Hope for the land of my father

"Nimu na Sir. Apne Kinna lon". This was unfamiliar territory and I was looking for a suitable response. For the uninitiated, the kid is about 14 and was selling yellow-looking popcorn in the middle of a traffic jam on my way back from Gulshan to Dhanmondi, a couple of weeks ago. What he was saying was, "I really do not want your charity, please buy the popcorn". So, after persistent haranguing for five minutes, I bought two packets of popcorn. I gave him a Tk 20 note and he meticulously gave me back Tk 10. I felt like I was on a different planet than the one I knew.

Now, some context. I live in the US and for majority of my life I have been outside Bangladesh, even though I was born in Bangladesh. I make a modest living running a small, but global, business based out of Boulder, Colorado. Our little company employs some 500 villagers in Nepal, maintains fully staffed offices in China and Europe as well as in our corporate headquarters. I go back every-so-often to Bangladesh and make futile attempts to start a venture there and, more importantly, to try to connect with the land of my parents. Most of the time, I come back home (yes, I consider Boulder my home) somewhat discouraged and sad.

2010 is different both in imagination and in reality. All of a sudden I have great hope for the land of my father. It all got triggered by the 14-year-old popcorn vendor in a smoggy traffic jam.

Going back to the 14-year-old with the popcorn; when I went back to Dhaka some 21 months ago, the same kid would probably have simply had begged for some money. I would probably have had given him the money to ease my guilt. But this time it was different. He was selling things. And he was really proud of his mini-enterprise. I figured this was probably an anomaly — a once in a 100 year event.

The next night, I went to dinner with a couple of friends to Sonargaon (it seems that hotels are the IN places to go, god knows why.). I was relating my experience to these friends and we concluded that some weird, or as my friends put it, "Pagol" kid has gone off his rockers. How wrong were we!

After dinner, we were making our way back out of the clogged road (Panthapath) and some guy in his '20s wanted to sell me brightly coloured children's books. I have no need for such books so I tried my tried and true method of giving him some money. The man said, "Amito Bhikhya Korina Sir, Apni Boi gulo Kinen" (I am not begging Sir; I want you to buy these books please). So, I bought four books after doing some obligatory bargaining. He too did not want to take any more than his selling price, even though I was willing to give him an extra Tk 100.

After the transaction, there was a stunned silence in the car. One of the two people in the car lives in the US and the other person lives in Dhaka but her experience with the streets of Dhaka is probably even more remote than mine. These sorts of incidents repeated in a variety of forms over the 10 days that I was in Dhaka and Sylhet. There was the waiter at a truck-stop, Ujan Bhati, who ran to the car with my wallet which I had somehow left under the table. This thing had few hundred US dollars and about five Tk 1,000 notes. There was this kid at a CNG station near Sylhet who wanted to clean my windshield in order to earn some money but again this kid too refused a handout!

I come back to the US with great hope for the land of my father. There is a qualitative shift in people's psyche in Bangladesh. People have healthy disdain for government; any government. The mullahs are nowhere to be seen. The economy is growing at a 6 percent clip and it shows in terms of the hustle-bustle of the cities and village bazars. Young people do not aspire to be government bureaucrats (which was once our idea of "making it"). Banglish is becoming Lingua Franca. Women are dressing colourfully and trying to entice the boys regardless of the frowns. Couples are walking (sometime hand-in-hand) near lakes and parks. Garbage is being picked up every morning in a vain attempt to keep the cities clean (I saw this every day around 5:30am as I walked by the river from Dhanmondi to Sadarghat by different routes). The Tuktuks are all converting to CNG (Compressed Natural gas) — greatly reducing costs and pollution.

However, the change that makes all of the other changes pale and insignificant is the great entrepreneurial drive of people trying to make a living in a growing economy. The boy in the traffic jam selling popcorn and the industrialist with offices in Dhaka and Singapore are chasing their dreams, their own personal dreams, maybe, but dreams nonetheless. They are walking the path built with labour and pride and not with charity and compassion of the 'bideshis'.

There is great hope in the land of my father. Let us all drink to that hopeful future, unencumbered by our brutal past. As someone who has known the brutality of the "Aristocracy of Pull" and the liberating feelings of "Aristocracy of Talent", my great hope is that the new Bangladesh I saw really gets into the bone marrow of the country. That, it is now becoming not who you know but what you know that matters.

———————————

Kayes Ahmed is a businessman running multinational operations from Ohio, USA.