The Boston Conference on Bangladesh in the 21st Century was envisioned by Bangladesh Development Initiative, a small group of academics and professionals who for the past decade or longer, run an organization that puts out the Journal of Bangladesh Studies (JBS) and occasional books on development.

Information on the group is at www.bdiusa.org

I have been on the editorial board of JBS since 2000 and with the organization’s small executive committee since 2003. In fact, I am currently the Vice President of the group. Because of its small size, the group is very effective at taking decisions and implementing them. What I like about the group is that it gets things done.

Run by a very proactive head, BDI hooked up with another group in Boston, DDBF, to put on this conference on Bangladesh on June 13/14.

The conference took an entire year of planning, as these things tend to. We decided on the theme and topics, put out a Call for Papers that we distributed far and wide. When abstracts came in we selected the first batch, and then papers came in which we reviewed and selected. Finally, the program itself had to be arranged. Much of this was done through email and conference calling during April and May. Apart from DDBF in Boston, none of the organizers were located in the same place.

During June I had been particularly busy at work and could not attend to the conference matters as well so when I went to Boston on the 13th, I was apprehensive and hoped that the arrangements would go well. After searching around a bit, I walked through Harvard Yard to the other side and found the Center for International Governance Studies of the Kennedy School of Government to where the conference was to be. An older African American man who worked within one of the buildings told me “I think the event you are looking for is on the other side of the street in that brown building”.

“Why, did you see a lot of people looking like me going in there?”

He laughed and raised his hand pointing to the color of his skin “and like me”.

I went in. I had missed the morning’s events given that I flew in during the early part of the day and found at least 300 people busily settling in tables with their boxed lunches.

Various younger graduate students and others had been drawn in to help with the registration, audiovisual technical detail, and general information giving.

The conference lasted for two days; the program is still available on the BDI website. It was an interesting mix of participants from Bangladesh and the US, from academe and the private sector, and from journalists to development consultants. There were twenty-year old Bangladeshi Americans mingling with sixty-year old retired civil servants from Dhaka, and wives accompanying participants chatting over tea with young women professors. It was a bit disorienting for me – it seemed like a social occasion because of the range of ages present and the familial environment. For instance, I bumped into a school friend I had not seen in 25 years and we caught up on each other’s lives over dinner. However, like most “educated” Bengali immigrants in the US, I was not used to having Bengalis in my workplace. I had come to the conference in my workplace demeanor, my “pants” and jacket, literally as well as psychically, but felt as though I should have donned a more desi attire so as to be ready for a social event.

Part of this comes from some Bangladeshi immigrants such as myself settling far away from large cities. I live over an hour from Chicago and do not see too many desis. When I do, it is a social occasion - perhaps an Eid gathering, or a Diwali function. Like many others, I am isolated from the Bangladeshi community – except through the Internet.

The conference covered many topics from various disciplines. Broadly there were papers on domestic politics, economic issues such as employment generation, worker remittances, foreign aid, export development, overall development issues, NGOs, health, population, education, environmental problems, and foreign policy. As I mentioned before, papers were presented by a variety of people including social scientists, engineers, scientists, practitioners, and other prominent authors and leaders.

The speakers were experts in their areas as were and session chairs commented on the topics as well. Since sessions were concurrent, it would have been impossible to attend them all. On the first day, I participated in a session on environment, which brought up Bangladesh’s energy prospects and policy, NRB-RB cooperation for environmental policy, and forest preservation. The last topic was mine. While the attendance was not heavy, the questions from those who were there were good. During the keynote speech in the dinner, Dr. Rounaq Jahan brought up some excellent points regarding the need to re-establish democracy in Bangladesh. She pointed out that corruption was somewhat hard to root out, that it occurred because of the kind of social relationships that existed at all levels, within families, businesses, and organizations of all kinds. Thus rooting out corruption would entail self-examination by all of us of our every day relationships so as to democratize our society and act ethically at every moment.

The dinner was followed by a cultural program, which entailed Bangladeshi songs and dance. These were well performed by a welcome mix of professional and amateur talents.

The next day’s programs entailed similar concurrent sessions and keynote speakers. At the end of the day, there were breakout sessions on some of the key topics that were entertained throughout the conference. These included education, employment and growth, foreign policy, macroeconomics and finance, NGOs, health, and population, and governance and democracy. I facilitated the session on macroeconomics and finance, which was combined with employment and growth. There were many opinions from experienced economists, bankers, and writers as well as younger eager professionals who were very concerned with investment and growth in Bangladesh.

What struck me during the focus group and other sessions is the interactions between older seasoned thinkers who have been working in or on Bangladesh for decades and the young men and women who were either in graduate school or relatively early in their careers in the US. There was both a mutual respect for each other’s ideas as well as impatience with the old and unseasoned thinking.

Later in the day, the thoughts that had been collected from participants were presented to the entire audience and the conference was formally brought to an official end on Saturday June 14.

As I headed back to the T to get to my hotel, I thought what a lively gathering it had been. Bangladeshis are very attached to their country and communities. The love that they have for the land comes from so many different areas of work. The large number of books sold by University Press Limited who had a stall at the conference indicated the high level of interest. Everyone was eager to do something for Bangladesh – they were interested in “giving back” in some way. I thought of the two papers on worker remittances that had been presented and realized that NRBs wanted to do more than just send money back. They wanted to part of a process of institutional building and investment in Bangladesh. It was not simply about being proud of where they were from. I thought of why I seem to work only on Bangladesh. The entire universe seems to be contained there for me – perhaps I was not the only one who felt that way.

Photo: Malina Mohiuddin, Iqbal Hossain