A real greenery

A fountain inside historic Bahadur Shah Park, well known as Victoria Park, in Old Dhaka.Photo: STAR

The historic Bahadur Shah Park, well known as Victoria Park as its earlier name, is green with some 500 trees and the lone place that offers amusement for cross-section of people in Old Dhaka.
Every day more than 2,000 people including women and the elderly arrive there after and before dark to do exercise and spend leisure.
Paved walkways and sitting benches attract the city dwellers to the park that has two separate and clean lavatories for male and female inside and a fountain in the centre.
Victoria Park was renamed after Bahadur Shah in 1957, reads a board erected inside it by Bahadur Shah Park Morning Walkers' Association, a body of the local residents.
Small cultural activities are also held now and then in the park looked after by the walkers' association and Dhaka City Corporation (DCC), according to locals.
A 50-year-old man, Monindra Ghosh, has been coming to Bahadur Shah for his everyday exercise over the last eight years.
According to him, people from Shakhari Bazar, Tantibazar, Bangla Bazar, Kaltabazar, Laxmi Bazar, Patla Khan Lane, and Dal Potti get there for a walk or jogging.
People have been increasingly coming there day by day, as this is the lone park locating around the areas, said Ghosh.
He said guardians, especially women, of the students of St Gregory's and St Francis Xavier's turn to the park to do jogging or have morning walk.
An assistant professor of Jagannath University (JnU), Syad Sadial Ferdous, comes to the park for exercise for the last two years. JnU students often take rest and spend chatting with friends there, he said.
The walkers' association managed exercise equipment for its members in the park. Some 400 members come there for walking, jogging, and doing exercise every day, said the organisation's executive member Labibuddin Lablu.
Lablu said the exercise equipment has gone almost out of order, which needs replacement. “Our association try to solve any kind of problem at the park,” he said.
Naznin, mother of a class IV girl at St Francis Xavier's School, said she often come to the park for walking after dropping her child at the school like many others.
Many a woman takes a walk in Bahadur Shah in morning and afternoon, as it is safe, said a teacher of Winston Ideal School, Tahmina Begum. She is a morning walker there for the last three years.
Bahadur Shah also is a place that people with hypertension and diabetes have found congenial to do exercise and thus check the diseases.
For the last five years Dr Din Mohammad Rumon has been coming to the park to control his blood pressure and diabetes.
Around 2,000 people of different age come to the park for walking and jogging in both day and night and majority of them are patients of diabetes and high pressure, he said.
History of the park
Bahadur Shah is a park in Sadarghat in the capital, Dhaka. It is now a war memorial and a tribute to the martyrs who fought in the first war of independence against British rule.
The conflicting sepoys and their civil compatriots were publicly hanged right there in the park place.
Built in 1858 at the initiative of Nawab Khwaja Abdul Ghani, it was called Victoria Park until 1947 and later renamed after Bahadur Shah II, the last Mughal emperor.