The much-awaited constitutional reforms may have sailed through the National Assembly and Senate but there are trials ahead.
The much-awaited constitutional reforms may have sailed through the National Assembly and Senate but there are trials ahead.
A flourishing intellectual cottage industry has grown in India — and across the planet — around the worthy enterprise of measuring and estimating poverty and hunger. Much of the published reams of this debate, to which economists, nutritionists and public planners tirelessly contribute, would appear strangely remote to a person who lives with and battles hunger. She would recognise little in their involved, sophisticated, bitterly contested and often opaque calculus, assumptions, arguments and conclusions. She would not find adequate acknowledgement of the struggles that dispossessed people the world over wage every single day against want and injustice, to feed, clothe and house themselves and the people they love.
After migrating to the Western world, Bangladeshi Muslims like people from quite a few other Muslim majority countries started to face identity crisis. Are they Americans first or Muslims first? Or, are they Bangladeshi-Americans or Muslim-Americans? All those questions remain unresolved. Although most of the Bangladeshi immigrants in America do not have any sympathy for Islamist parties back home, a god number of them begin to nurture positive view about the US based Islamist organizations. Because of their uncertain future in a Western society, Bangladeshi Muslims strive to cling to the religious aspect of their self identity. The Saudi influenced mosques, Sunday’s Arabic schools for children and weekly Halaqa session gradually pull them far from Rabindranath Thakur, Lalon Shah and Jibanananda’s paradigm. In reality, the new generation of the Bangladeshi-Americans gradually lose connection to their forefathers’ secular Aboho Bangla past. In this backdrop, the US based Islamist groups have big audience to grab. Gradually, more and more Bangladeshi Muslims living in America were starting to cultivate sympathetic view about groups like CAIR, ICNA, ISNA, MPAC or MSA.
13 April 2010 — Arundhati Roy talks with Sagarika Ghose in a special interview on CNN-IBN.
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