Unheard Voices

For a long time, I thought it was just me. So, feeling a bit guilty, I told no-one about it. Thought it might fade with time. Then I realised it was here to stay. I’m talking of course of my secret fantasy of driving down Dhaka’s streets in a massive industrial digger. Yellow: it has to be yellow. Every time I come across an irritating driver, I simply scoop him up with my steel grey claw and hurl him, car and all, into a bush. Or alternatively roll over his vehicle like a tank and squash it.

Imagine my relief when, in a moment of weakness, I disclosed this to a close friend, an urbane and respected professional, only to have him reveal that he too had a personal fantasy. His involves having football stadium floodlights attached to his car. Each time someone comes up behind him with their headlights on full beam, he turns on his extra lights and dazzles them, He’s obviously thought this through in some detail, and adds, with a touch of relish, “I’d actually like to burn their retinas”.

Then, at a sophisticated dinner party one evening, I am chatting to an articulate woman, who seems the embodiment of politeness and charm. But in the course of the conversation, when I discuss my intention to write this article, she discloses that she has her own demonic side which only emerges in Dhaka traffic, letting slip that she occasionally dreams of having an automatic machine gun fitted to her car, so that she can simply wipe out those drivers who annoy her, in a hail of bullets.

It seems that Dhaka traffic brings out the worst in us, proving our careful cultivated social demeanour to be a thin veneer. Underneath all of us, the psychopath lurks, brought to the surface by the driving habits of our wonderful metropolis.

Read more here

Started writing again, and thought I might share it with UV, seeing as DP helped me get off the ground in the first place!

It could be a library reading room. Several men, some in suits and ties, poring over texts, heads bowed. Early evening sunlight casting geometric shapes on the walls. Silence, except for the occasional whisper of a turned page, or the harsh cry of a crow on the windowsill.

Your eye travels round the room, taking in these greying, learned readers, many of them retired or senior professors, who have gathered together for a weekend to edit educational texts. And it comes to rest, registering just a faint sense of surprise, on an elderly man sitting in the far corner. Diminutive, bony, long-bearded. He wears a high floppy woolen hat which topples rather comically to one side, and sits, quiet as a shadow, engrossed in his text. At a distance, his eyes appear closed. Perhaps he is actually sleeping gently. And why not? It’s been a long day, and the subject of our gaze is after all approaching eighty years old.

Read more here

“I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words… When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and unrestrained.”

Overheard at the Dhaka Club? Two retired colonels strolling through a park perhaps? An op-ed writer in the Daily Star? No, this quotation, from the Greek poet Hesiod, is just a little older than that. It dates back 2700 years in fact, and just goes to show how bemoaning the youth of today is an ancient and established custom. Much later, a mere two and a half thousand years ago, Socrates is said to have echoed these thoughts, in the following passage attributed to him:

“The young now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect to their elders…. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and are tyrants over their teachers… They talk as if they alone knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them.”

Now Hesiod and Socrates have many advantages over your correspondent, whose words are unlikely to be read two and a half weeks from now, let alone two and a half millennia, but they suffer by comparison in one vital respect: they weren’t at the recent launch of the magazine “Voices of Hope”, and I was. If they had been, they might well have reconsidered their opinion about the youth of today, as there they would have met a highly impressive group of youngsters who are committed to making a difference and to shaping a better world, starting right here at home.

Read more here

The moment I saw it I knew I had to have it. In this image, a small round ball, bathed in light, has come to a stop on a dark cliff, a precipice. The scene is crepuscular and restful, and suggests absolute balance and poise. It represented everything that was missing in my life that day, and seemed a perfect antidote to the chaos and cacophony on the streets outside the gallery. Unaccustomed as I am to acquiring original pieces of art, I bought it, and it now hangs on my wall exuding a meditative calm as I head through the door each day into the jaws of the real world. So naturally, when a series of events leads to the possibility of my meeting the artist, Mohammad Fokhrul Islam, I jump at the chance.

Read more here.

You could easily spend years in this city and not even know of its existence. Hidden away in the triangle formed by upmarket Banani and Gulshan, and bustling Mohakkali, a stone’s throw but also a universe away from the villas and the trendy boutiques, the slum area of Korail is an island of poverty in a sea of affluence. But you won’t find despair or self-pity here. (more…)

(This is a reworked version of an earlier article)

The classic test of whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist is to look at a glass of water, and say whether you think it’s half full or half empty. But what do you call yourself when your natural reaction is to want to pour out the water, which is probably poisoned anyway, and hurl the glass against the wall?

When you survey the state of the world we’ve brought upon ourselves, it’s difficult to conceive of any other reaction. Switch on the news and what do you see? Iraq spinning out of control, and now mired in anarchy, Palestine bruised and beaten, while Iran is now under threat from a bunch of imperialist psychopaths disguised as world leaders, driven by a military-industrial complex gone berserk, and aided and abetted as ever by the supine international media. And all this against the backdrop of a planet slowly heating up around us, destined one day to throw its hands in the air and eject completely this impertinent species called the human race which has so abused its hospitality.

Depressed by this? Don’t change channels yet; don’t turn the page. There’s more: I’m just getting started. Indeed why look outward to the wider world when there is plenty to take in on our own doorstep?

Read more here.

By way of introduction, Asif has asked me to post again, and while many of my pieces do not exactly meet the lofty requirements of acute political analysis and social insight familiar to UV readers, I hope at least that these evoke some memories and give a flavour of the place to those far away…
***

Travelling by coach these days in the UK is a rather colourless experience. Large ergonomically-shaped vehicles with looping mirrors glide in and out of bus stations, the uniformed drivers gently bouncing on their hydraulically-powered seats. Comfortable and on time, they surge along the motorways, stay in lane, and by and large obey the rules. “But where’s the excitement in that?”, I hear you cry. If you want the thrill of a real bus journey, one which connects you with primal feelings of joy, terror and blessed relief, then Bangladesh is where it’s at.

Read more here.

Crossposted from Deep in the Desh

My contract with VSO was for a year, and today I will leave Bangladesh and return to England, bringing this time to a close. And almost certainly this blog, bar a possible epilogue from London. How to surmise a year? I haven’t found religion or myself, but I haven’t really looked. What’s so distracting is Bangladesh; it throws up surprises in every corner and I can’t help but be transfixed by it.

I’ve seen things here that you would never see in the ‘West’, not because people are necessarily so poor or the country so incredible, but because Bangladesh really is like the unsynthesised manifold of human life. Here, I find one can see things in a way that you wouldn’t be able to in Europe, that both the presentation and the perception holds an almost absurd blinding clarity. Bangladesh is what happens if you cram far too many people in to a ridiculous part of the world, prone to flooding, earthquakes and with terrible weather, and don’t provide any kind of adequate infrastructure or governance to accommodate them. In the slums the density is around 200,000 people per square kilometre. There are pockets of shiny Western ‘modernity’ and convenience, but large areas that resemble a Dickensian candlelit world of stories amidst shadows, as if you might concentrate a whole soap-opera in to one little shack.

(more…)

Four Seasons Restaurant burnt, Sat Masjid Road, Dhanmondi
(more…)

Went for a random walk around Dhaka during the 3 hour curfew break.
(more…)

Now that the magnates have won and far more people have cars worldwide, your average city journey anywhere on the planet, certainly including Dhaka, is probably slower than the same trip on horseback. Having air-conditioning is probably the sole advantage to owning a car here. Often, it’d be easier, if only the weather were more inviting, to get out and walk, or perhaps crawl. Even so, a friend of mine who is an authority on transport says the actual volume of traffic is not the key problem: it’s the lack of lane control which really makes the roads tangled.

But there are other drawbacks to mass car ownership. Consider the impact that it has on our city itself. When the motor car begins to dominate our thinking, and becomes available to all, then of course we need wider roads. Once we get wider roads, more people buy cars, until you end up with cities in total gridlock. You also then need flyovers, the clearing of residential space, pushing people further and further out into the suburban sprawl. Contrast today’s concrete jungle with the idyllic evocations I keep reading of leafy Dhanmondi and Lalmatia just a couple of decades back.

Read more here

It was just an off-hand remark – pretty standard fare amongst such circles. I was sitting with a twenty-something audience member after a performance by our jazz duo BlueNote. The scene: an expat club. Balmy evening air, tinkling glasses, the chatter of people looking forward to the weekend after a busy week at work. To make polite conversation, I asked her how long she’d been here, and whether she was enjoying it? “Oh you know” she replied, “it has its moments. Up days and down days. But it’s also really nice to be able to come in here and escape from Bangladesh.” It may be that she was merely talking about the traffic, or the noise, but people rarely stop to specify. It’s the whole shebang that needs escaping from, it seems.

Once I would have been eye-poppingly outraged by such a comment – the casual contempt it implied, and the automatic (and in this case entirely mistaken) assumption that I as another bideshi (foreigner) would agree without hesitation. But now I just feel weary, and rather saddened by this common sentiment, which echoes with so much missed opportunity. Much as I was when someone asked me recently how long I had to go on my contract. I said something like “Just over a year”, and his spontaneous and utterly sincere response was “Oh, not too bad then”, as if it was Alcatraz, not Dhaka I was describing.

What is it that goes wrong? Why is it that such statements can be heard so easily? Read more here.

I was going to tell you about Fatima, the engaging eight-year old I met in Rangpur during my recent trip to visit Madhabi. You may recall that I wrote last year about an offhand remark made one day by Nisit, a teacher educator colleague of mine, to the man driving his rickshaw to work. “You should send your daughter to school” he’d said, then gone on to explain why. He’d thought nothing more of it, until a chance meeting a full three years later, where the same rickshaw driver proudly announced how heíd followed this advice, and how his daughter was now doing well at school.

Read more here

There is no question that when you look around in downtown Dhaka, among the high-rises and the opaque glass palaces of the corporations, past the shining adverts and powerful cars, there is always a fair amount of suffering on display. Into these gaps fall the destitute, the lame, the old, the sightless and the hard-bitten kids who have learnt to survive, at the age of 8, on the harsh streets. And when faced with these Gap People, you can react in so many different ways. You can indulge in warm syrupy feelings of pity, salve your consciences by distributing a few taka here and there, or pretend it isn’t happening by blocking it out and concentrating extra hard on your newspaper.

Alternatively, you can start to do something to make a real change. This is no doubt the most arduous and demanding of all responses, but certainly the most rewarding too. Rezaul Karim is someone who has taken up that challenge with a vengeance, and who is making a difference to the lives of some of the most disadvantaged people in the country.

Read more here.

Have been out of Bangladesh for 2 months now. Looking forward to returning next week. Here’s a little something I wrote recently on the subject…

As the plane banked over Dhaka and roared out into the December night, I looked out of the window at the millions of flickering, pulsing golden lights below, sinking further and further away from me. Each one represented a family home, an office, a factory, and around each of these buzzing bulbs, relationships, hopes and despairs, loves and antipathies fluttered like moths. But as we hurtled upwards, they shrank into silent sparks, then were finally lost in lapping waves of darkness. My head sank back against the seat, and a strange sound escaped my lips. When I played it back in my mind, I realised it was a small sigh.

Read more here.