the mundane, every not so praised events and uplifting the summation of all into universal theme of collective humanity with ease, in her careful selection of words, slowly delivered in a day of January winter while the leaders from past and current look on and the sea of crowds who had come to witness the change and hope over fear may indeed become the symbolic implication of the "Day" when it seemed goodness is still achievable and rottenness and hideous vileness are in sure retreat. Praise Song for the Day............. “Praise Song for the Day,” by Elizabeth Alexander, January 20, 2009 Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each other’s eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darni...

Gideon Levy has courage. Being in the middle of all the jubilation, proud smirks and chest thumping madness, this Israeli writer with conscience writes in Israel's prominent newspaper Haaretz what needs to be written about Gaza and deaths of more than 1100 of women, men and children and that the number is continually growing with increasing pace. "In the streets, people are running back and forth in panic, holding children and suitcases in their hands, helpless as the shells fall around them. Nobody in the diplomatic corridors is in any hurry to help those unfortunates who have nowhere to run. The handful of journalists trying to cover the events, despite the outrageous media closure Israel has imposed, are also in danger. The Israel Defense Forces Thursday shelled the media building they were in and now they are all crowded in one office, as fearful and horrified as the rest of the scorched city's residents. ................. This is how Israel now looks to the outside w...

Slumping oil demand has already caused thousands of job losses across Alberta. The heydays of oil boom is slowly eroding into coldness matching the chill of snowy windchill. The Economist surmises the brief history of tar sands, its spectacular rise and seemingly similar astonishing fall in coming days unless a real "miracle" turns the world economy back to its agonized feet: "Extracting oil from the sands took off in the late 1990s, boosted by technological advances that greatly reduced costs. Sitting on the equivalent of 173 billion barrels of crude, the provincial government dreamed of making Alberta a new Saudi Arabia (with moose instead of camels). Although some, such as Peter Lougheed, a former premier, called for “orderly” development, a wild rush ensued, causing provincewide labour shortages. Even servers at fast-food restaurants had to be lured with an iPod or other inducements. Now, though, employment is slumping: Steve Vetter, a manager at a firm that service...

The sons and daughters of ex-Bangladesh rulers siphoned of hundreds of millions of dollars to foreign banks. After BNP got ousted in recent elections, and Awami League got into power, the massiveness of corruptions committed by "prince" and "princesses" of this proud but still impoverished nation slowly started to emerge . It took the fall and the change of the government before the thieveries were uncovered. Awami League, the current ruling party in Bangladesh, that came to power very recently after winning a landslide victory in parliamentary election, must take serious note in the happenings and flattenings of once upon a time's big giants, the behemoth thugs and petty thieves who had sucked the nation of Bangladeshis dried and cold like brute vampires. Awami League's mantra should be avoiding this scandalous bruteness with representative governance devoid of the same fleecing of the nation wholesale. Otherwise, should there be any doubt among all respect...

Perhaps we can take a bit of break from watching entertainment news, and can learn a thing or two of suppressed history and contemporary miseries, and about men, women and children of a land where violent deaths, and utter humiliations are in abundance mostly due to the inaction and willful ignorance of global citizenry.

I don’t want to write about Gaza. Don’t want to see still images of the bloodied streets full of blown off corpses, children, women, men, and the ghoulish videos of horrific screams pouring out of wounded human beings amidst macabre deaths. Sometimes words leave you. Sometimes, the degree of horror and brutality snuff out heated air. And the responses from the civilized world, leaders and politicians, high brow scholars of glorified predilection to softening blows, intensify the silent acquiescence to massacres. In the name of furious self defense from rudimentary resistance of starved dehumanized, genocide is uplifted as camouflaged battle on fright. I heard it enough! I’d read the same stories many times now. Nothing would change. People would die. Children would be crushed under collapsing buildings from bombs and missiles. Agonies of women, widows, amputated school teachers would only be reverberated from the confined walls of their dismal surroundings. Emergency ambula...

Just started reading Junot Diaz's 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. His choice of words, dialogues, and the moving way this remarkable story is unfolding in different voices, first through Oscar's voice, then his sister Lola and now I've started reading their mother Belicia, in reverse chronological order, making it a story to remember I believe. The author gave sporadic historical information on Dominican Republic, especially, the long forgotten dictator Trujillo in relevant footnotes, that made the story more interesting. I hope to write more on this novel in the coming days.

MGMT's Time to Pretend is a touching music, though ironical in its contradictory messages, but that's what made it a great song with memorable lyric like the following excerpt: "This is our decision, to live fast and die young. We've got the vision, now let's have some fun. Yeah, it's overwhelming, but what else can we do. Get jobs in offices, and wake up for the morning commute. .................. We were fated to pretend I'll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms I'll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world I'll miss my sister, miss my father, miss my dog and my home Yeah, I'll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone But there is really nothing, nothing we can do ............... We'll choke on our vomit and that will be the end We were fated to pretend To pretend We're fated to pretend To pretend" Lyric Link: http://www.lyricsmode.com/ lyrics/m/mgmt/time_to_pret end.html Ano...

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga – a Book Review By Mahbubul Karim (Sohel) December 30, 2008 Writing about the dispossessed, poor and the destitute is not a small feat. Poor and the impoverished do not own the press. They don’t have any powerful and effective lobby group to represent them in the government or corporate sectors. Portrayals of this underrepresented segments of human society is mostly superficial and marginal at best. Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger reminded me Monica Ali’s The Brick Lane , not in its depiction of men and women in Indian sub-continent, but the razor sharp words of critiques, untangling the myths and disillusions perpetuated by the ruling “master” in the name of preserving so-called democracy, have similarities in overall texture. Also, various issues in Arundhati Roy’s poignant non-fictions, essays are explored in White Tiger in moving dialogues and monologues. The story of Balram Halwai is the story of a common man who can be found in every ci...

Evolution may not be as linear as it was perceived before. New research are finding startling evidences that there are multiple evolutionary lineages, especially, in the development of complex cognitive sophistications. Fish, reptiles, vertebrates and invertebrates may have more intelligence than the "supreme" human beings ever considered to these "inferior" species to have. "One of the most common misconceptions about brain evolution is that it represents a linear process culminating in the amazing cognitive powers of humans, with the brains of other modern species representing previous stages. Such ideas have even influenced the thinking of neuroscientists and psychologists who compare the brains of different species used in biomedical research. Over the past 30 years, however, research in comparative neuroanatomy clearly has shown that complex brains—and sophisticated cognition—have evolved from simpler brains multiple times independently in separate lineage...

Aleksandar Hemon's story published in The New Yorker on September 22, 2008 was one of the best stories I've read this year. The title of this sparkling and mini-voltage filled story is The Noble Truths of Suffering . A novice Sarajevo writer's encounter with an American prize winning author, the observations through a voice of drunken stupor, and elaboration of violence through Buddhistish non-violence made the conflicting descriptions of war, brutality and politics painfully live. Here is an excerpt from Aleksandar Hemon's "The Noble Truths of Suffering": "an ex-marine who would have been a hero in the battle of Falluja had he not been dishonorably discharged for failing to corroborate the official story of the rape of a twelve-year-old Iraqi girl and the murder of her and her entire family, an unfortunate instance of miscommunication with local civilians. Tiny returns home from Iraq to Chicago and spends time visiting his old haunts on the North Side, ...

Changez's life changes drastically, from pursuing efficiency and fundamentals in appraising businesses to questioning the fallacies embedded in hard core capitalistic haunting bonanza. Freshly graduated from Princeton, highly motivated pursuing career to coveted aristocracy, Changez moves past his classmates and colleagues at Underwood Samson in rapid pace, beaming with unmistakable confidence in his every strides, demeanor and winning smiles. September 11 changes everything as he reflects on his plight: "the door to the elevator was shut upon me and I began to travel down the shaft, alone." Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a slender novel, but with substantial pathos imbued in sharp observations, without relinquishing a good story's structured rhythm into cliched slogans against power and superpower. The effective monologue that the writer used where an unnamed American was entertained over a cup of tea and later the mouth watering dinner of Lah...

I've picked up this book after about two years it has gathered sliver of accumulated dusts in the unreached corner of my overburdened bookshelf. I remember of reading at least a dozen pages of it early last year, perhaps earlier than that. Ali Smith is a writer of inexhaustible energy it seems. The first chapter describes a twelve year old girl, the way she tries to cope in a "substandard" summer vacation home with her parents and a sibling, away from her schoolmates. Her Sony Dv camera gives her comfort. She snaps at everything, theorizing, imagining reality beyond reality, even pondering about science and irony: "Astrid knocks her hand against the side of the chair to see if it will hurt. It does, but not very much. She knocks again, harder. It hurts more. Of course science can prove, typical and ironic, that her hand is not actually hitting the chair by dividing down he distance smaller and smaller. She hits it again. Ow." The outside world is a mystery to he...

It perhaps is a surprise for many hearing and reading about German professor Kalisch's jolting thesis on the existence of a prophet . For the believers of any particular religion, this claim must be feeling hurtful. However, what does it matter, if any particular historical figure was indeed historical or fictional? Shouldn't the essence and peaceful conveyance of messages for all mankind from divinity above be enough? Remember those sarcastic hoopla surrounding Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code a few years ago? And the zealots' and bigots' shameful thuggeries in protest of ridiculous prophet cartoons? Even at the time of these prophets, founder of religions, were treated as aberrant nuisance, or radical preachers, freethinkers, the scoundrel heretics. Flowing of time, perhaps luck, coincidence, or carefully planted seeds in the time of antiquity had propelled many of them in glorious position, the holiest, closest to deity any other hapless human being can ever espous...

Is this a historic night? The tears and jeers will subside, as will euphoria and slogans. American Presidential Election mesmerizes the entire wold. The world in seize. Hopes. Dreams. Desperate screams muffled by violet violence. They say, "Rosa Park sat so King Stands. King stood so Obama Runs. Obama Ran so we all can fly." Barack Hussein Obama now doesn't need to hide or hush hush his middle name. Shouldn't he say, "I am Barack Obama, and Hussein is my middle name", without fear or political shame? "I have a dream............" A new America, emerging from hundreds of years of brutal past filled with forgotten blood, ashes, servitude and humiliations of unknown many in near and far. America the compassionate. Not the enforcer of fear, war and torture. The world trembles, in hope, to see the rising of a peaceful dove. "I have a dream............."

Images of Sun are breathtaking. See more images from this link .

Here is the simple basics of worldwide economic crisis explained by this year's Nobel Prize winner in Economics , the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman: What is the nature of the crisis? The details can be insanely complex, but the basics are fairly simple. The bursting of the housing bubble has led to large losses for anyone who bought assets backed by mortgage payments; these losses have left many financial institutions with too much debt and too little capital to provide the credit the economy needs; troubled financial institutions have tried to meet their debts and increase their capital by selling assets, but this has driven asset prices down, reducing their capital even further. What can be done to stem the crisis? Aid to homeowners, though desirable, can’t prevent large losses on bad loans, and in any case will take effect too slowly to help in the current panic. The natural thing to do, then — and the solution adopted in many previous financial crises — is to deal with...