Guilty until proven innocent

Though I insist on his giving me the full address and directions to his home, he says with confidence, "Come to the Bakshi Bazaar intersection and then just mention my name to anyone and he will direct you to my place."

I show up there and sure enough, NOBODY has ever heard of him. After a while, people start giving me strange looks.

And I do get into an argument with him at another time. He assumes the Don Corleone (Marlon Brando) voice and says ominously, "Naveed, I don't think you know who you are dealing with. Just go to that [exclusive, private] club and ask around about me and you will realise who I am."

Scared, I do exactly that. And just as he said, I DO get the same consistent answer from all five people whom I ask about him — "We have NEVER heard of this guy."

Over confidence. This is why others know more about me than I do about myself. I never knew about my non-existent mole on my back till I learned about it on social media.

I think there is also a touch of megalomania with the over confidence. That's how we are. That's fine, we love ourselves, perhaps a tad too much.

It is the overconfidence and megalomania that prompted Donald Trump to declare his travel ban which was immediately shot down by the three judges. Considering three losses in cricket being called a white wash, the actions of the three wise men and woman constitute an orange wash.

Perhaps it is the same over confidence in flimsy facts and the megalomania of a few hoping to score some brownie points that lead to the World Bank's missing its disbursement target for the Padma Bridge. So it gets known as a few whistles are blown with some 'facts' sewn and the fingers are shown at the Eastern Time Zone (in Canada). The World Bank loan gets totally blown with a harsh tone as we groan and moan while being thrown into the Padma crossing at the speed of a drone as a nation is made to sit in the corner with the head adorning a cone. But we start building with dough that's our own while the bridge is no clone of the real thing. Hope the DC based bank will not continue to be prone to pick a bone. We further hope that the lone man on the bank's throne, Jim Yong Kim, will hopefully pick up the phone and ask his crew the question: "What went wrong?"

The buck stops with you Mr Kim. No more blame storming, do some brain storming on what went wrong. The price has been too high for us being guilty until proven innocent.

The writer is an engineer at Ford & Qualcomm USA and CEO of IBM & Nokia Siemens Networks Bangladesh turned comedian (by choice), the host of ATN Bangla's The Naveed Mahbub Show and ABC Radio's Good Morning Bangladesh, the founder of Naveed's Comedy Club.

E-mail: naveed@naveedmahbub.com