STRAY CAT

I am rarely getting free time at home because of my busy schedules during weekdays. The time I spend at home Saturdays -Thursdays is like:

7:30 - Waking up and all morning rituals including bath
8:00 - Breakfast with eyes on the newspaper.
8:20 - Leaving for office
9:30 - 10 PM arriving home with a tired body and mind.
10:15 - Flirting with my daughter and watching TV till 11:30 before sleeping.

So you see its a pretty boring life except for the time with my daughter and most of the time she falls asleep within 10:30. One day I noticed that there is a faint mew mew sound from the kitchen. S told that one stray cat had sneaked into the house and was messing up with kitchen wares. The cat was not welcome in the house then. Some day later S told me that she has found that cat with a new born kitten lurking in the carpet beneath the living room sofa. It was cold outside so the mother was trying to keep the kitten warm. S put some news paper there so that they can be warm lying on it. However presumably with the fear that its hideout had been discovered, the mother fled with the kitten. I missed the whole show. The next day I could hear a vehement mew mew sound. There was something sad about that sound. S told me excitedly that the whole day the cat was wondering around the house and making that sound and the kitten was not seen with it. Probably she hid the kitten somewhere and she can't find her baby anymore. She was coming back to the old hiding place with the hope that she could find it. Stupid cat! I took my daughter in my arms and tried to find the kitten. I could feel the cat's pain and realized that kids should not be separated from their parents. But I could hardly do anything. Sadly I did not see the cat from the next day and do not know the fate of the kitten. Is this a lesson of life?

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AROUND THE BLOGOSPHERE

* A conversation with Microsoft.

* Secret asian man weighs in on media coverage of the tsunami

* Global justice in a shared hemisphere.

* World Cricket Tsunami Appeal Shirt (used) Auction.

* Blogging disaster relief in Phuket.

* Korea rules in new consumer electronics.

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BANGLADESH SECURES ITS FIRST TEST WIN

Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.

It was a team effort. No centuries scored were scored in the match. But there were some fine bowling performances by Md. Rafique, Enamul Haque Jr. & Tapas Baishya. The final score is:

Bangladesh 488 & 204/9 d. and Zimbabwe 312 & 154
Result: Bangladesh won by 226 runs
Series: Bangladesh leads the 2-Test series 1-0

Will blog later. Its party time.

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CANDLELIGHT COMMEMORATION FOR TSUNAMI VICTIMS IN BANGLADESH



People light up candles to commemorate victims of the tsunami disaster at Central Shahid Minar in Dhaka on January 7, 2005. People from all over the country took part in the candlelight vigil organized by civil organizations Angikar Bangladesh, Prakritajan and Barcik.

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WHO LET THE BLOG OUT?

It was a question asked by a fellow Bangladeshi blogger Ishtiaque when he was surprised to find that his blog was nominated in the Best Bangladeshi/Sri Lankan Blog category of the Asia Weblog Awards 2004. Probably he missed out the fact that it was I who nominated ten of Bangladeshi blogs of my choice. My intention was to highlight as many Bangladeshi bloggers to the international readers which might encourage them to carry on with more interest. Blogs are also a showcase of one persons culture, thoughts and interests as it is public. Bangladesh's national identity portrayed in the world is not always something we can be proud of. I believe that we can show to the world via our blog or any other public media that we Bangladeshis are not at all behind than the other nations.

I am not a fan of the Awards. But a little bit of fame and more acquaintance can widen one' responsibilities and it can really give one the urge to develop the level of understandings and standard. And this award had its glitches. First of all we did not like the idea of merging the single Sri-Lankan nomination Extra-Extra by Fred, a foreigner blogging from Jaffna with six other Bangladeshi Blogs. I chose not to bother about it as I thought it would not matter much. Now the result convinced me more that I should have protested. Extra-Extra won the best blog in the category primarily because it was highlighted as one of the on-the-site blog during the Asian tsunami disaster on December. The blog had way much traffic than its average during last couple of week and it could collect the votes required to beat a Bangladeshi blog. I am not taking away any credit of that blog, but think that Sri-Lanka should have had another category. There were concerns about the weakness of the voting tool to prevent against multiple voting by the same persons. Wamy noticed that in a few hours his vote increased from 26 to 40. which was unusual at the initial stage. From the result before and after the closing of vote it seems that the multiple votes were not filtered by Simon as promised. But again I thank Simon for taking the pain to host this awards. In this process some Bangladeshi blogs got promoted.

For your refernce here is a list for more Bangladeshi bloggers who are doing a fine job. I will make some recommendation here according to the latest posts:

* Tanya in Bangladesh
* Imtiaz's Weblog

Specially I would like to mention this blog "A Whisper from the heart" wonderfully written by a Singaporean girl Gwen about her experience of living in Dhaka. If you read her blog regularly you can learn some Bangla also.

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PROFITING FROM THE TSUNAMI DONATIONS

Some disturbing news regarding misuse and exploitation of the tsunami donations are cropping up which disheartens me a lot.

Fake collection efforts by email and by fake collection jars by crooks were seen all over Europe and elsewhere. A woman who registered the domain name tsunamirelief.com says she was conned to donate it by someone who then tried to sell the site name for $50,000 on eBay. Daniel Brett slates Oxfam for their pointless effort in sending the victims thousands of "£60- family aid packages" consisting of plastic buckets, soap, toothpaste, detergent, toilet paper and 55 tonnes of bottled water, which are available at one tenth of the cost in the countries affected by the disaster. He points out that millions of pounds are being spent on airfreighting out resources that could be sourced from Singapore, China, India, Thailand and Malaysia. Buying more from the tsunami affected countries would be a booster for these countries economies and help them in recovering from the mammoth loss.

The saying goes: "there will always be people who will try to profit from catastrophes for their own personal enrichment". But I think the aid agencies and the police need to be more careful so that the donated money can be properly utilized for the caused. And above all let everybody raise questions like this so that the donated money cannot be exploited more.

Update: Parth argues that in countries like India only about 15% reaches the beneficiary in government schemes. So effective aid efforts should be People to People, not Government to Government.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY

"Obviously when you have other sub-standard teams across the world, then surely Australia will end up being the no. 1 Cricket team"

- Javed Miandad, Former Pakistani player/national coach putting things into perspective

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