I created a company in America called Gonofone, which in Bengali means people's phone.

This lawyer examined the documents in Bengali submitted by the complainant and made inquiries with the Madaripur Magistrate's Court.

For many years indigenous tribes in Tripura, India, have worked to have Kokborok used in their primary schools, where only English and Bengali had been taught.

Moreover, while Kokborok speakers want to use Latin script to facilitate the transition to higher education, the Bengali script predominates in the region, which has led to protests and social unrest.

We'd all seen matches in Kolkata, but we'd never seen anything like this Shah Rukh, with the Bengali song, getting the audiences all worked up for Kolkata not for India, but for Kolkata.

In November 1970, tropical cyclone Bhola struck East Pakistan, killing between 300,000 and 500,000 people. Bhola is still considered one of the worst natural disasters on record, and the military dictatorship s lukewarm relief efforts incensed the Bengali population.

With support from the civilian population, as well as from the Mukti Bahini, an irregular army of Bengali rebels, the Indian army swept into East Pakistan. Nixon was too bogged down in Vietnam to do more than issue threats.

Although Myanmar is an overwhelmingly Buddhist country, dozens of religious and ethnic communities have long lived there side by side. In the heart of Yangon, the golden dome of the Sule Pagoda stands just across the street from the minarets of the Bengali Mosque.

Traditionally, under Bengali Sufi mystical teachings, the majority Muslim population lived peacefully with other religions, and Bangladesh had a good record on education and civil rights for women. Until recently, Muslim fundamentalists were discredited, because militias such as al Badr and Razakar had supported atrocities against civilians during the civil war of 1971.

To its credit albeit under pressure from donor countries the Bengali authorities seem to sense that their country is drifting toward becoming a failed state and are making greater efforts to arrest Islamist killers, despite some of them being part of the ruling coalition. Two radical Islamist groups have also been banned.

The comprehensive defeat of the Islamist parties that sought to take Bangladesh away from its democratic and secular roots, and which had sought in 1971 to impose Urdu as a national language and suppress Bengali language and culture, is the real story of the election. The vote demonstrated that Bangladesh s 153 million people have little appetite for bringing Islamism into politics.

The NGO Taskforce against Torture has documented over 500 cases of torture and intimidation by radical Islamists, who also have murdered supporters of the Communist Party, such as Abdul Kayyam Badshah. Indeed, Hindus, Christians, and Buddhists have been targeted as well, and religious extremists more recently have attacked Sufi shrines deemed to be idolatrous, and even Bengali cultural events that unite all religions in a common identity.