No time like the past
AZ, Dhaka
Malcolm Beith's piece on the revisit to Burma (cannot be Myanmar, as there is no chance) was nostalgic, as I recalled my school days in Bhola (then in Bengal of British India, now in Bangladesh) where I was in the school during the early 1940s. My Rangoon-born cousin was in class ten. Later in life he married a British Indian Muslim lass also born in Rangoon. During the subsequent war years he was a railway guard in Chittagong sector when the Japanese had captured BUrma and were nosing near the eastern borders with India.In those Empire days, India and Burma were close together as far as communication and transport were concerned, and a large community of Indian citizens settled in Burma for trade and business. this year (2003) in metropolis Dhaka, I purchased a 'Burmese' lunge (loincloth) from a footpath hawker for Taka 60. Smooth as Burmese silk, but obviously synthetic. Beith evokes the stoppage of time in the Burmese small town in 2003 in a way which is etched in memory. It reminds me that here in Bangladesh, time has sort of stopped since the war of liberation in 1971, as we are not moving forward, in three decades, towards development and progress in the way anticipated and expected by the millions who suffered the pangs of the struggle. Old style politics has no time clock; and the rich background of the leaders somehow cannot be channelled in a way which could symbolise national consensus. The new nation's teething troubles never tend to cease. We are not growing up! Here in a cramped, overcrowded metropolis Dhaka, we are grappling with time in micro units, year by year, or in five-year periods of general elections. The long-range vision is brushed aside for ad hoc consolidations. The coming years (2004-5) appear to be crucial, as the politicians face the suppressed wrath of the suffering masses, who have no security anywhere at any level. That is the problem with Father Time--it has to move in a certain way at a certain rate, otherwise problems are created indefinitely.
|
|
