Owning a chauffeured automobile and strolling around Dhaka streets seating in the back seat is a passion of bourgeois Dhaka from those colonial days. Like the picture below, initially the British Lords used to drive over muddy Dhaka roads creating a dust storm and Dhakaites used to remember that dust storm as the life long memory. Then the Nawabs started becoming owners of Chauffeured Motor vehicles (One can argue that Nawab of Dhaka brought the first motor vehicle in Dhaka, even before the shahibs).
Anyway the passion caused by that life time memory of a moving motor car causing dust storm over the dirt roads of Dhaka kept on transmitting through the genes.
Throughout the transition into the new nationhood, i.e., starting from early 1900s to early 70s, the club of motor car owners in Dhaka remained very exclusive. Only those with high passion to be a blue blood and some disposable money dared enter the circle. Even in the 70s Dhaka, a 1955 Volkswagen or a 61 Hillman or 58 Datsun was the ultimate symbol of aristocracy.
However over the coming decades, the exclusiveness of the auto owners club started getting diluted. Although Dhaka became more crowded than ever and there were no open road left to drive to, Dhakaites dream of owning that Chauffer driven car and riding in the back seat, creating a dust storm along the dirt road still boils the elite wannabe passion of Dhaka bourgeois class.
And slowly thanks to endless marching band of garments magnets, remittance, corrupt government officials and engineers, overworking ( in private practice) doctors, UN Peace corps returnees, gun trotting extortionists, corporate automobile culture… at the turn of the century, Dhaka now seems to be buried under a menacing heap of automobiles.
MODHUMITA, a housewife and mother of two, hasn’t had a full night’s sleep since May not since her house and the small shrimp hatchery her family owned got washed away by Cyclone Aila and her two small children almost died.
The last time I was down in her village Shakbaria: a small community of about a 40-50 mainly Hindu families on the south-western coastal belt of Khulna her family of seven was still living in a makeshift house made of straw, fronds and plastic sheeting provided by Save the Children UK.
This was almost four months after the Cyclone had hit the house that got washed away. That was an NGO-prescribed “climate-resilient” variety of the kind that had been built to stand tall even against the onslaught of violent, tropical storms. It got washed away by the fierce tidal surge of unprecedented velocity. The early warning systems in place had only predicted the storm, not the ferocity of the tidal surge. The collateral damage was not caused by the storm, but by the mighty tidal surge that it had propelled. This shows once again that we need to scale up our disaster risk reduction efforts and hone our early warning systems.
I regularly visit the coastal regions of Bangladesh for work. Whenever I meet a family, the first personal question I am asked is, Apnar bari kothai? (Where is your home?) “Dhaka”, is my standard response. This is usually met by a curious look, because very few people are really from Dhaka, a city of migrants, many of whom have lived there for generations but who have never owned it. For most, it is a city to be at, not a place to be from.
So I have to explain, “I live in Dhaka now, but our family is really from Habiganj, Sylhet.”
Inevitably, I get an enthusiastic, “Oh! So do you visit Sylhet? How is your village?”
“I don’t know. We lost everything to the river.”
This earns me instant empathy. They take me in as one of them – a migrant soul detached from her roots, a survivor of our changing homeland. Then they want to tell me more about themselves because they feel a kind of kinship. But I am not sure how similar our migrant experiences really are. Our home in Habiganj was washed away before I was even born. I was born uprooted. Most of the people I meet at the coast have been uprooted in the recent past. Some are being uprooted in the very present. Read more…
There are 192 countries in the United Nations. Many of their leaders attend the General Assemby every September. This year has been noted for the first UNGA speech by President Obama. The Bangladeshi Prime Minister also gave a speech. As has been noted, Bangladeshi media chose to focus on the speech being in Bangla, even though that’s routine for the country’s heads of government. This post focuses on what she actually said.
About 20 para, of which only about half that the world is interested in, of which only one that actually made a strong argument. Madam Prime Minister, next time do better.
When we talk about climate change and think about it as some theoretical prospect of the future, it’s not. It’s here, it’s now, its facing these people in their daily lives.
As the world gears up for the UN’s climate change conference to be held in Copenhagen in December, many journalists, documentary makers, researchers and photographers have been dispatched to our part of the world to see for themselves what climate change is all about. Having had the good fortune or misfortune, depending on which way you’re looking at it, of working with some of these climate change enthusiasts, has made me realize, for the first time, how big Bangladesh’s climate change issue really is and how we, Bangladeshis, are almost completely oblivious to it! Also, how little we know about this.
Just a few hard facts first, the third or fourth assessment of the IPCC report claims that by 2050, we will lose 17% of Bangladesh and 20 million will be displaced. All of this because of climate change– because the sealevels will rise, because we will see more cyclones and flood and because our people will have no where to go.
Shocking pictures! Dhaka, Sept 2 (bdnews24.com)—At least 22 people, including professor Anu Muhammad, were injured in the capital on Wednesday after police baton charged demonstrators attempting to besiege Petrobangla headquarters over recent exploration deals granted to two international companies.
Interview: Shahidul Alam - http://shahidul.wordpress.com Read more…
Spiralling prices, terrorist attacks, blatant attempts to rig the election — the third BNP government’s many failures are self-evident. And yet, even this incompetent government presided over the fastest growth rate in our history. But one would be hard pressed to find much good news about that government.
This is because, in addition to incompetence in general governance, that government was also a disaster in terms of media manipulation and the retail politics of daily news cycle. In contrast, the current lot is probably the most media savvy in our history.
It’s therefore vitally important for the independent media — that’s you, dear reader — to be alert. It’s absolutely crucial that you remain vigilant, and keep the third AL government honest.
A week ago, in my first post on Tipaimukh, I made two points. First, as a downstream country, the dam will affect Bangladesh. Second, India has clear obligations to Bangladesh — legal, political, and moral obligations — on this issue that it is not meeting. I concluded that post with this:
India itself is downstream from rivers originating in China, and is vulnerable to the same practice that it is inflicting on us. India can be reminded of this politely, but firmly. And if the bilateral effort doesn’t go far, this must be raised at multilateral fora.
In this post I make two more points.
Our political parties, on balance, are doing well on this issue.
The histories of nations are similar to the mountainous streams of the Tipaimukh region. They never flow in a straight line. The history of the Bengali people of the Gangetic plain also show many such twists and turns.
India and Pakistan emerged as nations at the same time from the same womb. The new states were delivered in an environment of communalism. Pakistan, in theory and practice, was a communal Muslim state. Thus the rivalry with Hindu-ruled and Hindu-majority India, even though India and Pakistan shared a common history and a common heritage. No matter the government-level relations, the people of erstwhile East Pakistan had a normal, if not special, relationship with India. Neither the Muslim nor the Hindu communities are totally non-communal; yet there was a mutual empathy for each other’s sorrows. I remember the death of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. We were playing a friendly game of football in a remote village of Manikganj. The fastest way to disseminate information then was through the radio. While we getting ready to play, someone came and informed us that Nehru had passed away. We immediately decided not to commence with the match. Read more…
“It is therefore not surprising that many in India are opposed to the Tipaimukh dam. Protests from local, indigenous people and the state governments of Manipur and Mizoram did hold up the project for a long time. It is true that by providing various monetary benefits and by offering free electricity, etc., the North East Electricity Production Company (NEEPCO), the current Tipaimukh implementing agency, has been able to pacify the state governments. However, many in India, particularly the indigenous people of the area, continue to oppose Tipaimukh dam project precisely because of the many reasons cited above” Read more…
The histories of nations are similar to the mountainous streams of the Tipaimukh region. They never flow in a straight line. The history of the Bengali people of the Gangetic plain also show many such twists and turns.