সম্পাদকীয়

When the current issue of our Journal was being finalized for the press in October, a terrible killing machine of state terrorism unfolded in the most atrocious manner against a group of people who have been oppresed and persecuted for more than seven decades. The destructiuon and ongoing killing is being broadcast live online and reaching various people and societies in all corners of the globe through cellphones and other medium. Yet, everyone seems to be disconnected from each other and becoming insenstive. The state terrorism unleashed by the state of Israel on a crowded people in a small piece of beseized land called ‘Gaza’ caused the death of more than three thousand children in mere 30 days! Twenty Five children died every minute, but in the face of such babrbarity the rest of humanity remain unpurturbed, indifferent! However, the ink of poets never dries out. Amidst this destruction, the poems of Palestinian poets explode out of the beseized Gaza and circulate through social media. In the same vain by breaking our normal lineup we start our Journal with two timely poems by Sibaji Bandyopadhyay.

The main theme of the curent issue was ‘the mind on the mobile and the colonized mind of Bangalis.’ The reason behind choosing such a theme was to explore whether the individual mind and the self could keep their freedoms in this age of unprecedented techonological advance and free flow of information through social media without unknowingly being colonized by an unseen more powerful authority.

Bangalis seem to be unable to get rid of the legacy of colonization by the Anglo-imperial power. Their paradigm of thinking and worldview is still nurtured and developed through a knowledge outlet that is controlled and shaped by the Anglosphere. It’s most evident in South Asia, especially in the case of local media. When it comes to deliver international news, the colonized mind of our journalists prevent them from trusting non-Anglo, non-European sources even though these are available online in English. Despite being misled by the fabricated news sourced from the very Anglo media during Iraq invasion, our journalists still blindly rely on their news outlets for authenticity.

Our embrace of contemporaneity is a byproduct of old colonial legacy and neo-colonial reality. One essential aspect of this contemporaneity is the usage of cellular or mobile phones. This new device of connectivity no doubt has augmented people’s capacity to express their ideas and thoughts, yet it has created new kind of incapacity and limitations. The far reaching effects of these devices in shaping the mindset of an individual and the society are discussed in three following articles:

Mamun Hussain, in his article with a very inqusitive mind explores the blurring of the demarkation line between truth and lies as the cellphones impact the innerworking of the thought process of an individual. The research article by Ritaprava Bandyopadhyay and Amita Chatterjee explains the dilemma and the complexity in separating fake news from authentic news. Amina Khatun in her article talks in detail about the harmful influence of the idiot box, facebook, cellphones etc. She laments how these devices instead of flourishing the bonds, are raising unseen walls and excerbating loneliness and depression among people.

In addition we present articles by Himani Bannerji on Alexandra Kollontai, by Amit Chaudhuri on three essential books, by Mouma Dutta on Bangali Muslims, by Farooque Chowdhury on political-cultural struggles in the pre-independence Bangladesh, by Atmajit Mukhopadhyay on classical vs colloquial Bangla, by Mohit Ul Alam on Rabindranath and Shakespeare, by Prasanta Dhar on Marx’s Capital, by Sandipan Sen on poet Madhusudan Dutta and others along with poems and short stories.