A Bad Week for Basket Cases (and Women!)

What Bangladesh usually makes the news for.

Its been a bad week for Bangladesh.  Even those in the furthest reaches of Antarctica (read: LA) have heard the news of the petty squabble between ‘the lady of the house” (I’ve taken out any names to assuage my sister’s fears about a raid on our house in the middle of the night by the RAB) and Professor Yunus, Managing Director (not anymore!) of the Grameen Bank, and pioneer of the theory of microcredit that now seems to pervade the “NGO” universe.

"Please pay back your loans. Or else where am I gonna find the $100 mill I supposedly owe the Norwegian government?"

 

Definition of microcredit: lending miniscule amounts of money (like 50 bucks) to the poorest of the poor at exorbitant interest rates, and using the pressure of existing community and social structures such as family and peer groups to ensure repayment.
Also, lending mostly to women, coz they dumb.  I mean responsible, responsible.

Yay International Women’s Day.  Don’t lynch me.

That’s the cynic or critic’s view of the Grameen Bank and microcredit, but according to Yunus and many others, microcredit has been successful in reducing poverty in Bangladesh.

I’m not gonna get into the details of what happened between “the lady” and Yunus, ‘coz there are a million articles out there about the issue.  Lets just stick to criticizing the government and getting thrown in jail.

Basically, “the lady’s” got a huge daddy complex, and therefore, the country’s gotta deal with it as well.  Dr. Yunus didn’t love her daddy enough, and she’s mad that she didn’t get the Nobel Prize for naming the airport after her daddy, so its time for him to go.  She was given a window of opportunity when a “mockumentary” produced by some Norwegians who were surreptitiously paid off by GrameenPhone (the largest telecommunications company in Bangladesh, started by Yunus, but taken over by evil Norwegians who want him to stop meddling in their neocolonial exploitation of the brown folk) came out late last year blasting Yunus for stealing money from the Norwegian government who collected that money as taxes from Telenor after they stole it from the brown folk.  Its all very convoluted.

So with one swift stroke, the old lady singlehandedly managed to ruin the reputation of the country internationally for the next 3 years until her government gets voted out of power. What reputation, you may ask?  A reputation as an LDC that’s on the right (kinda) track towards economic prosperity (whatever that means for an LDC) and human rights (cept for the indigenous tribal peeps — kill em all!).  We’re all about the right policy here.  Too bad we fail in implementation, usually due to greed or corruption.  Still, there is [was] hope.

Now we once again look like  a bunch of idiots led by an uneducated, incompetent housewife.  And a petty one, at that.  All this right before International Women’s Day!

And now, the main issue for me is, who the hell am I gonna vote for in the next election?  In the past, I was always a clear-cut Awami Leaguer, but now I feel like I’m voting for the 2012 presidential election in the other country for which I hold a passport — the US!  I really don’t know who to vote for in either election.  I may even abstain.

Unfortunately for this government, they haven’t managed to keep to any of the promises they made during their campaign.  Food prices?  Inflating.  Traffic?  Its gonna be a looooooong time before it stops getting worse, let alone gets any better.  Electricity?  The power’s gone out three times while I’ve been writing this article.  The Stock Market?   Trending ↓

I heard there’s this party called Jamaat… I wonder what they’re all about.  At least they got a man at the helm.

Happy International Women’s Day!

And now the desh in Sports…

So there’s this sport called cricket which is like baseball but with less running and more tea.  When it comes to the subcontinent, its pretty much the only game that we can compete in internationally, since it involves wimps and drinking tea.  The so-called “World Cup” (all of 14 countries) is being co-hosted by India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, and is pretty much the most exciting thing that has happened in both Bangladesh and cricket in the last 20 years, since people in South Asia actually give a shit about cricket (unlike people anywhere else, pretty much — even in England where cricket was born — but they got the Premiere League, after all).

I just went to two games in the last two weeks in which the Bangladesh team played.  The first of these was a harrowing win against Ireland.  We were losing for most of the game, and then managed, through some miracle, to pull it off at the end.  Of course back then I hadn’t seen the second game, and so attributed the win to Bangladesh’s stingy skillful defense of their meagre total.

What cricket looks like (SNOOOORE!)

Then I went to the second game.  Lets forget Bangladesh’s lowest run (point) total in the World Cup so far (58 in about 18 overs — in baseball, that’s like scoring 0.5 runs in 3 innings and calling it a game) and pathetic loss to West Indies.  On the way back home to wash away our sorrows with copious amounts of whiskey and wine, we passed by a large crowd gathered outside the stadium.  One of us remarked, “Look, they’re waiting to stone the team bus!”  Little did we know that not only were they doing just that, but that they were too stupid to realize which team bus they were stoning, and ended up stoning the West Indian bus, causing tons of embarrassment and bad press, as well as causing a near international incident when the world realized how bad Chris Gayle’s (West Indian star player) twitter grammar was, and probably ensuring that Bangladesh never has any part in hosting any more global sporting events.

So yeah… a bad week for Bangladesh.  And women leaders.

All is not lost, however, as we still got this guy.  Maybe he can shame the rest of us into being decent human beings.

And I’d just like to let a certain someone know that they’re not showing baseball at the American Club yet — its Spring Training, dumbass!

Filed under: Economy, Politics, Sports, NGOs