By rahnuma ahmed
The last two months plus flashed by as I burned the midnight oil, working on three manuscripts, intended for Boi Mela 2012. While it is true that I’ve accomplished a lot, there are still chunks left that need to be done, which means they will not make it to the book fair. But hey, no regrets. Viewing the book fair as a goal post helped spur my work, but the Mela is not a train one needs to catch, not at the cost of the quality of the product. Printing mistakes, atrocious ones in the case of Oitijjo’s publication of Rabindranath’s works this year, have created a heightened sense of awareness about the quality of the ?books published. I watched Shamsuzzaman Khan, director-general of Bangla Academy, and Sanjida Khatun, torch-bearer of Tagore, caution publishers on TV news to not reduce the national book fair into a mindless race of touching the February goal post.
No regrets about not making it to the book fair, true, but I missed writing my columns. Sorely. Out of touch with the world, one where western leaders and their Gulf monarchical collaborators attempt to implement their plans of a ‘New Middle-East’ map, instead of the older, ‘Greater Middle East’? (The Unfolding Crisis in Pakistan-III. “New Imperial Cartographies. Destroying and Re-creating National Boundaries,” New Age, May 18, 2009).
The term was introduced by the US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in a Tel Aviv press conference in July 2006, ?[w]hat we?re seeing here [in regards to the destruction of Lebanon and the Israeli attacks on Lebanon], in a sense, is the growing?the ?birth pangs??of a ?New Middle East? and whatever we do we [meaning the United States] have to be certain that we?re pushing forward to the New Middle East [and] not going back to the old one.” (full citation, with the additions in square brackets, from Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a ?New Middle East?, Global Research, November 18, 2006).
“Creative destruction”, in the words of neo-conservative philosopher and Bush adviser Michael Ledeen, is “an awesome revolutionary force.” And, as Nazemroaya elaborates, it “generates conditions of violence and warfare throughout the region” — extending from “Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria to Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Iran, and the borders of NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan,” and, might I add, drone-attacked Pakistan — so that the United States, Britain and Israel can redraw the map of the Middle East, to further their “geo-strategic needs and objectives.”
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