Hartal diary

Published : 8 Feb 2013, 08:16 AM
Updated : 8 Feb 2013, 08:16 AM

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.