Bangladesh podcast # 2 – the Bangladeshi abroad perspective on the regime change
It will also be on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
If you want to support the costs for hosting and Zencastr, you can give to my Patreon.
Bangladesh podcast (a second one will be recorded in two days)
It will also be on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
If you want to support the costs for hosting and Zencastr, you can give to my Patreon.
The flip side of globalization
It’s Bangladesh after Sri Lanka: Protests erupt over 52% fuel price hike: Following the tragic situation in Sri Lanka, thousands of demonstrators flocked to the streets in many Bangladeshi cities when the Sheikh Hasina administration raised fuel prices to their highest level since the neighbouring nation’s independence by about 52%. Global supply shocks due to … Continue reading The flip side of globalization
From basket-case to garment superpower
This article seems to use Bangladesh as a prop to beat Pakistan’s governing class over the head, Beg, borrow, repeat: Pakistan’s IMF addiction continues even as its finance minister leaves. It’s a pretty strange thing in 2019. In the 20th-century Bangladesh was known for the early 1970s famine, as well as periodic catastrophic floods. A …
Bangladesh elections
Bangladeshis Must Choose ‘Lesser of Two Evils’ in Election: Per capita income has increased by nearly 150 percent, while the share of the population living in extreme poverty has shrunk to about 9 percent from 19 percent, according to the World Bank. Electricity generation has also increased drastically under Mrs. Hasina’s rule, helping to boost … Continue reading “Bangladesh elections”
The servitude I saw
Many people are talking about the late Alex Tizon’s article in The Atlantic, My Family’s Slave. Much of the piece was as disturbing for me as it was for most Americans. But some of it was shockingly familiar. I’ll get to that. First, Tizon died unexpectedly before the article was published. We won’t be able to […]
Moderate Muslims are moderate in some things
Bangladesh bloggers: Clear pattern to killings: Since then, the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina appears to have reached an accommodation with Hefajat. The Islamist group has confined itself to the madrassa premises and the government has put five bloggers in jail for allegedly hurting the religious feelings of Muslims. The government now appears to […]
The data sets in the dark
Recently I was tipped off to the appearance of a new paper, Genome-Wide Association Study Identifies Chromosome 10q24.32 Variants Associated with Arsenic Metabolism and Toxicity Phenotypes in Bangladesh. This is the section which caught my eye: “Using data on urinary arsenic metabolite concentrations and approximately 300,000 genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for 1,313 arsenic-exposed Bangladeshi […]
Expectations of Bangladesh
The New York Times has a puff piece on Sheikh Hasina up. In general I favor the Awami League despite its socialist origins because the party is less bigoted against religious minorities and would likely wink less at de facto ethnic cleansing (though of course the typical Awami League Muslim is still rather prejudiced against […]
“Fortress India,” things that make you go “hhhmmm”
I always consider Foreign Policy to be a shallower version of Foreign Affairs, but there are so many weird issues with this piece, Fortress India – Why is Delhi building a new Berlin Wall to keep out its Bangladeshi neighbors? First, the subhead. The uniqueness of the Berlin Wall is that it wasn’t meant to […]
“Asian” in all the right places
mtDNA haplogroup G1a2
The pith: In this post I examine the most recent results from 23andMe for my family in the context of familial and regional (Bengal) history. I also use these results to offer up a framework for the ethnognesis of the eastern Ben…