Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Life in Dhaka: The End

Dear Dhaka,

Let's be clear from the very outset: you won't miss me and I won't miss you.

Never have I lived in a place that feels so close to the state of nature, where life really is "solitary, poor, nastybrutish, and short." You have made a mockery out of me as I have tried to live as I want to, run our my schedules and plan my ambitions, with your constant power cuts, flooding, dust, open sewers, traffic, violence, hartals, dengue fever, tolerated exrteme poverty, visible open defecation and absolute, total lack of organisation. I complain constantly about living with you and yet I rarely leave, so effective are you at making it difficult to get anywhere else in the country. 


Instead you have reduced me to nothing more than a hypocrite, celebrating as break a number of laws as I ride my scooter over a pavement to jump ahead of traffic to pass through a red light, and the next time cursing the same illegal riders when they nearly take my life doing the same. Most impressively, you have killed the concept of solidarity, making right and wrong disappear, reducing me to simply wanting to get by. So am I beaten and can now admit defeat. I can list all your problems, but I have no solutions beyond escape. Instead, you grow by the day and land prices continue to rise. Seriously, how do you make it look so easy?


I'll be back, but it will never be for long. Surviving wasn't so difficult, but it was not a pleasure. I'll take away happy memories of the people I have met here, but I'll leave with none of you. 


Yours sincerely,


Maximobo

1 comment:

  1. Thanks a lot for your try to live in Dhaka. But our nation is not ready to welcome foreigners like you yet. If you look back 300 years ago, Bangladesh was one of the richest place in the world. And Now it is one of the poorest place in the world due to so many reasons which we are not responsible for. That is why I think you got a very negative view of Bangladesh, which apparently very true from outside.

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