Illustration by E.R. Ronny

Let’s get to the point; we don’t have enough time for silly introductions. I am going to show you how to survive, and if you can’t fight off dumb little zombies, you don’t deserve to survive at all! This is war, comrades, and I expect you to behave like soldiers!

First things first: you hear about people biting each other, you do NOT wait. You wait, you die. It’ll be risky with all the zombies running around and no one having a clue what’s going on (except you, of course), but it’s the best chance you have to gather resources before humans are overrun– that includes banding together in a small community. You wait more than three days, you deserve to die. Hell, I’ll be surprised if you can wait three days. Zombies are hungry, can smell you, and break doors.

But I am going to be realistic. This is Day 2 and you FINALLY decided to put Zombie Apocalypse Plan in action. I am assuming you know where to get weapons. You don’t need a fancy one – we are not dealing with robots or armoured aliens. They have human bodies with toned down human vulnerabilities. You need to shoot a lot, and be accurate enough to blow their brains off. That’s the only sure fire way to kill zombies, regardless of what Zombieland tells you. I prefer submachine guns with at least .357 hollowpoints. Anything less than .305 will kill, but lacks stopping power. Unfortunately, they are hard to come across so you will have to settle for Uzis and AK-47s. Handguns with .22 calibers or less won’t stop a zombie unless it’s a headshot. You’ll also need a melee weapon: Katanas will be over your head, so you’ll have to make do with a machete.

It astounds me that people in the movies don’t wear some kind of armour during an invasion, seeing as how infections spread through bites. Get a lightweight Kevlar and/or a padded leather jacket as soon as possible, as well as a backpack to carry enough food in the form of protein bars (anything else will just slow you down) and water for a week. Antibiotics and painkillers are a must, as is some sort of ADD medication to help you keep yourself concentrated.

It is absolutely imperative to group together and fortify a building. Zombies tend to do what they were doing while they were alive, so crowded areas like a school or a mall is a big no-no. An apartment building will work great, and a warehouse with very few entrances will be even better. Surround yourself with cameras, booby-traps, flashlights, and don’t forget to keep guard! It’s a warzone outside! And get ammunitions. Lots and lots of ammunitions.

Zombies aren’t smart. They’ll probably die of starvation sooner rather than later. They never seem to get around the idea of refrigerators. So my strategy is to wait them out. But if you are going to travel anyway, bikes are fast and preferable if you are alone (there won’t be any electricity, so you need and can siphon off fuel faster), but cars are safer. Travel in groups of twos to the least, and definitely not with any one who can’t use a gun.

In a worst case scenario where you are the only one left, you should move north. I really don’t think zombies can survive long in the cold, and snow will slow them down. There should be enough canned food in Alaska, if not, you can always hunt. Always keep a line of communication open. It’ll be likely that some army base somewhere or a nuclear submarine have survived as well. And when you all group together, it will be time to form an army to wage war! It will be time will come to take back what’s rightfully yours! It will be glorious!

The Other Side by Emil

Hello, hello and hello, my zombie minions. I am your all-powerful Undead Overlord. Welcome to the new age world. As you most assuredly must have realised by now, ALL of you are zombies. No, don’t look so yellow. Or, I guess that’s not your fault. It’s not important how it happened, or why, or when. I doubt you could process such delicate information with your rotting brains. In fact, it’s taking a toll on me just to maintain this ITF (Intelligent Telepathic Field). Anyway, the only thing that matters is that we are all zombies and the only thing that can satiate our hunger is the salty, and strangely sweet, flesh of the common human being.

Yes, you are dead. Yes, you are impervious to pain. Unfortunately, you are not invincible, nor are you immortal. And if you thought runny noses were annoying, wait till you get bouts of runny skin and runny limbs. The less you have to eat, the more of that it will happen. So, it’s vital that you find sustenance as often as you can. The more you get, the stronger you will be. Who knows, someday your brain might even be as developed as mine. Well, actually. Never mind.

There are some things that you have to keep in mind. Some rules of thumb that you should follow.

Pack life: You better start getting used to pack life, and working as a team. Never, ever fight among yourself. Firstly, flesh of your kind is poison, so don’t bother trying to go for the easy way to survival. Hunt in groups. In very, very large groups. Go alone, and you will most assuredly re-die. Go with a buddy or two, you will re-die. So when I say hunt in large groups, I mean REALLY large. Surround your target (singular, preferably. More targets = more guns in your faces), and share the meal like the good little deadbeats that you are.

Choose your location: Be wise. Be very, very wise when you’re choosing your targets. That should go hand-in-hand with choosing the location of the kill. You can afford to be picky if your targets are the crippled and the bedridden, but otherwise, you need to be careful. Closed spaces will provide you with the possibility of cornering your target into a dead-end. But the advantage of your massive numbers will mean nothing when you’re running through corridors and hallways. Any half-brained dolt would be able to pick you off one by one with a Smith & Wesson 500. Open spaces, like roads and what not, will favour numbers better, but be careful of targets wielding assault rifles or any burst fire guns.

Accessories: All of you have numerous accessories at your disposal. When besieged by groups of zombie hunters, use distracting tactics to split the team apart, and pick them out one by one. God knows how much of these instructions you lot will be able to retain, but I can hope for the best. Remember, getting shot does NOT stop you. Nothing stops you short of having your brains blown out. You never tire, you never sleep, and you never stop. Lost a hand, make a human lend you one. One of your legs ran away? Crawl to your prey. You are unstoppable forces of unnature, and THEY are just flesh and blood, ripe for your picking.

The Magnum: Yes. You heard that right. They WILL be carrying this. If you come across anyone armed with this. Either take ‘em out quick, or run and pray for your unlives. We’re lucky the .500 never became very popular. Being shot by that is like being hit by a magnet-train. Heck, even being in the near vicinity of it being fired runs the risk of your brain turning to jelly and oozing out. Find and destroy these weapons/ammunitions of mass destruction as much as you can. And don’t make the mistake of underestimating its little brother- the .44- either.

Forget the crappy zombie movies you’ve seen where those dead things are sluggish and dumb. They don’t know everything about us, and we don’t know everything about them. Avoid getting shot, if possible. And remember, that infection is not your first priority. Kill, eat, and THEN infect failing the first two. You are as fast as a human being. You may be falling apart, but you still have legs, and hands, and a body. USE it! Go for the diaphragm, the hamstring, aim for the groin, the eyes, carpe jugulum! They are few, you are many. They have everything to lose, you don’t. The world is your lawn. Go. Carry on, my undead sons. Bring me the world.

Published in Rising Star, The Daily Star, 13 April, 2010 in collaboration with Shahriar Shamim Emil

Santa Claus in a bear costume

According to the news (not this one, though, can’t find the link), the officials did not follow procedures that would lead to unbanning of Facebook – they emailed, rather than using the Report Abuse link, so the unban was delayed.

I imagine what they put in the report abuse details to be something very similar to this:

Report Abuse:

Dear Sir/Madam,
I represent the People’s Republic of Bangladesh on behalf of Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission. If you don’t know where Bangladesh is, it is juuuuuust beside India and just a little off Myanmar. Now, it has come to our attention that your website Facebook is hosting several “fan pages” that are offensive to our communist liberal sensibilities. Our primary concern is the fan page “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” which was created because of attempted censorship by known terrorists, so as People’s Republic, and under public pressure from groups of fundamentalists that represent all of Bangladesh, we are censoring Facebook to counter the counter of censorship, all arising from the cartoon pointing out censorship doesn’t work. As you can see from the 0.002% loss (approximate) of daily hits of your 400,000,000 user base, this is working.

There are also some hot and sexy pics of our great country’s leaders on two other groups (which I can not name because I never heard of them before), all fake of course, as you can tell by the shadows. These pictures are bad for our country’s perfect image – and you should know from your recent campaign for better privacy, image is important. We demand the pictures of the country’s progressive and change making Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and of the opposition leader (a lesser being) Khaleda Zia’s to be removed immediately, along with all related or non-related, political or otherwise, caricatures or pictures that paint our leaders in bad light. Unfortunately, failure to do so would result us prolonging the ban, as supported by the “freedom of speech” clause in our democratic country’s Constitution.

That being said, although the Mohammed page is our primary concern, we might lift the ban on facebook users in Digital Bangladesh (a term that is open to interpretation since we have not defined it) once you delete the groups concerning the totally uncorrupted and honest leaders, which under no circumstances arose from disappointment, anger or general dislike for douche moves like banning an entire media based on the actions of a few.

Thank you for your co-operation,
Hussain M Elius

P.S. You can tell that I am an official because I have a passport photo in my profile.

We read at various media that you’ve mentioned Avro is a pirated version of Bijoy. Could you please elaborate on that?

I have write-ups published in newspapers and my website on the issue, so you might refer to those. Last Tuesday, an article was published on The Daily Sangabd, which has the detailed information. However, for your clarification, when the keyboard layout used in Bijoy is used in any other software, it is defined as piracy.

To refute your claim, an article was recently published in The Daily Janakantha on behalf of Avro team. In that article, it was mentioned that Avro shares an 8-keystroke difference with that of UniBijoy’s layout.

Law does not understand an 8-key stroke difference. If you refer to the Copyright Law in 2005 and go through its related divisions – which I have mentioned in my article at The Daily Sangbad, you will easily understand.

Do you plan on taking legal actions?

I don’t want to go through legal actions. I have already complained at the Copyright Office and they have already sent a notice demanding an explanation to Avro. I’ve received a copy of it myself today. There are laws in the country. You can easily write against someone in blogs, websites or newspapers, but that does not mean law cannot be enforced. If you claim that it is not pirated, then elaborate through legal references. The answer does not lie with one’s verbal claims of 8-keystroke or 10-keystroke differences. I did not make the copyright or patent myself. Copyright or patent registrar has given it to me. If you have issues regarding copyright, you can approach the Government and complain that your copyright has been taken. I have even mentioned at Janakantha that you can impose a libel suit against me if needed.

Apart from this, are there any other measures you plan on taking?

Firstly, I’ll see what actions Copyright Registrar takes on the issue. If they can resolve it, I don’t need to take any further steps. According to the country’s legal infrastructure, I can go to court under Copyright, Patent or Trademark Law. I didn’t want to approach the court about these issues since 2003; however given the provocative and defaming language used against me, it seems as though my biggest mistake was simply making Bijoy. Yet, the person who has copied my keyboard and distributed openly in a website has not apparently committed any crime. My crime is mine. It’s my copyright, it’s my patent and in spite of it, I am the one at flaw here.

It seems claims have been that in blogs that Avro is open source…

It is not open source. It’s a freeware. Open source means software’s source is publicly open. Please refer to a copy of Prothom Alo from last Friday. Avro’s Windows version does not have its source open. Many freeware in the world were distributed free of cost initially, and charged for its proceeding versions. It’s almost like creating hype that you’re distributing something for free. I have no problem with free distribution of your own software, but why will you distribute someone else’s work? Bijoy is not his product. He has Avro Easy and other keyboards – I have no complaints against them. Why will he use my work? He, himself has admitted 99% has been copied, and now he is claiming 8-keystroke differences. Basically, the characters used to map Bangla letters using A to Z is the same, and in his said differences, we all know how many times does one use chondrobindu or bishorgo – and those are not related to fingering. In spite of all this, he claims he has not copied.

Thank you for your time, Mr. Jabbar.

Mustafa Jabbar, proprietor of Bijoy shares his take on the debate between Bijoy and Avro. The telephone interview was taken by Hussain M Elius on 2 May, 2010.

This was a trimmed down version of what was supposed to go along this article on Star Weekend. But the said article got cut off in the wrong places during editing and this one was not included at all . Oh well =(

“The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion” – Arthur C. Clarke

For thousands of years, man has attempted to define objective moral values: Aristotle had his virtues in his Nicomachean Ethics, Bentham and Mill had their utilitarianism and Kant had his Categorical Imperative. There are many more iterations of moral virtues and vice, but the most popular once are the ones promoted by religion. In fact, many even believe that morality stems from religion, so much so that the first question several ask me when they learn I am a skeptic is to ask any variation of, “How can you differentiate between good and bad without God?”

Such a statement poses two immediate problems. Are actions designated good or bad, morale or immoral, simply because a celestial being wants or doesn’t want us to do? If so, morality is objectively meaningless- it is no different than following random rules made by a child in his own little game. All one has to do to be morale then is to subscribe to a certain sky-daddy doctrine- you are simply doing as you are told and not because there is a good reason for it.

On the other hand, if you reason that God has a legitimate motive for deciding what morale is and it is not, then you have superseded God on such issues. Not to mention that this line of thought implies that He, too, is bound by a code of conduct!

Where then, does morality come from?

Being that many animals can grasp right and wrong on a basic level, it astounds me that anyone would suggest that morality comes from a holy origin. A dog understands benefit and detriment; apes have a sense of humor; elephants show emotions; and dolphin families spread culture. It doesn’t take a human to understand right and wrong, so it makes sense that a man-god cannot be the only authority for morality. We humans, as animals, have a natural internal sense of what is right and wrong, developed through the evolutionary process.

Right and wrong are understandings ingrained in the very development of our species. Because our survival depended on cooperation— dealing with everything from predators to hunting food to battling nature— those who were more capable of fairness were more likely to survive. Altruism, sympathy, kindness, forgiveness, and even hatred, all have their origins in interacting with other people for a common cause. Without these, cooperation is more likely to break down and that’s when survival is endangered.

As the human culture has grown more complex, so has our varied opinion on what is right and wrong, and how much something is right or wrong. Any thinking person, regardless of belief or non-belief, will have a very large set of moral positions that they hold. These positions are complex and nuanced, and if the person is open-minded, are subject to change over time (e.g., One may chose to be for the death penalty until confronted with the stats showing that some of those who are put to death has been found innocent years later). In fact, I have yet to meet two people with identical morals, so I will cautiously suggest that morale absolutism doesn’t exist.

Some example questions: What should the legal age of consent be? Should all hard drugs be legalized? What limits should there be on warfare, and can it be moral to kill even one innocent civilian? To what extent are the wealthy obligated to help the poor? Abortion? The list goes on. Such topics can be debated and arguments can be sliced and diced between philosophers, scientists, and the common people, but when religion comes into play, all arguments halts. Religion is based on the authority of the supernatural: you can’t be more right than a being who knows everything (or, for the matter, a being that can put you in an eternal torture chamber). Homosexuality is condemned in the Abrahamic religions, but it is no longer a part of debate that a person doesn’t chose to be homosexual, rather, they are born that way. Even if there was a choice, is it really morale to look at a person’s private life and judge whatever he may chose to do?

I’ll take an aside here and say that the concepts of hell and heaven has many flaws, but the chief one that bothers me most is the way it tries to enforce this so called morality on people. Doing something because of punishment or reward, might be a rational thing to do, but that doesn’t mean that rational beings are by default, morale. Take the example of the character Dexter in a TV show of the same name- a true psychopath, but not the one that goes around killing whoever he finds in sight. He knows that if he does so, even if he wants to, he will be prosecuted; an intelligent decision, no doubt, but not necessarily a morale one. If the reason you are doing what is “right” is because you fear punishment, then you are no better than a potty trained dog! “Doing what is right…” implies thinking long, hard, and carefully about what “right” is. I’m amazed this fact is not self-evident to some. There is no black and white source of universal moral law, which is why religion fails to be of any real use in a debate about morality.

That being said, a simple code of ethics like the golden rule doesn’t yield an easy answer either. Take the infamous trolley problem as an example. Is it better to kill an innocent, or allow many innocents to die through inaction? What if you have a choice of letting one of your better friends die or letting, say, five people you don’t know die? And what if one or all of those five people are respectable members of the society?

Today, after millennia of social evolution, we have a conscious counterpart to evolutionary altruism called the social contract. The social contract is a collective understanding about behaviors necessary for civilization to endure. To illustrate a case, if a society collectively decided that theft was allowable, the benefits from property rights would be sacrificed. Laws and social norms are an incarnation of the necessities for societal balance. As such a change in laws and norms, which happens almost everyday, is a reflection (albeit a bad one) of morale development in the society. It will perhaps be safe to say that, reversibly, it is the morale development, aided by newer information that we are presented with, that eventually changes some laws. To derive from a previous example, the death penalty is now illegal in more places then it was a hundred years ago.

Enforcing Bronze Age beliefs as laws shows, in my opinion, the inability and unwillingness to move forward and accept changes in the social environment. While it might be true that some changes might not be for the best, other changes certainly will be. Claiming what you “know” to be right and enforcing them is short-sighted at best and disastrous for humanity at worst.

Morality is doing what is right no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told no matter what is right.

Appeared on Don’t Feed the Animals, 16 April, 2010

Another time check and he dashed towards the living room. Frenzied, he searched for old magazines in the dark and found something of the sort. Cursing himself for dozing off when she wasn’t here, he flung 120 pounds of his flesh and bones onto the crumpled pillows. His head knocked against the bedstead and landed on the side. At that very instant, she arrived. In the blink of a second, his fan creaked into a stop. Fanning himself with the magazine while rubbing the bump on his forehead, his lips curled into a victorious smile. He was ready to embrace her, embrace her insinuating darkness and humid temperament. Tonight, he was ready to embrace load shedding.

So be it. Surviving routine power losses (or 12 hours of darkness on a daily basis) has become part of our lives. We are more prepared than ever with our productivity and lifestyles reduced to half a day. WASA has little to worry about with forty degrees of humidity in the atmosphere endowing us with three sweaty showers a day. Yes, we are Bangalis adaptable, adequate and advanced towards 22nd Century technology.

Of course, the joke had to be on. Ever since this whole deal about Digital Bangladesh begun with posters of people carrying transistors (?!), everyone knew we were in for a revolution this time. What better way than cutting down power supplies by 12 hours, eh? No one guessed that and it was the perfect surprise for 2010. Top that with excruciatingly painful traffic congestions and hiking prices of everyday commodities, and new rules suggesting we keep our air conditioners switched off during peak hours, shop only on certain days in certain areas and convert to solar energy. None of those measures would have gone under appreciated if our IPSes didn’t go onto becoming permanently interrupted power supplies (meaning, they don’t get charged enough to discharge adequately and have therefore, died).

But, if we were to take a truly empathetic insight into the scenario, we will realise that none of us are exactly certain about what the term ‘digital’ implies. It could mean one in a million things, such as driving more fuel consuming vehicles (?!), befriending top government officials on Facebook (!!!), changing our middle names online to suit the debated history of our nation in relevance to the ruling party, spending intoxicating amounts of cash to live the ‘advanced’ way only to realise we don’t know how it should be lived, carrying sunlight (Robi) phones and so on. Given none of us really know what we should be expecting; maybe the unprecedented load shedding is actually part of the bigger picture, a digital revolution unfathomable to our mere mortal intelligence.

Maybe, this is a calling for us to become less mechanised and start acting like human beings, not machines locked in a tiny cubicle. Now, who would have thought that, huh? Because we cannot be glued to ‘digital’ boxes otherwise known as computers, televisions and cellular phones, we are forced to interact within a more personal, physical proximity. We get out of our houses to breathe excessively carbonated air and meet our neighbours, people we didn’t even know existed until the day the lights went out… for good. We smack a punch at our friends and say, “LOL, poked!” We shake our worse halves vigorously and scream, “Reply koro na keno? I am nudging you!” We squeeze a stranger’s nose and announce, “iLike!” Truth is, we are being saved from a major phenomenon and when Google and Facebook take over the world to preach GooBookism, we will be the only lot to have conserved what Adam and Eve mistakenly gave us too much of.

Guess who has the last laugh then, huh?

No, seriously with a near 2000 megawatt of power deficit and an economy of approximately 160 million people to run, load shedding is more than just a problem. In 3rd grade science class (that’s way back in the ’90s), we were often asked to imagine life without electricity and it seemed frightening. Suppose we all exaggerated life without electricity is possible, not frightening and surprisingly (to date) sustainable. How our newly digitized economy is running is beyond the scope of our Business School professors in college. They say this is no ordinary darkness, this is advanced darkness. This is digital darkness.

Published in Rising Star, The Daily Star, 08 April 2010, in collaboration with Sabhanaz Rashid Diya