India, Dec. 21 -- The rice shoots slept in the mud. The farmer, seeking rapid growth, pulled them upward, one by one. "I have taught them to grow," he said. At sunrise, the meadow lay barren and pale. To lift the stem is not to rise, roots must embrace the earth below. (Zen Parable)

In Dhaka's acrid haze-the lingering residue of torched newsrooms like Prothom Alo and The Daily Star-the world stumbles over its own shock. Smoke still stings foreign eyes, yet global powers had long celebrated this turmoil as democracy's triumphant dawn. They missed the threads unraveling beneath their gaze: not liberation, but collapse. What emerged after Sharif Osman Hadi's assassination was no democratic dawn, but a Frankenstein state stitched from mob fu...