Star Diary
Where Do We Stand?
While surfing channels on the TV, a news scrolling down a newsfeed caught my eye. It read 'Farmer choked to death by the BSF.' I had earlier read that the Indian government had discouraged the Indian BSF from gunning people down at the Bangladesh-India border. The country felt relieved by this news, as that meant that the number of our people murdered at the border would decrease. But who knew that an alternative to bullets would lead to more innovative ways of killing Bangladeshis. Opening fire on unarmed civilians, by itself, is a severe breach of international regulations. However, strangling a farmer from across the border to death for an act as simple as cutting grass is unprecedented and reflects an inexplicable act of vengeance. While we now understand that India values its grass tremendously, the BSF needs to realise that the price tag on a human life is a tad bit higher. I was further shocked to realise that this was no breaking news and neither did the murder make the headlines. Instead, it was meshed with other less significant local news, giving the impression that this was an everyday occurrence that we, as a nation, were very used to. The next day's newspapers carried no screaming headline expressing outrage on this shocking news in the front-page, only a normal back-page story covered it. That left me wondering; is our media so busy covering more significant news that it's alright for such an incident to take a backseat? Have we become desensitized to the fact that our fellow brothers and sisters are being pointlessly murdered at our border? It is high time to rethink our priorities, for the sake of ourselves and for the sake of the values that we intend to uphold.
Tasnim Jara
Dhaka Medical College
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TRUTH OR DARE
I was drinking a cup of tea in front of a laundry shop when I overheard a conversation between the laundryman and a couple of customers. One of the customers complained about exhaustion due to the scorching heat. The laundryman then replied, “Allah is unhappy with us. He is making us suffer with extreme heat because of meting out injustice to a noble man like Sayeedi.” I asked him, “Are you serious?” The laundryman nodded his head.
“Why do you think like that?”
He replied, “Sayeedi is a religious man. We have given him death sentence without any valid proof. Allah is angry at us.”
The customers and everyone around were a little shocked and a conversation ensured about the heinous crimes committed by Sayeedi during the Liberation War of 1971. I do not know whether the laundryman would agree with us or not, but it is shocking to note that many of our countrymen do not know about true history of our country. We all should be blamed for that.
Nasih Ul Wadud Alam
Stamford University, Dhaka
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