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THE MONTHLY MAGAZINE FROM NEW AGE

September, 2006 @newagebd.com Main Page « Front Page « Metro « Business « International « Sports « National « Editorial « Op-Ed « Home « Timeout « Letters «

LEFT ALIGNED I surf, therefore I am Mahtab Haider There are more than 40 billion pages on the internet This month the worldwide web — better known to us as the internet — turned fifteen years old. In less than two decades it has gone from a small network used by a sum total of three geeks in the basement of the Smithsonian to a cornerstone of our digital, globalised future, featuring over 40 billion pages of information, opinion and minutiae that we trawl through on a daily basis, whether to check a spelling or research the Neanderthal man. Personally, I think the internet comes closest to fitting into the profile of the omnipotent, omniscient being that mankind has forever envisioned as its guardian. For one, it always answers your prayers (unless you still use dial-up, in which case you deserve to die). No matter how esoteric your query, the internet will at least be able to point you in the right direction if not furnish you with thousands of pages of information on your topic of choice. It is completely non discriminatory in its approach to individuals: it does not provide better or more information to those in the first world, or discriminate on the basis of creed or colour. It belongs to no individual or community and no one controls it — crucial in ensuring the true democracy that it boasts. And last but not the least, everyone is allowed to air their opinions on the internet, be they members of the KKK or the movement to canonise Lady Di.    For those of us who live in the developing world, the internet’s significance cannot be overemphasised. This month, my membership at the British Council Library in Dhaka has given me access to a service that allows me to download or read online, over 11,000 books published by the Oxford University Press and articles from over 30 academic journals that have been in print since 1886. Ten years ago, to gain access to this material — indeed to prepare the list of material that I must read in order to understand something as widely written about as, say, global warming — would have taken over a year. To actually get my hands on the material itself might have involved anything from hours of letter-writing to institutes that could supply me a hard-copy of the journals, to the very likely possibility of foreign travel in order to obtain the rarer ones.    What the internet does for journalists or academics is one thing, but the impact it has in our day-to-day personal lives is often underestimated. As author John Naughton pointed out in an article I read (on the web) this month, ‘Amazon used to be a large river in South America, and Yahoo was a term from Gulliver’s Travel’s, but that was before the world wide web’. Can any one of us imagine a time when we didn’t have email — and the trouble it would put us through to not be able to send electronic, instantly delivered messages to friends, colleagues and family who live thousands of miles away? When I got my first internet account in 1997, all I had access to was email — that too delivered twice-daily because my ISP had to dial a number in Hong Kong to connect to the internet. The system was called UUCP — a technology that is now so dated that the only place you might find accessible reference to it is the internet. Nine years on, the internet is like an extension of my brain. No, really, this week my broadband connection was lost because of some maintenance that my ISP was doing. I felt crippled. I was genuinely distressed. I felt like someone who has lost the use of an opposable digit or their brain’s frontal lobe.    To explain that I am not exaggerating let me detail my daily routine. I wake up at around 9:30 and listen to the BBC Bengali Service bulletin on the internet radio. It is broadcast at 6:30am our time, but I don’t need to wake up that early, I can listen to it at any time of the day on the BBC website. Next I read our local papers and soon after make a quick skim through the UK’s Guardian newspaper’s website to check what is happening in the rest of the world. Then I turn on a classic rock radio station (on the internet) and get into the shower. At work, a slew of emails from my colleagues are waiting for me, some are articles that are due, some are excuses, and some are an angry volley of expletives that end with ‘So no, I don’t think I will be writing for you again’. Imagine how harsh that would have sounded and how bad I would have felt if those words were said to me in person! The internet makes everything easier: our ability to be blunt and our ability to accept bluntness.    Of course, there is a darker side to the internet: no I am not talking about the porn websites — those are one of the more popular things about it. The internet necessitates use of computers and a knowledge of their use that, I admit, discriminates between rich and poor. But hey, that’s not the internet’s fault, that’s ours. If we had left it to the internet comrades, perhaps social justice and equality would not be such a distant dream. FAKE PLASTIC THOUGHTS Good night, and good luck! Mahfuz Sadique Dhaka’s mesmeric beauty is the mayhem The shrill whistles of the neighbourhood guards pierce the still air, simultaneously. Hovering over the lane was the hard-earned silence from the day and its doldrums. It’s lost, but just for a moment. The lone guard sitting under the lamppost in the flickering neon, right under my window, was soon back to his slumber. And inside the second floor room above, the calm night was lulling my mind to rest, until it too would deceive the lids of these eyes to close, for the time being. The phone, the books, the net, the white noise from the TV as the cable goes dead, the midnight snack, the countless burnt butts on the ashtray are all past, hours ago. What’s left?    The vagaries of letting go, of releasing ‘the sound and the fury’ of this cacophony, of decoding the method that this madness instils…the night is doing its thing. It’s making me sane again. Confessions of chronic insomniacs would sound stale to those who sleep in peace under the blanket of darkness. Then again, so few do these days. This city, Dhaka, is increasingly letting less and less people sleep. I have heard many a reasoning from, and of, this new insomniac generation. Some say its just inactivity, some say its depression, while others brandish a longer list. Well, yes and no. I say it’s all that, and a bit more. That ‘bit more’, like a splinter stuck inside the soft inners of the ‘stream of consciousness’, is probably as intricate as the web of wires over Shankharibazar, and as elusive as the breathing spaces between buildings of Kalyanpur.    This urban existence is a cage of its own. The masses that walk, talk, yell in this gargantuan metropolis all seem part of one large roaring tidal wave, and yet they are each an island. Through the tinted windows in traffic, we take in a veiled world; between spastic laughter of strangers at tea stalls, we seek splintered joy; the cries of babies’ of nameless mothers, and the rages of violent men in their silent homes, jolt us back to reality. We live a splintered existence. Throughout rushing hours of daylight, and then the neon-blazed evenings, we take in more and more. And a ‘bit more’.    Like a dry cactus, millions of others like me, wait for the warm sands of time to brush aside. As night’s hue spreads its blanket over the city, in the relative silence, the zombies populating this insomniac Dhaka fill the missing links of the day. Clocks stop, for me. Connecting the dots of the day’s dilemmas and dwindling between thoughts, and afterthoughts, we eventually try to draw a straight line. A singular stream of thought that makes sense of everything that has passed us by. Still most can’t let go completely. Chatting online for some, while talking to inanimate receivers on the same lack of sanguinities in life, trying to be ‘lover of strangers’, many just stay stuck in reverse. Misguided emotional gratification is the curse of this insomniac generation.    While others, like me, sometimes release through the zeitgeist of the city at night. The walls of my home whisper bad omens at night. I rush out. And then I know I am not alone. Each in their own constellation of ‘imagined realities’, we are travellers of the night. She is there too. The butterfly of the night, with her painted wings, on a solitary rickshaw tickles the shackles of ‘prisoners of desire’. The night guards, the stray dog, the prowling police van, the travelling tea man, the sleeping strained muscles of labour on the footpath in front of glass façades, the whale-like trucks with their thunder and sad eyes, and the ‘urban malfunction’ that is me. No social distortion here; no ambiguity of purpose. Those that belong to the night somehow know each other’s purpose, or even the lack of it. I have never seen surprise in the eyes of an insomniac. They know why the other is there. Somehow it makes more sense.    And sometimes I just stay inside my glasshouse in this concrete jungle. In my room, my house, my own space some days are fine, some days are bad. And sometimes, I feel like melting the iron grills of my window and stick my out. To do what? To scream at the top of my voice like Peter Finch in the 1976 seminal movie, Network: ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’    I don’t. I silently endure the whispers of the walls, listen to the same songs of misery. Because I know there is no man, no mansion, no messiah I can point at and say those aimless words. I am mad at nothing. I just need to let go. What to do? Yoga? Good sex? Seduxen? Seduction?    Like most grand problems in life, there is probably a simple solution. Until it sprouts out of this ‘Concrete Garden’, this insomniac generation burns the air with their silent fumes of distorted incense. Dhaka is awake all night.    So next time you can’t sleep, come over to the Dhanmondi Road No. 32 bridge. Rahmat and I will be having our regular tea party. And his tea is worth the ride itself. Or otherwise, like the great journalist Edward R. Murrow would have said: ‘Good Night, and Good Luck!’