The Union Parishad elections, being held across the country, make it relevant for us to talk about the taxon navigation amongst many other things. It's the ability to directly sense the place where one wants to be, which is how cats return when dumped miles away from home. These ongoing elections add to the quandary, if this nation losing its way, is going to find it back!

When elections are voterless, streets are lawless, politicians are mindless, officials are careless and the rest of the country is clueless, the sign of drifting is evident. And if this drifting continues for some more years, shall we remember where we started? If we don't know how much we will remember, how shall we know how much we will have forgotten?

It's said that animals navigate with their memories. Rats and dogs follow the scent trail because they remember scents. Worms follow chemical trails, moving in the direction that increases the concentration of chemicals that attract them. When a goose is migrating north for the summer, one of its strategies is to sense the planet's magnetic north and go toward it.

How do we plan to navigate? How do we plan to get back to our original place? Shall we ever have those days again when people's choice is going to win elections? Shall we ever have the laws again to punish the guilty and protect the innocent? When shall our politicians be honourable again? When shall people be the source of all power instead of being the appendage?

Even rubber has its elasticity, which is the ability to return to its original shape after it has been stretched. Everything about us is being stretched. We're stretched in words and actions. We're stretched in our doubts, fears and convictions. Truths are stretched; so are lies. Election results are stretched so that unpopular candidates can win. Financial scandals are stretched so that culprits can escape. Even the grades in schools are stretched to stretch the number of graduates.  

The greatest amount of stretching is being done to spoken words when anybody can say anything without taking responsibility. And as we condone this stress on the gift of gab, mouths after mouths are churning out doublespeak. By the time the roulette ball eventually loses its momentum and falls into one of the pockets of the wheel, we might forget the number on which we had placed the bet.  

Another fundamental skill that enables animals to find their way home from great distances is their ability to relate their locations to other places. For example, a pigeon can detect north using its magnetic sense, but that doesn't help if it needs to go east. For that, it has to add the additional knowledge of knowing the relationship between north and east. That's what we humans call the sense of direction. 

Does anybody know which direction we are heading? If nobody knows the destination, who knows how far we have moved from the origin? If we speak to confuse and act to conceal, how do we tell whether or not we have passed the threshold? 

Hence, the question isn't how much we have rolled out but how much we have to roll back. That we have let the genie come out of the bottle isn't half as challenging as putting the genie back in the bottle. Shall we ever succeed in moderating the excesses or gathering what has been scattered in this country?

For argument's sake, let's assume this country suddenly wakes up and wants to fix things. Who is going to do it? Who will decide what is right or wrong, sinful or virtuous, wise or stupid, and useful or useless? Where shall we find the skills lost in guile, knowledge lost in ignorance, efficiency lost in manipulation, and decency lost in denial? Who is going to see that more left-hand drive flyovers won't be built in this right-hand drive country? Who is going to ensure that the post-mortem of a young girl raped and killed won't miss those obvious facts again? 

How are the wanderers of a wasteland going to make it fertile again? What will enable them to erase the mischief that has seeped into the rocks of this nation? Will it be possible to rehabilitate those minds addicted to easy money and quick success? Can we reel in the kites soaring in the sky of insincerity and recklessness? When will minds imbibing fantasy get back to their senses? 

It's hard to find an alternative leadership in this country because our leadership has left us with no alternative. Minds marinated in greed and opportunism, the fight for prestige and principle is entirely forgotten. If anybody is fighting for anything, it's not to make things better, but better to take things under his or her own sweet control.

The writer is editor of the weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star. 

Email: badrul151@yahoo.com