Dhaka, Aug. 15 -- I remember once seeing a political advertisement that featured a forlorn matriarch of the native Americas in gorgeous ethnic dress. The caption went like this: "People look at what we wear. They don't see who is wearing them."

In the advertisement, the exotic clothing is strikingly visible: What it obscures is the marginalisation of the human living within those garments. Her invisibility attests to the way in which the so-called march of progress trivialises the wayside-fallen, those who, in a broader global context, have been called the war-disabled of competition. War is not only the physical extinction of the vanquished by the victorious: It is the ideational disablement of survivors in the victor's version of histo...