These 57,320 square miles, we have is littered with various development projects all year long. For quite some time now it has been our reality, but now with every other thing, becoming bad to worse, this too is finding a way to astonish the numbest of us. At this point, it seems like not a corner of the country can be found where there is no alarming sound of angry machinery and countless roadblocks.
Though not even the villages are spared and are being maddeningly urbanized, it becomes especially harrowing when one lives in a city like Dhaka. The infamous Dhaka jam becomes that much harder to navigate with the continuous buildout of the city that we are told is there for our betterment.
So, I hear cities grow all day long. Sometimes that’s all I hear. Buildings and blocks, bricks and machines clanking against each other like fighters in a cage. I really hate the arrogance with which it grows bigger and bigger like a bully. Making me feel small in a way only a bully can.
Yet thousands of forests grew, forests that outsize history, that predates men, they grew like a monk’s meditation. There were times when people used to go to the forests to learn. The forests that touched heaven and came back humbler. There is a sound when a forest grows, the monks knew that. If I am going, to be honest, I think there are probably sounds when a moon goes crescent to full. But the point is a rapturous forest that can accommodate all things life grows with the silence that only with years of meditation one can hear. And here we are, building taller and shinier things so loudly that the heavens can hear us.
Our Padma Bridge, our Dhaka Metro Rail, our Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant, and all the other upcoming megaprojects that fill up lists that according to the brochures say will make a dreamy Bangladesh, is dangerously close to being a nightmare.
There are no monks now. There’s no pilgrims’ progress. No Sanyasi. And I hear the cities grow all day long. All night long, moons come and go, and stars go blind with the spectacles below. Someday I think I’ll go blind too. The cities are becoming unnaturally grotesque and needlessly big. The American capitalistic approach that tells us being arrogant and loud is the only way to deliver one’s confidence is being translated into our once sleepy neighborhoods, our once malleable pavements.
All I want to say is that the process of development can be kind. It doesn’t have to uproot people so ruthlessly. It can be considered, people’s lives around and the history left behind. Development can be brought about without having to obliterate the past. Because in building a future, we have to remember who we used to be. Now there is a tightrope dance going on between our collective memory and our collective amnesia. And I hope, for the sake of our mental peace and physical well-being, we choose our memory.
