Here is a strange paradox. The liberation struggle itself was a war of the largely unarmed against the power of the Pakistani army. The people went out with bamboo staves, poor indigenous weapons, against those they had come to see as an occupying force. At Independence the economy was shattered - centuries of extraction by the Moguls, by the British Raj, by West Pakistan. There seems to be so little curiosity in a 'world community' which has so much time to monitor the affairs of an Iraq or a former Yugoslavia, as to why and how Bangladesh lives.
Many Bangladeshi intellectuals ask why no one wonders how the people survive.
A hundred and twenty million people on 56,000 square miles of land - it looks like a hopeless situation. If the people of the Western world were excluded from health care, social and government services, they would either make a revolution or they would perish. Of course people have large families. Where there is no security, the only certainty lies in networks of flesh and blood. If parents have six or seven children, they do so in the certainty that at least one or two will perish.