Category Archives: Bangladesh

It’s Bangladesh after Sri Lanka: Protests erupt over 52% fuel price hike: Following the tragic situation in Sri Lanka, thousands of demonstrators flocked to the streets in many Bangladeshi cities when the Sheikh Hasina administration raised fuel prices to their highest level since the neighbouring nation’s independence by about 52%. Global supply shocks due to … Continue reading The flip side of globalization

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The Barua Buddhists of Bengal are often said to be indigenous and continuous practitioners of the Buddhist religion among ethnic Bengalis. That is, they descend from the Buddhist communities of Bengali that flourished during the Pala period, and went into decline during the Muslim period, to disappear on the whole. The claim here is to …

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This article seems to use Bangladesh as a prop to beat Pakistan’s governing class over the head, Beg, borrow, repeat: Pakistan’s IMF addiction continues even as its finance minister leaves. It’s a pretty strange thing in 2019. In the 20th-century Bangladesh was known for the early 1970s famine, as well as periodic catastrophic floods. A …

Continue reading “From basket-case to garment superpower”

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Bangladeshis Must Choose ‘Lesser of Two Evils’ in Election: Per capita income has increased by nearly 150 percent, while the share of the population living in extreme poverty has shrunk to about 9 percent from 19 percent, according to the World Bank. Electricity generation has also increased drastically under Mrs. Hasina’s rule, helping to boost … Continue reading “Bangladesh elections”

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Many people are talking about the late Alex Tizon’s article in The Atlantic, My Family’s Slave. Much of the piece was as disturbing for me as it was for most Americans. But some of it was shockingly familiar. I’ll get to that. First, Tizon died unexpectedly before the article was published. We won’t be able to […]

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Bangladesh bloggers: Clear pattern to killings: Since then, the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina appears to have reached an accommodation with Hefajat. The Islamist group has confined itself to the madrassa premises and the government has put five bloggers in jail for allegedly hurting the religious feelings of Muslims. The government now appears to […]

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Recently I was tipped off to the appearance of a new paper, Genome-Wide Association Study Identifies Chromosome 10q24.32 Variants Associated with Arsenic Metabolism and Toxicity Phenotypes in Bangladesh. This is the section which caught my eye: “Using data on urinary arsenic metabolite concentrations and approximately 300,000 genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for 1,313 arsenic-exposed Bangladeshi […]

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The New York Times has a puff piece on Sheikh Hasina up. In general I favor the Awami League despite its socialist origins because the party is less bigoted against religious minorities and would likely wink less at de facto ethnic cleansing (though of course the typical Awami League Muslim is still rather prejudiced against […]

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I always consider Foreign Policy to be a shallower version of Foreign Affairs, but there are so many weird issues with this piece, Fortress India – Why is Delhi building a new Berlin Wall to keep out its Bangladeshi neighbors? First, the subhead. The uniqueness of the Berlin Wall is that it wasn’t meant to […]

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mtDNA haplogroup G1a2
The pith: In this post I examine the most recent results from 23andMe for my family in the context of familial and regional (Bengal) history. I also use these results to offer up a framework for the ethnognesis of the eastern Ben…

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Razib Khan