by Rubana

IT’S difficult to be aggressive and discreet and yet wear a single garb.
   It’s difficult to see both sides of the coin at the same time.
   It’s difficult being critical and appreciative while looking at one single picture.
   To be conservative and reformist both is an impossibility.
   There comes a time in a nation’s life when the people decide to choose a faith. Affiliation is perhaps a better choice than silence. Survival becomes crucial and the citizen of the state knows that in order to breathe, he either has the choice to believe what he is witnessing or he has the option to opine.
   What are you doing tonight? Are you joining the endless stream of political gossip and trying to get the latest update on what’s happening behind bars? Have you heard the latest about a few privileged prisoners having two cell phones? Are you willing, most importantly, to be consumed by rumours?
   Or, your day could begin like mine does. A good reading of all the dailies, a loyal google alert on South Asian news, a substantial dose of channel surfing are all it takes to start a family foible. At 6:00, the household could do with a decent drop of silence. Instead my family wakes up with the rustling newsprints, with sites of bomb blasts pasted live on the wall on a hapless 42", with keyboards tapping in absolute fury proving their points, holding the screens close to our bodies as if in a desperate bid to establish what each one of us believe at that particular hour, when most of the other households are either out for morning runs or getting ready for their routine eight hours at the office. But our category is labelled: The Deferring Different.
   We are a clan of ingrates who insult their eggs, jam and cereal first thing in the morning.
   The toasts look sorry enough when the butter knives, in a hurry, cover the carbon. The sliced guavas are the only group who are worthy at that hour. But only if they are sliced.
   The family has no time to peel an orange, considers it a waste to pick those hyper-expensive, overripe cubed mangoes with forks and at the end send them to the kitchen for the staff to throw it to the bin. The fresh tippy orange Darjeeling pekoe is a thing of the past. The once-upon-a-time tea-cosies are non-existent. The tea, if at all poured in the morning, is a measured process of a maximum stretch of five minutes. All this while we are still reading, skimming, constructing, reconstructing and deconstructing what’s in front of us. A newspaper defiantly takes up the maximum space on the morning table and then begins the struggle. Is it time for the Star or the Age, Alo or Kal, Shomoy or Zamin, the dot-com or the dot-org. For the ones in the publishing business, contradictions must be common as today, now, and this minute must be their best and their worst of times. Ironically, news begins where ease ends. The best news is the worst blast; the best column is the one tells the most gruesome stories; the best issue is the one that chronologically captures the maximum number of earthquakes, disasters and deaths.
   What sells best is a catastrophic calamity. I still remember how the family was full of praises about a Bangla daily which had actually reported the news of an ex-PM’s arrest the same day making a clear statement of the team’s usual loyalty to breaking news that break our dawns. Content is secondary to pace today and conversations are like booby traps. One may fall into the web of references to the past and any member is bound to be happily reminded that during the last strike she was the one who heavily complained about the merchandise being stuck at her factory and almost wishing for an iron rule. The problem with the family is that it wants different rules, separate tunes, and even a whole set of menus of South Asian and Continental mix. What fails the ideals of the ‘family’ are its conflicting greed to grab convenience. A corporate life disallows protests but a researcher loves the tint of democracy. Basic identities in this land get clogged by needs of the hour. We need equality when we desire to sound progressive, we become progressive when we need to side with the radicals, we become repressive when we deal with labour, we become wretched when we face poverty, we become drunk with fame, we suffer hang overs with well meaning friends of convenience, we dream only when we need to sleep. Convenience kills us and we die deaths of euthanasia just because we cannot bear to see ourselves go bad. After all, even the worst in the family has a South Asian conscience.
   That is why the twelve-year old in the family is upset this morning. He has always run for the students’ council for the last two years. This is the first time he’s dropping out of the race. When asked, he tells the family that the board only has Koreans in it and that his voice wouldn’t be heard and that his presence would be an electoral mistake. This generation of 1995 teaches the family a lot. He explains his bias against the Koreans, he mistrusts their intentions and above all, he has already learned the election game of the minority miseries. He re-endorses a common knowledge: our nations thrive on bias, mistrust and injustice and the transfer of knowledge from our end to our kids has been a smooth process.
   It’s time to drive down to the office. It’s time to cross the rocky roads.
   The roads en route to the office are raped by inefficient development planning. The family gets to think again...
   Every MP who blesses the parliament building get active with allocation and the first priority is ensuring the next term. Therefore, the question of prioritising does not arise. There have to be a number of roads developed in the area. Unreasonable allocation of funds is not a concern. As long as more people get the share of the annual development fund, it’s best for the MP’s profile. With every bad planning, we Bangladeshis end up digging our own graves costing our nation at least twenty long years of shame.
   The family reaches the office. Business has been bad. The confidence level of the customers is at a subzero level. They want the return of democracy. Since when has democracy been linked to business? The eldest daughter routinely showers praises on the military for having stopped the unruly mob from blocking the roads to Chittagong. To her Chittagong was what matters the most. The rest of the country can take a hike down whichever route it chose to opt for. After all, exports were what mattered most. The port has been under control. The turnaround time at port is no more than 3.1 days. How to keep the prices under control, though?
   Just imagine the other teenager in the family going to the nearest store only to discover that her favourite chips, drinks, cereals were not there. She asked why they were out of stock. The manager of the store replied: ‘Boss Jail-ey.’ This had become the joke of the day. The store owner’s bank account was apparently frozen; therefore, there were no consignments coming in. The family said a silent prayer and thanked God for having blessed them with an unbelievable level of adaptability because of which they could live without imported food, air conditioners, huge baths, etc, etc. They’re smart people.
   Adversity was just another name for profile in this land. The more people knew you, the more you’d be in trouble. So being prepared to do without anything and everything was part of disaster preparedness process.
   The next joke was initiated by the chauffeur. He had overheard the family making plans for a dinner the following week. Bless his curious soul: he had an innocent question, ‘But who were the ones who were coming to our house? Aren’t most of the family’s friends in jail?’ What could be more shameful than that? The recent trend has been to arrest the children. Having heard of a potential arrest case, the family has offered the youngest kid of the affected family to come and live with them.
   The family is driving back home pretty early, just in time to watch the prime news bulletin. The opening scene hurts the eye. A seminar on banning teachers from joining politics. Wasn't politics meant for philosophers? But then again, haven’t we all misused our positions? The mum talks about her professor who resigned from the communist party way back in 1974 right after he had joined the Department of English at Dhaka University. He had a simple logic: how could students belonging to other political leanings ever trust him if he himself wore a specific colour?
   By the time the news had moved on to another scene, the family went on to discuss how bad a government official could have been to have refused distributing anything to the flood affected area just because there was no press coverage there? By that time, the next channel was all about a party that ended in a fiasco last night. They were showing young women wearing next to nothing coming out of a concert where they were surely dancing their lives away. The parents look at each other and made sure that all the kids were staying home tonight.
   It was dinner time. It was a lemoned menu. Apparently ten lemons were selling at twenty taka this season. Amazing piece of information as everything else was almost reaching the sky-est limit. The family staff did not stop at that. She added that ‘lebu wala’ was disgusted while selling his merchandise and he had added that next season the family would have to buy imported ones at forty taka per piece.
   He was definitely not growing lemons anymore.
   Such are we. We are a species of unbelievable ingratitude. We exploit sufficiency. We turn into demons with democracy; we cry our lungs away when silenced; we curse when allowed free speech; we steal when the land itself is ours. And then when we lose it all, we sing praises of lost leaders and slain heroes. As a nation, we suffer from chronic amnesia. But at the same time, there's a disconnect between our memory cells and our hearts. We rarely forgive. We go distances to slap someone who had done something to us somewhere down the line without remembering the actual hurt.
   It’s time for a member of the family to leave for the weekend. Pleasantly enough, Biman, the national carrier is on time. So, the airline’s finally putting up a good fight against the private competition. Go national, boys: she mutters under her breath. The aircraft’s old, but the pilot and the crew are uniquely hospitable. The traveller knows that the bird’s taking the right turn and it’s time to land. The magazines on board are not palatable. But luckily enough she was carrying her copy of the ‘Economist.’ The Asian section has a piece on Bangladesh and it’s all about the ‘minus-two’ formula and the subheading mentions that the country is looking ‘green’ now. She zooms in to the name of the colour. Green? Did they mean ‘Khaki?’ Well, the article is a well-meaning one. One way or the other, the direction looked credible. The country seems to have very little options other than moving mountains with prayers.
   Let’s count on faith, shall we?