Word: thousands
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ordinary was up. Neither, apparently, did the Asian press corps, or even the unfortunate Sheik Mujib, the assassinee, himself. To be fair about it, however, it is rather hard to tell what's out of the ordinary in a nation where political assassinations occur at the rate of one thousand a year. Dozens of natives learn daily, at the cost of their lives, that it is very, very dangerous to assume you know Bangladesh...
VERY FEW BENGALIS eat as much as Westerners--in the whole country, probably less than one hundred thousand--but on the other hand the extent of starvation is almost certainly exaggerated. We get our "facts" on malnutrition from the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), a highly political body which would be out of work if its own figures didn't conclusively prove the world was on the brink of famine. By fooling around with their definitions one can 'prove' that anywhere from sixty all the way down to a mere fifteen percent of the Bengali population is underfed (fifteen...
WESTERNERS criticize the Bengali government beauracracy for its slowness, ineptitude, and inefficiency; in themselves, these criticisms are proof Westerners do not understand Bangladesh's government. The point of the government, as has been the point of government in South Asia for at least a thousand years, is to enrich government officials and strengthen the power of the upper castes over the lower, and at this the government is remarkably adroit, efficient, and swift. There are very few construction projects, for example, from which officials fail to achieve their target of bribes, very few internal disturbances from which the peasants gain...
...should get to Boston sometime late this afternoon. He left from our hometown in South Carolina yesterday after work and is driving 20 hours straight to get here. All last summer we fanatically rooted for the Bosox even though we were a thousand miles from Fenway Park, but tomorrow we're going to be in the Fenway bleachers cheering our Red Sox in the World Series...
Being a Boston Red Sox fan a thousand miles from the Hub is not all that easy. It consists of trying to glean the game story out of a box score, since the typical game blurb was only a sentence or two long. It also means staying up to get the ball scores if the Sox were out West. Otherwise you'd be kept in suspense until two days later when the story would finally make the morning editions...