KC Writes

26 June 2025 In the very beginning, there was no India as we know it today. Imagine a land with rivers flowing, different tribes living their lives, their sacred songs filling the air, and fire playing a central role in their rituals. Then, one significant day by the Ravi River, it seemed like fire itself made a choice. The Battle of the Ten Kings wasn’t just a small squabble over some land for their animals. It was a pivotal moment when Vedism—the early form of what would become Hinduism—started to solidify its future path. King Sudas of the Bharatas, with his priest Vasishtha guiding him, stood against not just ten other tribes, but in a way, against the more diverse and varied beliefs of the early Vedic world. With their victory, a new kind of order began to emerge – more centralized, focused on specific rituals, and perhaps a bit more exclusive. From the aftermath of this tribal diversity rose the Kuru Kingdom. Think of it as the first real political state in Indian history, an...

24 June 2025 Bangladesh’s financial sector, particularly its non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs) and leasing companies, isn’t just struggling — it’s bleeding out. For the past 16 years, a toxic cocktail of systemic corruption, crony capitalism, and a shocking erosion of regulatory independence has turned these vital financial entities into personal piggy banks for a select few. The numbers are chilling: over Tk 92,000 crore has vanished in major scams across the broader financial landscape, and Non-Performing Loans (NPLs) have surged by an unprecedented 713% since 2009, reaching a staggering Tk 4.20 trillion by March 2025. This isn’t just mismanagement — it’s a deliberate, calculated plunder of our nation’s wealth, with specific entities like People’s Leasing and International Leasing at the epicenter. At the core of this disaster lies the rot at the top. Bangladesh Bank executives weren’t merely negligent — they were instructed to  look the other way  as banks and finance...

 22 June 2025 The world loves its convenient fictions. The plight of the Rohingya—those weary, stateless souls penned into the fetid camps of Cox’s Bazar—is too often flattened into a simple tale of ethnic hatred. True, Buddhist nationalism has burned hot in Myanmar for decades. But look closer. Peel back the pieties and platitudes, and you’ll find something darker at play: the cold, calculating hand of greed, cloaked in the garb of prejudice. And behind it? The long shadow of a rising imperial power, staking its claim in blood and concrete. For over a thousand years, the Rohingya and their ancestors have tilled the earth, fished the coasts, and prayed on the western rim of today’s Myanmar. From the 7th century onward, Arab traders, the Bengal Sultanate, and local kingdoms forged a mosaic of cultures in Arakan. The name Rohingya itself—mocked as a modern invention by Myanmar’s rulers—echoes in records as far back as the 18th century. “The Rohingya are as native to Arakan as any oth...

20 June 2025 The rivers that carve through Bangladesh tell a story not just of water and land, but of human journeys spanning millennia. At the apex of the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh has always been a crossroads—where people met, mingled, and moved on, leaving behind echoes in the soil and the skin, in memory and in blood. Here, history isn’t neatly buried. It seeps into daily life. Into how we cook. How we build. Even how we trade. We like to speak of ancient civilizations as if they’re finished—dead, dusted, and stored behind museum glass. But Michel Danino, Indian scholar of French origin and author of The Lost River, throws a quiet challenge at that idea: What if the Indus Valley Civilization never really ended? Danino has spent decades chasing the traces of the Harappan world—its bricks, its beads, its buried rivers. And his conclusion is simple but profound: the Indus didn’t vanish. It survived. Not in pyramids or palaces, but in the unnoticed—mud homes, kitchen habits, local craf...