Prithvi Shams > Recent Status Updates

ব্রিটিশ বেনিয়ারা ধুরন্ধর ছিলো বটে, তবে তার চেয়েও ধুরন্ধর ছিলো এদেশীয় নবাব, মনসবদার আর ভূস্বামীরা, ক্ষমতার মোহে অন্ত:কলহে যারা বৃটিশদের জন্য মাঠ ছেড়ে দিয়েছিলো। বাংলার সাধারণ মানুষ মুঘলদের হাতেও নিস্পেষিত হতো, বৃটিশদের হাতেও নিগৃহীত হতো। তবে পলাশীর পটপরিবর্তন পরবর্তী ব্রিটিশ আমলে বাংলার জনজীবনে যে সর্বগ্রাসী, সর্বনাশী বিপর্যয় নেমেছিলো, তার বর্ণনা হৃদয়ে যুগ যুগান্তরেও অনুরণন ঘটাবে।

বইটা পড়ার সময় খোয়াবে ধরে। বইটা প্রায় শেষ হলে এলেও খোয়াব কাটে না, ফ্ল্যাপের কভারে খোয়াব শিশিরবিন্দু হয়ে টলোমলো করে।

Philosophy and travelogue thrown in a delectable mixture, in conversational prose too. A happy break from the grim atmosphere of "A Game of Thrones".

‘I’m so tired of people who wouldn’t visit a doctor who used a stethoscope instead of an MRI demanding that farmers like me use 1930s technology to raise food,’ writes the Missouri farmer Blake Hurst, on protesters against Genetically Modified crops

Most primates raised in captivity who have never seen a snake will make it unmistakably clear that they loathe snakes the moment they see one, and it is probable that the traditional human dislike of snakes has a biological source that explains the biblical source, rather than the other way around.

“We don't piss in your ashtrays, So please don't throw cigarettes in our urinals.”

"You know, I think the main purpose of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps is to get poor Americans into clean, pressed, unpatched clothes, so rich Americans can stand to look at them"

“Klepp sensed a wolfish hunger lurking behind each of the world's sorrows”

"Data, data everywhere, but not a thought to think."

It is odd, when you think about it, that we accuse racists of “discrimination.” This is the very thing of which they are by definition incapable: They think all members of certain groups are the same.

Otto Katz once said to Arthur Koestler, “We all have inferiority complexes of various sizes, but yours isn't a complex—it's a cathedral.” Koestler liked this remark so much that he included it in his autobiography, thus attaining the status of one who could actually brag about his inferiority complex as if size mattered.

I remembered what my old friend the late Edward Said had told me: “You should
go to Tunisia, Christopher. It’s the gentlest country in Africa. Even the Islamists are highly civilized!”

Bernard-Henri Lévy once even produced a damning time line showing that every Pakistani “capture” of a wanted jihadist had occurred the week immediately preceding a vote in Congress on subventions to the government in Islamabad.

Hitchens'glib view of post-invasion Afghanistan sickens me. I'm supposed to accept that the US is this ever-merciful saviour that just swooped in on Taliban Afghanistan and gifted them democracy. Curious mind wants to know- who was it that armed and financed the Taliban in the first place? I sure hope not the CIA!

The empire on which the sun never set was also the empire on which the gore never dried.