As though the world needs to be reminded from time to time that among us lurk monsters of unscrupulous conscience, those whose characters are tinged with a psychopathic pathology so evil that they conspire deliberately or through inaction to compel misery and death upon others.

From the category of unmerciful tyrants who consign their populations to dire poverty, ill health and slaughter to the predators on the world scene who consider themselves aids to the Grim Reaper in the consecrated virtue of servicing religion through wholesale death and destruction, to those who are so consumed by greed that they prey upon the indigent who have little choice but to work for wages insufficient o provide them with the necessities of life, we are made aware of the fragile, transitory nature of human rights.

Those who have it in abundance, the assurances of their rights as a human being to live free and be enabled to live a decent life, one that provides a living wage for an honest day's work and protection under robust laws of equality and justice so families can grow and thrive and aspire, under a civil social contract give a thought now and again to those whom fortune has delivered to a vastly different kind of fate.

Bangladesh exists in the Indian subcontinent, once part of that vast geography that India represents, then part of breakaway Pakistan, and then through another human-devised social-religious cataclysmic rupture, become a nation in its own right. A nation whose ethnic and religious makeup mark it as different from its neighbours in part, but yet those differences are in fact slight; all human beings require the very same life assurances. The poverty-stricken in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan are held in triple thrall; to sectarian violence and strife, ethnic, tribal adversities, and the iniquitous ability of the social and financially advantaged to control and menace their already miserable lives.

Hundreds of impoverished factory workers, earning the pittance that stands between starvation and endurance, are still missing after the collapse of the building that housed numerous factories producing textile products for the advanced countries of the world in Savar, Bangladesh. The country's own safety and security authorities who ordered the obviously collapsing building to be vacated, hadn't bothered to see that their own orders to evacuate were followed. The building owner had connections where they counted.

Well over 300 hundred people are dead, their relatives in mourning, while others are maimed and suffering. Hundreds of people are still thought to be alive and in pain within the collapsed building complex. It defies any concept of humanity to think of people -- the building owner, the factory owners, the public authorities -- whose consciences have been so utterly compromised that they shrugged off the inevitability of the disaster that occurred.