Tips: 1

10 Tips for Better Battles...

According to Gottman's research, the way a couple fights is one of the most accurate indicators of whether they'll stay together. Couples who are good at de-escalating arguments with humor and compliments are in good shape. Those who shut each other out or jab each other with sarcasm and insults are headed for trouble. Fortunately, anyone can learn the tools of relationship-friendly fights. Below, our experts weigh in with their advice on how to argue happily ever after:

Surrender the need to be right. We fight because we believe that we're right, and we want the other person to understand that. But Love suggests you ask yourself one important question: Would you rather be right or happy? "Focus on a solution that would be right for everyone, rather than worry about who's right and who's wrong," says Love.

Stay on topic. If you're fighting about the fact that he drank too much at your sister's wedding, then stick to that grievance. This is not a good time to throw in that he was late picking you up last week and never puts his empty bottles in the recycling bin. "Bringing up all the past hurts and done-wrongs will put your partner on the defensive. Sticking to your point will keep your mate from getting confused, impatient, and even angrier," says Lew Moore, PhD, chair of the marriage and family therapy program at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas.

Focus on your partner's point, rather than yours. Your husband will be more likely to hear your perspective if you let him know that you're genuinely listening to his. So instead of just trying to ram your point of view across, spend at least as much time listening to his. "Ask him questions like, 'Could you say more about that'? Then you're not in the same shoot-and-reload position," says Love.

Give the other person an out, when necessary. Many women get frustrated when their man changes the subject or makes a joke during a heated argument. But Gottman and his team discovered that this was not necessarily a bad thing, as it can be an effective way to break the tension and give each partner some breathing space. By allowing him to change the subject and stop talking about the problem, you're giving him an out -- and that can be helpful if emotions are running high or he is starting to feel defensive or trapped. You can also do this by calling a "time out" when you feel things are getting out of hand, resolving to finish the discussion when each party has cooled off. Of course, you must resume the conversation at a later date.

Pick your battles. Sometimes you just have to accept that he'll always be 15 minutes late and will never learn to see the black stuff that grows between the bathroom tiles. If you're always picking a fight about little things, it will be hard to get him to listen to the big things. "Some people argue for the sake of arguing," says Love. "So you have to ask yourself, 'Is this really important to the relationship? Do I really want to spend my time and energy bickering about this stuff?'"

Avoid personal attacks. So you're mad at your husband for leaving you stranded at his office barbecue. Fine, you have a right. But telling him what an inconsiderate jerk he is probably won't make him correct his behavior for the next office function. Instead, explain how it made you feel when he left you stranded for 45 minutes with that tedious dweeb from HR.

Offer positive feedback. Gottman's research found that happy couples make at least five positive statements or actions for every negative one. Positive feedback means anything from saying, "Good point. I hadn't thought about it that way" to a smile or nod. Love agrees. "Have the maturity and ego-strength to validate your partner's position when he has a good point. Disarming your partner keeps things from escalating," she says.

Watch your body language. Head-shaking, eye rolls, clenched jaws, and derisive snorts can be just as damaging as verbal insults. "Pay attention to how your words are landing," says Tina B. Tessina, PhD, a psychotherapist and author of It Ends with You: Grow Up and Out of Dysfunction (New Page Books, 2003). If your partner looks hurt or has closed body posture -- folded arms, crossed legs, sagging shoulders -- you might be broadcasting more hostility than you think.

Pick the right time and place. If you've had a brutal day at the office, if your precious children have been perfect monsters, or if the outdoor temperature is above 95 degrees, then try to avoid a major conflict with your spouse. "Resist the temptation to try to resolve problems during particular vulnerable times. It's much more effective to say, 'I want to work this out, but I'm not at my best right now. Let's set a time for tomorrow,'" says Daphne Stevens, PhD, a marriage and family therapist based in Macon, Georgia.

Take the high road. Okay, say you've done all this stuff and your partner continues to criticize or stonewall. That's frustrating. It might suggest that you might consider couples counseling, but sinking to his level won't help the situation. "Treat the other person with respect even if you're not getting it in return," says Laura Giles, MSW, who has a private counseling practice in Norfolk, Virginia. After all, when you both start behaving with bitterness and derision, nobody wins.

Bangladesh: Global Competitiveness Report (GCR) 2005-06

Bangladesh has ranked 110th in the Global Competitiveness Report (GCR) 2005-06 covering 117 countries, eight notches down from last year's ranking.

India and Pakistan have improved their positions in the ranking to 50th and 83rd this year from last year's 55th and 91st. Bangladesh ranked 102nd among 104 countries in the GCR 2004-05.

The country's ranking would change marginally to 101st this year from last year's 102nd if the GCR would cover the same countries. This shows many new entrants to the survey are better placed than Bangladesh.

Releasing the GCR simultaneously with other countries, Dr Debapriya Bhattacharya, executive director of the Centre for Policy Dialogue, told newsmen at the CPD office in Dhaka the countries that are behind Bangladesh are facing conflicts or some other problems and volatility.

"Overall picture is deteriorating in Bangladesh compared to the global situation. Corruption and governance still remain major problems here," he mentioned. "There is no change in perception. We can change the perception by changing the reality."

The country is experiencing a deteriorating trend in investment and the business environment index, he said. The government is suffering from indecision, and policy instability is a cause for increasing concern about business environment.

Bangladesh ranked the lowest among 117 countries this year both in the corruption sub-index and the public institution index.

The Growth Competitiveness Index (GCI) of 2005 and 2004 shows change in the country credit rating in Bangladesh, which was negative five percent, had been the worst.

The CPD in collaboration with the World Economic Forum has been assessing the business competitiveness environment in Bangladesh since 2001. The GCR deals with two broad indicators the GCI and Business Competitiveness Index (BCI). This year's survey covered 93 companies in Bangladesh, which are contributing most to the national economy, Debapriya said.

According to the survey, the graft situation has further deteriorated. Most of the respondents cited corruption as the most important determining factor affecting the business environment. The overall composition of public spending is wasteful and the situation remains unchanged, they pointed out.

Public trust in the financial honesty of politicians is still very low but slightly improved in 2005. In terms of illegal payments to influence government policies, laws, regulations, and diversion of public funds to companies, the situation deteriorated, it mentioned.

Apart from corruption, four other top determining factors mentioned in the study are inefficient bureaucracy, inadequate infrastructure, policy instability and crime and theft.

About freedom of press, the study said ability to publish or broadcast news without fear of censorship or retaliation has slid to good from better and the judicial system is heavily influenced by political interference.

Debapriya mentioned that these are not the CPD's views. Rather, what the entrepreneurs are thinking has been reflected in the survey "It does not mean that Bangladesh did not improve in any area. We are doing good but not enough," he added.

Low cost of labor and natural resources still continue to be major competing factors for Bangladesh, the CPD executive director said. Investment, production and export are good but it is not better than last year's. Strengthening corporate governance has become essential.

The survey was designed to cover relatively large companies with total assets of at least Tk 10 crore. These include 46 manufacturing companies, 13 financial institutions, 7 Real estate and construction firms, 8 ICT enterprises, 7 transport and engineering firms and 12 others.

Literature: Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. He grew up in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), Sri Lanka, Iran and India. After graduating from the University of Delhi, he went to Oxford to study Social Anthropology and received a Master of Philosophy and a Ph. D in 1982. In 1980, he went to Egypt to do field work in the fellaheen village of Lataifa. The work he did there resulted in In an Antique Land (IAAL 1993). Ghosh has been a journalist and published his first novel, The Circle of Reason in 1986, and his second, The Shadow Lines, in 1988. Since then, he has published IAAL, The Calcutta Chromosome, and The Glass Palace, done fieldwork in Cambodia, lived in Delhi and written for a number of publications. He currently lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.

Books by Ghosh:

> The Circle of Reason. New York: Viking, 1986. 423 pp.
Ghosh's first novel opens with the arrival of a child "Alu" ("potato"-- for the shape of his head) in a small village and is divided into three sections: "Satwa: Reason," "Rajas: Passion," and "Tamas: Death."

> The Shadow Lines. New York: Penguin, 1990. (First published in England by Bloomsbury Press, 1988) 246 pp.
His second novel focuses on the narrator's family in Calcutta and Dhaka and their connection with an English family in London.

> In an Antique Land. New York: Vintage, 1994. (First published in England by Granta Books, 1992) 393 pp.
The cover proclaims IAAL "History in the guise of a traveller's tale," and the multi-generic book moves back and forth between Ghosh's experience living in small villages and towns in the Nile Delta and his reconstruction of a Jewish trader and his slave's lives in the eleventh century from documents from the Cairo Geniza.

> The Calcutta Chromosome (Picador, 1996)
This novel has been described as "a kind of mystery thriller" (India Today). It brings together three searches: the first is that of an Egyptian clerk, Antar, working alone in a New York apartment in the early years of the twenty-first century to trace the adventures of L. Murugan, who disappeared in Calcutta in 1995; the second pertains to Murugan's obsession with the missing links in the history of malaria research; the third search is that of Urmila Roy, a journalist in Calcutta in 1995 who is researching the works of Phulboni, a writer who produced a strange cycle of "Lakhan stories" that he wrote in the 1930s but suppressed thereafter.

> The Glass Palace (Random, 2000)
In a review in The New York Times, Pankaj Mishra describes Ghosh as one of few postcolonial writers "to have expressed in his work a developing awareness of the aspirations, defeats and disappointments of colonized peoples as they figure out their place in the world." The novel is set primarily in Burma and India and catalogs the evolving history of those regions before and during the fraught years of the second world war and India's independence struggle.

Literature: Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy (born November 24, 1961) is an Indian novelist and peace activist. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel The God of Small Things.

Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother and a Bengali Hindu father, a tea planter by profession. She spent her childhood in Aymanam, in Kerala, schooling in Corpus Christi. She left Kerala for Delhi at age 16, and embarked on a bohemian lifestyle, staying in a small hut with a tin roof within the walls of Delhi's Feroz shah Kotla and making a living selling empty bottles. She then proceeded to study architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture, where she met her first husband, the architect Gerard Da Cunha.

Arundhati met her second husband, Pradeep Kishen, a film-maker, in 1984, under whose influence she moved into films. She acted in the role of a village girl in the award-winning movie Massey Sahib, and wrote the screenplays for In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones and Electric Moon. She also wrote the screenplay for The 'Banyan Tree', a television serial.

Roy began writing The God of Small Things in 1992 and finished it in 1996. She received half-a-million pounds in advances, and rights to the book were sold in 21 countries. The book is semi-autobiographical and a major part captures her childhood experiences in Aymanam. Contrary to some assumptions, Roy is not a twin. This misinformation arose from the fact that the character of Rahel is based on herself. We see this in the physical description of the character in her adulthood and also by some of this character's interactions with her mother, Ammu.

In response to India's testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran, Rajasthan, Roy wrote The End of Imagination, a critique of the Indian government's nuclear policies. It was published in her collection The Cost of Living, in which she also crusaded against India's massive hydroelectric dam projects in the central and western states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. She has since devoted herself solely to non-fiction and politics, publishing two more collections of essays as well as working for social causes.

In 2002, Roy was convicted of contempt of court by the Supreme Court in New Delhi for accusing the court of attempting to silence protests against the Narmada Dam Project, but she received only a symbolic sentence of one day in prison.

Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May, 2004, for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence.

In early 2005, New Republic commentator Tom Frank sparked controversy with the comment, "Maybe sometimes you just want to be on the side of whoever is more likely to take a bunker buster to Arundhati Roy."

Literature: Monica Ali

Monica Ali

Monica Ali is the daughter of English and Bangladeshi parents. She came to England aged three years, her first home being Bolton in Greater Manchester, and later studied at Oxford University. Her first novel, Brick Lane (2003), is an epic saga about a Bangladeshi family living in the UK, and explores the British immigrant experience. It has been shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Monica Ali lives in London and was named in 2003 by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British Novelists'.

Prizes and awards:

2003 British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award (shortlist), Brick Lane
2003 British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year, Brick Lane
2003 Guardian First Book Award (shortlist), Brick Lane
2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist), Brick Lane
2003 WH Smith People's Choice Award, Brick Lane

Literature: Vikram Seth

Vikram Seth

A small, wiry soap opera enthusiast with well-defined features and a ready smile, Vikram Seth was born in Calcutta in 1952 (also the home of Indian literary giant Rabindranath Tagore). Throughout Seth's childhood, his father Prem Seth was a shoe company executive and his mother Laila Seth served as a judge (Bemrose). Vikram Seth is the oldest of three--his brother conducts Buddhist meditational tours and his youngest sister serves as an Austrian diplomat (Robinson, Rachlin).

After completing his primary education, Seth left India to study at Oxford University, England, earning a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics (a PPE degree). He further enrolled at Stanford University, intending to earn a PhD in Economics, but never completed his study. While at Stanford, Seth was also a also a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing from 1977-1978. During a period from 1980-1982, he studied classical Chinese poetry and different languages at Nanjing University, China. Seth mentions that he "never had any passion for economics, not what I felt for writing poetry" (Robinson). But Seth does comment upon his failure to complete a PhD: "I feel a bit of regret that I didn't finish my Ph.D. I'm interested in it, but it's not a passion, the way writing is" (Rachlin).

Vikram Seth has published eight notable works - six collections of poetry and two novels - with a ninth novel soon to come. During the period before and after Seth published his first novel, he contributed poetic works for more than a decade. Seth's books of poetry include Mappings (1980), From Heaven Lake (1983), which discusses a hitchhiking trip through Nepal into India that Seth took while studying in China, The Humble Administrator's Garden (1985), All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990), Beastly Tales (1991), and Three Chinese Poets (1992). These works broach a variety of subjects indicative of Seth's education and experiences, evidenced in a passage from All You Who Sleep Tonight entitled "Sit" (Seth, 20):

Sit, drink your coffee here; your work can wait awhile. You're twenty-six, and still have some life ahead. No need for wit; just talk vacuities, and I'll Reciprocate in kind, or laugh at you instead.
The world is too opaque, distressing and profound. This twenty minutes' rendezvous will make my day: To sit here in the sun, with grackles all around, Staring with beady eyes, and you two feet away.

In 1986, Vikram Seth wrote The Golden Gate, his first novel, called "Byronesque" by some critics (Perry). The Golden Gate, which is a novel composed entirely of rhyming tentrameter sonnets--690 of them to be precise--is a satirical romance describing the stories of young professionals in San Francisco throughout their quests and questions to find, then deal with, love in their own lives as well as each others'. After this initial work, Seth slowly produced A Suitable Boy, the 1,349 page colossus whose publication in 1993 propelled Seth into the public spotlight.

In addition to Vikram Seth's literary and poetic achievements, he was commissioned by the English National Opera to write a libretto based on the Greek legend of Arion and the Dolphin. The opera was performed for the first time in June 1994. Orion Children's Books subsequently published a picture book based on the opera in which Vikram Seth's words are illustrated by the internationally acclaimed artist Jane Ray. The book has since been made into a twenty-five minute animated special entitled "Arion and the Dolphin" which has shown in Australia, Canada, Iceland, Malta, New Zealand, and throughout the United Kingdom.

Poems:

> Mappings (1980)
> The Humble Administrator's Garden (1985)
> All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990),
> Beastly Tales (1991)
> Three Chinese Poets (1992)

Novels:

> The Golden Gate - A Novel in Verse, 1986
> A Suitable Boy, 1993
> An Equal Music, 1999
> Two Lives, 2005

Literature: Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri

In 1967, Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London to Bengali parents.As a child, Lahiri moved with her family to Rhode Island where Jhumpa spent her adolescence. Lahiri went on to attend Barnard College, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English and later attending Boston University. It was here Lahiri attained Master's Degrees in English, Creative Writing, and Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts as well as a Ph D in Renaissance Studies. Lahiri also worked for a short time teaching creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Lahiri has traveled extensively to India and has experienced the effects of colonialism there as well as experienced the issues of the diaspora as it exists. She feels strong ties to her parents' homeland as well as the United States and England. Growing up with ties to all three countries created in Lahiri a sense of homelessness and an inability to feel accepted. Lahiri explains this as an inheritance of her parents' ties to India, "It's hard to have parents who consider another place "home"-even after living abroad for 30 years, India is home for them. We were always looking back so I never felt fully at home here. There's nobody in this whole country that we're related to. India was different-our extended family offered real connections." Yet her familial ties to India were not enough to make India "home" for Lahiri, "I didn't grow up there, I wasn't a part of things. We visited often but we didn't have a home. We were clutching at a world that was never fully with us" (Interview with Vibhuti Patel in Newsweek International, 9-20-99).

Lahiri, the daughter of a librarian and school teacher, has always been inclined to creative writing. Lahiri remembers a need to write as early as ten years old and she has always used writing as an outlet for her emotions, "When I learned to read, I felt the need to copy. I started writing ten page 'novels' during recess with my friends' writing allowed me to observe and make sense of things without having to participate. I didn't belong. I looked different and felt like an outsider" (Interview with Vibhuti Patel in Newsweek International, 9-20-99).

At a press conference in Calcutta in January of 2001, Lahiri described this absence of belonging, "No country is my motherland. I always find myself in exile in whichever country I travel to, that's why I was tempted to write something about those living their lives in exile". This idea of exile runs consistently throughout Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize winning book Interpreter of Maladies.

The book brings to light many of the issues with identity faced by the Diaspora community. The book contains the stories of first and second generation Indian immigrants, as well as a few stories involving ideas of otherness among communities in India. The stories revolve around the difficulties of relationships, communication and a loss of identity for those in diaspora. No matter where the story takes place, the characters struggle with the same feelings of exile and the struggle between the two worlds by which they are torn. The stories deal with the always shifting lines between gender, sexuality, and social status within a diaspora. Whether the character be a homeless woman from India or an Indian male student in the United States, all the characters display the effects of displacement in a diaspora.

Lahiri has won many awards for Interpreter of Maladies. These awards and honors include The Pulitzer Prize in 2000, The Transatlantic Review Award from the Henfield Foundation, The Louisiana Review Award for Short Fiction, the O. Henry Award for Best American Short Stories, the PEN/Hemingway Award, The New Yorker Debut ofthe Year Award and The American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. Lahiri also received a nomination for the LA Times Book prize as well as the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. She has published three stories in The New Yorker, as well as published works in the Agni, Epoch, The Louisville Review, Harvard Review and the Story Quarterly. Lahiri is currently living in New York with her husband and son. Lahiri released her first novel in September of 2003. The novel is titled The Namesake and it follows the trials of a newlywed couple who immigrate to Cambridge, Massachusetts, from Calcutta.

Works:

> The Namesake (2003)
> India Holy Song (2000)
> Interpreter of Maladies (1999)
> "A Temporary Prayer: What Happens when the Lights go out." The New Yorker 20 April 1998
> "Sexy." The New Yorker 28 Dec 1998
> "The Third and Final Continent." The New Yorker 21 May 1999

Literature: Anita Desai

Anita Desai

Anita Desai was born in 1937, in Mussoorie, India; her father was Bengali and mother German. She was educated in Delhi where she received an AB in English Literature from the University of Delhi. Her published works include short stories, children's books, and eight novels. Two of the novels, Clear Light of Day (1980) and In Custody (1984), were short-listed for the Booker Prize. She received the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction for the novel, The Village by the Sea (1982), and the 1978 National Academy of Letters Award for Fire on the Mountain (1977).

Anita Desai is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London and she has been a member of the Advisory Board for English of the National Academy of Letters in Delhi and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has been Visiting Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge, in England, and has taught writing at Smith College and has been the Purington Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College in the United States. She is married and has four children.

Anita Desai recently joined the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies in MIT's first professorial appointment primarily in fiction writing in more than 20 years.

Published Works:

1965: Voices in the City
1971: Bye-Bye, Blackbird
1977: Fire on the Mountain
1978: Games at Twilight
1978: Where Shall we go this summer?
1979: The Peacock Garden
1980: Clear Light of Day
1982: The Village by the Sea
1983: Cry, the Peacock
1984: In Custody
1988: Baumgartner's Bombay
1995: Journey to Ithaca
1999: Fasting, Feasting
2000: Diamond Dust: Stories

Literature: Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee was born on July 27, 1940 to wealthy parents, Sudhir Lal and Bina Mukherjee in Calcutta, India. She learned how to read and write by the age of three. In 1947, she moved to Britain with her family at the age of eight and lived in Europe for about three and a half years. By the age of ten, Mukherjee knew that she wanted to become a writer, and had written numerous short stories.

After getting her B.A from the University of Calcutta in 1959 and her M.A. in English and Ancient Indian Culture from the University of Baroda in 1961, she came to the United States of America. Having been awarded a scholarship from the University of Iowa, earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing in 1963 and her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature in 1969. While studying at the University of Iowa, she met and married a Canadian student from Harvard, Clark Blaise, on September 19, 1963. The two writers met and, after a brief courtship, married within two weeks. Together, the two writers have produced two books along with their other independent works. Mukherjee's career a professor and her marriage to Blaise Clark has given her opportunities to teach all over the United States and Canada. Currently she is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Published Works:

• The Tiger's Daughter, Houghton, 1972.
• Wife, Houghton, 1975.
• Kautilya's Concept of Diplomacy: A New Interpretation, Minerva, 1976.
• Days and Nights in Calcutta (nonfiction with Blaise)), Doubleday: Garden City, New York, 1977.
• An Invisible Woman, McClelland & Stewart, 1981.
• Darkness, Penguin, 1985.
• The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy, (With Blaise) Viking, 1987.
• The Middleman and Other Stories, Grove, 1988.
• Jasmine, Grove, 1989.
• Political Culture and Leadership in India (nonfiction), South Asia, 1991.
• Regionalism in Indian Perspective (nonfiction), South Asia, 1992.
• The Holder of the World, Knopf: New York City, 1993.
• Leave It to Me, A.A. Knopf: New York City, 1997.

Bangladesh: My Thinking…

Being a Business Professional I think our growing generation has a great deal of responsibility on our head to create better opportunities for the future.

I believe in a Bangladesh, where we will not fight with each other over our cultural and religious identities but will separate both to claim both. A Bangladesh where we will not make everyone equal by law like the communists of 1970’s but will work to provide equal opportunities for each of the citizen so that they can claim their position on the base of merit and ability. A Bangladesh where our Bengali identity will prevail over the landscape to make a declaration of our flag flying high among the best of the nations ever roamed above the ground.

Millions of people died over one hope that their children will cherish a better life. Still, they are leaving us with a cloud of corruption in our society, a very weak economy and loads of burden regarding our national identity. This is our responsibility to provide better future and better opportunities for our children to come.

Certain people with certain views can differ of course. But the art of democracy teaches us to agree on one point that all of us do not agree on every point. That gives us our own sets of choice over our options. Make the right decision that is all we have to do.

Universities: European vs American...

European Universities

Europe created the modern university. Scholars were gathering in Paris and Bologna before America was on the map. Oxford and Cambridge invented the residential university: the idea of a community of scholars living together to pursue higher learning. Germany created the research university. A century ago European universities were a magnet for scholars and a model for academic administrators the world over.

European vs American

As Economist.com survey of higher education explains, since the Second World War Europe has progressively surrendered its lead in higher education to the United States. America boasts 17 of the world's top 20 universities, according to a widely used global ranking by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. American universities currently employ 70% of the world's Nobel prize-winners, 30% of the world's output of articles on science and engineering, and 44% of the most frequently cited articles. No wonder developing countries now look to America rather than Europe for a model for higher education.

Why have European universities declined so precipitously in recent decades? And what can be done to restore them to their former glory? The answer to the first question lies in the role of the state. American universities get their funding from a variety of different sources, not just government but also philanthropists, businesses and of course, the students themselves. European ones are largely state-funded. The constraints on state funding mean that European governments force universities to “process” more and more students without giving them the necessary cash—and respond to the universities' complaints by trying to micromanage them. Inevitably, quality has eroded. Yet, as the American model shows, people are prepared to pay for good higher education, because they know they will benefit from it: that's why America spends twice as much of its GDP on higher education as Europe does.

The answer to the second question is to set universities free from the state. Free universities to run their internal affairs: how can French universities, for example, compete for talent with their American rivals when professors are civil servants? And free them to charge fees for their services—including, most importantly, student fees.

Asian Universities

The standard European retort is that if people have to pay for higher education, it will become the monopoly of the rich. But spending on higher education in Europe is highly regressive (more middle-class students go to university than working-class ones). And higher education is hardly a monopoly of the rich in America: a third of undergraduates come from racial minorities, and about a quarter come from families with incomes below the poverty line. The government certainly has a responsibility to help students to borrow against their future incomes. But student fees offer the best chance of pumping more resources into higher education. They also offer the best chance of combining equity with excellence.

Europe still boasts some of the world's best universities, and there are some signs that policymakers have realized that their system is failing. Britain, the pacemaker in university reform in Europe, is raising fees. The Germans are trying to create a Teutonic Ivy League. European universities are aggressively wooing foreign students. Pan-European plans are encouraging student mobility and forcing the more eccentric European countries (notably Germany) to reform their degree structures. But the reforms have been too tentative.

America is not the only competition Europe faces in the knowledge economy. Emerging countries have cottoned on to the idea of working smarter as well as harder. Singapore is determined to turn itself into a “knowledge island”. India is sprucing up its institutes of technology. In the past decade China has doubled the size of its student population while pouring vast resources into elite universities. Forget about catching up with America; unless Europeans reform their universities, they will soon be left in the dust by Asia as well.

Satyajit Ray: a Bengali Filmmaker...

Satyajit Ray
A Bengali Filmmaker

Satyajit Ray (May 2, 1921 - April 23, 1992) was an Academy Award winning Bengali film director whose films are perhaps the greatest testament to Bengali and Indian cinema. He is mostly known for his Apu trilogy - the films Pather Panchali (Song of the Road), Aparajito (The Unconquered), and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu). - but has a large collection of works that are acclaimed among the world film industry, most notably by the likes of Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. He has been called one of the four greatest director/producers of cinema in the world, and Kurosawa famously said of Ray: "Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon."

Life

Satyajit Ray was born into a relatively wealthy and highly influential Brahmo family in Kolkata. His father Sukumar Ray was one of the leading Bengali writers, in the vein of Lewis Carrol and Edward Lear, and his grandfather Upendrakishore Ray (Ray Chowdhuri) was a renaissance man with many interests ranging from writing to typography. Likewise, Ray was well-educated, attending the Presidency College, Kolkata and also at the Vishwabharati (Santiniketan) established by Rabindranath Tagore. Thereafter, he spent many years as a layout artist in a publishing house (Signet Press)) and worked with a reputed advertising agency (D.J.Keemer). Inspired by the novel Pather Panchali by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, he decided to adapt it into a film and shoot it on location using friends as actors, putting up the initial funding himself.

Creative Career

In 1949, before he decided to make films, Ray met the great French director Jean Renoir who visited Calcutta to scout locations for his film The River (1950). Renoir encouraged Ray to make films and this was part of the motivation that led to the making of Pather Panchali.

Partway through filming he ran out of funds; the Government of West Bengal loaned him the rest, allowing him to finish the film. The film was successful both artistically and commercially, winning kudos at the 1955 Cannes film festival and heralded a new era in the Indian film industry. After a Cannes screening, Francois Truffaut, is reported to have said: “I don’t want to see a movie of peasants eating with their hands.”

Most of Ray's work (especially his early work including the Apu Trilogy) seems to have been influenced by the Italian Neorealist movement in Italian post-war cinema. In fact, the one film which moved Ray the most before he started scripting Pather Panchali was Italian Neorealist film-maker Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief, which he reportedly saw 55 times.

Ray's work tends to be both realistic and subdued; his early work is compassionate and touching; his later work, while more political, is also at times cynical, but still infused with his typical humour. Ray's first film outside of the Apu trilogy was the comic Paras Pathar/The Philosopher's Stone, in 1958. It was soon followed by Jalsaghar/The Music Room, which generated critical praise in the U.S. and Europe.

As the Apu trilogy was completed, it was followed by a creative period that won Ray continued acclaim at home and internationally - several of his most popular films (Charulata, Mahanagar/The Big City, Devi, and Teen Kanya/Three Daughters) were made at this time. In 1962, Ray directed Kanchenjungha, which was his first original screenplay and colour film. Kanchenjungha is notable as one of the few films to be shot in real time. Beginning with Kanchenjungha, Ray also took over responsibility for musical composition within his films.

Later Projects

Other notable works in Ray's career include Nayak (1965), Goopy Gayen Bagha Bayen/The Adventures Of Goopy And Bagha, a children's film from 1969 featuring Ray's own songs (and based on Sukumar Ray's stories), and 1970's Aranyer Dinratri/Days And Nights In The Forest. During the 1970s Ray completed the Calcutta trilogy: Seemabaddha/Company Limited, Pratidwani/The Adversary and Jana Aranya/The Middleman, three films which were conceived seperately, but whose thematic connections form a loose trilogy. Each generated further acclaim, with Jana Aranya winning additional awards.

In 1977, Ray completed Shatranj Ke Khiladi/The Chess Players, an Urdu/Hindustani movie about chess players of Lucknow. This film starred Sanjeev Kumar, Saeed Jaffrey, Amjad Khan, Shabana Azmi, Victor Bannerjee and Richard Attenborough. Apart from a later short film in Hindi, Sadgati, starring Om Puri and the late Smita Patil, this was his only feature film in a language other than Bengali. Both these films were based on original stories by Munshi Premchand, the giant of Hindi literature.

Literary Adaptations

Though most of the Bengali stories filmed are also written by him, he has also adapted a number of books by famous authors into films: Kapurush and Mahanagar (Premendra Mitra), Mahapurush and Paras Pathar (Parashuram), Chiriyakhana (Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay), Tagore's Charulata, Teen Konya, Ghare Baire, Shankar's Jana Aranya, and Sunil Gangopadhyay's Aranyer Dinratri. He had also adapted Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People.

Unfilmed

In 1967, Ray wrote a script for a movie to be entitled "The Alien," with Columbia Pictures as producer for this planned US/India co-production, and Peter Sellers and Marlon Brando as the leading actors. However Ray was surprised to find that the script he had co-written had already been copyrighted and the fee appropriated. Marlon Brando dropped out of the project and though an attempt was made to bring James Coburn in his place, Ray became disillusioned and returned to Calcutta. Columbia expressed interest in reviving the project several times in the 70s and 80s but nothing came of it. When E.T. was released in 1982, many saw striking similarities in the movie to Ray's earlier script - Ray discussed the collapse of the project in a 1980 Sight & Sound feature, with further details revealed by Ray's biographer Andrew Robinson (in The Inner Eye, 1989). Ray believed that Spielberg's movie "would not have been possible without my script of The Alien being available throughout America in mimeographed copies." Spielberg denied this by saying "I was a kid in High School when this script was circulating in Hollywood".

Other Accomplishments

In 1985, Ray won the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for lifetime contribution to Indian cinema. He received the Academy's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992, one of only two Oscar winners from India. He was also awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1992. He had also obtained the Legion of Honor from the hand of the French president in Kolkata. A project to restore all of Ray's films was launched in the early 1990s, with many individuals in India and the United States participating (including noted filmmakers Martin Scorsese, James Ivory and Ismail Merchant). A theatrical retrospective of the restored films toured internationally in the 1990s, generating press and new audiences.

Satyajit Ray was also a prolific writer in Bengali. Arguably his most famous written works were the exploits of Feluda, a Bengali detective, and Professor Shanku, a scientist. Most of his writings have now been translated into English, and are finding an eager second generation of readers. Ray wrote his autobiography encompassing his childhood years, Jakhtan Choto Chilam (1982) and essays on film: Our Films, Their Films (1976), along with Bosoy Chalachchitra (1976), Ekei Bole Shooting (1979). Most of his novels and stories have been published as books by Ananda Publishing, Calcutta and most of the screenplays are published in Bengali in the Eksan Journal. During the mid-1990s, Ray's film essays and an anthology of short stories had also been published in the West.

Filmography

> Pather Panchali (1955)
> Aparajito (1957)
> Parash Pathar (1958)
> Jalsaghar (1958)
> The World of Apu / Apur Sansar (1959)
> Devi (1960)
> Teen Kanya (1961)
> Rabindranath Tagore (1961)
> Kanchenjungha (1962)
> Abhijan (1962)
> Mahanagar (1963)
> Charulata (1964)
> Kapurush (1965)
> Mahapurush (1966)
> Nayak (1966)
> Chiriyakhana (1967)
> Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969)
> Aranyer Din Ratri (1970)
> Pratidwandi (1971)
> Seemabaddha (1971)
> Sikkim (1971)
> The Inner Eye (1972)
> Ashani Sanket (1973)
> Sonar Kella (1974)
> Jana Aranya (1976)
> Bala (1976)
> Shatranj Ke Khiladi (1977)
> Joi Baba Felunath (1978)
> Hirok Rajar Deshe (198])
> Ghare Baire (1984)
> Sukumar Ray (1987)
> Ganashatru (1989)
> Shakha Proshakha (1990)
> Agantuk (1991)

References

> Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, Robinson, A. Andre Deutsch (1989).
> Satyajit Ray, The Inner Eye: The Biography of a Master Film-Maker, Robinson, A. I.B. Tauris (2003).
> Satyajit Ray: A Vision of Cinema, Robinson, A. I.B. Tauris (2005).

Dr. M. Yunus: Banker to the Poor…

Dr. Muhammad Yunus
Founder, Grameen Bank

In 1974, Professor Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist from Chittagong University, led his students on a field trip to a poor village. They interviewed a woman who made bamboo stools, and learnt that she had to borrow the equivalent of 15p to buy raw bamboo for each stool made. After repaying the middleman, sometimes at rates as high as 10% a week, she was left with a penny profit margin. Had she been able to borrow at more advantageous rates, she would have been able to amass an economic cushion and raise herself above subsistence level.

Realizing that there must be something terribly wrong with the economics he was teaching, Yunus took matters into his own hands, and from his own pocket lent the equivalent of £ 17 to 42 basket-weavers. He found that it was possible with this tiny amount not only to help them survive, but also to create the spark of personal initiative and enterprise necessary to pull themselves out of poverty.

Against the advice of banks and government, Yunus carried on giving out 'micro-loans', and in 1983 formed the Grameen Bank, meaning 'village bank' founded on principles of trust and solidarity. In Bangladesh today, Grameen has 1,084 branches, with 12,500 staff serving 2.1 million borrowers in 37,000 villages. On any working day Grameen collects an average of $1.5 million in weekly installments. Of the borrowers, 94% are women and over 98% of the loans are paid back, a recovery rate higher than any other banking system. Grameen methods are applied in projects in 58 countries, including the US, Canada, France, The Netherlands and Norway.

Muhammad Yunus is that rare thing: a bona fide visionary. His dream is the total eradication of poverty from the world. 'Grameen', he claims, 'is a message of hope, a programme for putting homelessness and destitution in a museum so that one day our children will visit it and ask how we could have allowed such a terrible thing to go on for so long'. This work is a fundamental rethink on the economic relationship between the rich and the poor, their rights and their obligations. The World Bank recently acknowledged that 'this business approach to the alleviation of poverty has allowed millions of individuals to work their way out of poverty with dignity'.

Credit is the last hope left to those faced with absolute poverty. That is why Muhammad Yunus believes that the right to credit should be recognized as a fundamental human right. It is this struggle and the unique and extraordinary methods he invented to combat human despair that Muhammad Yunus recounts here with humility and conviction. It is also the view of a man familiar with both Eastern and Western cultures — on the failures and potential for good of industrial countries. It is an appeal for action: we must concentrate on promoting the will to survive and the courage to build in the first and most essential element of the economic cycle — Man.

Muhammad Yunus was born in 1940 in Chittagong, the business centre of what was then Eastern Bengal. He was the third of 14 children of whom five died in infancy. Educated in Chittagong, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. In 1972 he became head of the Economics Department at Chittagong University. He is the founder and managing director of the Grameen Bank. In 1997, Professor Yunus led the world’s first Micro Credit Summit in Washington, DC.

Dr. Fakhruddin Ahmed: A Banker…

Dr. Fakhruddin Ahmed
Managing Director, PKSF

Former Governor of Bangladesh Bank Dr. Fakhruddin Ahmed has joined Palli Karma Sahayak Foundation (PKSF) as the Managing Director on June 1, 2005. Dr. Fakhruddin Ahmed held senior positions in the World Bank from 1978 to 2001 before joining Bangladesh Bank as its Governor. He started his career as lecturer in the Economics Department of Dhaka University. Later he joined the Civil Service of Pakistan and served the government in various capacities until 1978.

Dr. Fakhruddin Ahmed stood first class first in both BA (Hons) and MA in Economics at Dhaka University in 1960 and 1961 respectively. He is holding a Master’s Degree in Development Economics from Williams College, USA and Doctor of Philosophy in Economics from Princeton University.

CPD and Prof. Rehman Sobhan…

Prof. Rehman Sobhan

Professor Rehman Sobhan was educated at St. Paul's School, Darjeeling, Aitichison College, Lahore and Cambridge University. He began his working career at the faculty of Economics, Dhaka University. He served as Member, Bangladesh Planning Commission, in charge of the Divisions of Industry, Power and Natural Resources, and of Physical Infrastructure, as Chairman, Research Director and Director General, BIDS and as a Visiting Fellow, Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University. He was a Member of the Advisory Council of the President of Bangladesh in charge of the Ministry of Planning and the Economic Relations Division. He is today the Chairman, Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD).

Professor Sobhan has held a number of important professional positions. He was a Member of the Panel of Economists of the Third and Fourth Five Year Plans of Pakistan. He served as Envoy Extraordinary with special responsibility for Economic Affairs, Govt. of Bangladesh during 1971, as President, Bangladesh Economic Association, as a Member, Bangladesh National Commission on Money Banking and Finance, as a Member, UN Committee for Development Planning, as a Member, Governing Council of the UN University, Tokyo, as a Member of the Commission for a New Asia, Kuala Lumpur, as a Member of the Board of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, Geneva, as a Member of the Executive Committee of the International Economic Association, and as a Member, Group of Eminent Persons appointed by SAARC Heads of State. He is the Chairman of the Board of Grameen Bank.

Books Published : Basic Democracies, Works Programme and Rural Development in East Pakistan (1968), Public Enterprise in an Intermediate Regime: A Study in the Political Economy of Bangladesh (1980), The Crisis of External Dependence: The Political Economy of Foreign Aid to Bangladesh (1982), Public Enterprise and the Nature of the State (1983), Rural Poverty and Agrarian Reform in the Philippines (1983), From Aid Dependence to Self-Reliance: Development Options for Bangladesh (1990), Debt Default and the Crisis of State Sponsored Entrepreneurship in Bangladesh (1991), Public Allocative Strategies, Rural Development and Poverty Alleviation : A Global Perspective (1991), Planning and Public Action for Asian Women (1992), Rethinking the Role of the State in Development : Asian Perspectives (1993), Bangladesh : Problems of Governance (1993), Agrarian Reform and Social Transformation (1993), Aid Dependence and Donor Policy: The Case of Tanzania (1996), Towards a Theory of Governance and Development: Learning from East Asia (1998), Team leader and Editor of the annual Independent Review of Bangladesh's Development: Experiences with Economic Reform (1995), Growth or Stagnation? A Review of Bangladesh's Development (1996), Crisis in Governance:Review of Bangladesh's Development (1997), Trends in the Post-Flood Economy:Review of Bangladesh's Development (2000).

Economics and Wahiduddin Mahmud…

Prof. Wahiduddin Mahmud

Prof. Wahiduddin Mahmud is currently the Professor of Economics at Dhaka University. He is also the President of Bangladesh Economic Association, a post he has held since 1996, and the Chairman of the PKSF, a premier institution in Bangladesh for funding microcredit programmes of the NGOs.

He is the Chairman of the Banking Reform Committee set up by the Government of Bangladesh and the Panel of Economists for the Fifth Five Year Plan (1998-2002), a Member of the Macroeconomic Consultative Committee of the Ministry of Finance and a Board Member of the Central Bank.

He has been a Convenor of the Agricultural Commission as well as the Banking Commission. He was the Minister of Finance and Planning in the 1996 National Caretaker Government in Bangladesh.

He holds a PhD from University of Cambridge and has served as a consultant at international agencies including the World Bank. He has held visiting faculty positions at various institutes prominent among them being, the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.

Prof. Mahmud has published a number of research papers in reputed academic journals, particularly on macroeconomic policies and reforms, macroeconomic models of developing countries, structural adjustment, food policy, agricultural and rural diversification, manpower planning, international labour migration, rural development and gender issues.

His prominet works are: Macroeconomics of Microcredit: The Experience in Bangladesh, book manuscript, CIRDAP, Dhaka, 2000; Social Development and Minimum Needs: New Role of the UN and the Bretton Woods Institutions, mimeo, UN WIDER, Helsinki and "Agricultural Diversification: A Strategic Factor for Growth" in R Ahmed and S Haggblade (eds), Out of the Shadows of Famine: Evolving Food Markets and Food Policy in Bangladesh, the John Hopkins University Press for IFPRI, 2000. His forthcoming edited book is titled Adjustment and Beyond: The Reform Experience in South Asia, Macmillan (London).

WTO and The International Trade...

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is the only global international organization dealing with the rules of trade between nations. At its heart are the WTO agreements, negotiated and signed by the bulk of the world’s trading nations and ratified in their parliaments. The goal is to help producers of goods and services, exporters, and importers conduct their business.

Pascal Lamy
Director-General, WTO

Pascal Lamy is the fifth Director-General of the WTO. His appointment took effect on 1 September 2005 for a four-year term.

Pascal Lamy is a graduate of France's leading business school, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC), the Paris Institute of Political Studies ("Sciences Po") and the ENA civil service college (Ecole Nationale d'Administration). He began his career in the civil service at the French Finance Ministry's auditing agency, the Inspection générale des Finances, and the Treasury Department. He later became adviser to Economics and Finance Minister, Jacques Delors, and to Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy.

From 1984 to 1994, Mr Lamy worked in Brussels as chief of staff (chef de cabinet) to Commission President, Jacques Delors, representing him at the G7. In November 1994 he joined the Crédit Lyonnais, where under Jean Peyrelevade he helped restructure the bank, becoming its number two. After the privatisation of Crédit Lyonnais, Mr Lamy was appointed in July 1999 by Romano Prodi and the French government to the European Commission. In September 1999 the European Parliament confirmed him as Trade Commissioner.

World Bank and The Development...

The World Bank Group’s mission is to fight poverty and improve the living standards of people in the developing world. It is a development Bank which provides loans, policy advice, technical assistance and knowledge sharing services to low and middle income countries to reduce poverty.

Paul Wolfowitz
President, The World Bank Group

Paul Wolfowitz was unanimously approved as 10th President of the World Bank Group by the institution’s Board of Executive Directors on March 31, 2005.

Prior to this appointment, Mr. Wolfowitz spent more than three decades as a public servant, ambassador and educator, including 24 years in government service under seven U.S. presidents. His practical experience in the developing world includes three years in Indonesia as U.S. Ambassador, and his Washington-based policy work on East Asian affairs.

Mr. Wolfowitz also has been a leader in higher education. From 1994-2001, he served as Dean and Professor of International Relations at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University. Earlier, he taught political science at Yale University. Mr. Wolfowitz has written widely on foreign policy, diplomacy and national security, and was a member of the advisory board of Foreign Affairs.

In government, Mr. Wolfowitz served three years under Secretary of State George Shultz as Ambassador to Indonesia, the fourth most-populous country in the world and largest in the Muslim world. During Ambassador Wolfowitz’s tenure in that country, he was known for reaching out to all elements of society and for his advocacy of reform and political openness. Under his leadership, the embassy in Jakarta was officially recognized as one of the best-managed U.S. diplomatic missions in the world.

Earlier, Mr. Wolfowitz served two years as head of the U. S. State Department’s Policy Planning Office and three-and-a-half years as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, where he worked directly with the leaders of more than 20 countries. In that position, Mr. Wolfowitz played a key role in supporting the peaceful transition to democracy in the Philippines in 1986. He also worked to help improve U.S. relations with China, strengthen alliances with Japan and Korea, and lay the groundwork for the subsequent democratic transition in Korea.

In 1989, President George H.W. Bush appointed Mr. Wolfowitz to the post of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, where he played a role in planning for the successful liberation of Kuwait, including organizing the fundraising effort that raised $50 billion in multilateral support. He also collaborated on the U.S. administration’s nuclear arms reduction initiative, in September 1991. As Deputy Secretary of Defense under President George W. Bush from 2001-2005, Mr. Wolfowitz’s responsibilities included oversight of the budget process as well as development of policy to respond to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Mr. Wolfowitz majored in Mathematics at Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY, and earned a Ph.D in Political Science at the University of Chicago. His early interest in development issues was evident in his 1972 doctoral dissertation on water desalination in the Middle East, as well as in his first government paper — written in 1966 for the Budget Bureau on the impact of agricultural subsidies.

IMF and The World Economy…

The IMF is an international organization of 184 member countries. It was established to promote international monetary cooperation, exchange stability, and orderly exchange arrangements; to foster economic growth and high levels of employment; and to provide temporary financial assistance to countries to help ease balance of payments adjustment. Address: 700 19th St. NW, Washington, DC 20431.

The work of the IMF is of three main types. First: Surveillance. Surveillance involves the monitoring of economic and financial developments, and the provision of policy advice, aimed especially at crisis-prevention. Second: Balance of Payments. The IMF also lends to countries with balance of payments difficulties, to provide temporary financing and to support policies aimed at correcting the underlying problems; loans to low-income countries are also aimed especially at poverty reduction. Third: Technical Assistance. The IMF provides countries with technical assistance and training in its areas of expertise.

Rodrigo de Rato y Figaredo

Managing Director, IMF

Rodrigo de Rato assumed office as Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund on June 7, 2004. This followed his selection by the Executive Board of the IMF, on May 4, 2004, to serve as Managing Director and Chairman of the Executive Board.

Prior to taking up his position at the IMF, Mr. de Rato was Vice President for Economic Affairs and Minister of Economy for the Government of Spain, a post to which he was appointed in May 1996. In his capacity as Minister of Economy, Mr. de Rato was also Governor for Spain on the Boards of Governors of the IMF, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He regularly attended the European Union's Economics and Finance Ministers meetings, and represented the EU at the Group of Seven Finance Ministers meeting in Ottawa, Canada, in 2002, when Spain held the EU Presidency. He was also in charge of foreign trade relations for the Government of Spain, and represented Spain at the World Trade Organization's ministerial meetings in Seattle, United States, in 1999, in Doha, Qatar, in 2001, and Cancún, Mexico, in 2003. He was a member of Spain's parliament from 1982 to 2004.

Mr. de Rato earned a law degree in 1971 from the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, and a Master of Business Administration from the University of California at Berkeley in 1974. In 2003, he earned a PhD in Economics from the Universidad Complutense.

Mr. de Rato is the ninth Managing Director of the IMF. He directly succeeded Horst Köhler, who resigned from the IMF on March 4, 2004. Mr. de Rato, a Spanish national, was born in Madrid, Spain on March 18, 1949.

Think Positive!

I am inviting all of you people to think positive and act positively for the greater interest of you as well as for whole universe. Just Check out the positive sides of your life and go ahead.

Why should you think positively?

I. Human beings are the greatest creature of the earth and what is rational that is always positive
II. In negative thinking you can’t attain positive result
III. A man/woman can change the world but other animals can’t
IV. A man/woman can think or dream beyond his/her capacity
V. Positive thinking enhances knowledge, self-confidence and capability

How can we be positive in Thinking?

I. Pursue knowledge (Autobiography, history of greatest persons)
II. Try to understand where from have you come, where you will go, and what your responsibility is
III. Try to think in your own way and avoid tradition
IV. Try to understand the logical reason of any incident or behavior of the people
V. Try to understand yourself and the future pathway of your life
VI. Before express any thing try to understand the position of you at the delivered opinion

What are the expectations from you?

I. Always think constructive, act constructive
II. Set positive orientation of life
III. Search the true meaning of life
IV. Set positive goals and go for it
V. Always practice positivism, everywhere
VI. Get united with positive people and work on some positive dreams

VII. Share your positive thinking, ideas and dreams

Sir and the spirit...

HUMAYUN AZAD, (Rarikhal, Munshiganj, Bangladesh, 28 April 1947 - Munich, Germany, 11 August 2004) was a prolific Bangladeshi author and scholar. He wrote more than 70 books including 10 novels, 7 collections of poetry, 7 books of comparative literature and 2 books for children. Azad received the prestigious Bangla Academy Award (1996) and the Shishu Academy Award for his contributions in both adult and children literature.

Dr. Azad got his doctorate degree in linguistics in 1976 at the University of Edinburgh. He later served as a professor of Bangla at the University of Dhaka and in his early career produced pioneering works on Bangla linguistics, notably Bangla semantics. He was regarded as the most important living linguist of the one-thousand-year-old Bangla language. Later in his career, especially during General Ershad’s rule, he became well-known as a liberal socio-political critic as he wrote biting commentaries against the dictatorship in local magazines. His commentaries continued throughout the 1990s and were later published as books as they grew in numbers. A freethinker and an atheist, he fearlessly and openly criticized in his works the extremism in religions, including Islam, the major religion in Bangladesh.

Dr. Azad also published the first comprehensive book in Bangla on the subject of women called Naari (Bangla for “Woman”) in 1992. In this monumental tome, Azad painstakingly compiled the feminist ideas of the west that underlie the feminist contributions of the subcontinent’s socio-political reformers and exposed the anti-women stance of some legendary Bengali writers including Rabindranath Tagore. The work, critical of the patriarchal and male-chauvinistic attitude of religions towards women, attracted negative reaction from conservative censors and the Bangladeshi Government banned the book in 1995. The ban was eventually lifted in 2000, following a legal battle Azad won in the High Court.

On February 27, 2004, he was the victim of a vicious assassination attempt by unidentified assailants in broad daylight on the campus of the University of Dhaka. As he was returning to his Fuller Road residence from the yearly book fair held at the Bangla Academy premises, the assailants stopped him on the road and hacked at his neck and face with machetes and later used bombs to disperse the crowd who tried to rescue him. He subsequently fell into a life-threatening coma for four days, but eventually survived after receiving intensive treatment at the Combined Military Hospital in Dhaka. He then went to Singapore for further treatment of his critically damaged face. The incident created a huge backlash among the progressive liberals in the society and the public in general who were appalled at the lack of secuity that made this attack on one of the most renowned scholars in the country possible. The students of the university were especially agitated at this heinous crime against their beloved teacher on their very own campus and marched processions in protest.

The assassination attempt took place following the publication of his novel Pak Sar Jamin Saad Baad, a story based on religious groups in Bangladesh who collaborated with the Pakistani army during the 1971 independence war. In it he tried to expose the attitudes and activities of the Islamists and the nationalists in Bangladesh. He simulated a scenario that vividly portrayed fanatic and barbaric nature of these groups. Afterwards, Dr. Azad expressed that he had suffered severe mental trauma since the attack, but he also vowed to continue writing against the rise of Islamists in Bangladesh.

Islamists in Bangladesh, on the other hand, condemned the assassination attempt but simultaneously claimed that the novel injured the sentiments of the majority. They demanded that the novel be banned and a blasphemy law be passed so that no such book could be published in the future, a reaction not too dissimilar to their treatment of his earlier Naari.

On August 11, 2004, Dr. Azad was found dead in his apartment in Munich, Germany, where he had moved just a week prior to conduct research on the nineteenth century German romantic poet Heinrich Heine. Azad’s family in Bangladesh refused to acknowledge the German police force’s primary conclusions, which indicated a natural death.