Laser fact: It’s actually an Acronym
Acronyms, small words that have a bigger meaning that what we would expect. Many times, we say or see them be used in such a way that we put a label to the acronym without knowing the meaning of the said acronym.
One example of this would be LASER. The word has been used so much in our time that we connect it to a futuristic gun, a light saber or a simple laser pointer. However, what many of us fail to realize is that the term laser is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.
What seem to happen is that with enough repetition, we soon start to accept the term laser as an actual word and not as an acronym. Like Adrono theorized, that with enough repetition, we the listener, can start to accept or find meaning to a certain song. In this case the argument would be a word/acronym.
The same was going on in the book The Spectral Wound by Nayanika Mookherjee. When films and advertisements tried to put birangonas as a branding icon then the real image of a birangona becomes distorted to a point which villagers might start to argue against the women that suffered in the 1971 war. In other words, the movie that shows a seductive Bengali woman entice a Pakistani soldier on to her, with enough repetition, might become the image that people tie when they hear the word birangona. This is troubling to the women that went through that experience since their testimony is being challenged by marketing and pop culture.
The reason why an ad would have such an image is that the birangona are what seem to be uniting a country together. I found this to be odd in that many countries are proud of their history since it contains moments of victory, but Bangladesh is mostly united through a victimized history. In other words, the people seem to rally together when reminded of the horrible past they endured.
Although the idea of honoring the women is there it seems to be out of context since as many would have seen exoticism sells more. So, by having a “birangona” as more sexual, the entire people might start to believe that the testimonial accounts the actual women are false. With enough ads being placed, the Bengali people might start to believe the marketing and advertisements as true. So instead of imaging the face of a women fighting from being raped, the people might instead imagine a Bengali woman inviting for someone on to herself.
Just as the term laser, there is a history behind the term but because we see it used so much we tend to link it to what we see on films and ads like laser pointer. We forget or disregard the history or the actual meaning of a term and instead take the definition that we see in our popular culture. The term birangona was supposed to represent a “brave women” but with advertisement depicting another image, this meaning becomes distorted and can cause it to mean something else.
