For the love of engineering!

Published : 26 April 2013, 02:12 PM
Updated : 26 April 2013, 02:12 PM

As Bangladeshis, we need to have a thick skin and a general appreciation for absurdity to understand our political scene. However, even after growing up in such a culture, it is still not easy to be contemplative about a tragedy that was so easily preventable. After the collapse of Rana Plaza in Savar, with over 300 dead and thousands injured — such a terrible, meaningless, and most of all preventable tragedy — only anger and righteous indignation follow. That is the common human emotion that links all of us, nothing unique about that.

Behind every preventable tragedy there is a greedy idiot, but after almost every tragedy come the idiot politicians, in force. The constant bickering of the political parties has taken such a repulsive turn in Bangladesh that the home minister is now actually accusing people from the opposition parties responsible for the collapse of the building.

It is worth noting that the home minister's assessment is based on a new radical (and self-concocted) theory in physics called "tana hechra" (pull indiscriminately) which suggests that it is possible for a few people to severely damage the integrity of concrete structures just by pulling on them. Never mind the entire historical tradition of math and structural engineering, and the principles regarding compressive, tensile, and shear stresses.

Scientists and engineers of Bangladesh, please take note: your knowledge is useless in the face of such ludicracy.

The home minister's understanding of the matter is unsurprisingly less than stellar, but it veers close to lunacy. According to his "in depth" understanding of structural elasticity, some opposition party members and strikers pulled on the visible cracks and pillars that held the massive structure together, which caused the drastic collapse. This would be laughable if uttered by some kooky old uncle to a child about his Lego pieces. However, the home minister is one of the most powerful people in this country. The suggestion that some people (i.e. renters aligned with BNP/Jamaat) have somehow orchestrated this is not only in poor taste but also goes against the laws of physics.

And to make these crazy conjectures while we are still searching for survivors and digging out the bodies of helpless people whose only crime was to be poor and need work whatever the conditions, is so utterly mind boggling that I had to check numerous times to fully comprehend the insinuation.

We are used to poor manners from politicians.  Sadek Hossain Khoka's comment about the Fatikchari violence is not very khoka (child)-like at all but reeks of a vengeful man angry at the world. However, these comments suggest that there is a deep disregard for human life among the leaders of this country. The home minister's blame game is really the last kick to the teeth after we are already nearly toothless.

Is it too much to expect more than mediocrity wrapped in poor taste? We have reached the point in this conversation where all this must stop. The Alamgirs, the Khokas must be more contemplative about their speech to the public and less comfortable with the idea of coming across as a party faithful at the expense of their common sense and humanity.

Then again, I am assuming that within their own private sphere, they have common sense and a shared humanity. We do not ask much from them, we do not ask them to be a constitutional scholar from Harvard or an engineer from M.I.T. to run this country. We do not ask them to know the intricacies of development economics and projection curves. We do not ask them to even behave like a polite person.

However, we must insist that they behave like human beings. That is all.

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Jyoti Omi Chowdhury is a war theorist and a visiting researcher at the Center for Sustainable Development, Harvard University.