Tiptoeing through the minefield
My morning muse visits me with the gift of an old song. I have minimised the YouTube screen in which Khurshid Alam's song from an old movie, The Father (1979), continues to play. "What gaan (song) can I sing? All around, there are all these guns: Bren Guns, Sten Guns and Machine Guns." The lyricist Gazi Mazharul Anwar has worked wonders in pointing out the loaded dilemma between creativity (i.e. gaan) and hostility (i.e. gun). In a way, he echoed the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, who once said that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Auschwitz, of course, is the ill-famous town in Poland that was used by Nazi Germany for extermination camps during World War II. Once humanity has witnessed the brutality at its extreme level, one should not sing for humanity, Adorno contended.
Writing is becoming increasingly difficult as one has to tiptoe through a minefield, not knowing which topic may set off a trigger or become a bummer. It's not nice to hear that we have the worst record of press freedom among South Asian countries, lower than Afghanistan. International media propaganda? Perhaps! In a media-eat-media world, I am so glad that I am no longer a journalist in search of facts. I write my opinion pieces based on the information that is already published. I share my value judgements in connotative language. I set aside my Friday mornings to reflect on the current news that is electrifying with different shock intensities.
My page editor knows it all too well that she cannot make me think of my Saturday column, except for Friday morning. I work better only when there is a deadline. I guess deadlines are liberating in the sense that it takes the eye off the ball of what to write and what not to write, or what is right and what is not right. You just go with your creative flow because you have a deadline to meet. The outcome is often terrible, at times tolerable. Do you smell something fishy in the way I am beating around the bush? Yes, you have smelled it right.
There shouldn't have been any scarcity of topics given we had a long Eid break, right? Topics should line up like the motorcycles on the shoulder of Padma Bridge and drive in a regulated manner. Writing should have been easy like driving through the emptied Dhaka streets. Yet, there was helter-skelter when the Dhaka residents who did not have the luxury of tracing their umbilical cord back to their ancestral homes smelled something foul in the air. There was nothing natural about the way the piped gas started leaking over the holidays. People were scared; many came out into the streets. Some residential complexes started miking, asking residents not to light their stoves. For the first time, I did not complain about being hostage to the private LPG cylinder makers who have had us, the consumers, tightly under their thumbs. Rumours grew their tongues as news of gas leakage started hitting all portals, but there were no decisive instructions from the authorities concerned.
News outlets quoted anonymous inside sources saying that the closure of factories and reduced amount of consumption during Eid break increased the pressure in the gas lines, causing gas leakage. Hours later, we heard that the national gas service provider Titas had reduced the pressure of gas through its district regulation stations and brought the situation under control. No apologies. No punitive measures for creating such a panic and turning Dhaka into a ticking bomb.
Someone at the regulation stations failed to anticipate the decline in gas usage over the Eid holidays. Yet, such annual events should be a standard operating procedure. Now, can I dare criticise the negligence of the power and energy authorities? The answer lies in their name. They are so powerful that mere mortals like me can only feebly connote in a soundwave inaudible to the big bosses.
Do you think if I fail to pitch my resistance in a soundwave range below 20 Hertz, it will be picked up by the providence? Or, should I pitch high over 20,000 Hertz to reach the ear of the supernatural beings? How else do I protest the crescent grin of the fowl vendor who was asking for Tk 350 per kg of live broiler birds on the night before Eid? How do I respond to the quadrupled price of salad items following the news of Eid being observed in a faraway desert? Once again, do I dare write about this syndicate that has us under their thumbs? There is no one to see our misery, feel our pain.
You may chuckle, thinking why bother the small fries when there are so many big fish responsible for the situation. It is fishy how some of these big fishes act like demigods. Their arrogance scales new heights, and their audacity mounts.
For one alpha male in a sports body, it was perhaps demeaning for his male ego to see the female athletes performing at international levels. The girls did what his boys could not. He tried to bask in the glory of the girls for a while, then realised he had failed to deliver on his national assignment. His meanness became obvious when he dilly-dallied to pay the entry fees of a tournament and forwarded the payment request to the ministry concerned as his exit clause in a fine print. The amount, quoted as Tk 20 lakh, is so negligible in the grand scheme of things that another sports boss waved his willows to suggest that even his players could have coughed up. Now the ball-filled-with-air and the ball-covered-in-expensive-leather are having a field day. The air is becoming increasingly foul.
Meanwhile, I scratch my head thinking about what to write. Friday is becoming my "bheja fry" day.
Dr Shamsad Mortuza is a professor of English at Dhaka University.