Tuesday, 30 September 2014
Sunday, 28 September 2014
রেজওয়ানা চৌধুরী বন্যা ♥♪♥ Rezwana Choudhury Bonnya
রেজওয়ানা চৌধুরী বন্যা ♥♪♥ Rezwana Choudhury Bonnya ♥♪♥ PC: IBANGLAUTSAB.ORG
Saturday, 20 September 2014
Sunday, 14 September 2014
It’s more than the Mother Earth
Mizan Rahman
Even while the flight was still in the air, approaching the runway for
landing, most of the Bangladeshi passengers hastened to unbuckle their
seta-belts and started a mad rush for their overhead (and invariably overweight)
bags. They all wanted to be the first to get their bags out at the gate, the
first to leave the plane, the first to be at the immigration line. Nobody but
nobody was paying any attention to what the poor air-hostess was trying to announce
at the top of her voice, her desperate plea for them to get back to their seats
and keep their seat-belts buckled until the plane comes to a full stop at
the gate. It all fell on deaf ears. It was in defiance of all aviation laws, as
if to declare that now that they in their own land they do not have to abide by
the “white man’s laws” anymore. All they
had in mind is a race, a fierce, unyielding competition to beat others, by
whatever means it takes, to be at the gate ahead of everybody else. “To be the
first at the gate” seems to have become a national obsession with our people,
completely oblivious of the fact that in the process they have managed to fall
behind almost every other nation in the world.
It was just three years before, the last time I visited Bangladesh, I
couldn’t but marvel at the enormous size of the new airport building, as well as the smart and prompt service at
almost every official counter, both immigration and customs. This time,
however, things were markedly different. I was standing near the middle of a
long line-up at the immigration counter holding my “foreign” passport, when a
small plain-clothed fellow came from nowhere and snatched the immigration forms
I had in my hands. Before I could react he declared in a semi-official voice
that I am a “foreigner”, so I needed expert help in filling out the forms
properly, which he was there for, as a representative of the People’s Republic of
Bangladesh, to help doing, free of cost. Annoyed as I was at his not-too-polished
manners I was nonetheless pleased that the Government seems to have gone out of
its way to help the nonresident travelers through the rather confusing process
of immigration and customs. Until I realized that this clever fellow’s motives
were less than entirely altruistic toward the “poor foreigners” as he obviously
would like to think of us. In fact it was more than likely that he was in
league with the rest of the immigration officials in the building trying to
spot the foreign passport holders, use their well-honed skills to fleece them
out of a few precious US dollars or British pounds. For he not only “filled up” my forms that I had already done myself, but managed to whisk
me through the front of the line, ignoring the fact this was a blatant breach
of official rules, then get my papers quickly signed and sealed by the
‘kind-hearted’ officer at the booth. Tired and exhausted as I was after a long
sleepless journey I couldn’t help feeling deeply embarrassed by this whole
episode of receiving “precious little help” from no less than the
representatives of the Govt. of Bangladesh without even asking for it, and in
such an irregular manner. But the motive became clear only later, when I was
getting ready to leave the immigration doors. This “kindly” gentleman stood in
my way almost blocking the exit, and asked in a somewhat demanding tone:
“Didn’t you forget something, sir?” Oh
yes, of course, I did indeed. The tips---the ubiquitous tips. Fortunately I had
an extra dollar in my pocket. What I didn’t know, however, is that a dollar is
not an acceptable currency anymore at the Dhaka airport-----the minimum is a 5
dollar bill, even for a street beggar. I didn’t have a 5 dollar bill, only a
couple of dollar bills and a 10 dollar one.
The wily fellow somehow managed to rid me of the bill with the higher
denomination.
Three years before I had vowed to myself, as I was boarding the flight
out of Dhaka airport, that it would be the last time I’d have visited my country.
Nothing against the country, of course, it’s
just my own failing health and my inability to stay well for more than a week.It
seems my body had a special affinity for all the deadly virus and bacteria of
Bangladesh. In less than a week of my arrival I find myself coughing
and sneezing, or visiting the toilet far too often . The poor sister of mine
finds herself running from doctor to doctor, and from one clinic to another,
trying to find relief for her ailing Canadian brother. It’s only near the end of my stay I may start
feeling a little better, but by that time it’s time to leave. So, what’s the
point going there in the first place?
And yet, hello there, I am here once again. My sons were not too pleased
with me that I broke my own promise. They pleaded with me to reconsider my
“foolish” decision to take the same trip yet again. For heaven’s sake, dad, cancel your flight,
and save us from having to die out of worrying for you all the time”. I’d say
to that, rather mischievously: “Good, let this be your turn to worry for me.
This will be an earned payback for the years and years of continuous worry that
your mother and I had to go through when you were young. We worried because you
we loved you and because you are so precious to us. And now you will worry for
the same reason”. Then I added:“ Why do I break my promise again and again? For
the same reason. Love. I love my country. Pull of one’s land of birth is a very
strong force. It’s like the adolescent love----intense and irrational. It
doesn’t add up to any logical end-----it is like the center of a strong
gravitational force from some unknown part of the universe. You are completely
helpless in its field. To tell you the truth, my boys, this is the only love
that outlives every other love of life----this blind love for your own country.
All other material love will soon fade away, only this one will keep growing.
Particularly with distance. And with age.The farther you are from your country
the stronger you feel for it. Strange,
isn’t it? Perhaps it’s a bit hard for you to understand these peculiar aspects
of human nature, but you will one day as you get older.“
And yet, I know much too well that the country I’ve come to visit now is
not the same country I knew in the past. The land that was once my endless
playground, with her wide open space for my adolescent adventures to go wild at
times, has long been lost. But wait a minute. Am I talking about the loss of a
land, or the loss of my past? Spring comes only once in a man’s life, right? Everything is colorful at that time. One feels
that he is the center of the universe----everything around him has been put in
place just to please him. The world was a huge orchestra that was playing to
his favorite music, an endless garden that was ablaze with flowers of all
colors and fragrance.
I went to my old village for a brief visit. Accompanied by two sisters
and two brothers. When I was a young boy I’d think nothing of jumping on a
crowded, filthy, third class compartment of a local train at the Fulbaria
station near the edge of what is now called the ‘old Dhaka’. Trains in those
days were powered by steam, which to me was great fun because of its slow,
leisurely pace and its apparent disregard for a time schedule. It was just a
short distance by today’s standard, no more than 35 miles, yet the train would
take almost the whole day to reach my destination-----Khanabari station, two
miles from my village Hashnabad. No reason to complain. For me the ride was the
real attraction. And the distance----ah, the illusive distance. Thanks to the
slow pace of the train the 35 miles would seem to be a continent away, the
distance was mesmerizingly alluring. Every time I went to my village I wished
the journey would never end.
But today, alas today, my old frail body, worn
by years and years of use and abuse, is hesitant to take the short trip even
for half of a day. Can’t even imagine boarding a passenger train, third class
or first, steam or diesel, too conscious of safety, infectious diseases, dirty
water, suspicious-looking people. Too careful, too timid to take the next step.
So we decided to go by car instead. Getting a car was not a problem, of course,
every one of my siblings owned a private car, as almost everybody else does in
Dhaka these days. As an expatriate who left his country more than 50 years ago
I couldn’t help seeing the irony that in one generation the status of an
automobile rises sharply from an unreachable luxury to an everyday necessity.
Although my personal choice would have been a train ride if only for the
sake of old times, just to tickle myself with the memories of over sixty years
before, notwithstanding the obvious discomforts in the passenger compartments
and the time it takes to go from one point to another, we opted for the car,
because we couldn’t imagine having to spend the night at our village home, that
could hardly be called a ‘home’ anymore. My ever-caring sisters wouldn’t allow
anything to happen to their beloved brother, their adorable dada, just
because they let their guards down and didn’t think twice before deciding to
stay over in the filthy, unhealthy environment of the village. There are far
too many dangers there-----dirty water, unclean cooking hands of our
well-meaning relatives, and, above all, in the dark of the night village the
thieves and robbers are always lurking in the wings. Even the neo-Islamist
zealots of the village can become a threat for an agnostic Canadian Bangladeshi
like me. Seated comfortably in one of the two cars, my mind, however, oblivious
of all the real and imagined perils of a rural visit, was traveling in a time
capsule while my sisters were drawing up the details of whom to visit in the
village, and where to take me that might be of some interest. I was trying to
recreate the wonderful days of the past that were long gone, and letting my
imagination run wild in a dazed reverie of the mind. But you know something?
Even my imagination doesn’t seem to take me anywhere. It stops at a crossroad.
I do not seem to be the same person anymore. Time has split the person into two
different men. Today our gasoline-powered automobile is barreling along the
intercity highways built by the strong hands of the free citizens of a free
country. There are no more of those groves of mangoes lining the two sides of
the road, no seasonal jackfruits to fill the air with their delectably luscious
aroma. Instead, there are teeming crowds everywhere, with their ever present
stench of sweat, their dawn-to-dusk hard labor bearing down on their frail
bodies, turning them into moving shadows in a horror movie. Wherever I look I
see people, waves of people bumping into each other, hanging onto each other, with
no rooms to move, no rooms to breathe, nowhere to look but at each other. The
density is overpowering. There is no nature there anymore, just people and
nothing but people. Wherever I look I see countless rickshaws,
dust-coated dirty buses and baby-taxis and trucks and bullock carts and vans
and rows and rows of push-carts. How many people are there in this tiny
land of mine? Fifteen crores? Maybe sixteen. That was last year’s estimate. It
must have changed this year. Whatever number they come up with today, will rise
by a few hundred thousand tomorrow. Next month it may be a million more. When I
look around with a mental picture of rice-fields spread across miles and miles
of open space under a blue sky all I see is vast construction sites filled with
bricks and bags of sand and cement, all ready to build the next row of
apartment complexes. In vain I crave for the village there was once on this
ground, with its rain-filled river banks, its wide open fields of corn and
grains gently waving at the urban visitors. Where is that village of my youth?
There is no village any more. The village has been gobbled up by the
city. The boys of the village do not live in the village any longer. They have
gone to the city to peddle the rickety rickshaws. And they dream to go
to the rich Arab lands where there are jobs, any jobs, menial jobs--- jobs that
the Arabs are loathe to do themselves. To Kuwait, to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain,
Iraq. Or to the richer eastern countries like Malaysia, Indonesia or Singapore.
Hungry people will go anywhere in search of food.
On your return from the visit to your homeland you are inevitably faced
with one question: how was it? What do you think is the state of the country? A
dull, mundane question, and not too original either. About the state of our
country, my friend, you should know better than I do. It is you who have the
satellite connection with the country, so you can watch every hour of the day
and night what is going on in that god-forsaken country of ours. Fresh,
up-to-date news, if I need to know, can be found from you, every hour by the
hour. Besides, my purpose was not to gauge the overall situation in the
country, rather to spend some leisurely time with my aging siblings,
reminiscing our old times, our lost childhood and adolescence. Also to visit a
few old friends, who are still alive, still have not lost their minds or their
precious memory. If your question is: what did you see in the country,
then it’s a different matter. The eye is mine, so what I see with these
eyes is strictly my seeing-----that can be, and often is, going to be
different from what you or others may see. We all do the act of seeing with a
pair of colored glasses on our eyes----colored by our own beliefs and
prejudices, and preconceived ideas and opinions. I always maintained that men
do not see with their eyes, but with their minds. But you know something? The
truth of the matter is: it doesn’t really make any difference to anyone in the
world what my eyes saw in my country. Or even what I think is going to happen
in future. I do not live in that country. I only go there for occasional
visits, when the conditions are just fine for flying, with a bagful of US
dollars in my pocket, then spend a few leisurely weeks eating rich Bangladeshi
food at people’s homes, then head home (notice that this ‘home’ of mine is not
the same it was a few short years before), as soon as the hot muggy season starts
buzzing in the air. I go to my country just so I can be spoiled by the
new-found comfort and affluence, which
you can see only in one area-----one that is bounded by the magical circle: Gulshan-Banani-Baridhara.
My travel route in Bangladesh usually starts from the airport straight to
somewhere in that holy belt. The people who inhabit those areas are not much
different from what I am-----a migrating winter bird. At least in their
world-view. At home in nice cool days of winter, but to somewhere in the west
when it becomes too hot and uncomfortable. They try to be as respectful to the
local tradition as possible-----they will eat their water-soaked left-over rice, but only once a year, and not
because of not enough fresh food being available, but because it is trendy to
do so------not because there’s not enough food, but because there is too much.
The home of my host in Dhaka isn’t likely to have a hole in the roof for the
summer rain to leak through, it’s not a place where the domestic rodents would
feel comfortable, or the flush floods turning the yards into a river. No, I do
not go to see the ugly side of my country, only the polished, flashy face of
it. My legs will rest on rich carpeted floors in the well-decorated living
rooms lined with impressive collection of libraries, which I doubt if anyone
has ever bothered to read beyond the first page. Every room has an attached
bathroom, even the ‘servants’ quarter’ has its own private bathroom area (see,
how modern, human-right conscious people we have become), which is no small
feat when you consider the fact that it is in a country where you are not
likely to find a single public washroom anywhere in the megacity of Dhaka,
especially when you are badly in need of one.
Years of having lived in Canada, one of the coldest countries in the
world, must have given me an extra sensitivity to the heat of Dhaka, even in
the relatively mild season of winter. But that is not a problem, really, for my
kindly hosts. Every room has an attached AC. This magical acronym, I found out,
is one of the few things the new born babies in our neo-affluent families learn
even before they can fully pronounce their own names. I remember the first time
I heard it in a car I couldn’t figure out what it meant. (Yes, I know what you
will say. By that time I was already getting a bit confused about a lot of
worldly things). My sister had to spell it out for me-----Air Conditioner). So
you see, physical comfort for an expatriate brother or brother-in-law is not a
problem anymore. Everything is there for you-----just have to ask for it.
Western music? Mozart? Bach or Beethoven? They have stocks of those also. You need to get something from the
store? Don’t worry. The driver will take you there, carry your bags, even if
you insist on carrying them yourself, however heavy or light they may be. In
this house nobody carries his/her shopping bags but the driver or the servant,
nobody has ever opened the car door by him/herself. Nobody has ever used the
shoe polish on his/her own shoes, washed the clothes, hung the laundry, or even
changed the baby’s diaper. Now tell me, my friend, having lived in this
environment how much knowledge I’d gather on Bangladesh that would have any
credibility anywhere? As far as I could see Gulshan-Banani-Baridhara is not
Bangladesh------only the streets are. The homes here are the same as you will
find in any modern western home, but the outside is different. The outside is
hell, which people usually mean real Bangladesh. Don’t be shocked if I say that
there are slums in this posh area also-----of course there are. Are there any
slums in Ottawa’s Rockcliffe area, or the US’s Scotsdale? Of course not. But here in Bangladesh the realities are
different. Here the coexistence of a posh area and a run-down slum is the two
sides of the same equation-----one is a consequence of the other. Like the dark
shadows under the bright lamp. One justifies the other. Of course not everybody
looks at these ubiquitous slums of upscale Dhaka as a simple cause-and-effect
situation. Only a nuisance, a disgusting eyesore, as my friends and relations would
have me believe.
I found myself in a rather embarrassing
situation in Dhaka on my latest visit. There was a dinner invitation at a
relative’s place in the evening. A young couple, well-educated, bright and
talented engineers, both husband and wife, which is not too uncommon in modern
Bangladesh. They made a lot of money in their trade, so they can afford the
high living styles of the upscale suburban areas of Dhaka. On their longer
vacations they take the family to the expensive sea-resorts in India. Sometimes
they will take off for a week-long recess to Singapore, just the two of them,
or to some hill-top resorts in the European Alps. For a good life money has
never been a problem for them.
After a hearty meal we were doing
some small talk-----weather in Dhaka and Ottawa, the traffic jams, the
political situation, the rotten state of the education system. Pretty soon we
came upon the hot topic of the day----the non-resident Bangladeshis, NRB in
short. It was hot because only a month ago there was a big conferenceof the
NRB’s from all over the world, considered big experts in their respective areas
of specialty, and hence amply qualified to fly in on expense account, dine and
wine in the best hotels that the city of Dhaka can offer, and utter a few
precious words, some magical words, that would suddenly help open the eyes of
the hapless Bangladeshis to the right ways of how to solve the problems of
their country. The discussion invariably zeroed in on the specific topic of
‘expatriate’ talent, and how that invaluable resource could be made useful for
the greater good of their native country. What exactly they can do, and more
specifically, what are the things that have been done here that can be credited
to ‘nonresident’ talent. So went on the low-key, cool-tempered tone of
conversation, until suddenly there seemed to be an eruption. All of a sudden,
from out of nowhere, this young technocrat who made a ton of money drawing
sketches for fashionable homes and condos and ultramodern shopping malls, burst
out with angry denunciation of the entire class of the ‘so-called non-resident
talents’, saying things like ‘they would best serve their country by just
staying away, do nothing at all’. That they are ‘the real honey-suckers who, in
the name of helping their native country, are coming here to dine and wine in
the best hotels, at the expense of the poor taxpayers, to give us their
so-called expert opinions on what is good for us and what is not. If I had a
say on any of this I’d just shove it on their face, and say: “ thanks but no
thanks, we are doing quite well with or without your help, God is the best
helper of all, please leave us alone, and that will be the best help you can
deliver as far as we are concerned.”’ He was not finished. “You want to know who
are our best friends? Who are doing the
real sacrifice for their country? The real patriots? It’s those poor,
illiterate, ignorant village boys who are earning those precious dollars for
the treasury of their motherland by working like slaves in the oil-rich
countries of the Middle East. You guys are enjoying the best of all worlds in
the affluent west, God bless you, but please, we beg you, do not try to advise
us on what is good for us.” Frankly I was taken aback by the apparent hostility
in his voice-----it was completely uncalled-for, I thought. Nothing that I
said, or was uttered in our otherwise civil discussion, that could have
contributed to the sudden outburst. I know, of course, that our people,
mild-mannered under normal circumstances, can exhibit some unexpected
combustibility with little or no apparent provocation. Obviously his wife,
quiet all the time, and deeply embarrassed by her husband’s lack of common
civility of a ‘gracious host’, decided to put a halt to all the madness, so she
cleverly steered the discussion away from the NRB’s to the harmless family matters. My sense of relief couldn’t
have been more profound.After that barrage of sharp
rebuke of the entire class of the NRB’s all I could look for was a quick and
graceful way to say good night to my hosts and dash for the exit.
But the whole episode, as unpleasant as it
was, kept me awake for the better part of the night. Kept me thinking. Could it
be, despite the absolutely despicable way he had chosen to put it to me, that
there was a grain of truth in what he had to say, I asked myself. Could it be
true that in the name of coming to visit our old country with loads of big
ideas of how to run the country more efficiently, we, the so-called NRB’s,
actually end up adding to its problems? Are we going to be a part of the
solution, or, are we really the
problem, as the fellow said so emphatically? Isn’t it true that we, the
venerable NRB’s, come for short visits to our ‘homeland’, when the weather is
nice, when the political climate is relatively calm, with bagful of theories of
development that we learned from the big professional schools in the West, then
appear on the national television talk-shows to dazzle the eyes of our
wide-eyed viewers with the vast amount of knowledge that we have acquired,
finally to board the return flight as the days start getting a little warmer
and stickier?How many of us can claim to have stayed over for a year or so,
like a great many Indian expatriates do, through thick and thin, to join our
hands with the working mass of our hapless country, without any financial
compensation in return? I wonder. There must be a handful of exceptions, as
there always are, but they are definitely not the rule. At least one person I
know who doesn’t----myself. Today it’s my health that wouldn’t permit me to
prolong my stay, but there were other excuses not to stay when I was much
younger. Today it may be the body, yesterday it was the mind. So would it be
too much of a breach of graceful hospitality if my fellow country-men raise
their collective fingers at me and say: “You have come to have a good time in
our country, so, please have as good a time as you can, but please, we beg you,
do not try to tell us what is good for
us and what isn’t”? No, I don’t think
so.
But despite how acutely aware I may be of my
personal limitations, or those of my other aging fellow nationals from
Bangladesh, there is no denying of the fact that we all originated from this
land-----this is the place where the journey began. Just because we are
perceived to be living in a land of plenty, enjoying the benefits of an
affluent society, doesn’t mean that our lives are but an endless trail of
uninterrupted mirth and happiness-----no, it is not necessarily a garden of
roses as it may seem from a distance. It is true that we do not suffer the same
day-to-day frustrationsand hopelessness that they do at home, so we may not be
privy to their sufferings. But there are some frustrations and hopelessness in
our ‘affluent’ lives also, which may not be easy for the people at home to
fathom. People may live worlds apart, but they all share one common thing:
problems. Their colors may vary, shades may be different, but problems they all
are. It may be hard for my fellow countrymen to believe, but one of the main
sources of our so-called ‘problems’ is our old country----the country we left
behind. The truth of that old adage: “the farther you are the stronger the pull
is”, cannot be fully appreciated until you are far away. And by far the
strongest of these ‘pulls’ arise from the separation from your land of birth.
The ‘land’ doesn’t remain a piece of real estate anymore, no more a piece of
sodden earth, but a beloved face, a home that you have lost forever. It’s not
easy to appreciate from ‘home’ in that long-deserted land, how painful that
‘loss’ can be. In our subconscious mind it can easily trickle into our everyday
thoughts, in our unguarded moments of absent-mindedness, in the jobs we do for
a living, or the things we talk about with our spouses and friends . Not too
infrequently we find ourselves engaged in meaningless squabbles with each other
on issues that directly or indirectly concern the country----sometimes we get
to the point of fisticuffs, or worse. We fight over what is right or wrong for
the country, get ourselves organized into political groups, organize rallies on
the streets of Ottawa and Washington on issues that have nothing to do with the
local population, but everything to do with things that are happening in the
far-away lands. Our bodies may have found a home away from home, but our minds
and hearts remain firmly rooted in the home we are not likely to go back to. So
my friends, it is for more than a few good meals and good laughs and perhaps a
few tears as well, with old friends and relatives, that we spend thousands of
dollars every two or three years to book flights for Dhaka or Sylhet or
wherever the destination may be. It is much more than what the bare eye can
see, much more subtle than the mind can comprehend. It is at the very core of
our existence. It defines who we are, why we are, even though we may not have a
clear idea of what it is. It is with us as a constant companion, as a shadow we
leave behind when we walk. It throbs in our heart continuously, like the heart
itself. Those who have never set a foot out of their country will never
understand what I am talking about. How will they know what drives us to start
talking about our country when we manage to go there on occasional visits?
There may not be much substance in what we say, but God knows there is never a
question of our hearts not being there. We are well aware that we shall not be
able to solve any of the problems that the country is facing, but wouldn’t it
be a bigger problem if we didn’t even think about them?
In a somewhat perverse way I feel grateful to
that rude young man for some of the thoughts he helped implant in my mind.
Having said that I, too, have a few pointed questions to ask the
self-proclaimed ‘patriots’ like him. We, the vilified expatriates, may be all
air and no substance, but exactly what are the invaluable contributions they
themselves are making to the well-being of the country, economic and otherwise?
Yes, they are staying home, perhaps spurning the lure of a comfortable foreign
country, I’ll give them the full credit for that. They are the ones who are
living there through good times and bad, slugging it out with all the dirt and
filth in the air, the myriads of bugs and insects that inhabit their homes, day
after day, year in and year out, which I’ll happily allow them. We are mostly
exempted from that part of the ‘suffering’ if I can call it suffering at all.
But if we can be targeted for ridicule and rebuke because of the perceived
‘luxury’ filled life we lead abroad, why is it that the privileged class that
this particular gentleman and his kind represent should be left unscathed and
untouched? Do they not deserve a fraction of the same rebuke and ridicule that
they have subjected us to? As far as I could tell the amount of luxury goods
that I saw in that house, or in any house of their class will easily exceed the
‘luxuries’ I can afford in my own house in Ottawa, or I will ever desire to
have. My house here is but a small hut compared to the palatial mansions they
have built for themselves on vast tracts of land, where the cost of land is
only comparable with the price of pure gold. For the people living in slums
nearby, the inevitable slums I referred to a little while ago, these rich
people’s big homes are like big insults, mocking them for their very
existence-----a constant reminder of the inequities that pervade the entire
society. These ultra-rich friends of mine may have set up their permanent
residence in the country, but do they really, really, understand what it means
to make a hard-earned living by working dawn-to-dusk in subhuman conditions?
So, don’t you think it would be a tad hypocritical for them to try the ‘guilt’
card on me by telling all the sad tales of the desperately poor people of the
country?
Let me say it straight. I think the big
problem of the problem, if not the basic problem, is the freshly spawning class
of ultra-rich people that we are witnessing since independence in 1971. What
exactly does it mean to be ‘ultra-rich’ these days? First, they are rich,
outrageously rich. They are not always aware how and where the money is pouring
from, so forget about you and I having any clue. Second, their children go to
the English Medium schools, preparing for their eventual O-level and A-level
exams, which are administered by the lords of education not their own country,
but in the good-old colonial land of United Kingdom, and in particular, the royal city of Cambridge. What it all means
is that these patriotic citizens of our land are preparing their children as
export models for the more coveted western markets, just as the shrimp farmers
in the deep south of Bangladesh are aiming to send their best products to
foreign markets. These children speak English with great ease, while they speak
Bengali, supposedly their mother tongue, with equal difficulty. I am yet to
hear of any high-income Bengali family sending their children to a public
school where the medium is Bengali-----that would be a very shameful act
indeed. They wouldn’t be able to show their face to any of their fellow members
in the weekly sauna clubs or birthday parties. Third, at least one of the
members in their extended families will have set up his/her permanent residence
somewhere in the West, (it has to be the West, and not any crummy backyard of
Africa or Asia) preferably in the US or Canada, or down under, the great open
land of Australia-----because these are the blessed countries where money grows
on trees, where dreams come true no matter what, and where the weekly income
for an unemployed worker may exceed the wages of a regular working person. From
my personal knowledge of the Gulshan-Banani-Baridhara triangle, I haven’t seen
a single family who doesn’t have one or more children having emigrated to the
west. Fourth, they own more than one ‘flat’ in the city. Flats, for this class
of people, are what can be described as a cash cow. Their god of good fortune.
The idea is that one of the flats will be their principal residence, while the
others are their ‘frredom-55’-----a nice little nest-egg for their retirement.
In the good old days the phrase ‘upper middle
class’ used to mean much more than their higher incomes. Usually it would mean
higher education, higher cultural sensibilities, higher taste in arts, music,
lifestyle, as well as high moral standards. Nowadays, of course, these are
extras that need not restrict anyone from claiming a status among the upper
classes-----money alone can apparently buy a lot of those so-called education,
high taste, arts and music. Today higher education is just an option-----not a
necessary ingredient for real success. The argument goes like this: if you can
get rich by skipping the education part then why waste time on it? Why indeed!
Besides,what does education mean these days, anyway? A piece of paper with an
official seal on it? Sometimes it’s not much more worth than that lousy piece
of paper. Education today is like the hard currency-----a highly devalued
commodity. Just as the money today isn’t worth a fraction of the money fifty
years before, education has faced the same fate if you compare with what it
used to be in our grandparents’ days. According to popular folklore there was a
tradition in some of the old Hindu families that the smartest and the most
gifted of their children will choose teaching in high schools as his/her
profession. Education in those times meant much more than imparting classroom
instruction according to a set syllabus-----it meant building a character, a
sound solid human being capable of withholding the best traditions of his/her
society with full respect for all fellow human beings. Education used to mean
preparing the young men and women for a better future of themselves as well as
the world they live in. It meant strength of character, of strong resolve to
withhold the fundamental values of humanity, of an idealism to forge ahead trying
to create a better world. How does that lofty goal compare with the strictly utilitarian
attitude of today? Let’s not even think about that. It is too painful.
The correlation between higher education and
the gradual development of higher personal tastes cannot be overemphasized. By
education I do not mean the usual rote education, but real education which is a
lot harder. Rote education ends up with a meaningless ‘certificate’, but no
enlightenment. For what I call real education the goal is the enlightenment, a
certificate is just a minor acknowledgement of completion of a program. In the
olden days there was a word in Bengali:Shikkha-deekkha, meaning,
roughly, education with dedicated devotion. That is, both a curriculum and a
character. A trained person for a particular job, but a complete personality
for all jobs. You can get a formal education by simply cramming your books, but
you cannot build your character or your personality by cramming anything. It
comes through years of dedicated hard work and a strict regime of mental and
physical hardship and austerity. This dedicated devotion I am talking about will
teach you what it means to be a human being, what it means to be humble and
respectful to others, to be tolerant and charitable, to be a better person, be
it at home or at a gathering or a shopping area, or wherever you may be. Fifty
or sixty years before people didn’t have enough money to send their kids to
pricy schools, nor did they need to. There was good education, good solid
education, even in the poorest of poor schools. Plus a full dose of
character-building programs.
You will see a problem no matter where you
look at in my old country of Bangladesh. The ranking of these problems in terms
of severity may be debatable, but ultimately this too will be
counterproductive. Experts in different areas may pick a different one, some
may choose the overpopulation, some food production, some will pick economy as
their pet topic, some may take education. What is needed now is not as much
their expertise in locating the problems, as their knowledge of how to address
those problems in an effort to seek a solution. I am not much of an expert in
anything. But I’ll humbly submit that I spent my entire life in the business of
education, so it may not too impertinent on my part to offer one or two ideas
on this subject.
Right now, right at this moment, it won’t be
an exaggeration to say that there is an undercurrent of a slow wave of change
in the country. One could feel it in the air. It’s not on the surface yet, but
it is pulsating, it is palpable. It would be nice if the initiative would
originate from the political quarters, but let us not lament on something that
could have happened but didn’t. The crux of the matter is that some kind of
change is about to happen there. Question is: what kind of change? Who will be
the agent of that change? What is needed isn’t just any kind of change, but
some fundamental changes. Changes in the way people behave, and think. Changes
in the way people look at their values and traditions. They are not easy to
come by----they take time, may take years and years, may even take some
catastrophic events for those attitudinal changes to take root. Is it likely
that the neo-rich class of Gulshan-Banani-Baridhara triangle will for some
reason feel inspired to bring about a radical change in the society that may
threaten their own freshly-minted wealth? Hardly! They will be quite satisfied
with the status quo, as the rich always are in every society in every goddamn country. That leaves us with only one possible source: the younger generation,
who do not have much to lose except a dream for a better country that they feel
they are owed. They are acutely aware that they have been cheated out of a life
by the greedy older generation who, in the name of enhancing the wealth of the
country, ended up enhancing their own, thus ruining the future of an entire
generation of not so rich but talented and promising young boys and girls. It
is the children of the filthy rich who are finding employment in foreign lands
because they had the good fortune of learning the English language at school,
while the children of the poor middle class had to languish in Bengali schools
trying to learn everything from Math to Religion to Science in the Bengali
medium thus closing the door for them to compete with the more privileged ones.
This has to change. This has to change in a radical way. Education should be
open and fair to everybody irrespective of his/her means. This is especially
true in an underdeveloped country like Bangladesh, although my personal belief
is that the principle of universal education should be applicable universally to
all people in every country of the world.
If there has to be a meaningful change in my
country then I strongly believe the first step must be taken in the area of
education. The slow erosion of our educational standards didn’t start
recently----it began almost as soon as the British left the subcontinent.
Slowly but steadily the foundation started getting weaker and weaker.
Ill-trained teachers, high student-teacher ratios in classrooms, poorly written
textbooks, more emphasis on religious education than on modern scientific
learning-----none of these elements had any positive effect on the overall
objectives of what a modern society should be aiming for. Unfortunately the
process of decline accelerated since our independence instead of the opposite
that was what everyone hoped for. The primary reason for that is perhaps a very
poor understanding of the real objectives of the nation as a whole by the
people who were put in power.What can you expect from a semi- literate person,
given the portfolio of education, in charge of drawing up a master plan for the
entire country? Add to that one more unspeakable element of gory filth----the
rampant corruption at every level of the government, and you get the blueprint
of the total breakdown of a system that never had a chance to recover. In the
name of introducing the principal language of the country as the primary medium
of education for the common mass, while setting up a parallel system of
privately funded for-profit elite schools where English is the medium of
education (and where, incidentally, the kids from the politicians’ families
went), they helped create two or more classes in a society where class was
never one of the major issues, since most of us basically belonged to the same
class, namely, the class of working farmers. Suddenly, in a large community of
have-nots, there cropped up pockets of upper-class, upper middle-class and
lower middle-classes.
I was born when
the British were still reigning over the country. I went to a
government-subsidized High Secondary School for Muslim boys where most of the
students came from farming families in the nearby villages. However there were
also a number of boys from the rich landowning family of the local Nawabs, who
always came to school in chauffeur-driven automobiles. Within the walls of our
school we never felt that we belonged to two different ‘classes’. But today, things
are radically different. The ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ hardly get an opportunity
to mix together, let alone become close friends. Thanks to the new lords of the
independent country the ‘classes’ are now sharply defined and divided. One may
ask: did we learn anything in those subsidized schools that was worth
something? I can’t answer for others, but I can for my own education.
Admittedly I didn’t turn out to be a wonder-kid, but whatever English I can
manage to write today (I know, it’s not much), is all that I learned in that
poor school of my childhood where the barefooted farmers’ boys sat beside the
well-dressed boys from the landowners’ families. What we had in those days was
a balanced education: equal emphasis on Bengali and English, plus a strong
foundation in basic mathematics and sciences.
But today, the ‘good’ schools are defined to
be those that have English as their medium of education, where you have to
invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to get you child admitted. Good schools
are only for rich people today. I’m told that even to get your toddler admitted
in a kindergarten you need to spend a bushel of money, plus a hefty ‘voluntary’
contribution to the school’s general fund. These under-the-table arrangements
are called ‘donations’. On top of all that there is the ubiquitous ‘additional
income’ for the teachers, in the guise of the so-called ‘coaching class’. This
is nothing but a form of ordinary graft, an abominable betrayal of the sacred
oath of student-teacher relationship. In my days, the honorable teachers, almost
as poor as their students, wouldn’t even imagine how to ask for money from
their students for a bit of extra coaching outside the classroom. Thank God, I
didn’t have to grow up today, because if I did then there was no way my father
could afford sending me to school, let alone dishing out some additional cash
for this vicious malignant in our education system called ‘coaching school’. I
wonder what would have happened to me if I were to grow up today with my father
having to support a large family with his honest, hard-earned little income.
Quit school after the primary? Peddle a rickshaw? Die an early, happy death, of
consumption, or cholera, malaria?
Did I say
‘honest’ income? Something of an oxymoron in today’s polluted culture. ‘Honesty
is the best policy’---the phrase used to be drilled into our head in those
days. There was another popular phrase that we all loved to quote: ‘Knowledge
is power’. Hah! What a joke. Today, honesty is the worst policy----a sure way
to perennial poverty. And knowledge? What about knowledge? All you need is an iPhone, a smartphone, that everyone has these days, and the real power is not
that small box anyway, but in the hard cash that the ultra-rich will need the
help of their smartphone to count.
How long can this be allowed to continue? Not
too long, I hope. This has to change----dramatically and fundamentally. We need
a complete overhaul. A state that stands to effectively block the way a young
man or woman can fulfill his/her dreams and ambitions, irrespective of his/her
means, social or financial status, his/her class, race or religion, that fails
to show the way to a poor child how to unshackle himself from the bondage of
poverty, is essentially a failed state, in my opinion. That state doesn’t
deserve a place among the family of independent states of the United Nations.
Regretfully I have to say that my old country of Bangladesh is tethering
precariously toward that condition. Somehow we have to find a way to dig ourselves
out of that deep hole. What we need, desperately need, is change, some radical
change, real meaningful change. Not cosmetic, but fundamental change.
I’m well aware that I am not the first
individual who has thought about it as a serious problem. There are many more,
both in and out of the country. Lot of us have wondered how did we, how on
earth, did we allow our education system erode so quickly and apparently, so
irretrievably? I had an opportunity to discuss the matter with some of the
people who are directly affected by this precipitous decline of educational
standards, namely, the young students, past and present. They, too, do not have
much faith in the standard of their education in comparison with other
countries. They suffer from low esteem of what they have learned in their home
country, which becomes acutely clear to them when they come abroad. They are
aware that they will have to make up a lot of ground before they can catch up
with their fellow students from elsewhere. It is not their fault. They have
been cheated out of a good, honest education. They are the new generation of worthless
degrees with no real value. They have no jobs at home, and no demand abroad,
except in cheap labor markets. With a certificate for a bachelor’s degree
gathering dust at home they find themselves having to make a living driving a
cab, delivering pizza or cutting meat in the grocery stores. They didn’t
deserve this----we have forced them to seek a life they didn’t want to have.
This is our lost generation----lost because we failed to take care of them when
there was time.
As a preamble to the rest of my article I’ll
tell you a story about a little girl I read about on one of my recent visits to
Bangladesh. She is from some remote village in North Bengal-----a young teen-aged girl, the oldest of a number of siblings, who along with their hapless
mother were left on their own by their father, missing for quite a while, and
presumed to have remarried and set up a new family. The mother tries her best
to feed her children by working dawn to dusk at other people’s homes, but of
course, there is never enough to feed the entire family. Normally, the eldest
child, the teen-aged girl in this case, would also have worked in someone’s
house to supplement her mother’s meager income. But this girl had other ideas.
She wanted to go to school. She wanted to be a doctor when she grew up. If this
is not an audacity of hope then what is I wonder. There was no way on earth
that she or her mother could have worked it out to send her to school while
keeping the family fed. But she made it happen. And she was absolutely
determined that she would make it happen. So this is what the little girl did.
She started going to school as she planned, then, after school she would come
home to gobble up whatever tidbits were there in the kitchen for her to calm
the hunger, take an empty pot, and run for the market in a village where nobody
would recognize her face. The idea was to beg----yes, beg for a few small
changes from the kind-hearted strangers. There was never enough money in the
pot, but just about enough to buy some essentials for her mother to cook for
the family. The next day the same routine would follow, and the next, the next,
and so on. This is how she kept her dream alive. I do not know, and I wish I
tried more to follow up her story, what happened to her since I left the
country. But this girl kept me thinking. Isn’t it our collective responsibility
to rescue that girl from the cruel bondage of having to feed her family with
her empty-pot charity while keeping her dream alive to become a doctor? Is it
what our independence was meant for? No, I think it is time we wake up to what
the real needs are. The real need is to liberate that poor girl from the
indignity of begging and send her straight to school without having to worry
for the food for the family. I think the state of Bangladesh owes it to her. Let
no dreams be shattered for want of money. Our future cannot be built unless we
let these dreams, these outrageous dreams, come true. True liberty for the
nation can be achieved only when the individual liberties can be assured.
A few of my high achieving friends have
expressed the view that there is a severe lack of top quality research in
Bangladesh, that there are no good researchers, no real scholarship, and hence
no intellectual productivity in the real sense. I do not share that view
completely. I agree that there isn’t much meaningful research going on in the
country, but it is not true that we do not have top quality researchers or
scholars. On the contrary, I think our pool of national scholars is no less
impressive than almost any country in South Asia. A few of them can easily
compete with the best of the world in their fields. No, it’s not the dearth of
scholars we suffer from, what we do not have is an environment of scholarship. We
do have highly gifted people among us, who could have been tremendously
productive had they been given the opportunities, the freedom of mind and
thought, as well as ample financial support that is almost automatic in western
societies for scholars of that caliber. Perhaps more than the physical support
what is needed for a creative mind to keep producing new ideas is freedom-----something
our society doesn’t seem to understand too well. If a scientist or a scholar of
any field has to be always conscious if his/her ideas may be found offensive by
some powerful person or some powerful group, political or religious or otherwise,
then he/she cannot do his/her work freely. Production of knowledge is not much
different from production of food grains. It needs good care-----good soil
condition, regular watering and sufficient exposure to the sun as well as rain.
The conditions conducive to good intellectual productivity hasn’t developed as
much as one would hope for. The inevitable result of all this is a state of
total frustration many of these highly intelligent people find themselves in,
isolated and abandoned, each living in a cocoon of his/her own making, some
even finding solace in doing the most unproductive thing of all-----spend their
time in the mosque. They may have been formally honored in public ceremonies
with some token awards some time or other, but by and large they are left alone
to rot in their own solitary confinement. What our nation doesn’t seem to
understand is that the true scholars do not care much for those meaningless
awards----what they want is an opportunity to work freely, independently, and
without any interference from any power group of any kind. Unfortunately we are
yet to be able to create these conditions for scholars to thrive and prosper.
As a result we may have individual scholars here and there, but no sustained
work around the ideas introduced by him/her-----no school of scholarship as
there are aplenty in the western world.
Finally, I’d like to take a look at some of
the traditional blockages that seem to prevent the creative mind to have a free
hand in creating his/her new things. The most obvious blockage is our religious
bigotries, our near total obsession with the daily rules and rituals of
religious practices. Even apart from religious obsession we cherish a social
culture that isn’t a whole lot different from a tribal culture of the middle
ages. Our mind is focused more on the individual family than on the nation as a
whole. In most matters of life our center of attention is our family (extended
family I mean), so to hell with national interests if there is a perceived
conflict with our personal interests. This family or self-oriented mindset of
our people demonstrates itself quite blatantly in almost everything we look at
in Bangladesh. An ultra-narrow pathway beside a palatial home built on an
acre-wide piece of land, open manholes and sewers all over the town, no public
washrooms anywhere in the city while every house in the upper middle class
areas has an attached bathroom with every room, people unwilling to line up for
anything, be it for a passport, a ticket at the cinema, or a seat in the
hospital. The same is true when it comes to employment for a job. It is almost
always the inside man, recommended by the big boss, who will get the job, and
not necessarily the most qualified person. I am told it is the same in the
colleges and universities as well-----forget about your qualifications, what
matters most is whom you know and how powerful your patron is.
These are but small examples of how the
individual/family interests are often outweighing the national interests in our
tribal culture. I’ll admit that there are pockets of valiant efforts here and
there to break away from this vicious circle of family interests. From time to
time we hear of outstanding people doing outstanding things for the community
that bring benefit not just to their own families but to every family, which is
what we need. Unfortunately, more often than not, these too, are individual
efforts that tend to fizzle out soon after the person dies. Not too many people
come forward to pick up the mantle and carry on the good work he/she started.
These individual good acts are, in a sense, demonstration of the same
phenomenon I just alluded to------individualism. What the society needs, in
this day and age, are collective efforts. In order to sustain the good work
begun by one visionary individual one needs to establish an institution that
will continue the tradition. In most of the western countries it is the
strength of the institutions that keep the entire structure standing on its own
legs. Almost every great man/woman leaves a legacy which gradually develops
into powerful institutions that benefit an entire population. Legacy alone
doesn’t make one immortal, his/her work carried through by the subsequent
institutions, do. His contribution then crosses over the local area into the
international field. He becomes a world citizen.
What our country needs is many more of these
outstanding people-----people who become household names in course of time not
just in their own homeland but the world over. I can name just a few
institutions in Bangladesh that have earned my respect because of the long
tradition of service they have established. Bangla Academy, Bulbul Academy,
Chhayanot, Udichi, Arts and Culture Academy, Bardem, General Health Center, are
among the few that deserve honorable mention for their long and difficult
journey in carrying on with their mission of public service. Perhaps the most
well-known among all Bangladeshi institutions is Grameen Bank, started by the
great visionary gentleman called Dr. Mohammad Yunus. People outside Bangladesh
may not have heard about Chhayanot or Bardem, but Grameen Bank is no longer
just a Bangladeshi term, it has an international flavor. We need more of these
world-known institutions. We need intellectual production similar to South
Korea and Japan. We need good bright innovators, thinkers, inventors, topnotch
scholars. Don’t we have the potential? Of course we have. Talent is something
that is uniformly distributed among the human race, at least that is what I
believe. It’s not the lack of talent but the lack of social and political
support that often keeps them from pushing ahead. We need to shake our tribal
culture, for heaven’s sake. We need to create a free environment for the
talented people to their things, to create a new world for us all. At the
moment our governments are not doing their jobs as well as one would hope for.
They seem to be more interested in polarizing the students in the universities
for political purposes, rather than encouraging the highly talented young men
and women to become successful innovators and inventors in whatever field they
may be working on. Our leaders keep boasting about the University of Dhaka
being the Oxford of the East, which is no more than a cruel joke today. It was
never comparable to Oxford, and isn’t likely to be in the near future, as long as the social and political attitudes of the
government and the people remain unchanged.
Sept.14, 2014
( Translated by
the author from the original Bengali story: Shudhu Mati Noy)
Mizan Rahman ♥♪♥ মীজান রহমান
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