November 14, 2007

Video Update: Imran Khan Arrested Thanks to Jamaat (yes, Jamaat)!

Video update showing Imran's arrest:



Imran Khan arrested. Way to go Jamaat-e-Islami! I'm deciding if they're officially with Musharraf or if they decided that punishing Imran for marrying (and divorcing) a white woman took precedence over the fight against dictatorship?

Best online reaction to this news (in bangla).

Though as a Bangladeshi I cannot approve of Khan's appropriation of our national symbol, I'll make an exception in these dire circumstances: fight like a cornered tiger boy!

9 comments:

Fugstar said...

Bluddy bumbandits on that campus.

He wasnt exactly going to 'appropriate' the jackfruit now was he?

DhakaShohor said...

If he had, people such as yourself would have found some special pan-Islamic flavour in jack-fruit by now; the aroma of the jackfruit would have some sort of virile/sacred meaning attached to it and no one would refer to it as a "stench"; and some cartoonist would have been jailed for insulting the kathal.:)

Keno? Apnar kathal pochondo na?

Anonymous said...

Tiger is a common thing, i dont think of desh when the image of tiger flashes before my eyes... i think of the tamil tigers, imran khans captaincy and london zoo! not to mention sher khan jungle book (no the cartoon).

Jackfruit has its place in the universe, but the very idea of a national fruit is pretty queer in of itself. The choice of national symbols in desh is naff. what happened to the yellow in the flag?

khathals are quite comical, cute and endearing, they hang like testicles from trees. There are a bunch of them outside the PMs office in dhaka, i remember seeing guards/soldiers picking them off and ticking some non warrior cult boxes in my head.

In the event of being stuck with such a fruit as a national symbol, i would try to extract some tasteful metaphors if the time required it from me.

I think said metaphor would be 'the spirit of the ganj'. i would design it so that it would never be subjected to national symbolic witch hunts.

I would take it really far and derive architectural forms from the internal geometry. I would institute compulsary, geometry topology and horticulture in higher education by invoking the spirit of the kathal. I would possibly even extend the kathal fetish to see if it contained lessons for neighbour hood planning. I would channel state funds into interdisciplinary kathal research. in Kathal nagar any proposal with the word kathal would be fast tracked.

I would consolidate pan islamic solidarity through the kathal, as the family of strange fruits has relatives in south east asia.

I would only allow kathals to be exported after each fruit had been sung to by a band of out of tune school kids. Singing praises to the kathal would thus be a daily national ritual in all schools throughout the land.

DhakaShohor said...

Damn, and all I would have done is simply make torkari out of the kathal seeds!

As for the resemblance between kathals and testicles... surely you're not talking of HUMAN testicles? :O Because if you are, I can think of at least a dozen other fruits that come to mind before kathals!

Anonymous said...

What about revising the national anthem to 'fagune tor kathaler bone ghrane'?

Anonymous said...

...and thus the robbi babu contingent was one over by the spirit of the kathal.

Bit by bit the kathal fethish took hold of the nation. Leaders would go to international forums and spend half of their time talking about the kathal. The kathal fragrance started reaching the upper atmosphere is such large amounts that it came to mitigate climate change.

'The Peoples Committee for the Protection of Kathal and Its Biosoveriegnty, Mine Mine Mine' set itself up to represent the interests of the deshi consumer.

Kathal remnants were fetching large amounts in the beauty parlours of capital, where certain types of ladies would fight oer eachother for kathal face packs to make them less ugly.

The world bank coopted the kathal as an ingenious indigenous knowledge project and set about finding evil ways of making some money out of it. One way was through 'the participatory approach ' (skiming of 20% of each kathal + large consultant participant fees + large consultant participant medical bills).

meanwhile in a cartoonists studio a committee with no imagination was adding the final touches to its blatant fruit substitutionary rendition of 'The Gummi Bears.

The city males found their lost virility in the kathal seed extract. It could cure baldness and make them do wonderful things.
QED

name your fruits.

DhakaShohor said...

(apologies to regular readers for the less-than-savoury conversation)

boroi, olives, aamloki, peyara, oranges and apples.

Kathals are way down the list, not least because of their texture.

in the meantime, may I remind other readers that while the excesses that you describe in the name of nationalism are mostly speculative, hinging on the possibility that kathals get some special meaning; a real life excess in the name of religion is still taking place in Bangladesh. An excess I described above and shall repeat: a 23-year old is JAILED for ALLEGEDLY insulting the Prophet.

In the meantime, you haven't told me whether you like kathals or not. Personally, not a huge fan of the fruit, but once you make some shaag and chingri with it..... ahhh, a piece of heaven in one's mouth! Too bad I can neither find nor cook kathal seeds here :(.

Anonymous said...

I'll eat them if someones gone to the trouble of procuring them for me and putting them in front of me. otherwise its mood dependant.

I appreciate their comedy value. one fruit i will go out of my way for in desh, climb a tree, head into a bustling market in search of is the hidden queen of the ganj, the kamranga. Thankfully nobody else really likes them so they are cheap. I for one see immense potential in kamranga products.

somebody somewhere needs to write a book on the geometry of fruits in bangladesh.

perhaps we have incomensurable views on anatomy. it wouldnt be the first matter.

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