Star Diary

A conscience shaken incident

Last Monday as I was returning home, I witnessed the mixture of beads of perspiration and tears on the exhausted face of a rickshaw puller. Out of curiosity I stood under a bus stand to know what was happening. Then, I saw a blue truck where rickshaws with invalid licenses were kept. To my sheer horror I saw an elderly rickshaw puller pleading to an officer in charge to keep three hundred taka that he had earned through out the day. However, the officer declined the compensation and demanded five hundred taka to free the rickshaw. The elderly rickshaw man sat on the dusty road and held on to the officer's feet to convince him, but the officer was not ready to hear anything. I started feeling guilty and terrible, thinking of the previous night, when I had spent a huge amount of money for my birthday whereas this old rickshaw puller, who was of my grandfather 's age, was pleading so hard for two hundred taka. If such  inequal distribution of wage still exists in our economy then we can never flourish; we would only suffer, because we do not evaluate the sweat of labour- I thought to myself.  I hope conditions would improve in the near future.
Musthasin Ibrahim Ifaz
Economics department,North South University

Glad it is happening

My sister used to get harassing phone calls from someone from her college. The calls were so disruptive and distressing that she started getting very upset about them. We could not locate the man who was calling, as he was using another name. She asked him not to call anymore and complained to the telecom operator but nothing happened. Eventually that man stopped calling her, but I have always wondered why our SIM cards are not registered properly. I am really happy that finally sim registration is happening and according to our state minister, all the unregistered SIM cards will be deactivated. There are around 128.7 million mobile-phone subscribers in Bangladesh until July this year. Even though the entire process of biometric verification might seem quite tiring, I would like to encourage everyone to retrace your sim cards and get them verified so that there is no non availability of user information.
Akram Hossain
Mirpur, Dhaka