Bangladesh: rediscovering cultural roots, facing challenges and acknowledging successes

"How effectively a society is able to cope with the challenges it faces depend largely on its culture."

Shahzaman Mazumder tries to find the cultural roots of Bangladesh and provides a good analysis on the Bangladeshis:

"Mostly fishermen, weavers, potters, and small farmers inhibited the territory that is today called Bangladesh, an extremely fertile delta. The many rivers and even more tributaries, marshes, and canals isolated communities and never allowed large indigenous political organization.

This isolation among apparently nearby communities is evident from the various dialects of Bangla. The fertile soil that allowed relatively easy living conditions was also an effective barrier assisting isolation-the people had no incentive to venture out."

He then carries on to discuss the psychological traits of the Bangladeshis which include small horizon of thinking, non-aggressive, intellectual, social and submissive. The isolation in small communities had never helped develop complex institutions inside the region. Many Bangladeshi institutions, which are emulated from the West fail as they ignore these cultural properties and thus fail to succeed.

Being a populous country and limited resources are also the main drawbacks of the country. Utsay Dot Net lists the challenges average Bangladeshis face which definitely put them up for a record setting. And they still survive:

Can’t figure it out? Well this is a record we already hold, each and every one of us. The fact that we still survive and the population manages to grow everyday even though we consume so many toxic materials in our food everyday is a miracle. No other race of people can claim to stomach so many different types of poison and still live to tell about it. We rule…

Many Bangladeshis had the notion of looking down upon anything Bangladeshi. Dhaka explains:

When I was young (and it is quite far off and not as recent as I like to pretend), there was this distinct feeling in the air that "Made in Bangladesh" was somehow not good enough. Given two equally good choices between a Deshi and a bideshi (foreign) product, most of my generation would choose the bideshi one. Most of the time of course, we were given a choice between a far superior foreign product and a very mediocre MIB (Made in Bangladesh) product.

But now Bangladesh is pushing forward overcoming the hurdles and growing in confidence. From garments industry to personalized home pages, products made by Bangladeshis are setting their landmarks.

Bangladesh pretty much clothes the entire world (now). What we don't do is make Armani shirts. Maybe we do, but "they" put in the logo and reap the profits when our elites buy them.

...(Pageflakes) is a personalized home page, with different modules known as "flakes" allowing you to build it up from scratch and individualize it to your heart’s content.

What really got me interested is the fact that their Chief Technology Officer is (a) Bangladeshi. 3rd world view reports that 18 Bangladeshis currently work for it, while Patricia from Underdogs Fight Back tells us that 3 Bangladeshi engineers were the original core developers.

The blogger urges the Bangladeshi readers to consider Bangladeshi products over other foreign ones not only because they are competitive but also they make Bangladesh proud.

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Pageflakes pagecasts: the 100000 feed strong metagator

After the recent addition of pagecasts feature Pageflakes announces that its users have created 100000 pagecasts for its metagator. Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen informs:

"Pagecasting" is the intersection of personalized pages with social media. Unlike existing social media such as blogs and podcasts, virtually anyone can use Pageflakes to easily and quickly mashup a multimedia page with interactive Flakes that will enable them to express themselves and interact with others in a powerful new way - including, of course, blogs, podcasts, videos, photos and more. Over 100,000 Pagecasters – a prolific subset of our much larger and rapidly growing Pageflakes user base – are enriching the lives of millions of Internet users around the world."

The cool thing is the tagging feature. For an example if you search by tag Bangladesh you can get all the Bangladesh related Pageflakes personalized (shared) pages.

There are numerous possibilities of how users can create and use these features. Using the group feature a group of users can create shared pages and do some more interactive things like editing other's pages.

It may not be far when we will see these personalized Web 2.0 pages of Pageflakes entwined with more enriched blogging feature and social networking features like twitter or facebook. These pages will be the virtual alter ego of the owners.

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Pageflakes: the number one personalized web page

I first found about Pageflakes about a year ago. Since then it has become sleeker and better.

For those who are new to it, its an Ajax-based personalized start page like the big boys, Google personalized webpages, My Yahoo and Windows Live. In this page you have hundreds of interesting Flakes (modules) to add. These Flakes contains your day-to-day requirements like reading email, Web search, subscribe and read RSS/Atom feeds, address book, dictionary, notes, calendar, weather forecast, social networking like del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr photos, video, radio and other user-created modules. You can simply embed Flakes in your personal blogs like this using the export function. Developers can create new modules for Pageflakes and these can be shared with others.

You can simply drag and drop these modules to your Pageflakes browser desktop. No complex configuration or coding is required. You can access it without registering but for accessing your customizations from different pcs you can simply register for free. It has a page publishing feature with that you can share your pages with other users. You can make it read only for shared users or let others modify some of your contents as an option. It has also a blog Flake which lets you to blog in your PF page. If you put your location details it will automatically offer you flakes with localized contents. You want help in customizing your Pageflakes page? Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen explains this on video.

My inclination to Pageflakes is due to the fact that its 3 core developers are Bangladeshis. Its CTO is Omar Al Zabir Misho, whom I met in February 2006 in a Bangladeshi blogger meet. There are 18 Bangladeshis working for Pageflakes now.

And surprise..surprise. Pageflakes is also available in Bangla. Besides English it also offers German, Chiense and Portugese language versions.

Pageflakes is run by Pageflakes Ltd. Initially the company was privately funded and Benchmark Capital invested an undisclosed amount in May 2006 (wikipedia).

PC World has recently declared Pageflakes as the number one personalized web page.

So what are you waiting for? Make Pageflakes your own personalized startpage. You can set this up easily- just add http://www.pageflakes.com/:

i) In MS Internet Explorer: Tools--> Options-->Homepage
ii) In Mozilla Firefox browser: Tools--> Internet Options-->Homepage

And Voila, there you have it!

For an example of a customized startpage you can look at my page.

So how does it look? You can share your experiences, excitements, frustrations in the comments section.

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