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     Volume 6 Issue 6 | February 16, 2007 |


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Dhaka Diary

Driving Away the 'Small-Businesses'
A few days ago I went to a reputed coaching centre in Dhanmondi. When I had reached the place, I found the road surprisingly clean. I thought maybe it was due to the recent drive at mobile shops on the street by the Caretaker Government. When I spoke to the receptionist about this, I was shocked to hear a completely different story. I was told that for a long time the coaching centre authority was trying to drive out the cigarette and tea vendors who used to reside in front of their centre but their efforts were fruitless. The youngsters coming to their coaching centre were in to smoking. What was more astonishing was that, these cigarette vendors were doing brisk business by adding slight amounts of “gaja” along with the tobacco in their cigarettes. As the matter was serious, the administrators of the coaching centre went to the DCC office to complain. Their appeal was granted by the government officials and they were successful in driving out the culprits, but they had to pay a high price which was bribing the officials. I was glad to know that such an immoral practice was finally prevented but disappointed at the same time to think that we have to bribe our so-called public-servers to establish a clean and healthy environment in our country when it is their due responsibility to serve the public.

Naome Syed
Mohammadpur


Flyover Lamps in the Morning
For the last few days, I noticed that most of the sodium lamps on the Mohakhali flyover remained switched on in broad daylight. I cannot understand why it remains so. Isn't there anybody to look into this issue? While the whole country is going through horrible episodes of load shedding, we are here spoiling our valuable resources. We are always blaming the Power Development Board for everything, but this particular scenario does not support the real fact. The people are not conscious about the over and unnecessary consumption of power and most of the time government offices are not concerned about this either. I do hope that the concerned authority will do something about this, since our demand for power will increase even more in the coming days.

MARS Sohel
BUET

A Dog's Courtesy!
This particular incident occurred a couple of days ago. I was heading towards my coaching centre. On the way, I found a street-dog standing at the marginal end of a zebra crossing. Experiencing a dog standing without any motive isn't at all a fascinating phenomenon, but what drew my attention was that it didn't cast its instinctive glance anywhere. It merely stared at the signal post, which had the red indicator turned on. At that moment, I couldn't figure out any logical deduction of the dog's strange behaviour. There were very few people and cars on the road. Utilising the opportunity, I stood back and observed it from a decent distance. A few seconds later, finally, I figured out that the dog was actually waiting for the light to turn green! And surely enough, as soon as the yellow signal switched over to green, it wagged its curved tail and started moving forward. We have a variety of things to learn from these so-called 'low-intellectual species'.

Zihad Azad

Kalabagan, Dhaka

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