Dreams from a Dystopia

I'm blogging from a Coffee Bean cafe today. This particular outlet is quiet and pleasant at this hour, this brief slot of time which I reserve for blogging every week.

I shall not dwell on too serious a topic this week as the last post about WW1 and emptiness was a rather bleak one. Moreover there's a Christmassy feel in the air now as November ends and December is approaching. What a great month December is! It's definitely my favourite time of the year.

My day at the office today was mostly spent having discussions with my colleagues. It happens that there are quite a number of tasks that we need to complete before the year ends. Most people are also starting to clear their leave and plan for year-end vacations with their families. And I, being single and not much of a family man looks forward to an uninterrupted month of productive work. No holidays or vacations for me.

Come to think of it, I have not been travelling much for the past decade. The only country that I've travelled to during the last five years has been Bangladesh!. For a while I was making regular monthly trips there.

Strangely, I've never blogged about my experience there. I think part of it is because all my trips there have been rather stressful ones: difficult customers and equally difficult business issues. I am actually glad that I do not have to go there again in the foreseeable future. That chapter of my life is thankfully closed.

The most memorable thing about Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh is their buses. Dhaka, like many Third World cities, are congested with cars, trishaws, three-wheelers, pedestrians and beggars. What's fascinating about their buses is the sheer misery of their condition--they all look like they've been salvaged from the vehicle junkyard. But everywhere in Dhaka, these much-battered and dented rickety metal ribcages which pass off as passenger buses are always packed to the brimmed. You see sweaty faces peer back at you from rusted frames of broken windows and windscreens as they lumber across the congested city roads like condemned autobots from some Transformer purgatory. And if you've been stuck in Dhaka traffic before, you'll know that you will get many opportunities to study them closely: your taxi will likely be pushed so uncomfortably close to them that you could easily wind down your window to touch the crinkled bodies of these metal beasts.

I was utterly fascinated by them. I considered them works of art, metal behemoths sculpted by the harsh daily struggles of Dhaka traffic. They became a source of amusement for me as I fantasized about authoring a coffee table book on Bangladeshi buses. One with many full-color pages of these monsters from an industrial dystopia in all their magnificent glory.

These were the daydreams that occupied me as I was stuck for two hours in a hired car, inching my way from Gulshan to Mothijheel. There in my island of calm amidst the chaos, I see the hot struggles of humanity all around me, of people cast helplessly into the world, each carrying dreams of their own within, perhaps not unlike mine.