This morning, as my driver Aziz and I pulled up to the Gulshan 2 Circle, I noticed more than ever that changes are afoot.

“Everyone is in their own lane, Aziz bhai,” I commented. “The traffic looks so… tidy.” And indeed, the sloppy mess of rickshaw-between-car-between-baby taxi-between-bicycle-between-car that normally clutters each breathable inch of space (betwixt which beggars manage to knock on car windows one at a time and ask for change) was today evenly divided into four lanes, structured by men in orange vests with handouts telling drivers to mind the red and green lights and to obey the signs. Indeed, the government has recently issued a law requiring vehicles to “stay in the middle of your lane unless indicated by your turn signal, and obey all traffic lights and appropriate street signs.”

This, my friends, is a revolutionary new requirement, unprecedented in potential reach. If Bangladeshis could manage this superhuman feat, the earth might cease its revolutions and cause the sun to bow in honour of this great achievement. However, citizens hold out little hope for such a result, as the scheme, which currently has traffic controllers at maybe 6 or 7 prominent intersections throughout the city, is masterminded and managed by some Japanese firm, anxious to bring their civilized ways to Southeast Asia. The colonial style of such a “modernizing” endeavour is not lost on the people. (more…)

Today we interviewed some sort of under-secretary to a government minister. His position in the dark, warehouse-like government building was never very clear to me, but he obligingly read off answers to questions about education and the importance of our client’s work with preschools. After the interview, he insisted that we stay for tea and a chat with our young western client, from whom he requested a phone number and address! While this young westerner was very impressed that a minister wanted her business card, I couldn’t help thinking to myself how foolish and backwards it was that he, a “high-profile” government employee, seemed to think some 24-year-old could do something for him simply because she had a British passport. Personally, I despise this sort of shameless “networking,” which serves only the purpose of collecting feathers of western alliances in one’s cap. It makes me feel so used for my whiteness. Then, of course, I feel cynical that I can be so hard on others.

I have started watching a lot of HBO-Asia in the past week, which is a way to quell the evening boredom and remind me of home. Only, the more I watch “Hollywood movies” here in Bangladesh, the cheesier they seem to me. I start to wonder if the very things I find lame and cheesy about Bengali movies aren’t inherently lame and cheesy in their western counterparts as well. Perhaps it’s also because things look worse on a smaller screen, but I have started to question my very own notions of “quality” by seeing the cliches of Hollywood in an outside context. Of course, many of these movies I would have always thought cheesy, because they are made from inside the “machine” that I feel is so unadventurous and lacking in risk or reward. So many of these same movies look just as cheesy and unrealistic to me in America. I just can’t tell if these are cheesy to my western mind or just my Asian one. (more…)

Sadly, I spent most of this year’s annual celebration of all things Bengali with foreigners. I had planned on making the festivities a part of my day, but there was simply too much work to do at the office.

But maybe I should back up and explain some of this mother-tongue stuff. A little history lesson: before India gained its independence from its colonial captors in Britain, the nation included the ethnically separate region which is now Pakistan, and its great Muslim ally in the east, Bangladesh. But India’s struggle for independence created an uprising, and an alliance, between these extreme eastern and western reaches of the country, and in 1947, they declared their independence under the name Pakistan, which later became an Islamic state. All was well and good for about 20 years while this new nation of Muslims found peace. However, trouble was brewing between the larger, stronger region of West Pakistan, and its little brother, East Pakistan. With little government representation and even less in terms of aid for the never-ending flood of natural disasters (cyclones, floods, mudslides), Bengali Pakistanis were disgruntled, to say the least. But the straw that broke the camel’s back was West Pakistan’s insistence that East Pakistan adopt Urdu as the official language. And that was the end: there was rioting in the streets. Major uprisings. Bengali, spoken since the 8th century among not just 150 million East Pakistanis, but almost an equal number of Indians in West Bengal, was under attack. And, in 1971, after a bloody war that lasted for 9 months and borrowed the support of Indian forces (take that, Pakistan!), the nation of Bangladesh was created.

So, today we celebrate the mother tongue: the language of the people. The language fought for by the people. The language that will never die.