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Tuesday, January 5, 2010

[ALOCHONA] MY PILGRIMAGE TO TANGAIL TO VIEW THE FAMED BHASANI HUT



MY PILGRIMAGE TO TANGAIL TO VIEW THE FAMED BHASANI HUT

 

Abid Bahar

 

(Adapted from Abid Bahar's book: BHASANI AND THE BIRTH OF BANGLADESH)

 

During the late 90's, I was searching for a topic to do research on a major project about Bangladesh. This was meant to be a Sociological research. (1) I was seriously thinking about Bangabandu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's life as a theme. Professor Sheila McDonough, (a Canadian scholar on South Asia) redirected my interest to do research into the life of Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bashani, (she thought due to Bhasani's ascetic religious life and his selfless political leadership, he was as if the Mahatma Gandhi of Bangladesh, she also added that Bhasani had a long life and studying the life of Bhasani would be similar to studying the history of the birth of Bangladesh). She also noted it will also give me the opportunity to understand Bangabandu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the other Bengali leaders. True, Bangladesh is the country of my birth but I had permanently left and from a distance I remained in touch with the people through my academic pursuits and when I sought to know more about it, I recognized the life of Bhasani as a topic that matched my own interests.

            Soon I recognized that Bashani was a political leader who with the other leaders of his time shaped the politics of the subcontinent in general and Bengal and Bangladesh in particular. Bashani was born in British Bengal in the later part of the 19th century in the remote Pabna district of present day Bangladesh.  He was a Sufi religious mystic and a peasant leader. While most leaders with the change in fortune turned from rural living into the status of Calcutta babus, all his life Bhasani lived like a Brngali rural peasant. He fought against the British, against Pakistani military leadership and in the independent Bangladesh he always supported Bangabandu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman who had been his political associate but not surprisingly disapproved Bangabandu's one party BKSAL politics.

Among many of his accomplishments, Bhasani played a very important role during the 70's in the liberation war of Bangladesh in which I was also directly involved. Ironically, I never knowingly attended his political meetings personally, although I was aware of his activities through the media.  I remember in 1967, once I was on my way to Kanungopara College in Chittagong to meet a family member, I saw Bashani at a close range. I saw him speaking at a meeting of rural peasants from a podium by the side of a rural road. I still remember that I was a curious passerby drawn to the thunderous noise coming from the roadside gathering where I saw him, then already an old man, speaking to the rural peasants. From his outfit and appearance he looked like a rural Bengali peasant, talking with a very angry face, his teeth partially out.  I remember that before this encounter, I didn't know who he was. I inquired about the name of this person. I didn't then even in my dreams know that the life of this person was going to be my topic of great interest.  I would have forgotten both his name and this incident had I not remembered the very angry look in his face and his teeth, that seemed almost about to bite something or somebody. That was my first impression of a political leader who could be very angry about something I did not know and I didn't want to enquire about at that time. Without understanding the depth of the matter, I remember, I left the place to my journey's end.

             Later, I came to know of Bashani's political activities but neither as a researcher nor as a follower of him. Before I began research, like many other Bengalis, I remained indifferent to his political appeals, though acknowledging with respect that he was one of the leading catalysts for change in the region.

         My research on the life of Bhasani began in the summer of 1989, by now, Bashani was dead and the dust had started to settle down and some research had been done on him. My proficiency in Bengali, the language Bashani used in his communications made my job easier. During the 80's as a faculty in a Bangladeshi university teaching the Social History of Bengal also served me with a useful foil to work on this topic.

            As I began my research in Dhaka, I had scheduled meeting Nasir Bashani, Bashani's son who was a former Minister in the Bangladeshi government. I also met Mostaque Ahamed, former AL/ BKSAL Minister and later the president of Bangladesh (I found Mostaque a very unpleasant personality.) I met many other Bhasani associates and followers including Kazi Zaffor. In the process, I have recorded some general oral history about Bhasani. Most of my interviewees did not provide much help but they all informed me that I should go to Santosh village of Tangail where Bashani lived in a hut "that is still there."

     Santosh is about 30 kilometers from Dhaka.  I, along with my local guide, left for Santosh by bus through quite rugged streets (at the time of Ershed's regime in power) and often had to stand for hours hanging on the handle from the ceiling in a packed bus, sometimes feeling like I was suspended in the mid air. In addition, twice we had to wait and change to another bus. As it was becoming quite hectic, the feeling of discomfort and fatigue soon started to show. This was perhaps because I had gotten used to Canadian comfort. Finally after about an agonizing 6 hours off and on journey, I finally arrived in Santosh.  As I approached the town, I looked for the hut but instead noticed from a distance the top of a huge building with a tomb. My guide said, that is where Bashani lived. For a moment, I felt as if my guide was as inexperienced as I was since I was sure that it could not be a hut. But my guide cleared my confusion saying that it was Bashani's newly built mausoleum. True, they had transformed his graveyard into a mausoleum. I felt disheartened, believing the original hut had been destroyed. As I approached near, I saw many would be his followers visiting his mausoleum. But not far from the mausoleum, I noticed a hut.  I thought I had finally found what I wanted to find for my research: the hut where Bashani lived.  To my great satisfaction, I collected some books on him, conducted some quick interviews with his colleagues and took some pictures of the hut and happily back to Canada.

             As I continued my work in Canada, I realized that I had not gathered enough to finish my research.  However, I continued collecting secondary materials and kept up contacts with his followers in Bangladesh and abroad. During this time many Bashani followers launched an international campaign to fight against the Indian Farakka dam over the Ganges River. While Bhasani fought for the independence of Bangladesh and appreciated Indian help, when India began its water aggression against Bangladesh, Bashani initiated the protest march against this Indian dam project. It is to note that the impact of the Farakka dam devastated one quarter of Bangladesh in the southwest. As luck would have it, I was asked by some of his followers from New York to take an important leadership position in the lobbying campaign by the International Farakka Committee against the dam. As an environmental issue, I devoted some time to this through writing in newspapers, leading protest marches, touring Bangladesh and doing press conferences in Dhaka, Chittagong and in Tangail Press club.  Many of the Bhasani followers believed that I, like many of them, was a Bashani supporter and some suggested I should also take an important position in Bashani's National Awami League (NAP) party work which I politely declined at the expense of their displeasure. The more I tried to convince them of my role, the more displeasure it caused them. Many of them are still angry with me and could not understand why, despite my role in the Farakka movement, I declined such a position. In my mind, I was not a Bashani's NAP party follower but principally a researcher who also had a chance to work in this great environmental cause initiated by Bashani. Fortunately, before it became a serious issue between us, my research was already done. Despite the misunderstandings, in the process of this close association (which I honestly appreciate,) I was able to collect important documents about Bashani, that otherwise would have been impossible to obtain.

            I made a second trip to Bangladesh in 1995 to renew my contacts, to verify the already formulated hypothesis about the ideological basis of Bashani's political leadership and to obtain additional information on my topic. I found the second trip more comfortable. I lived in a bungalow in Santosh over a week.   This was thanks to Azizur Rahman, a civil servant, and a friend of mine who by now had become an important government official and was the former president of the Bashani Trust.  I noticed how within about 8 years after my first trip, the place had turned into a small "temple city". It had become something of a pilgrimage center with the mausoleum and the hut still there as the centerpiece. Contact through Rahman also helped me to procure important documents. I also could easily make contact with Irfanul Bari, the former editor of Bashani's weekly Hoq Khota, and Mohammed Hossain, an associate of Bashani and also with Siddiqur Rahman, the former Bashani associate and the caretaker of the mausoleum. During this time, at the Tangail press club, the daily Deshkhata hearing my presence in the town interviewed me about our lobbying activities in USA and Canada.

         I took advantage of the bungalow to complete this "deluxe tour" - with my guide Kamal - to learn about Bhasani from Bhasani's family members, the Sufi Sagrits and the other close associates. I was also taken inside the hut, by the son-in-law of Bashani. I had a tour of the huge darbar hall (the bungalow style house) made of bamboo where he did jikr (meditation) with his disciples and settled disputes among people. Not far from it was the Bashani museum where artifacts were kept.  I was taken to the Zamindars palace, which by now became the abode of supposedly harmless snakes. In 1996, I went to Bangladesh for a third time to find additional information.  By now I realized that my long years of engagement with this project initially suggested by Dr. Sheila McDonough truly exhausted me. She had inspired me to understand this rare personality not known to most Bangladeshis but born in Bangladesh and for his selfless life style she called "the Gandhi of Bangladesh."  As a scholar on South Asia, Dr. McDonough had written books on Gandhi, Jinnah, and Iqbal and singled out Bhasani as the leader whose life she thought should be researched. Throughout the time I was working on Bhasani's life, I kept in my mind what McDonough suggested in her book, Gandhi's Response to Islam, "In ... [doing research], we ... consider respect an important element in the attitude researchers should take when approaching religious phenomenon". She adds, "The reason [for this] is that an open, non-judgmental attitude is a valuable tool when attempting to comprehend religious meaning. … Respect from this perspective implies that we are open to the possibility of learning something we did not know before."(2) In approaching Bashani as a topic, I tried to internalize this habit. Among many others that helped me was the famous Canadian historian, Dr.Fridrick Bird.  Ishwar Modi of Rajstan University in India also gave me necessary help to understand Bashani.  In addition to Santosh being a beautiful place to visit it is truly a historic place where in 1957 world leaders assembled at the Kagmeri conference to say "Assalamu Alikum " to Pakistani rulers and now there is a university next to the mousalium and most importantly the Bhasani hut is still preserved for tourists.  My 2003 tour of Santosh was truly hospitable and an unforgatable pilgrimage to this great temple city; even in Bhasani's absence, I felt that he was there present with his people. It was here when he heard the death of Bangabandu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman he

 asked that someone bring him a transistor radio. [1]Maksud records it from the description of a person present at the time(3)

After this he went, inside the mosque. Approximately an hour later he came out … his eyes were wet in tears. He said: "everything is over. …"  He was counting the Tasbíh (the prayer-beads) rapidly. He had tears continuously flowing from his eyes. I understood how much he had loved Sheikh Mujib. I realized that he prayed for [him].(4)

          After the coup, while most leaders of the country and a large section of the population were joyous, celebrating the death of their once hero turned a dictator, Bhasani was visibly sad. He was sad because Mujib was his long time companion. He has been angry with him for the authoritarian rule he imposed over the young nation but never expected him to be killed with his entire family.(5)

             My work on Bhasani, the immortal pedestal took many years of research, partly because Bhasani was not alive and the sources of information about him used were written mostly in Bengali language. But during my research I was very fortunate to meet some special people that helped me while I was collecting rare documents for this project, one such special person was Hafiz Ullah. He was as if one of the many unknown selfless Bhasanis. After my research, I came back to Canada and lost my contact with him because like Bhasani he also left us for eternity.

Endnotes

1. The above was adopted from Abid Bahar's Ph.D. Dissertation: The Religious and Philosophical Basis of Bhasani's Political Leadership, 2003.  A revised version of the abstract is provided below:

Bhasani was originally a Sufi mystic turned politician. His political career spanned for close to six decades. During this time, he never sought power. He always remained faithful to his rebubia ideology and remained in the opposition leadership. Interestingly, with this type of leadership in a liberal Muslim country like Bangladesh he was a shelter for the progressive forces to fight against oppressive regimes. The 50's records show it was Bhasani', Abul Hashem, and Abul Kashem's similar Islamic left ideology that initiated the language movement. Inspired by this ideology to fight against oppression, Bhasani first established the AL and the Ittafaq, the two national institutions that were behind the anti Ayub movement and Bhasani also led the 69 movement to release Mujib from Agartala conspiracy case. Susequently Bhasani warned Mujib to stop negotiation with the hypocriat military rulers and Bhasani's call for action against Yahya Khan and Bhutto contributed to the liberation war. During the war he was in India leading the war then surprisingly he was put under house arrest in Northern India. After the war, Bhasani also led the anti BKSAL movement and led the Farakka March against India's water aggression. In all this Bhasani's war was against the oppressor (jalim) for its oppression (Joloom). He was a fatherly figure to Mujib and the rest of the AL leadership. Ziaur Rahman, the BNP founder who introduced the multi party democracy through the Fifth Amendment also had the blessing of Bhasani.  Unlike the other politicians of his time, Bhasani took politics as his service to God (Ebada). All his life he lived among peasants dined and dressed like a Bengali peasant. For his selfless service to his people, many contemporary South Asian and Western scholars wished to call him as if the Gandhi of Bangladesh. 

2. Shiela McDonnough, Gandhi's Response to Islam. New Delhi: D.K. Printworld (P) Ltd., 1994, p.1

3..Maksud, Mawlana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhasani, op. cit., p. 514.

4. This is from the statement of a person present at the time, recorded by Maksud. See Maksud, Mawlana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhasani. op. cit., p. 514.

5.Ibid.

(Professor Abid Bahar teaches in Canada. His recent books are on Burma is Burma's Missing Dots 2008 and Rohingyama- a drama on refugee experience 2008, Forget Me Not! 2009 on immigranr experience, and An Illustrated History of Bangabandu and Bangladesh, 2010 is in progress)



 




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[ALOCHONA] Sk Hasina stayed out of country for 50 days, Dipu Moni 4 months



Sk Hasina stayed out of country for 50 days, Dipu Moni 4 months
 
 



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[ALOCHONA] BAL: One year in office



BAL: One year in office
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



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[ALOCHONA] The Telegraph Credits FR Khan for Structural Design Concept of Burj Dubai



 Burj Dubai: The new pinnacle of vanity

For all the ambition of its construction, Dubai's new Khalifa Tower is a frightening, purposeless monument to the subprime era, says Stephen Bayley.

 

By Stephen Bayley
Published: 6:37AM GMT 05 Jan 2010

"Less is only more where more is no good." I wonder how many guests squinting into the Gulf's blue skies before the sublime, coruscating, vitreous surfaces of the blasphemously vertiginous Burj Dubai at yesterday's opening ceremony knew Frank Lloyd Wright's sardonic remark.

Wright was the Welsh-American architect – part bardic mystic, part technophile, complete megalomaniac – who proposed in 1956 the Illinois Sky City in Chicago. This was an outrageous, mile-high building: 528 floors, each with a height of 10 feet.

Wright's business was to shock and awe all mankind while doing what he could to épater la bourgeoisie at the same time. In 1956, there was neither the technological, nor indeed the financial, possibility of Wright's Sky City being built. It was a fantasy designed to impress. So, too, is Burj Dubai – or Burj Khalifa, the Khalifa Tower, as we must now call it, after it was renamed yesterday in honour of the president of the United Arab Emirates.

And Wright was its inspiration. Burj Khalifa is the work of the grand old Chicago architectural firm of Skidmore Owings and Merrill, world leaders in design of supertall buildings. SOM, as it is known, has drunk very deeply of Wright's intoxicating brew of techno-mysticism and physical daring. But, touchingly and significantly, Fazlur Khan, SOM's engineering genius whose experiments ultimately made Burj Khalifa possible, was born not in a big Western city but in Bhandarikandi, Shibchur Upazila near Dhaka.

Khan invented a new way of building tall. In the Middle Ages, masonry structures could not reach higher than the great European cathedrals: both the practicalities of hauling stone skywards with only wooden winding gear and wooden scaffolding, plus the structural requirement for unfeasibly thick walls to create stability, limited the masons' reach for Heaven.

Then, in the late 19th century, steel-framed buildings were developed in Chicago: giving the load-bearing job to structural metal made masonry redundant. Walls were there only to keep out the weather and the conventional skyscraper was born.

So Fazlur Khan created the unconventional skyscraper. Reversing the logic of the steel frame, he decided that the building's external envelope could – given enough trussing, framing and bracing – be the structure itself. This made buildings even lighter. The "bundled tube" meant buildings no longer need be boxlike in appearance: they could become sculpture.

Khan's amazing insight – he was name-checked by Obama in his Cairo University speech last year – changed both the economics and the morphology of supertall buildings. And it made Burj Khalifa possible: proportionately, Burj employs perhaps half the steel that conservatively supports the Empire State Building.

Fazlur Khan died in 1982, just a few years after he had completed Chicago's Sears Tower (then the world's tallest building), but Burj Khalifa is the ultimate expression of his audacious, lightweight design philosophy. And it is at the extreme outer limits of our understanding of structures. Some say scarily so.

There are three seismic fault zones in the UAE area, although Dubai itself is thought to be at low risk because of its particular soil structure. Yet if I were enjoying the view from, say, the 140th floor, I would not be able to help musing with a frisson of alarm that the geologically unstable Iran was not too far away. Indeed, minor tremors are often felt in Dubai.

The engineers say this is no threat, since the Burj's structure is inherently stable: its tapering profile and cautious weight distribution mean the heights may be psychologically demanding for the timorous but are, at least in theory, secure.

The summit, they say, where the residential floors are only eight metres across, is as secure as a knitting needle set in concrete. Indeed, Burj Khalifa dispenses with a pendulum-like mass-damper, which some supertalls use to moderate incidental movements.

Yet three years ago there were reports that concrete floor slabs had already cracked after suffering significant deflections. New Civil Engineer reported that carbon-fibre was urgently being used in remedial attempts to strengthen the floors. An expert told the same journal "things have to be pretty bad" before you start repairing a half-built building.

The contractors admit that Burj has already settled by several inches. True, all buildings settle and flex, otherwise they would crumble or snap, but – call me feeble – I'd be alarmed to watch standing waves in the lavatory bowl in a howling desert storm as my bundled tube creaked and shimmied its way into the shifting sands and Hades beyond.

There are other daunting technological and practical problems with such a building. Aerospace engineers will imagine the most horrible thing that could possibly happen to a wing and then design it to withstand several times as much force. But aerospace engineers are working in an older technological tradition than designers of supertall buildings: certainly, the tapering profile of Burj Khalifa helps diminish the effect of the wind, but variables and unknown unknowns remain. We have only small knowledge of how such an extreme structure responds to wind-induced dynamic torque.

Then there is the more prosaic matter of lifts, or how to shift a lot of people a vertical kilometre without a jetpack. At the World Trade Center (whose rather different lightweight design might have contributed to the vastness of the calamity) the lifts were organised into three sectors, breaking the journey. Burj Khalifa uses a similar staggered device: vertical ascents (at a nauseating 26mph) are divided into sections; passengers de-lift in a sky lobby – or what I would call a sweaty paranoia centre. Fire? Don't even think about it … or dive into the Jacuzzi.

But even more interesting than the technology is the art. Just as the great heroes of first generation Modernism were architects, artists and designers – Moholy-Nagy, Rodchenko, Tatlin – who came not from the cosmopolitan centres of Europe but its feral fringes, so the supertalls of the new century are being built in the Gulf and Asia, not in Coventry or Dortmund. And to a design principle created by a visionary Bangladeshi engineer avid to exploit his own idealised version of the American architectural dream.

In 1999, a research director at Deutsche Bank called Andrew Lawrence published an irreverent, but deadly accurate, paper called the Skyscraper Index. Here, Lawrence proposed a link – cause or symptom, could be either – between very tall buildings and economic crises. Thus, New York's Metropolitan Life building was finished just before the 1907 depression. The Chrysler Building was a contemporary of the Wall Street Crash and AT&T's preposterous Chippendale pedimented horror of 1984 by Philip Johnson only just preceded the company's inglorious unbundling.

It's all a matter of hubris. When in 1973 Gordon Metcalf of Sears opened the new Chicago building Fazlur Khan had created for him, he most incautiously said the biggest retailer in the world deserved its biggest building. Standing beneath Khan's mighty, cross-braced structure, Metcalf could not even see Kmart coming, let alone online shopping. Sears departed on a journey of value destruction and became a much smaller retailer with a very large building. (In a footnote to the history of corporate vanity, the Sears Building was recently rebranded the Willis Building.)

Burj Khalifa is the architectural equivalent of this same vanity, elevated to propaganda. Corporations want, or wanted, supertalls to exploit what Tom Wolfe called "kerbflash", that liminal effect which a dramatic architectural profile achieves. And now, rapidly developing, if structurally parlous, economies such as Dubai use architecture as advertising in much the same way as AT&T or Pittsburgh Plate Glass once did.

Height is an expression and a metaphor of ambition, but – equally – as Freud knew, falling is a universal fear. Dubai's economy will probably recover, but the Burj Khalifa will very likely be the last of its kind this particular Emirate builds.

Paradoxically, Burj Khalifa is not a truly modern building. It is a hangover of a demented spending binge. It is a subprime Great Pyramid. It is queasy nostalgia for a version of the future that looked old-fashioned a generation ago. It is kitsch retro fantasia, a glassy memorial to something not so much forgotten as never known.

Sublime to the point of being frightening, Burj Khalifa is archaically greedy with energy and resources. It is a modern building in the sense that – like Zaha Hadid's new MAXXI museum in Rome – it was built for vainglory rather than for purpose. Vast in size but small in meaning, Burj is a lot more stuff, but less idea.

I have a vision of it now, several years hence, its glossy surfaces dulled by sandstorms, embarrassing stress-fractures in its shiny, arrogant face. It will be an ancient monument surprisingly soon. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.

 

<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/dubai/6934603/Burj-Dubai-The-new-pinnacle-of-vanity.html>

 

 



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[mukto-mona] Re: Some oppressive verses in Hindu religion (for Mr. sman)




--- In mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com, "Abul Kasem" <abul88@...> wrote:
>
>
> Dear All
>
> If you thought that only islam mistreats the women, perish that thought.
> Here is how Hinduissm treats women. I did not publish this for a long time
> not to offend mnay Hindu readers. But the time has come to expose the
> misogynist nature of all religions. Please feel free to commwnts. Hindu
> fundamenttalists, please prove that what is written in this bomshell article
> is wrong.
>
> Abul Kasem
>
>
> women in vedas
> Comments
> Women in Vedas Soma Sablok The indian Constitution guarantees equall rights
> to both the sexes and does not discriminate on the basis of sacte, colour
> and creed
> However, despite the constitutional provisions, do womens enjoy equality
> with men ?
> The answer is 'No'. Their condition still remains miserable. Newspaper carry
> report of rape and burning of women for not bringing sufficient dowry or
> their inability to satisfy the demands of greedy in laws.
> Basically, out present attitude towards women streams from our religious
> scriptures which efer to women as contempt.
> Our oldest book are the 'Vedas' which contain highly objectionable and
> condemnable passages concerning women.
> Taking cue from the 'Vedas' authors of subsequent religious scriptures
> referred to women in more contemptuous form.
> 'Sati pratha' (custom of burning the widow with the body of her husband),
> 'Dasi Pratha' (keeping the slave girls), 'Niyog Pratha' (ancient aryan
> custom of childless widow or women having sexual intercoutrse with a man
> other than husband to beget child), were among cruel customa responsible for
> the plight of the women.
> Naturally, seeking shelter under such religious sanctions, unscrupulous
> women disgraced women to the maximuim possible extent and made them means of
> satisfying their lust.
> No one wanted a daughter
> As a result; female infant came to be considered unwanted. No one wanted a
> daughter. Everyone was interested in having a son. The birth of the son was
> celebrated, but the birth of the daughter plunged family into gloom.
> This attitude still persists, even though certain other customs have
> undergone changes.
> 'Rig Veda' itself says that a women should beget sons. The newly married
> wife is blessed so that she could have 10 sons.
> So much so, that for begetting a son, 'Vedas' prescribe a special ritual
> called 'Punsawan sanskar' (a ceremony performed during third month of
> pregnancy). During the ceremony it is prayed:
> "Almighty God, you have created this womb. Women may be born somewhere else
> but sons should be born from this womb" - Atharva Ved 6/11/3
> "O Husband protect the son to be born. Do not make him a women" - Atharva
> Ved 2/3/23
> In 'Shatpath Puran (shatpath Brahman)' a sonless women has been termed as
> unfortunate.
> 'Rig Veda' censures women by saying:
> "Lord Indra himself has said that women has very little intelligence. She
> cannot be thaught" - Rig Ved 8/33/17
> At another place it is written:
> "There cannot be any friendship with a women. Her heart is more cruel than
> heyna" - Rig Ved 10/95/15.
> 'Yajur Ved (Taitriya Sanhita)'m- "Womns code says that the women are
> withouth energy. They should not get a share in property. Even to the wicked
> they speak in feeble manner" - Yajur Ved 6/5/8/2
> Shatpath Puran, preachings of the 'Yajur Veda' clubs women, 'shudras'
> (untouchables), doga, crows together and says falsehood, sin and gloom
> remain integrated in them. (14/1/1/31)
> In 'Aiterey Puran', preaching of the 'Rig Veda' in harsih chandra -Narad
> dialogue, Narad says:
> "The daughter causes pain"
> Despicable
> To insult and humiliate women further, the religious books speak of women
> having sexual intercourse with animals or expressing desire for intercourse
> with them. What further insult can be heaped on women.
> In 'Yajur Veda' such references are found at a number of places where the
> principal wife of the host is depicted as having intercourse with a horse.
> For example consider the following hymn:
> "All wife of the host reciting three mantras go round the horse. While
> praying, they say: 'O horse, you are, protecter of the community on the
> basis of good qualities, you are, protecter or treasure of happiness. O
> horse, you become my husband.'" - Yajur Veda 23/19.
> "After the animal is purified by the priest, the principal wife sleeps near
> the horse and says: 'O Horse, i extract the semen worth conception and you
> release the semen worth conception'" - Yajur Veda 23/20.
> The horse and principal wife spread two legs each. Then the
> Ardhvaryu(priest) orders to cover the oblation place, raise canopy etc.
> After this, the principal wife of the host pulls penis of the horse and puts
> it in her vagina and says: "This horse may release semen in me." -Yajur Veda
> 23/20.
> Then the host, while praying to the horse says:
> "O horse, please throw semen on the upper part of the anus of my wife.
> Expand your penis and insert it in the vagina because after insertion, this
> penis makes women happy and lively" - 23/21.
> In the vedic age, the customs of polygamy was prevalent. Each wife spent
> most of the time devising ways and means to become favourite to her husband.
> Clear references are available in 'Rig Veda', (14/45),' and Atharva Veda
> (3/81)'
> Custom of Polygamy
> The Aryans in those days used to attack the original inhabitants of this
> place, or other tribe within their own race; loot them and snatch away their
> women. Thus, militant and wicked men had more wives. This custom of polygamy
> helped a great deal in bringing down the women.
> In 'Rig Ved' (10/59) it is written that Lord Indra had many queens that wre
> either defeated or killed by his principal wife.
> In 'Aitrey Puran', preachings of 'Rig Veda', (33/1), there is a reference to
> the effect that Harish Chandra had one hundred Wives.
> 'Yajur Veda' in the context of 'Ashva Medha' (Horse Sacraficing ceremony),
> says that many wives of Harish Chandra participated in the 'Yagyna'
> (religious sacrafice).
> In 'Shatpath Puran(Shatpath Brahmin)', preachings (13/4/1/9), of the Veda,
> it is written that four wives do service in 'Ashva Megha'. In another Puran
> (Tatiraity Brahamin, 3/8/4), it is written that wives are like property.
> Not only one man had many wives (married and slave girls), but there were
> cases of many men having a joint wife. It is confirmed from the following
> hymn in 'Atharva Veda':
> "O men, sow a seed in this fertile women" - Atharva Veda 14/1
> Both these customs clearly show that a women was treated like a moving
> property. The only difference between the two customs was that whereas
> according to former one man had a number of movable properties, in the
> latter, women a joint movable property.
> 'Vedas' also sanction 'Sati Pratha'
> Widow was burnt at the funeral Pyre of her husband.
> The widow was burnt at the funeral pyre of her husband so that she may
> remain his slave, birth after birth and may never be released from the bonds
> of slavery.
> The Atharva Veda says:
> "O dead man following the religion and wishing to go to the husbands world,
> this women comes to you. In the other world also may you give her children
> and wealth in the same manner.
> In the 'Vedas', widow is treated inhumanly. For example it is mentioned that
> on death of her husband, the wife was handed over to some other man, or to
> her husband younger brother.
> Swami Vivekananda opines that even at that time women used to have sexual
> intercourse with a person other than her husband to beget a child.
> The hymn says:
> "O woman, get up and adopt the worldly life again. It is futile to lie with
> this dead man. Get up and become the wife of the man who is holding your
> hand and who loves you. - Rig Ved 10/18/8
> Aparently this shows that woman is considered to be a property. Whenever and
> whosoever desired, could become her master.
> If the women was not remarried, then her head was shaved. This is evident
> from Atharva Veda (14/2/60).
> This custom was obviously meant to disgrace her. For what connection does
> shaving of widows head has with the death of her husband ?
> The condition of widows was miserable. She was considered to be a harbinger
> of inauspiciousness and was not allowed to participate in ceremonies like
> marriage. This custom is still prevalent in some places. She has to spend
> her life alone
> In Rig Veda therre are references to slave girls being given in charity as
> gifts. After killing the menfolk of other tribes, particularly of the native
> inhabitants, their women were rounded up and used as slave girls. It was
> custom to present slave girls to one other as gifts.
> The kings used to present chariots full of slave girls to their kith and kin
> and preists (Rig Veda 6/27/8). King Trasdasyu had given 50 slave girls. It
> was cutom to present slave girls to Saubhri Kandav (Rig Veda 8/38, 5/47/6).
> Intercourse withouth marriage
> A slave girl was called 'Vadhu' (wife), with whom sexual intercourse could
> be performed witouth any kind of marriage ceremony.
> These girls belonged to the men who snatched them from the enemies, or who
> had received them in dowry, or as gifts. Only the men to whom they belonged
> could have sexual intercourse with them.
> But some slave girls were kept as joint property of the tribe or the
> village. Any man could have sexual rlations with them. These girls became
> the prostitutes.
> The 'Vedas' also talk about 'Niyog', the custom of childless, widow or woman
> having sexual intercourse with a person other than her husband to beget a
> child.
> In simple words 'Niyog' means sending a married woman or a widow to a
> particular man for sexual intercourse so that she gets a son. Indication of
> this custom is available in 'Rig Veda'
> In 'Aadiparva' of 'Mahabharata' (chap. 95 and 103), it is mentioned that
> Satywati had appointed her son to bestow sons to the queens of Vichitrvirya,
> the younger brother of Bhishma, as a result of which Dhratrashtra and Pandu
> were born.
> Pandu himself has asked his wife, Kunti, to have sexual intercourse with a
> brahmin to get a son (Aadi Parva, chapters 120 to 123).
> Chastity of woman was not safe
> In the name of 'beejdan' (seed donation), they used to have sexual
> intercourse with issueless women. This was a cruel religious custom and the
> chastity of the women was not safe. The so called caretakers of the religion
> were allowed to have sexual intercourse with other man's wife.
> From 'Niyog pratha' it csn be inferred withouth fear of contradiction that
> women were looked upon as mere child producing machines.
> In 'The Position of women in Hindu Civilization' Dr. B. R. Ambedkar writes:
> "Though women is not married to man, she was considered to be a property of
> the entire family. But she was not getting share out of the property of her
> husband, only son could be successor to the property."
> Gajdhar Prasad Baudh says: " No woman of the Vedic age can be treated as
> pure. Vedic man could not keep even the relations brother-sister and
> father-daughter sacred from the oven of rape and debauchery/adultery named
> 'Niyog'. Under the influence of intoxication of wine, they used to recognise
> neither their sister nor their daughter and also did not keep the relations
> with them in mind. It is evident from their debauchery and adultery what a
> miserable plight of women was society in then. (Refer 'Arya Niti Ka
> Bhadaphor'. 5th Edition page 14).
> In the 'Vedas' there are instances where daughter was impregnated by her
> father and the sister by her brother.
> The following example of sexual interourse is found between father and
> daughter in the 'Rig Veda':
> "When father had sexual intercourse with his daughter, then with the help of
> earth he released his semen and at that time the Righteeous Devas (deities)
> formed this 'Vartrashak (Rudra) Devta' (Pledge keeper diety named Rudra)" -
> Atharva Veda (20/96/15).
> Women: Low grade creatures
> From the aforesaid account, it is clear that in the Vedas women have been
> considered to be low grade creatures.
> It is high time we expose scriptures, preaching such inhuman teachings so
> that they lose their credibility. Only then can there be a hope on women's
> liberation, and of equality between sexes which is guaranteed by Indian
> Constitution
>
> Last changed: January 02, 2001
>
>
>
>
> >From: "Avijit Roy" avijitroy@...
> >Reply-To: mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com
> >To: mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com
> >Subject: [mukto-mona] Re: Some oppressive verses in Hindu religion (for Mr.
> >sman)
> >Date: Tue, 03 Jul 2001 13:18:58
> >
> >Inequity and degradation of women are sanctified in the Hindu religion.
> >
> >Manu Smriti says:
> >" Never trust a woman.
> >Never sit alone with a woman even if it may be your mother, daughter,
> >sister
> >she may tempt you.
> >
> >Again the same Manu Smriti continues:
> >"Na stree swadantriya marhathi".
> >"No liberty for women in society".
> >
> >
> >Fatemolla bhai also quoted some of the oppressive verses in his article
> >(sorry my love) :
> >
> >"The best woman is worse than the worst man" -Toittorio Shonghita -
> >6/5//8/2. "Women are omen" - Moitrayani Shonghita -3/8/3. "A daughter is a
> >curse" - Oittorio Brahman 6/3/7. "Confine women otherwise she will loose
> >her
> >strength" (What a strength!) - Shatapath Brahman 14/1/1/31. And that
> >eternal
> >license also, -"One husband is enough for them although the husband may
> >have
> >many wives"- Oittorio Brahman 3/5/3/47. And then came THE thing: - "One
> >should weaken women by biting with stick so that she does not have any
> >right
> >on any property or her own body." - Shatapath Brahman - 4/4/2/13. And then,
> >"The husband would try to buy her with presents if she declines his lust.
> >If
> >it does not work then he would bit her by hand or stick". - Shatapath
> >Brahman - 6/4/7
> >
> >( Look at the Qura'an - Sura Nisa Ayat 34, and also to some Hadises in Sahi
> >Bokhari).... Got any similarity Mr. Usman ?
> >
> >
> >HINDU WOMAN (From the view point of Traditional Hindu law):
> >
> >1. The Hindu woman has no right to divorce her husband.
> >
> >2. She has no property or inheritance rights.
> >
> >3. Choice of partner is limited because she can only marry within her own
> >caste; moreover her horoscope must match that of the intending
> >bridegroom/family.
> >
> >4. The family of the girl has to offer an enormous dowry to the
> >bridegroom/family.
> >
> >5. If her husband dies she should commit Sati (being cremated with her dead
> >husband). Since today's law forbids Sati, society mainly punishes her in
> >other "holy" ways (see below).
> >
> >6. She cannot remarry.
> >
> >7. The widow is considered to be a curse and.must not be seen in public.
> >She
> >cannot wear jewellery or colourful clothes. (She should not even take part
> >in her children's marriage!)
> >
> >8. Child and infant marriage is encouraged.
> >
> >
> >
> >Shatidah (Sothi Daho) was another example of one of the brutal culture of
> >Hindu religion which is totally supported by Hindu religious scriptures
> >(those scriptures are considered as the revelation of god). SHOTI DAHA
> >refers to widow burning, though SOTI literally means virgin.
> >
> >Please check my Article :
> >http://humanists.net/avijit/article/shotihaho.htm
> >
> >
> >Do I need to express more, WHY I AM NOT A HINDU, Mr. Usman ?

Mr .Usman,  i was  a hindu woman,who was raped in riots in hyderabad(india).Three Muslim men gangraped me again and again.I was left in a muslim neighbourhood  as i was orphan only with small brother.under terror and for protection i became muslim.  Later one  Md.yusuf married me and divorced me.So i went for abortion.N ow i am working in a muslim house as servant.My brother is servant in  owner's shop.  Against mel my rapist's and my husband sodomised rape in me.wound there blood used to come .My brother is sodomised and raped by husband yusuf.Vedas and puranas are stories no real  history.MY LIFE REAL AND BROTHER LIFE REAL.ISLAM  WOMEN RAPED EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD.EVERY RELIGION   SOLD WOMEN ,RAPED WOMEN AS SLAVES.MAN any religion is a sexual beast who rape women,boys etc.religion does not protect helpless orphans and innocent people .In riots men,women,children killed.women raped.                               
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >_________________________________________________________________________
> >Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
> ><< message5.txt >>
>
> _________________________________________________________________________
> Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
>


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[ALOCHONA] The Telegraph - Fazlur R Khan the Bengali Engineer behind Modern Skyscrapers



 

Burj Dubai: The new pinnacle of vanity

By Stephen Bayley

The Telegraph

05 Jan 2010

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/dubai/6934603/Burj-Dubai-The-new-pinnacle-of-vanity.html

 

For all the ambition of its construction, Dubai's new Khalifa Tower is a frightening, purposeless monument to the subprime era, says Stephen Bayley.

 

Link to this video "Less is only more where more is no good." I wonder how many guests squinting into the Gulf's blue skies before the sublime, coruscating, vitreous surfaces of the blasphemously vertiginous Burj Dubai at yesterday's opening ceremony knew Frank Lloyd Wright's sardonic remark.

 

Wright was the Welsh-American architect – part bardic mystic, part technophile, complete megalomaniac – who proposed in 1956 the Illinois Sky City in Chicago. This was an outrageous, mile-high building: 528 floors, each with a height of 10 feet.

 

Wright's business was to shock and awe all mankind while doing what he could to épater la bourgeoisie at the same time. In 1956, there was neither the technological, nor indeed the financial, possibility of Wright's Sky City being built. It was a fantasy designed to impress. So, too, is Burj Dubai – or Burj Khalifa, the Khalifa Tower, as we must now call it, after it was renamed yesterday in honour of the president of the United Arab Emirates.

 

And Wright was its inspiration. Burj Khalifa is the work of the grand old Chicago architectural firm of Skidmore Owings and Merrill, world leaders in design of supertall buildings. SOM, as it is known, has drunk very deeply of Wright's intoxicating brew of techno-mysticism and physical daring. But, touchingly and significantly, Fazlur Khan, SOM's engineering genius whose experiments ultimately made Burj Khalifa possible, was born not in a big Western city but in Bhandarikandi, Shibchur Upazila near Dhaka.

 

Khan invented a new way of building tall. In the Middle Ages, masonry structures could not reach higher than the great European cathedrals: both the practicalities of hauling stone skywards with only wooden winding gear and wooden scaffolding, plus the structural requirement for unfeasibly thick walls to create stability, limited the masons' reach for Heaven.

 

Then, in the late 19th century, steel-framed buildings were developed in Chicago: giving the load-bearing job to structural metal made masonry redundant. Walls were there only to keep out the weather and the conventional skyscraper was born.

 

So Fazlur Khan created the unconventional skyscraper. Reversing the logic of the steel frame, he decided that the building's external envelope could – given enough trussing, framing and bracing – be the structure itself. This made buildings even lighter. The "bundled tube" meant buildings no longer need be boxlike in appearance: they could become sculpture.

 

Khan's amazing insight – he was name-checked by Obama in his Cairo University speech last year – changed both the economics and the morphology of supertall buildings. And it made Burj Khalifa possible: proportionately, Burj employs perhaps half the steel that conservatively supports the Empire State Building.

 

Fazlur Khan died in 1982, just a few years after he had completed Chicago's Sears Tower (then the world's tallest building), but Burj Khalifa is the ultimate expression of his audacious, lightweight design philosophy. And it is at the extreme outer limits of our understanding of structures. Some say scarily so.

 

There are three seismic fault zones in the UAE area, although Dubai itself is thought to be at low risk because of its particular soil structure. Yet if I were enjoying the view from, say, the 140th floor, I would not be able to help musing with a frisson of alarm that the geologically unstable Iran was not too far away. Indeed, minor tremors are often felt in Dubai.

 

The engineers say this is no threat, since the Burj's structure is inherently stable: its tapering profile and cautious weight distribution mean the heights may be psychologically demanding for the timorous but are, at least in theory, secure.

 

The summit, they say, where the residential floors are only eight metres across, is as secure as a knitting needle set in concrete. Indeed, Burj Khalifa dispenses with a pendulum-like mass-damper, which some supertalls use to moderate incidental movements.

 

Yet three years ago there were reports that concrete floor slabs had already cracked after suffering significant deflections. New Civil Engineer reported that carbon-fibre was urgently being used in remedial attempts to strengthen the floors. An expert told the same journal "things have to be pretty bad" before you start repairing a half-built building.

 

The contractors admit that Burj has already settled by several inches. True, all buildings settle and flex, otherwise they would crumble or snap, but – call me feeble – I'd be alarmed to watch standing waves in the lavatory bowl in a howling desert storm as my bundled tube creaked and shimmied its way into the shifting sands and Hades beyond.

 

There are other daunting technological and practical problems with such a building. Aerospace engineers will imagine the most horrible thing that could possibly happen to a wing and then design it to withstand several times as much force. But aerospace engineers are working in an older technological tradition than designers of supertall buildings: certainly, the tapering profile of Burj Khalifa helps diminish the effect of the wind, but variables and unknown unknowns remain. We have only small knowledge of how such an extreme structure responds to wind-induced dynamic torque.

 

Then there is the more prosaic matter of lifts, or how to shift a lot of people a vertical kilometre without a jetpack. At the World Trade Center (whose rather different lightweight design might have contributed to the vastness of the calamity) the lifts were organised into three sectors, breaking the journey. Burj Khalifa uses a similar staggered device: vertical ascents (at a nauseating 26mph) are divided into sections; passengers de-lift in a sky lobby – or what I would call a sweaty paranoia centre. Fire? Don't even think about it … or dive into the Jacuzzi.

 

But even more interesting than the technology is the art. Just as the great heroes of first generation Modernism were architects, artists and designers – Moholy-Nagy, Rodchenko, Tatlin – who came not from the cosmopolitan centres of Europe but its feral fringes, so the supertalls of the new century are being built in the Gulf and Asia, not in Coventry or Dortmund. And to a design principle created by a visionary Bangladeshi engineer avid to exploit his own idealised version of the American architectural dream.

 

In 1999, a research director at Deutsche Bank called Andrew Lawrence published an irreverent, but deadly accurate, paper called the Skyscraper Index. Here, Lawrence proposed a link – cause or symptom, could be either – between very tall buildings and economic crises. Thus, New York's Metropolitan Life building was finished just before the 1907 depression. The Chrysler Building was a contemporary of the Wall Street Crash and AT&T's preposterous Chippendale pedimented horror of 1984 by Philip Johnson only just preceded the company's inglorious unbundling.

 

It's all a matter of hubris. When in 1973 Gordon Metcalf of Sears opened the new Chicago building Fazlur Khan had created for him, he most incautiously said the biggest retailer in the world deserved its biggest building. Standing beneath Khan's mighty, cross-braced structure, Metcalf could not even see Kmart coming, let alone online shopping. Sears departed on a journey of value destruction and became a much smaller retailer with a very large building. (In a footnote to the history of corporate vanity, the Sears Building was recently rebranded the Willis Building.)

 

Burj Khalifa is the architectural equivalent of this same vanity, elevated to propaganda. Corporations want, or wanted, supertalls to exploit what Tom Wolfe called "kerbflash", that liminal effect which a dramatic architectural profile achieves. And now, rapidly developing, if structurally parlous, economies such as Dubai use architecture as advertising in much the same way as AT&T or Pittsburgh Plate Glass once did.

 

Height is an expression and a metaphor of ambition, but – equally – as Freud knew, falling is a universal fear. Dubai's economy will probably recover, but the Burj Khalifa will very likely be the last of its kind this particular Emirate builds.

 

Paradoxically, Burj Khalifa is not a truly modern building. It is a hangover of a demented spending binge. It is a subprime Great Pyramid. It is queasy nostalgia for a version of the future that looked old-fashioned a generation ago. It is kitsch retro fantasia, a glassy memorial to something not so much forgotten as never known.

 

Sublime to the point of being frightening, Burj Khalifa is archaically greedy with energy and resources. It is a modern building in the sense that – like Zaha Hadid's new MAXXI museum in Rome – it was built for vainglory rather than for purpose. Vast in size but small in meaning, Burj is a lot more stuff, but less idea.

 

I have a vision of it now, several years hence, its glossy surfaces dulled by sandstorms, embarrassing stress-fractures in its shiny, arrogant face. It will be an ancient monument surprisingly soon. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.



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[mukto-mona] TEN(10) years old Bhupen Hazarika Singing Rabha Xongeet;






Dear
Friends Listen TEN(10) years old Bhupen Hazarika Singing Rabha Xongeet;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoQHQx5sLBk
--

Sushanta kar

--
Click On :
~(1)~ http://sushantakar40.blogspot.com
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 to Read My writings Or On :
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   to read my edited Journal.
Swajatyer Ahomikar Theke Mukti Daner Sikshai Ajker Diner Pradhan Siksha: Rabindranath
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