Timeline: July 18 – July 19, 2006

Public transportation service from Khulna to Bagerhat is extremely poor. These two districts are only 30 kilometers apart, though the bus takes almost an hour to reach. Rupsha river separates the districts, and the newly built 1.4 kilometer bridge stands high. Yes, it’s named after Khan Jahan Ali as well.

I stayed overnight at Khan Jahania Gono Bidyalaya, which is less than a kilometer away from the famous Shat Gombuj or the “Sixty Dome” Mosque. Contrarary to it’s name, the Mosque doesn’t have sixty domes, but a total of eighty one. Seventy seven domes are over the roof and four domes are on four corners. There are sixty pillars supporting the mosque, and that’s how it got it’s name. Built in 1459 entirely with stones and red burn mud, the mosque measures 160′ x 108′ and the interior is beautifully decorated with terra cotta.

Bagerhat Museum is just beside the mosque, and it has quite a good collection of local antiques, mostly pottery and terra cotta.

The burial place of Khan Jahan Ali was near too, and I gave it a visit. My guide was a local electrician cum folk singer cum painter who has a very good relation with the people taking care of the burial place, or the maazar. The scenario inside the maazar looked a lot like what goes on inside Hindu temples. Some people have turned this sacred place into a business venture, and charges money from the visitors. I didn’t had to pay anything since my guide was their friend. The religious radicalism surrounding this place has got nothing to do with Islam.

Beside the burial lies a very big pond called “Thakur Dighi” and guess what’s in there! Crocodiles! Yes, dozens of crocodiles! They lived there for more than 500 years, and my understanding is that their ancestors were brought from Persia or Arabia by Hazrat Khan Jahan Ali. Interesting, huh?

It took eight long hours to reach Khulna, the so called industrial capital of Bangladesh. The 335 kilometers journey wouldn’t have been so boring and tiresome if the Volvo service of Green Line was better. Their AC acted weird, the TV blew up, the seats were uncomfortable, the mineral water had a bad odour, and the guide never apologised despite of so many problems. If I wasn’t carrying my iPod, then I would have surely died of boredom. A good lesson learnt, I’ll never ride on Green Line bus again.

I checked in at Hotel Royal, the best hotel in the region. Their services were of international standards, but surprisingly the room rent wasn’t too high. The room was well groomed with international standard fixtures, the bed was comfy, the room service was quick, and the room attendants appeared well trained. They have a bar too.

I roamed around the town, visited the New Market, but I wasn’t too impressed. Despite being the divisional head quarter of the division, the city was much smaller than I expected. It’s not too developed either. There were handful of cars in the road, and the buildings looked pale. Load shedding is a major problem of the city dwellers. Khulna city had nothing that can be compared to Dhaka, not even with port city Chittagong. Just imagine what kind of city it is where the shutters of shops get closed by 9 PM!

Just a few observations: 1. The dialect of Khulna people isn’t too difficult to understand. 2. The rikshaw fair is pretty cheap. 3. People of Khulna seems to be too obsessed with Hazrat Khan Jahan Ali, the 15 century Islamic religious leader and a ruler. Roads, schools, shops, buildings, companies, and a lot of installations are named after him.

If you are Mambo user and using Galleria, SimpleBoard, or ExtCalender components, then be careful. A Remote Include Vulnerability has been discovered, and a lot of Mambo run sites using one of these components are being hacked and defaced. To save yourself from this epidemic, check for this line on top of all the PHP files on your component directories:

defined( ‘_VALID_MOS’ ) or die( ‘Direct Access to this location is not allowed.’ )

If it’s not there on every pages, then add it on the top. If available, it’s always the best option to update your modules and components to the latest stable version.

Remeberber: if apache.org or whitehouse.gov can get hacked, so can be yours. Be careful. Very careful. There’s nothing called security in this crazy world.

Timeline: July 11 – July 13

It was my first trip to Joypurhat, a North Bengal district 380 km from Dhaka. It was infact my first trip to North Bengal as well, the vast region on the other side of Jamuna river.

Since there isn’t any AC bus service available on this route, I had to travel by Hanif Paribahan. I listened to my crazy collection of trance music through out the journey, so I didn’t get too bored. More over, crossing the 4.8 km Jamuna bridge (which is 110 kilometers northwest of Dhaka) was exciting. To date, it’s the longest brigde in South Asia, and 11th longest in the world.

It took 8 long hours to reach Joypurhat. My destination was further 15 kilometers from the town, a village in Pachbibi upa-zila. Pachbibi is completely an under developed rural area, with rikshaw vans as the only means of transport. It was quite surprsing for me see only a handful of real rickshaws around. The Indian border and Hili land port was near to where I stayed, I was informed that a lot of villages are involved with smuggling.

There’s a good number of indigenous population in the area, making it a heaven for a lot of local and international NGOs. A Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) mission school is also in the area, and I was told by my guide that they receives a huge funding from USA. I was told that they have their own backup generators, water supply system, air-conditioned rooms, computers lab with 50+ PCs and so on. I wanted to visit them, but couldn’t manage the time to do so.

An interesting point to mention before I end. If you go to a tea stall in Joypurhat, then this is how they’ll serve your tea: they’ll fill two-third of the cup with milk, and then one-third with tea! Should we call it it tea with milk, or milk with tea, that remains the question.

I went to Dhaka zoo today, and I absolutely hated it! It’s a nasty place with lots of nasty animals! It looked to me that the elephants didn’t take shower for months! The lions, tigers and the hippopotamus were stinking! A cheetah was bleeding as her tail was badly bitten off by another cheetah! Most of the poor animals looked ill-fed and seemed like there’s isn’t any vets in Bangladesh!

The stupid government can’t take care of the poor animals just like they can’t take care of us! Fuck the goverment!

As a spam fighting measure, most bloggers are using Nexodyne’s E-mail Icon Generator, which displays your e-mail addresses on graphical buttons. It supports major e-mail service providers and puts their logo after your username. Here’s how my Yahoo! address looks:

I’ll never need to use this button as I’ve better ways to protect my e-mail addresses from spam harvesters.