Gentlemen's Clubs and Shanty Towns

Day 6 has been skipped from this travelogue because primarily I was in a van watching more paddy fields…turns out, its not very exciting once you’ve seen 4-5 km of continuous fields! And we saw a lot more than that…try closer to 400 km…

Since Friday is part of the weekend in Bangladesh, we set out sightseeing in Dhaka. After travelling through the diplomatic area, we were moving towards the uber-famous Louis Kahn Bangladesh Parliament Building. I can’t even begin to describe how excited I was. I mean how often do you get to see the famous works of architecture you’ve read so much about and studied at college?

And I can’t even begin to describe how beautiful it was…in a concrete, industrialist kind of way. Majestic tends to be a word used for parliament buildings a lot but it tends to refer to ancient greek style buildings with Corinthian pillars and all the imposing accoutrements. The very modern concrete structure I saw was majestic in its own way. It sat isolated on an expansive green area but rather than looking lonely, the building looked imposing and haughty [if buildings were actual people rather than inanimate structures]. Nearby are residential quarters for government servants which were designed as part of this structure, and they are quite interesting to look at but we didn’t manage to stop and observe them more closely.

We then headed off to the house of the founder of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujeeb-ur-Rehman. The entire family was assassinated in this house with the exception of two daughters, one of whom was Sheikh Hasina (later a prime minister of Bangladesh), who were abroad at the time of the attack. The house itself is nothing special, but rather quite gruesome in the manner which it preserves the attack (blood stains have not been removed, bits of hair that fell off victims have been preserved behind glass etc.). The belongings of Pakistan’s founder—who died due to illness and not unrest—have been preserved much better and so I was a little disturbed by the house museum.

We then proceeded to see some of the older parts of the city, which were predictably extremely crowded with narrow lanes and lots of traffic—both pedestrian and vehicular. But as always fascinating to just stare at. We went to offer Friday prayers at the Bait-ul-Mukarram mosque which is the biggest mosque in Bangladesh—it was partially under construction so apart from its immense size, it was not at all interesting. The market set up around it on the street however…

We went to a late Mughal fort, which was characteristic of the period with its chhattris, quadripartite divisions and the red colour. It's a lesser building and has few carvings and is extremely simple for a Mughal but wandering in the gardens is always pleasant and calming. The day pretty much proceeded in this fashion and we were shown many historic buildings, the Dhaka University campus and the National Language Monument being some key sites in our travels. Bengalis take a great deal of pride in their hard fought independence and it's a bit difficult to take in as a Pakistani since we are the bad guys in this tale.

The other big highlight of the trip was wandering bored through the National Museum [I was tired and am absolutely not a fan of natural history] and seeing fabric woven from ivory—well that came in second after the famine series by Zainul Abedin—I can’t tell you how amazing they were—please google them, it was fabulous. They’re gorgeous in a stark and sad manner and just so powerful. Words cannot do the series justice.

Also, I am now simply summing up my thoughts and findings in this entry because the rest of the trip primarily consisted of meetings where we took apart the project in many ways over and over again trying to see how it could work in Pakistan, what needed to be changed and what needed to be retained. There’s an earlier blog entry where I lament the state of development organizations and this set of meetings helped reassure me quite a bit that at the top level, the planning level, a lot of thought truly goes into structural injustice, social norms etc etc.

Notes:
This country tells me that we need to stop using corruption and bad governance as an excuse. Too long have we been mired in our apathy. Poverty is not just a situation but a state of mind and to get out of this trap we need, no must, reform our thinking. It is a two-fold process as I see it—both to accept our situation & to not accept it. That sounds contradictory but let me explain:

We rail against the rampant injustices in Pakistan but do nothing because the injustice [supposedly] hampers us. There is no benefit in such a stance because we have not made our lives any better [perhaps we’ve made them a bit worse because we’ve disheartened ourselves and others with such a defeatist attitude]. The problem is that we are too focused on the bigger things [the ones out of our control] and do not realise/choose to focus on what we can do. Bengalis do, they seem to ignore the odds that are against them and keep working hard to better their lives and themselves. I’m not talking about NGOs, I’m talking about the ordinary man, the one who has a tiny field of rice or who drives a cycle rickshaw.

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I find it almost impossible to refrain from finding fault with BRAC despite how well planned and comprehensive its programmes/projects are. It is perhaps related to an innate need to justify what I myself do—that feeling that one is just not doing enough! Nonetheless, I had one major issue with BRAC’s strategy; that there is too much handholding of poor groups. Then again, maybe there’s nothing wrong with institutionalised handholding. Let me try and explain:

I don’t have to worry about money or when/where my next meal is coming from but its not as if I earn an extraordinary amount of money, so in times of need (e.g. after college I was unemployed for several months and depleted my meagre savings), I do have a back-up facility—a “lender” so to speak, in the form of my family. My parents are a form of handholding—they give out soft loans, do not need guarantors, do not set payback times etc. The poor, especially the ultra-poor, do not have this facility. Instead, every time they are strapped for cash, they have three options:

1. Mainstream lending agencies—a no-go because of the tedium of bureaucracy and the [usual] inevitability of rejection.

2. Microfinance Institutions—an excellent solution for those who need small business loans and who do not have large reserves of cash to start said business. But what about the other group of people who suddenly suffer loss in the form of the death of a family member? Or who need an expensive surgery? Or are simply unemployed and need some help? They can’t go to MFIs because they are not charities they are businesses.

3. Banya/Loan shark—the inevitable solution for the desperate poor man. And possibly the worst solution as it will lead to difficult repayment given heinously high interest rates and leads him/her into a vicious cycle of debt begetting more debt.

So why should we dismiss the so-called non-sustainable giving of freebies--they can be quite necessary.