Archive

“Please, you look so nice in a sari,” my mother encourages as she wraps the fabric around me, seemingly having a plan in mind. I used to always watch her wear saris, wondering why she bothered mummifying herself in these impossible-to-manage window curtains.

Recently I was watching a talk show and someone was saying,
'During Charlie Hebdo, thousands of people marched to defend their right to offend Muslims but no one raised their voice when their children were killed in Pakistan.'

There is a weird old story in Hindu Mythology.

I got brown skin. Milk-chocolate tone! During summer months, when I grill myself in bikini by the beach, my skin turns a few shades darker – quite close to dark chocolate. But that is today’s me, which is dramatically different from yesterday’s version, when I was being ruled by the ‘Fair & Lovely’ regime.

The recent slaughtering of secular bloggers in Bangladesh by the radical extremists who claims the killings are the way of Islam and the government's response to it has raised some serious questions about our democracy, freedom, security and the power of political Islam in our democratic politics. How free are we to say what we think and what we believe?

1. Why do Middle East get almost no attention for terrorist attacks while Paris attack swarms the social media?

(On last Friday night, Paris, the cultural center of Europe, was shaken by gunfire and suicide bombings of massive brutality at several locations. Officials confirmed that three teams of Islamic State attackers with assault rifles and suicide vests carried out the coordinated carnage. After the attack I followed the social and electronic media and saw how the whole world reacted to this incident.

Three Sachalayatan bloggers Ranadipam Basu, Tareq Rahim and Ahmedur Rashid Tutul, who is also the owner of the publishing company Sudhdhasor, were attacked in an attempt to kill on 31st October, 2015. Within few hours of the first attack the owner of another publishing company named Jagriti and a blogger Faisal Arefin Dipan was hacked to death. According to the latest news, the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF), a wing of the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda claimed the responsibility for both the attacks. At the time of writing, Ranadipam, Tareq and Tutul were in stable condition. You can get live update on the attack in Bengali from this post by Haseeb Mahmud.

We are speechless. We are dumbfounded. We are shaken. We are hurt.

We are hurt, but our pens still work. We are dumbfounded, but our heads are as clear as a sunny day. We are shaken, but we are armed. Our pens, our keyboards and our smart phones are our weapons. Our sharp minds are our ammunition.