Humanity has made a “tragic, desperate mess” of the planet, said Sir David Attenborough, the 93-year-old naturalist and documentary filmmaker on announcing his new series of documentaries called “Seven Worlds, One Planet” due to be broadcast on the BBC.

The problem of high un-employment that has been sweeping across the world ever since the 2008 financial crisis is yet to be adequately resolved. And with the passage of every year, creating enough quality jobs is looking increasingly difficult globally.

Mark Twain once famously said that truth is stranger than fiction. Truth’s ability to outperform fiction is limitless, not just in terms of strangeness, but also in the most outrageous, disgusting and horrifying way conceivable.

In awarding the Nobel Prize in literature to Peter Handke, the award committee said, “it’s not the academy’s mandate to balance literary quality against political considerations.” We need to talk about this.

When we read how indivi-duals accused of a crime—drug peddling, terrorism or murder—get shot during a gun fight between their cohorts and the law enforcers we shrug it off without a bat of an eyelid. We know that these “gunfights”, “shootouts” or “encounters” are euphemisms for extrajudicial killing.

Readers might be wondering why I chose this line from the famous song immortalised by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez as the heading of this article.

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to a trio who came from three different continents to teach and work together in Cambridge, USA. Abhijit Banerjee hails from India, Esther Duflo grew up in France, and Michael Kremer was born and brought up in the USA and finished his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard. Their research focuses on poverty alleviation, and more specifically on the design of policy to guide development practitioners and government.

We are all immensely proud of the economic development being achieved by Bangladesh and looking forward to our graduation from Least Developed Country (LDC) status to middle income country status within the next few years. However, as we move our development pathway forward we are facing a very significant fork in the road ahead and we will have to make some brave choices that will determine the quality of our development over the coming decade or more.

The world today is observing World Food Day with the theme, “Healthy diet for a Zero Hunger world”, This is a worthy fight to pick, particularly for Bangladesh, a country where we are constantly assailed with news of food adulteration and contamination. The mobile court drives that fine fruit sellers and milk producers for selling contaminated products, and restaurant owners for serving unhygienic and inedible food to the customers, are a testament to the low-quality food that we are consuming day in and day out.

Since the killing of Abrar Fahad, a number of issues have been raised by people rightly outraged by his gruesome murder at the hands of some Chhatra League members, as well as revelations about how supporters of the ruling party’s student wing have been regularly terrorising ordinary students, with full exemption. Among them is the role of political activities on university campuses.

I often wonder about the psyche and motivation of people who choose to resist unfairness, inequity and tyranny at a great personal cost. And I don’t mean luminaries like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr., but the unsung heroes who feel it their bounden duty to act in the public interest and ensure that future generations benefit from their selfless acts of moral valour.

To say that Chhatra League is in crisis presupposes that Chhatra League, too, can be reduced to facing a crisis, a fact that would have been unthinkable even a few weeks ago.

Protests and demonstrations are not new in Hong Kong. Even before returning to Chinese control in 1997, Hongkongers had demonstrated on different demands. When Chief Executive Carrie Lam wanted to push an extradition bill—that would allow both Hong Kong residents and visitors to be sent to China for trial—through the Legislative Council in March, it immediately triggered criticism and protests, particularly from the millennials of Hong Kong, demanding immediate withdrawal of the law. It is not surprising that the current protests that began in June continues with violent weekend street battles with the police.

The central bank has found itself in a bit of a quandary. The bank recently gave the remittance award to 36 individuals, including a loan defaulter—a top defaulter of Bangladesh Commerce Bank Ltd. (BCBL)— who also happens to be a money launderer, having laundered Tk 200 crore through the bank. This tragicomic episode neatly sums up the situation of our banking sector, especially with regard to loan defaults and the treatment afforded to them.

Donald Trump pulling out US forces from northeast Syria and exposing the region and its major ally—in the fight against Islamic State (IS)—the Kurds to Turkish offensive comes as no surprise given the litany of backstabbing the Kurdish people have suffered over the decades.

Emperors and kings and even queens have traditionally aspired for boys—male heirs to the thrones, who would govern their nations in the future. Very few, if at all ever envisaged or expected their daughters to succeed them. While the birth of a boy brought joy and celebrations, the birth of a girl has often been treated with less enthusiasm.

I venture to pen my thoughts on an issue knowing fully well that a recent Facebook posting critical of the Indo-Bangladesh MoU which allows India to draw water from the Feni River to the tune of 1.82 cusec, cost the life of a Buet student at the hands of some reprobates belonging to the BCL cadre.

In Ian McEwan’s “Sweet Tooth”, a novel based on the social life of London in the early 1970s, we see a vivid description of conditions that prevailed in the UK which was then facing several crises on different fronts, and was completely torn apart by industrial and social unrest with slowing economic growth and rising unemployment.

“Ban student politics” has become the rallying cry for the past few days, in both the social and mass media.

It is a common belief that only meritorious, above-average students can get into a university like Buet. It’s no joke when amongst thousands of applicants, only a handful are selected.