Our expatriate columnists

But I keep wondering who their readers and audiences are. As I see it, they are a microscopic few located in the Dhaka city, who are already convinced about the justness of the cause they espouse and the facts and analyses that they present. This is not to say that readers like me have nothing to learn from them.

My question is: have our columnists at all tried to address their facts, analyses and points of view to the readers and audiences of those countries which are the perpetrators of the wrongs? All of our columnists live in one or the other of those countries. There is quite a sizeable audience for these stuffs in the countries concerned, I am sure. There may be people who have little access to alternative points of view, especially of the third world people, and even they may be ignorant of facts. I am aware that it is not easy for a third worlder to have access to the media in those places. That's why I keep wondering whether anyone has ever made any effort to have such access and with what results.

We frequently complain that the media in those places would print or publicise only those facts and reports which they themselves like or the majority of their readers/audiences would like to hear or see. But that is not necessarily always true about all of them. The celebrated Indian author/ human rights activist Arundhuti Roy has a reasonable foothold in the West. I have seen several of her publications recently in bookshops in Boston-New York. In her speech in Mumbai, she advocated 'resistance' against injustice. To my mind, the way to resist, and perhaps the only way we can offer resistance, is to make our voices heard in those places to create public support for our cause, as opposed to the rulers who are often impervious to our pleas.

The other day a friend was complaining that our own media reports are often biased against us. I told him to look carefully at the source of their reports on world affairs and pointed out that they simply carry the reports from western wire services, and these days sometimes from the Internet. They cannot afford to keep their own correspondents posted abroad to write independently.

The whole things deserves a close scrutiny.