SAESM 2008

One of my students writes about her SAESM 2008 experience:

Bangladeshi Flag Flies High at SAESM 2008
Mahjuja Taznin

Bangladesh keeps up their repute at this year’s SAESM 2008 in the University of Delhi, India hosted jointly by Ramjas College and Miranda House from the 10^th to the 12^th of March. This year’s Meet has expanded and diversified beyond the usual paper presentations and the inter-country economics quiz, to include three new categories: a rapporteurship competition, a budding-economist competition and a panel discussion. With so many exciting and engaging events over three days instead of the customary two, SAESM this year was more like an Olympics of sorts than a conference!

The Meet began with the Inaugural on the afternoon of the 9^th of March at Ramjas College with a traditional Indian welcome from Ramjas and Miranda students complete with a red carpet, rangoli, tikkas and the traditional lamp lighting. After the Inaugural, we went down to business on the 10^th of March with the paper presentations initiating the first session, the presentations were each restricted to fifteen minutes and two participants in each theme from each country. Of the four themes for this year, ‘Accelerating Rural Growth and Empowering the Rural Poor’ was the theme for the first session. With the participants sequenced according to alphabetical order of countries, Bangladesh got to go first in all four paper sessions and I must say we held our own as curtain-raisers. In this session Samia Ahmed of the first year from Dhaka University, got introduced to SAESM and hopefully this experience will groom her for better performances in the future.

Meanwhile, Fahim Hassan from the third year, Dhaka University, a winner from last year, pulled off another terrific win. This guy is on a roll! Maybe he’ll pull off a hat trick for Bangladesh if he attends next year. Next the participants of the Budding Economists went in for a round of written tests with Biplab Kumar Datta of the fourth year and Syed Mohammed Ishraq Osman of the Masters batch from Dhaka University. The day ended with the exciting preliminary round of the inter-country economics quiz. Bangladesh unfortunately went in without one of its’ two pre-selected contestants who dropped out at the very last moment. Biplab had to improvise with the other contestant Deen Islam also from Dhaka University. But Sri Lanka and Nepal seemed to have been brushing up their skills over the year and became the dark horses of the prelim round while Bangladesh put on a jerky performance.

On the 11^th there were two paper sessions with the day starting with the theme ‘Investing in the Social Sectors’ where Sarwat Jahan and especially Mezbah Uddin of the Masters Batch, both from North-South University, gave very good papers and performances. However, as the saying goes, you can’t win all the time but, Bangladesh definitely put up stiff competition to say the least. Next there was another written round for the Budding Economists after which Biplab made it on as one of the five finalists based on the performance of previous rounds. In the afternoon came the third session with the theme ‘Improving the Quality of Physical Infrastructure’ with Umama Anzalin and yours truly, of the fourth year from Dhaka University. I have to say I didn’t come to this year’s SAESM with any thoughts about winning, but to give an enlightening presentation on my paper, so I didn’t really fret about my presentation timing. Also, this year I felt slack with the fifteen minutes limit compared to six minutes last year when we had to literally memorize our presentation speeches to make it on time. Add that to Rushad Sir’s last minute pep talk about talking slowly, mislead by my fast-tracking on the informal level, you can easily imagine how leisurely I went. I actually wondered as I went on, how brief and basic my presentation was: when all of a sudden, the bell went off twice in quick succession as I expounded my concluding remarks. Like I said, forget about winning, I was extremely embarrassed! I thought I could see Qamrum Nehar Madam brooding in the front row. But being the nonchalant person that I am, I only felt remorseful when Rushad Sir said my paper was a good one and it would have had a good chance of being the best paper if I had a better presentation! Now, if he had bothered to tell me before, I just might have bothered more immaculately about the timing — a perfect case of moral hazard due to asymmetric information if you ask me. My misadventure served as a caution to everyone after me, and Umama and the others raced through their presentations in what I bet was record time. As for me, I got more than consoled by the fact that people actually came up to me to tell me they liked my presentation! I thought at least Umama and I had put up a good show, however, I was shocked out of my socks (even though I wasn’t wearing any) when they called my name as the joint winner in the session with Manka Bazaz from India at the award ceremony. Maybe it was the year of the tortoise (remember the tortoise and the hare?) or, maybe God looked down upon Rushad Sir because he was feeling guilty about telling me to go slow, who knows? However, dear readers have no doubts about Umama’s capabilities; apart from an impressive performance in the conference, she made a winning presentation on behest of the Indian immigration official to breeze through immigration formalities.

Day-2 ended with a tie-breaking grand finale of the inter-country economics quiz between India and Pakistan, you can count on these two countries for making cliff-hangers! Bangladesh’s campaign in the quiz competition completely unraveled in the final, exposing perhaps our need for a brush up.

The third and final day began with the fourth and last session under the theme ‘Accountability, Institutions and Economic Growth’ with Sangeeta Nath of the fourth year and Shah Imran of the third year, both from Dhaka University putting on an excellent performance for Bangladesh. While Imran put up a decent show, Sangeeta was immaculate to say the least. Pakistan also had a decent performance. No wonder everybody looked quite puzzled when an Indian contestant was announced the winner. Meanwhile, Biplab earned us a major victory by cinching the Budding Economist SAESM 2008 title. Biplab was practically a shoo-in, considering the performances of the other four finalists. It was one of the highlights of the whole event as one of the organizers and major sponsors, the IFMR, was involved in choosing the winner. The last round of this competition was the climactic end of the whole conference proceedings and Biplab put up a brilliant show, answering with much aplomb a volley of questions testing the economic and analytical skills of the participants. Clinching the title in this category won Bangladesh lavish praise from all quarters.

Among other competitions, Pakistan won the Rapporteurship competition, the performance of which was left to the discretion of the judges since it was a written competition on how well one participant from each country comprehended the paper session proceedings. Our participant from the rapporteurship, Zannat-E-Noor from North-South University, also put in a dignified performance in the panel discussion but the participant from India deservingly won. However in true purport of a conference, Bangladesh put forward some very innovative and comprehensive views on the themes undertaken and gave a mostly well rounded performance all in all.

Our Cricket Team Sucks but Econ Team Rocks!

Well…after the Pakistan ODI tour..I don’t have much to say. I think we are becoming numb to these demoralizing defeats one after another and more frighteningly our cricketers too. I think it was a disaster to make Ashraful the captain of the team immediately after the world cup 2007. I am not saying this because hindsight is 20/20. Actually I had the same opinion at that time and I wish I started my blog at that time to prove my point.

Ash is no captaincy material, period. He is extremely talented and gifted batsman, but no captain. He is a simple, ordinary man. To be a skillful leader, you need certain kind of charisma and sophistication which Ashraful seriously lacks.

While Ashraful’s batting talent has never been in doubt, we have seen only glimpses of it so far. His consistency in producing big scores is ordinary at best. It would have been good idea to leave our best batsman to solely concentrate on marshalling his batting skills rather than overburdening with captaincy duties. Unlike other sports, a captain in cricket always has a much active and burdensome role to play.

So, immediate solution: remove Ashraful and save Ashraful, save Bangladesh cricket team.

When our high profile cricket team is humiliating us abroad, very low profile economics students of Dhaka university brought us lots of pride from abroad. I was fortunate enough to travel to Delhi, India while our students participated in the 5^th South Asian Economics Students Meet (SAESM). It’s a conference cum competition among the undergraduate economics students from the reputed universities of South Asia like Delhi University, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Colombo University to name a few. It has grown up to be a prestigious event sponsored by World Bank, ILO and other big time organizations. Dhaka university won three out of eight awards : two in paper presentation category and one in the budding economist competition and won lavish praise from all quarters for their stellar performance.

Pohela Boishakh 1415

You know when the festivity is really in the air?

I think its ONLY during the Pohela Boishakh!

You see over the years I kind of got disenchanted with our religious festivals. Our religious festivals are always tied with some sort of responsibility. You have to cook delicious foods (even though you have to stay awake whole night, ask my wife how she likes the idea!) , attend guests etc. Well I am not saying these are pure duties, you would also enjoy doing these responsibilities but still some responsibility.

Now talk about Qurbani Eid. With all the hassles of buying, slaughtering and processing, distribution of animal meat, there is not much room left to feel like festival. It is rather becoming a grueling industrial supply chain process for me. I know lots of people do those things with utter enthusiasm, good for them but not for me! I really don't like the whole city becoming a slaughter house with stinking smell and spluttered blood here and there. Much more civilized approach would have been to pick some separate enclosures for only slaughtering purpose and people would carry back meat home from there.

I am also aware that my view might upset lots of folks and some of them might get so mad that they have already chosen me as their preferred choice of sacrifice for the next Qurbani! I guess I might not be a bad choice in terms of the volume of meat I would generate.

So when you can really say, well, here is the day, I don’t have to worry about nothing, I am gonna enjoy the rest of the day like anything with no threads attached. You go out and you see immediately thousands of people like you . You can feel it in their dresses, in the music, in Ramna, in Dhanmondi, wherever you go.

Pohela Boishakh is one way to express our true cultural identity. It is a purely Bengali occasion. Its for every Bengali in the whole world irrespective of religion and other caste consideration. That makes it much more enjoyable, adds much more color and vibrancy, the hallmark of a true carnival.

I wish I started the day as early as possible but with Nabeel being so restless (he never goes to sleep before 2 am in the morning) it is difficult to manage to be up and going early. I drove to Rajabazar to pick up Suzanna (our driver took the day off) and then headed towards DU campus and soon found it was a bad idea with severe traffic jam in Shahbagh. Much better option would have been to go by the Nilkhet route.

Somehow I gathered my last bit of patience to snail through the huge mass of people, turning a deaf ear to comments like “Gari anar aar jayga pailo na”, I was moving literally inch by inch. Somehow the whole dreadful exercise stopped, Suzanna was quite furious with my idea of bringing the car along and what a start to the day of festival!

We missed the procession arranged by the Art Gallery folks and Suzanna had another go at me for that. Well, what can you say? Not much, Suzanna might be reading the blog anyways.

Some of my good old DU friends gathered in front of the library and chatted like old timers do. Some leg pulling here and there, some laughter, some sigh for lost glory of old days and suddenly half the day is gone.

Then we met some exquisitely dressed young ladies. At first I hardly recognized them cause their appearance went through a drastic makeover with traditional Pohela Boishak attire. Then…. Lo and behold! Well..those were my very own 4^th year students! They looked great and both Suzanna and I were quite impressed.

But not so impressed were some of my friends who just after couple of minutes felt that I am spending too much time with my students while keeping them in safe distance. So I had to hurry back otherwise there was a huge risk of being manhandled in broad day light. Typical male instincts I guess!

We were entertaining thoughts of going either to Gulshan youth club concert or the Dhanmondi concert. Well, if Nabeel had a say, we would have surely ended up going to the Dhanmondi one cause Mila was supposed to perform there. Nabeel is probably the youngest die-hard fan of Mila and after listening to zillion times of the same song with Nabeel I have to admit I kind of like her music too. There is a certain kind of wholesome entertainment in her music. Anyways, we ended up going nowhere. Just pure exhaustion due to heat!

Wishing Pohela boishak grows bigger and better every year. It should be at least two day national holiday. You need at least a day to recover after all those revelries, don’t you?

So how was your Pohela Boishakh?