Why a little of everything is fishy!

FISHY things lately are having something to do with fish. Last Saturday, an orthopedic hospital was shut down in Dhaka because its self-styled surgeons, hardly high school graduates, treated patients with drill machine. One of them was a fish trader in his other life before joining his brother-in-law in this fishy business. Earlier, a number of our politicians declared in their income statements that a big chunk of their earnings had come from fish business. Not a sheer coincidence that the fishmongers and the big fish in this country are gainfully connected.
Many fishy people suddenly have got a fish story to tell. A fish trader takes up medical profession and politicians use fish farming to hide their money. While everybody is fishing in the muddy water, this country looks like a fishing village indeed!
What do fish and humans have in common? The no-brainer answer is that both start rotting from the head. Perhaps that rotting is now in its advanced stage. Nobody knows where to draw the line between being fishy and being humane.
John Christensen, founder of Chart House Learning, developed the “Fish! Philosophy,” which explores that relationship with a positive twist. He observed at Pike Place Fish Market in Washington, USA that fish sellers hurled salmons and trouts through the air into a man's arms. A cheer followed as the man expertly wrapped fish and gave it to a laughing customer. Christensen modeled a technique after the energy he found in that market to make individuals alert and active in the workplace. The technique is about finding what works, deciding what one believes in and being excited about it.
This nation has got the cheer, laughter and the energy alright. But the philosophy appears to be misplaced. There's a controversy surrounding an Everest climber these days. He apparently never made it to the highest peak of the world.  But fake that he may be, he had found what works in this country, decided what he should get us to believe in and then got us excited about the whole thing. All was fish that came to his net and he was soaking up the false glory. Newspapers splashed his story, civic groups threw receptions in his honour and television channels glamourised him. Our children were getting ready to look up to him as a role model.
All that time this man enjoyed the alleged hoax without as much as a healthy twitch. In this entire thing, he failed to show even the slightest decency. Instead, all that time he was fishing for every opportunity to exploit his place in the sun. As a nation we fell for it. Line, hook and sinker, we swallowed his bait.
In Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, old man Santiago says: “But, thank God, [the fish] are not as intelligent as we who kill them; although they are more noble and more able.” The current lineup of phonies includes spurious surgeons, prevaricating politicians and a controversial climber but they certainly do not exhaust the list. There are too many fishy men and women who have turned this country into a fish pond and our lives into one big fishing expedition. It's our innocence and tolerance that provide the fertile ground for them to angle for opportunities.
French Nobel laureate Andre Gide writes that fish die belly upward and rise to the surface because it is their way of falling. This aphorism aptly captures the essence of our madness, which unrelentingly encourages falling as rising. It's equally true for scaling heights, digging depths and excavating escape routes. Pretension gets so much attention that crimes are condoned, mistakes are manipulated and excuses are excused.
This gives us a society where criminals swim like fish. The guilty gets away with murder, while the innocent suffers in quiet anguish. In this latest venture of human exploitation, the victimiser exerts cruelty but victims are too numb to scream.
Karl Marx explained this condition in 1843 when he wrote: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” In our country, patriotism is being prescribed for sedation giving people a false sense of well-being. People in their euphoric condition can't tell they're being oppressed, too drowsy to realise their country is slipping out of their grip.
We've made the world's biggest human flag with 27,117 people. Next, more than 300,000 people sang our national anthem. Last Pahela Boishakh, 60,000 people painted 326,000 square feet area with decorative art. This is called frying fish in its own oil. The irony of which is that the ordinary people laboured for this pageant of patriotism, whereas at least half of them have been denied their right to cast votes.

The writer is Editor, First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star.
Email: badrul151@yahoo.com