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.
Lately, it seems cultures are mixing, and my own prejudices about this culture are slowly melting into misapprehensions I have about my own culture. Corruption, for example, which is rampant and widely accepted here (in the form of our clients paying off interviewees for a favorable interview, just to name one example) is not such a stranger at home, where my friend works for a boss who employs a constant stream of unpaid interns instead of ever hiring a salaried employee for his faux-successful company.
Life is complicated, and does not become more simplified when you demonize certain people and uphold others. While this part of the world has a long way to go, I wonder, to whom can they look as a shining example of ethical norms and moral absolutes? Because not one of our supposedly “modern” and “developed” nations in righteous. No, not one. And how dare we tell those who live a much harder life that they shouldn’t do something that makes it just a little bit easier for them to get by?
