Background
As East Pakistan struggled to become the separate state of Bangladesh during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, the political and military turmoil and associated atrocities led to a massive refugee problem, with at least 7 million displaced people pouring into neighbouring India. East Pakistan had recently endured devastation as a result of the Bhola cyclone, and the Bengalis' desperate plight increased in March that year when torrential rains and floods arrived in the region, threatening a humanitarian disaster. Quoting figures available at the time, a Rolling Stone feature claimed that up to half a million Bengalis had been killed by the cyclone in November 1970 − "a figure impossible to understand" − and the Pakistani army's subsequent brutal campaign of slaughter under Operation Searchlight accounted for at least 250,000 civilians “by the most conservative estimates”.
Appalled at the situation affecting his homeland and relatives, Bengali musician Ravi Shankar first brought the issue to the attention of his friend George Harrison in the early months of 1971, over dinner at Friar Park, according to Klaus Voormann’s recollection. By April, Shankar and Harrison were in Los Angeles working on the soundtrack to the film Raga, during which Harrison documented his early thoughts on the Bangladesh crisis in his song “Miss O'Dell”. After returning to England to produce Apple band Badfinger’s new album, Straight Up, and guesting on John Lennon’s Imagine − all the while, being kept abreast of the worsening situation via Shankar’s newspaper and magazine cuttings − he was back in LA to finish the Raga album in late June. Harrison would later talk of spending “three months” on the phone, trying to organise what became the Concert for Bangladesh (implying that efforts were under way from late April onwards), but it is widely acknowledged that the project began in earnest during the last week of June, five or six weeks before 1 August.
Read more about this topic: The Concert For Bangladesh
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)