Shehzad M Arifeen

For three days we were a state without a government.

Either we finally build a people’s republic or we condemn ourselves to repeat this “legacy of blood”.

Is it not easier to defeat your enemies in parliament than to be permanently on the warpath against some shapeshifting enemy?

If we can feed the RMG industry with blood, sweat, and taxes year after year, surely we should be able to decide the bare minimum that it pays its workers?

If fast fashion must dominate the “national interest,” then at the very least we must compel the state apparatuses to play a truly mediating role on behalf of “the nation.

Barely a month had passed since one of us wrote about rape, scopophilia and collective rage, and barely a day since we began an intergenerational dialogue on gender, rage and violence, full of hope at the emergence of passionate and resourceful young allies, when the world dutifully punched back.

Plagues, pandemics, floods and blights, we were once taught, are vehicles of retribution, weeding out those who have not prepared for divine wrath—the greedy, reckless, and arrogant.

There are few things more difficult in life than a full awareness of the conditions of one’s possibility. To come to terms with how little of my world is my own creation, and just how much of it is the accumulated labour of dead generations and living masses far removed from my consciousness, is to grapple with a sense of smallness and insignificance.