CROSS TALK
Plus one, not minus two
THE golden rule of algebra is that what you do to one side of the equation is what you must also do to the other. It must have been the spirit of this axiom that once drove us to the…
CROSS TALK
How Bangladesh must have lost its innocence
OTHER nations claim to know precisely when they lost their innocence. The Americans believe it happened on the day John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas. Norway lost its innocence on July 22, 2011 when in the first attack a…
CROSS TALK
The Pyrrhic victory of our politicians
GREEK king Pyrrhus, whose army suffered irreplaceable casualties in defeating the Romans, expressed his joy saying that one more victory like that would have undone him. That’s the origin of the phrase ‘a Pyrrhic victory,” which describes a victory with…
CROSS TALK
Ershad made a parody of himself
IT’S difficult to define a man who barks more than he bites, and that ineptitude last week drove Hussein Muhammad Ershad to his wit’s end when he made a Mephistophelean deal with his destiny and sold his soul for political…
CROSS TALK
Politicians should have a retirement age
WHAT the prime minister said in her address to the imams last week should be the wisdom of all wisdoms. She said she didn’t feel like aspiring for the prime minister’s job anymore because the sufferings of people had become…
CROSS TALK
Talkative politicians can’t have a dialogue
SAMUEL Taylor Coleridge wrote in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: “Water, water, everywhere/ Nor any drop to drink.” A lesser known poet named James Casey took that lamentation further when he cried: “Water, water, everywhere and not a drop…
CROSS TALK
The ultimate tragedy of Bangladesh politics
AN entire week elapsed when two sides of Bangladesh ground against each other like tectonic plates. Last week, upheavals erupted across the country as if a nation was convulsing in pain. People lived in the fear of an approaching Armageddon…
Cross Talk
Politicians playing Russian roulette with people
RISE and shine Bangladesh, the promised day is come. Acting secretary general of BNP has warned that after the quarterfinals and semifinals, the final round would be played on October 25. The home minister of the country expressed his inability…
CROSS TALK
The bold telegram from Blood
NEIL Sheehan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, has reviewed the book The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide written by Princeton University Professor Gary J. Bass. Sheehan writes that although no precise figure was available for the deaths, the…
CROSS TALK
Railroading Rampal power plant
AMERICAN writer Mark Twain said that a railroad is like a lie that one has to keep building to make it stand. Our government plans to build a power plant, not a railroad in Rampal. And we hope it’s not…
CROSS TALK
Home minister is the patron saint of driving
OUR home minister forgot last week that he was not the law minister, that he was not a one-man parliament or a court judge, who could make or interpret laws or their amendments for that matter. He said drivers couldn’t…
Cross Talk
Two parties are two peas in a pod
When the great Greek poet Epimenides said all Cretans were liars, the paradox was that he was himself a Cretan. Come to think of it, that “liar paradox” also defines our political irony. Almost everything the ruling party blames on…
CROSS TALK
India is liable for Felani’s death
AN Indian rifle, reportedly a 5.56mm INSAS, fired the shot, which killed 15-year-old Felani. It was an Indian bullet that reportedly pierced her chest, and it was the Indian barbed-wire fence from which her blood-dripping body hung head-down for hours.…
Cross Talk
Don’t follow leaders who can’t change
IT can be both good news and bad news for us. Bad news first and it is obvious: Our leaders aren’t showing any sign of change. Good news is that in the next five to ten years many of them…
CROSS TALK
Are we making our children sad?
A 17-year-old girl was allegedly involved in the killing of her parents. Her 8-year-old-brother was initially sleeping, later locked up in a room after he woke up to the murderous commotion. The twelve-year-old maidservant helped the killers drag the dead…
CROSS TALK
Living in a Potemkin village
BETTER late than even later, the government decided to vacate the billboards whose owners and advertisers complained that their publicity spots were forcibly taken to promote political messages. In a nutshell, this is the story of the billboard blitzkrieg, which…
Cross Talk
Elasticity of human condition
Two weeks ago when Great Britain was ecstatic over the arrival of the royal baby and rest of the world shared that jubilation, I was thinking of rubber. It loses entropy if expanded, and a retractive force sets in to…
Cross Talk
Next we need peace crimes trial
The prime minister has personally assured us and the information minister reinforced that assurance. This government will execute some of the war crimes verdicts before it walks into the sunset. If that happens and when it does, we should be…
Cross Talk
Allama Shafi has wasted his breath
IN a video alleged to be a voiceover done with one of his sermons taken from the past, Hefajat leader Allama Shafi has denigrated women with the rudest words. We must know the vile video doesn’t exist for that reason…
CROSS TALK
Aviation science of national politics
FLOWN by a trainee pilot, flight 214 of South Korea’s Asiana Airlines crash-landed at San Francisco International Airport last Saturday. Since then the country’s president has issued a statement of regret. The chairman of the airline has apologised not only…
CROSS TALK
Sleeping thermometers
THE story minus the credentials of its characters reads like a sugar daddy-styled seduction scandal. A 77-year-old man shared the same bed with a 17-year-old girl and she was duty-bound to use her undressed body like a thermometer to take…
CROSS TALK
Let Grameen Bank be Grameen Bank
THE Grameen Bank Commission is ready already. It’s ready with recommendations to discuss the fate of the beleaguered microfinance organisation. On Tuesday, July 2, the big brains will gather to exchange rich ideas about the poor man’s bank. One of…
CROSS TALK
A gale of four cities
THE city corporation elections held on June 15 inBangladesh has something in common with the War of 1812. Fought between the United States and the British Empire, historians still can’t make up their mind as to which side had won…
CROSS TALK
The Dadaist budget won’t fly
THE controversy surrounding the national budget announced last week has something of the humour of Jackie Mason about it. This American comedian once quipped that he had enough money to last him the rest of his life unless he had…
CROSS TALK
Ershad’s Cinderella complex
AMERICAN psychotherapist Colette Dowling coined the phrase Cinderella complex, which basically means an unconscious desire of a person to be taken care of by others. The complex is said to become more apparent as a person grows older, and last…
CROSS TALK
Hidebound by history
ON May 20, the High Court disclosed its full version of the verdict on the 1976 trial of Colonel Taher, which was already announced on March 22, 2011. The court ruled that the execution of the late colonel was “illegal…
CROSS TALK
The need for a poverty museum
POVERTY is getting poorer, and that is the big news. A study done by Oxford University’s poverty and human development initiative tells us that acute poverty will be eradicated within 20 years. We aren’t hearing it for the first time.…
CROSS TALK
Intellectuals at actuals
AN old adage says that sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you. If you’re reading what are being written these days and listening to what are being said, you know words are no less…
CROSS TALK
Political brinkmanship and the Overconfidence Trap
THERE’S a name for it when confidence verges on stupidity. The owner of the building in Savar that came crashing down on April 24 knew his building was risky. There were cracks in the pillars and the fear of imminent…
CROSS TALK
Unbridled tongues bring disaster
THERE is a process to how people speak. It works like a factory where spoken words are selected to be produced, have their phonetics formulated and then finally are articulated by the motor system in the vocal apparatus before delivery.…
Cross Talk
A monument of greed collapsed
ACCIDENTS can happen in many ways, and they happen due to one or more of three reasons: human folly, willful neglect and atrocious arrogance. After an eight-storied building came crashing down in Savar last Wednesday, those three reasons were equally…
CROSS TALK
Between corpulence and corruption
ACCORD-ING to former US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson, most of America’s social problems stem from affluence, not poverty. He was referring to obesity that rivals smoking as the largest cause of premature deaths amongst the Americans.…
Cross Talk
Reversing the journey of this nation
The only two ways people can argue today over Bangladesh is whether it’s still descending into chaos or whether it has descended into chaos already. One can evoke the glass half-full or half-empty analogy, I suppose. How concerned one should…
CROSS TALK
Corruption: A self-fulfilling prophecy
IT’S good to know that in our unthinking country, there are minds who are still trying to think. Take the example of the chairman of Anti-Corruption Commission, who enlightened us during the observance of the Anti-Corruption Week last week that…
CROSS TALK
Placing Plassey in the present
In2007, Nick Robins wrote a book named The Corporation That Changed the World. Amongst other things he looked into the plundering of Bengal that started after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, when the leading aristocrats and merchants at the…
Cross Talk
Breaking people into mobs
The 1951 movie Quo Vadis is a fiction based on facts. Roman courtier Petronius falls out of favour with Emperor Nero and takes his own life in order to escape execution for treason. In his dying letter he begs the…
Cross Talk
Caught in our own web
If a spider gets caught in its own web, so does a country. The escalating violence of last few weeks has sucked us deeper into the coils of a crisis. If it’s too soon to call it a civil war,…
Cross talk
Houses of horror
If you look at that house for long, it makes you feel dizzy as if a dump of toxic waste radiates discomfort and contaminates the soul. It reminds you of the proclamation by the American writer Polly Adler, “A house…
Cross talk
What is in a name?
Name is the mark of a man in life like tombstone is in death. Name is the existence of a man in absentia, the incorporeal persona that others carry of him with them. Name is the fragrance of man that…
Cross talk
Death like a camera
Lots of water will flow under the bridge where she was found dead and the lecherous men, who nibbled on her body like vultures on cadavers, will find fresh preys to satisfy their lust. In the concourse of conspiring and…
Cross talk
On the other side of air
He often muttered that they would come to visit him, the people from other side of air who glowed in the darkness… On the night of the storm, the madman ate his dinner and took his medication. He then quietly…
All-powerful to be Impotent
The death of high-ranking bureaucrat in the hands of muggers last week made headlines across the country. Nikunja Bihari Devnath was stabbed within the earshot of drowsy policemen in an uncanny dissimilarity with the fate of Badhan who was stripped…