While We Travel

A few things are necessary when one travels: a reasonable, peaceful hotel, good shopping and food, fast transport, a quick guide to the list of must-see and must-do and of course, news from home. Your columnist has had 48 sleepless hours. In fact it feels like even longer, almost like 98. The children in the hotel corridor chanted their own hymns the whole night and dashed all chances of an uninterrupted slumber. Complaining didn’t help as the more than 50 percent of the hotel space was taken up by a huge group, who were traveling for a “huge” wedding to be held at the same venue. As luck would have it, we were only a minority. After all, money can buy most of what the world can offer. Including a dose of insomnia at the cost of another.

While we travel, we essentially get drawn to shopping and it ends up forming part of our travel experience. This time, while the Bangali boys dressed in suits, trying to sell in many of the High Street shops, asked quietly, “Apni ki Dhaka-r?” (Are you from Dhaka?), the range of apparel presented on the floors was doubly a surprise. Prices in Europe have fallen drastically. Price tags with an unbelievable £32 for a jacket made in Myanmar looked like a potential nightmare to a Bangladesh apparel exporter. Suits were selling at £80, shoes for £20 et al. Prices looked like crashing by the day and at the end, left one wondering whether labour, in spite of the humane concerns, is becoming even cheaper. One would have understood if this was the case of just one or two retailers, but the ground reality was that as most of us leave as happy shoppers, the labour forces, who make these clothes sitting next to our skin, are bleeding. So, somewhere down the line, there’s injustice at some level or the other. Very soon, a review of whether it’s the manufacturers or the retailers competing at the sharpest prices ever for business will again have to surface and addressed.

While we travel, it’s always an added pleasure to bump into a non-resident Bangladeshi. Therefore, when I was least expecting to spot any, 8000 feet above the sea level, at the Mount Pilatus in Lucerne, two Bangali faces popped up just like a welcome plateau. They were a couple from Kuwait and somewhat felt that we looked familiar. Five minutes into the conversation, a harsh realisation dawned on us. They were hopelessly out of touch with Bangladesh. Living away from their own homeland for over two decades, they had no interest in our development, challenges or news. That was the most shocking realisation of all. That they were clueless about home came as a shock as, most of us, by habit, stare at our telephone screens for “breaking news” from different sources in the country; as a habit, most of us browse our web and look for country updates. No dosage of international news or exposure can ever satiate what most of us want to know about “home”. Therefore, during the Eid break, when the entire country ran slow with news and when more than 70 percent of the news was either about an accident or a bail denied, I wondered what it is that we really look for when we read news. Ironically enough, we look for bad news that prompts discussion, and stimulates small addas where many of us often air…ahhh… our views, without having to execute any of them. So what matters most is the content of the news. Absence of “real” news depresses us, appearance of “regular” news frustrates. So, we, by habit, subscribe to deaths and disappointments and we routinely go sniffing for sensational news in web, screen and print.

While we travel, many of us look at the most scenic towns with cobbled roads, pretty cafes and the splash of green, and complain about our own hawkers, our own traffic, our own waste, our own billboards. At almost every opportunity, we habitually break into a conversation about why things won’t change in this country of ours. The discussion always boils down to one thing: mindsets. Apparently, changes can’t happen overnight and apparently, people would take a long time to change their habits. What would make things turn around for people? Inspiration. However, where is the voice to change things around? Where are the leaders who would inspire people to initiate and sustain positive changes in habits and practices and make people believe that civic virtue is constructed by strenuous citizenship?

While we travel, with so much to be proud of, starting from the Bangali boys serving at the Selfridges, trying to sell high end products down to the ones in the Silicon Valley, starting from manufacturing down to saving people at high-risk zones of the world, it is worth admitting that no earth displaces us, no work humiliates, no challenges kill, and no rules stifle. We are everywhere. . .