Photo: bdnews24.com

We were preoccupied with the future of our country.

The media was awash with the news of demonstrations between the fundamentalist right and the secular forces.

We were in the midst of debates between freedom of speech and the restrictions imposed.

Then of course the issue of lungi erupted. All because the newly elected board of one of the most prestigious neighbourhoods imposed a lungi ban on the rickshawallahs plying their streets. The ban was first reported on Facebook, then by a local newspaper. Afterwards, the society rescinded the ban, but it was too late. Enraged, bemused, and emboldened by the ban, a march was organized via Facebook, and before we knew it, it was showing that thousands had ‘accepted’ the invite.

Instead of thousands, hundreds showed up at the open field in Banani, with the goal of heading to Baridhara. It was the last day of Chaitra, and air was festive. However, the police, decked up in riot gear, was more prepared to confront the missing thousands.  Those who did show up, many decked in lungis for the first time, were prevented from leaving the field. An impromptu fashion walk of lungi clad youths ensued. Entry to Baridhara itself was somewhat more confrontational, with a few, for the grand offence of carrying lungis, were temporarily hauled off.

Yes, it was all about lungis, the harmless and comfortable single pierce tubular fabric that men for centuries have adorned both at home and outside for their daily chores. The artists Sultan and Zainal Abedin have rightfully depicted the simple garb as the adornment of the masses.

Photo: Moja losss?

Somehow, the analogy of Marie Antoinette came into mind. The nation was up in arms over the scarcity of bread and she had famously had suggested that those starving masses should switch to cake in lieu of bread. Battered by hartals, political upheavals, general uncertainties and what not, people like these rickshawallahs and other day labourers bear the brunt of shutdowns. A majority of them do not earn enough to have any savings and they literally live from hand to mouth on the streets of Dhaka. Baridhara, being a diplomatic zone, has a plethora of moneyed individuals, who are successful entrepreneurs. I do understand that there is a question of image of the neighbourhood. It is after all, one of the very few gated communities of the country outside the armed forces, and it does have its fair share of diplomatic presence, including ironically, that of Myanmar, whose national dress happen to be a stylized version of the same lungi. However, what right do we have to tell our blue collar brothers who are out there under the open sky what to wear and what not to wear in course of their livelihood? The lure of Baridhara for rickwallahs is of course these Bideshis who are less likely to haggle and happy to hand over a few extra notes. There were also trousers provided for a price at the gates and some of them with extra cash did avail them for a few hundred that was charged to them.

Now the lungi storm has reached the courts, with a showcause notice to the society officials as to why this ban should not been deemed illegal. The ban issue, even though withdrawn, will linger somewhat longer it seems.

Couch sociologists and anthropologists termed it as a nouveau riche phenomenon. Others were somewhat less polite, terming this as an arrogant something or rather of some sort, to the point of inviting the ban connoisseurs to go back to the family albums going back a few generations, if any, and inspect what garb the men had on. However, it does reflect the fact that there is a great social divide in the making. As part of the society gets more affluent and westernized, our models to emulate are no longer from within but from abroad, the lungi-less west to be more precise. Many of us have abandoned the lungi within our domestic settings and we assume that the rest have done the same. The ban also has been attributed to the Tri-State phenomenon (i.e. the neighburhoods of Gulshan, Banani, and Baridhara), and everything outside the demarcated areas are considered beyond the pale, a large pocket westernized elitism that is becoming more visible. The lungi ban, hidden under a mountain of social changes, did provide a comic relief to quite a few and enraging the rest in equal passions.

Kaiser Haq, a noted professor of English, wrote a piece called “Ode to the Lungi’ some time back. Given the current context, the piece had been way ahead of its time, with albeit a hefty dose of humour and sarcasm, as if, he had foreseen the days when this piece of fabric will be questioned. Our youth have reclaimed the gamcha as part of the attire that reflects the ‘Swadeshi’ spirit and patriotism. The visual clues of it resurgence are everywhere. Yet the ban on the other garb that has complimented the gamcha still happened.  Let the Lungi be…

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MK Aaref is an architect, and the CEO of Edward M. Kennedy Center Dhaka.

Photo: Reuters

The season of hartal is upon us. Called impromptu and usually on a weekday, it is wrecking havoc with my daily life. Instead of running off to work in the morning, I scan the net and the TV channels for banner news about the latest outbreak of violence. After weighing the pros and cons, I usually make a run for it or just stay home. Not making the trek to work has some advantages. I pay my bills and run errands, make a stop at the grocery store and browse a bit, at the same time composing letters and spreadsheets in my head that would have been executed in front of a screen at work but totally lacking the self-discipline to execute them at home.

Even if I do make it to work, some core people are always missing.  The accountant lives close to Shahbag and that is always a hotspot for burning buses and lathi-charges by the police. One lives in North Dhaka and is strictly prohibited by the parental units to make the sojourn to the south side during hartals. Another one simply takes off, visiting their vast country estates somewhere up north, the hartal induced picnic and lounging given away by their passionate uploading via Instagram to their Facebook pages. Another bunch, mostly expats assigned to different ministries as part of donor conditions, packs the expats’ clubs and pool sides of five-star hotels.

One of my employers during the past millennium, after suffering the loss of cash flow induced by the Janatar Mancha and other events, including that prolonged hartal that almost lasted three weeks, finally decided that the office would open in the evening, 9:00 pm I think, and work through till 6;00 am, with overflows of tea and coffee. The female workforce was of course excluded from that night-time office hours, but the jobs got done. Older, and somewhat wiser, if presented with such alternatives to regular working hours now, I would refuse. Nowadays with mobiles, mine would probably go off the hook by constant calls to make sure that I am ok. I also simply don’t want to return to those days where days and nights are interchanged.

I don’t support hartals by any parties. They are an elaborate nuisance tolerated by the jaded masses while imposed by our very wise politicians who don’t have any other means to be heard except by depriving the poor millions of blue collar earners like rickshaw-pullers and day labourers whose access to daily sustenance is tied to daily wages they earn in cash. While we champion the working classes, the rising poor and middle classes, hartals are simply a slap on their faces. The majority do not observe hartals because they believe in the cause espoused, but simply because they don’t want to be assaulted or caught by a flash mob, and suffer damages to their personal properties. Mob violence, as we see daily from the news footage, is barbaric, and we seem to be building up quite a tolerance for them. Yes, we are jaded, jaded to the point of collective amnesia where we forget what promises politicians make about hartals or respect for fellow human beings for that matter.

Some tongue in cheek suggestions. Let’s call a hartal against hartal. Or rather, let’s allocate a chunk of days throughout the year as hartal days. Let’s have a regulatory commission for hartals that will allocate them, albeit at least with two weeks of prior notice, and cannot be any other day other than Thursday or Sunday. I tell you, it will be a great boost to our tourism and service sectors, promoting hartal packages in Cox’s Bazaar and the Sunderbans. Hartals get observed in the city, the poor suffers as usual, and those who can afford it, frolic outside. I am simply tired and frustrated and embarrassed that more than 40 years after a hard-won independence, we have fallen upon each other so viciously in the absence of external colonizer or oppressor. We have messed with our history and created enemies within. If only such passions could have been channelled in opening schools and fighting poverty instead.

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MK Aaref is an architect. He studied architecture and urban planning at the University of Houston. Later, he specialised in privatisation during his MBA from Aston University, UK. He currently resides and practices in Dhaka.