Wake up Bangladesh

Rubana Huq
Published : 17 Oct 2011, 01:39 PM
Updated : 17 Oct 2011, 01:39 PM

Inflation is kissing the Everest; stock market slump has forced investors to fast unto death (breaking news alerts of today are prompting one face saving measure after the other); the foreign secretary is comparing his own body weight to the United States' stance on Prof Yunus; army is being deployed as a safe striking tool in Narayangang City Corporation polls; a school in Jessore has been forced to closure for the last 38 days simply because a supporter of the honourable member of parliament has not been chosen as a member of the parents' committee; the finance minister has been reported muttering gibberish in defence of the flawed system which does not push ministers to step down based on even official reports of complaint (most of the MPs are reported to be looting their constituencies); eight Bangladeshis being beheaded is being viewed as an act of justice by us ourselves; the opposition leader with three thousand cars is all set to launch a road march to different parts of the country while the honourable prime minister has decided to launch mobile courts and hinder Mrs. Zia's entourage; and of course, Mr. Ershad has done it again and has strategically emerged as a 'worthy' opposition out of the blues.

The deduction at this point is clear-cut: We people are who they want us to be. We read news with borrowed spectacles supplied by the position and the opposition.

To put it simply, the common people like us are being asked to keep our eyes closed and put on tinted glasses to see what our leaders would want us to see. To put it simply, we are supposed to be fools of an absurd play of plot. To put it mildly, we are 'bottle-trapped' by our political leaders who routinely assume that we are fools and have been so for the last three decades.

We are living in a land where one does not speak of evil and does no evil. Oh, but evil happens! Sure it does! We simply don't acknowledge it. The entire state is a veil of perception and it exists as and when our leaders will it to existence. We see what we are allowed to see. We speak of what we are expected to say. Once again, we, the people are supposed to be the most malleable form of matter: liquid and we can be pushed into bottles every five years and after every five, the genie is programmed to open the cork of our bottles and let us out. By then we, the people have gone through various forms of evaporation; have pushed each other; drunk our own blood, have torn our flesh out: all within the bottle. However, the real world does exist outside our green bottle. In there, the real players walk, protest, call each other names, shun parliaments, impose lopsided laws, sting opposition, embarrass position and go on forever.

And within the bottle, we are a slimy bunch, rubbing shoulders with each other, at times in dismay and at times in disbelief. But wait! There is high definition entertainment available for all of us within the bottle. There is a huge 3D new generation screen that project to us what the real players outside record. For the last couple of weeks, we have been watching serials with extreme caution. Like the people with maximum leisure in hand, we have been watching tug-of-war, battle of the apes, the bold and the beautiful, the thieves and the robbers, the rules and their simulation. We are watching our country through the lenses of the rulers and the ex-rulers.

Centuries of colonisation have disallowed language to our Caliban tongues. We are being taught to speak in a new language today. While the position projects its narrative through the high-tech medium, the opposition takes turns, after the commercial break and projects its story while forgetting that we, the bottle-trapped people may have lost our shapes and forms, but are acutely aware of our memory archives.

There was a young teacher, Nazmeen Haque, who once came to our school and suddenly introduced critical theories to our seventh grader minds. Basically, she was one teacher who did not undermine our intellect and rather, respected our intelligence. As seventh graders, she taught us Coleridge's concept of Willing Suspension of Disbelief. Through Rime of the Ancient Mariner and also through Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, we were taught to justify the use of fantastic or non-realistic elements in literary works of fiction as long as the writer could infuse a "human interest and a semblance of truth" into a fantastic tale. The reader could suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative and willingly suspend the disbelief on the element of fantasy. Otherwise, the reader would have the full freedom to question the fantasy and condemn the fabricated literature.

This lesson was well learnt and has been applied by most of us in our daily lives. As 'bottled-people', we may not have the strength to break the bottle, but we have enough spirit to steer the bottle from the centre to the edge. We may fall in the process, but we are an invincible bunch. Therefore, when we are fed stories from all corners, all we do is gape at the bad actors and switch channels. Unfortunately, there are only two channels in our nation. So when we switch from one to the other, the content is only reversed in order of merit. While we have over a hundred channels entertaining our silly souls, nationally we have only 2: one, which speaks for the position and the other, which covers the opposition. The third screen is blank and is often changed with the flavour of the season.

When will this virus of self-delusion stop? When will we wake up as a nation to believe that what we are being told is not the whole truth and that more could be shared with us? The fact is our leaders do not trust us as people. To them, we are truly commodified, to be bought at times of their convenience. To them, we are simply price tags.

Wake up, Bangladesh.

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Rubana Huq, Managing Director, Mohammadi Group.