To live and die in Dhaka
Plato once said about a certain city that it was what it was because its citizens were what they were. The great philosopher couldn't be wrong. If people inhabit a city, the city also inhabits them. The denizens of Dhaka reflect on it no less than it reflects on them.
If Dhaka is a crowded city, its people have crowded minds. If it's a city of gridlocks, people have learned to be patient and sit through them. This is a city of load-shedding, and people have got rechargeable lights and fans, IPS, UPS and generators built into their budgets. This is a city of insufficient transports. Lo and behold people of this city don't mind standing in long queues, and wait for buses. Enough to convince, the Zen of this city and its citizens have mutual influence.
Dhaka is a hectic city of frantic people. It's a city of hawkers and gawkers, mosques and masks, geeks and goons, phonies and cronies, touts and louts, the needy and the greedy, the wise and the wisecrack, the depraved and the devout. Dhaka is also an epileptic city. Its spasmodic traffic, periodic power cuts, gas crisis, water shortage, spate of violence, natural calamities and man-made disasters work like epileptic seizures. But then it's also an asthmatic city. The heat, dust, fumes, odours, roaring generators during load shedding, filth and squalor embody the image of a city gasping for breath.
If people make the city, the city also makes them. Historically, Paris has attracted writers and painters more than anybody else. London is the most visited city in the world, the world's largest financial centre alongside New York. A study funded by the US National Science Foundation examined geographic variation in personality. It found the residents of the Mid-Atlantic and New England states relatively stressed, irritable and depressed, whereas West Coast residents were more emotionally stable, relaxed and calm.
Traits associated with intellect, such as creativity, imagination, and openness, are higher in the Northeast and West Coast than in the Central and Southern states, where people are more pragmatic, straightforward and traditional. The residents of the Central and Southern states are also more neighbourly, friendly and generous. The single most significant finding of the study is that people choose to live in places that meet their needs.
Dhaka is a crucible city, where diverse emotions grind together the best and the worst in the country. Decisions are made here. Commotions are created. Political movements are organised. Corruptions are cultivated. The sublime is ridiculed and the ridiculous is sublimed.
A regression of the city is also a regression of its people. Nothing about Dhaka is dependable. Nothing about its people is also reliable. If you can't trust the city, you also can't trust its people. Don't eat anything offered by a stranger. Watch your pocket wherever you go. In this city, keep your shoes in prayer when in a mosque.
Dhaka is a pathological city. Its bus drivers are depraved. Its rickshaw pullers are desperate. Its hawkers are demented. Its police are debauched. Its doctors are demonic, engineers are disastrous and lawyers are deplorable. On the whole, its inhabitants are disillusioned in this city where looks are deceiving, shadows are threatening, and promises are misleading.
This is also a pathetic city. Crammed houses, blind alleys, crowded streets, clogged drains, overflowing garbage, dimly lit neighbourhoods at night, water shortage, power cuts and gas crisis formulate the ecology of a city bordering on hell. This is where people in their pursuit of dreams get trapped in nightmares.
It's also a nervous city. It lives in anxieties over load-shedding, water supply, and gas shortage. It lives in the fear of sabotage, earthquake and political showdowns. It's jittery about where the next traffic jam is going to grow like a meandering snake. It's panicky at night when junkies and criminals prowl its streets. It's paranoid by day because another day could bring another disaster.
The city is forever in conflict with its citizens. The restlessness, frenzy, cruelty, chaos, violence and hypocrisy are mutual. It appears to be a city that it's not, and its people aren't what they appear. Expensive cars, expansive lifestyle, impressive houses and compulsive greed camouflage the poverty and despair seething under its glitzy veneer. Fighting families, scrambling spouses, muddled marriages, profligate parents, complicated children, offending officers, scurrilous shopkeepers, and daredevil drivers diminish the inhabitants as much as the inhabitants diminish Dhaka.
It's also a pathetic city of contradictions. Piety and perversion go hand in hand. Devotion and deviation go in lock steps. People are shrinking while the city is expanding. People are more shadowy than the shadows. The city is creepier than the creepshows. More people come to this crammed city, featuring the ultimate contradiction. Here living is costly, but life is cheap.
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