http://tajikam.com

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Financial Times by Jon Boone

Shopping with her sister for vegetables and fruit in one of Dushanbe’s bazaars last week, Farida, a young Tajik woman, is extremely cautious about how she spends her money. The family budget is just $100 a month, a total dependent on whether her father, working on a construction site in far-off Moscow, is in work or not.

“We will spend hours trying to find the best deal and cheapest food, even if the vegetables are soft and mushy. We rarely eat meat.” If they run short one month they can turn to their two aunts, whose husbands also work in Russia, for financial help. It is estimated that, of a population of 7m, 1m Tajiks are doing the dirty jobs Russians do not want to do themselves and who cannot find jobs in their own country, whose sclerotic economy is crying out for reform.

About $1.8bn is sent back in remittances each year, making it vital for a country with a gross domestic product of just $3.6bn. The International Monetary Fund’s resident official describes the money as the “vital social safety net” that the government itself has singularly failed to provide.

Some foreign observers believe that, in a country where half the population lives in poverty, it is one of the few things keeping the troubled former Soviet colony from hurtling off the rails. “The real nightmare scenario will be what happens when the work dries up in Russia – construction is usually the first thing to go in a slowdown, and that is where most of the Tajiks are thought to be working,” says one western diplomat in Dushanbe, the capital.

Part from Hegel’s “Philosophy of History”.
by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1770-1831, German Philosopher

The Zend People derived their name from the language in which the Zend Books are written, i.e., the canonical books on which the religion of the ancient Parsees is founded. Of this religion of the Parsees or Fire-worshippers, there are still traces extant. There is a colony of them in Bombay; and on the Caspian Sea there are some scattered families that have retained this form of worship. Their national existence was put an end to by the Mahometans. The great Zerdusht — called Zoroaster by the Greeks — wrote his religious books in the Zend language. Until nearly the last third of the eighteenth century, this language and all the writings composed in it, were entirely unknown to Europeans; when at length the celebrated Frenchman, Anquetil- Duperron, disclosed to us these rich treasures. Filled with an enthusiasm for the Oriental World, which his poverty did not allow him to gratify, he enlisted in a French corps that was about to sail for India. He thus reached Bombay, where he met with the Parsees, and entered on the study of their religious ideas. With indescribable difficulty he succeeded in obtaining their religious books; making his way into their literature, and thus opening an entirely new and wide field of research, but which, owing to his imperfect acquaintance with the language, still awaits thorough investigation.