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Blame Culture
by David Tregenna
Sometimes the comments I hear from foreigners form such a cloud of grumbling and black misery, I’m surprised they don’t gently take off and float above the traffic into the sky, hovering there and raining down on the unsuspecting passers-by below.
‘Bangladeshis have no initiative. Why are they so lazy? Why are they so selfish? Why are they so corrupt?’ Interesting that these cheap comments are precise echoes of what our forebears said in Shanghai, Nairobi and Bombay. Look around, though, and you see a people whose every waking minute is testament to immense survival skills and initiative. True, the education system may not always encourage these, and the government bureaucracy seems to positively grind these abilities out of you, but they are there. Bangladeshis are, in my experience, one of the most industrious and dynamic peoples in the world - witness the shops abuzz from morning till midnight. Meanwhile, the idea of selfishness seems absurd when you consider some of the things I have written about family life and friendship. It’s not here that you find parents bundled into old people’s homes. And don’t get me started on corruption - while everyone acknowledges it’s a fact of life here I wish I had a pound for every time I’ve heard foreigners talking about how to set up offshore accounts in order to dodge punitive taxes back home. Ah but that’s different of course…
Let’s be honest, any new alien experience, living in a country far from home, can be frustrating at times. It challenges our most deeply-held habits and views on what is ‘normal’ (and therefore right) and the first response is usually a lapse into a casual and intellectually lazy blame culture, whereby our inner anxieties are projected outwards. And what is the first and most obvious target? The country in which we live of course. I know, I’ve done it myself. When things are going badly, it’s all too easy to lay the blame at the feet of ‘Bangladesh’.
But, perhaps the real question before us as guests in this culture is this: we may occasionally be at sea here, but do we drown, or learn to surf? Yes, life can be problematic, but those of us who are foreigners, just passing through of course, have a much easier time than the vast majority of the people who live their lives here. And this is perhaps the funniest thing - this myopia in which we are trapped, unable to see beyond our high, gated walls, unwilling to put things in perspective.
Besides, when we decry our experience here, we lose sight of the humanity, the energy and the warmth, the sheer buzz of this extraordinary and dynamic place, and get caught instead in ever decreasing spirals of negativity.
If things are so difficult here, then why do we stay? Why don’t we just go home? Simply enough, for many it’s about money. The splendid apartments, the clubs, the 4x4s, home help on tap: gardeners to guards to drivers to cooks to look after Sir’s or Madam’s every whim. Life is pretty easy. And all so well-paid too. Perhaps then, easier after all to stay and grumble than have the courage to leave.
There are of course many here who have made an effort to integrate, others who have learnt the language, or tried to explore the countryside - life outside the bubble of Gulshan. They may even be a silent majority - who knows? Either way I applaud and admire them. But you don’t see them so much, they tend to be the quiet ones, simply getting on with it.
Their voices are often drowned out by the red-faced, eye-popping sons and daughters of Empire. On a compassionate day you try to feel sorry for these grumblers, caught up in a place they don’t want to be, not understanding its culture, pretty miserable on the whole. Then you remind yourself that they are part of a long tradition of generations of foreigners here, doing unto Bangladesh what privileged people have always done to the disadvantaged, and gets harder to work up so much empathy. Our problems here as foreigners are fairly slight on the whole, wouldn’t you say?
david.tregenna@yahoo.com
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