I Am Asif

I'm just 23, so I haven't seen the murders by the Pakistani forces back in '71. And I was glad I hadn't been born then. But I am living and well here in 2009, and I had to be witness to a brutality the likes of which our country, and the whole world has never seen. By the time I'm writing this post, the bodies of 64 military personnel have been discovered who were killed by the latest massacre at the BDR headquarters in Dhaka, and 71 are still missing, who are most likely to have borne the same fate. The so-called 'jawaans' of the BDR killed all these assets of our country, stashed their bodies in ditches and manholes, like those of some mere street animals. I'm no political analyst, but it is pretty sure that these ruthless murders weren't committed just to claim some demand of the BDR men. And it is also evident that all this had been pre-planned by the murderers. Looking at the images of the disfigured bodies of these elite military personnel b...

The national election that took place yesterday, was the most anticipated event in the history of Bangladesh in many years. I'm not a columnist or a political analyst so I'm not going to write anything about it. If you're a Bangladeshi, you already know too much. But what I'm writing about here is my first voting experience. Several months back the work started to create the country's first national ID cards and the national voter list. From that point on right to the moment I casted my vote yesterday, the whole process seemed so systematic that it was almost unbelievable to many that it was happening in Bangladesh. Particularly yesterday, from going to the vote center and casting my vote, it didn't take me any more than 10 minutes, amazing huh? I went there, the whole center, which was a local school, was divided into several booths and lines so that the process gets faster. I only had to stand in my line for a couple of minutes or so. Then when I was called in...