This place certainly gets a bad press:
This spring, I took a month-long road trip across a country that we – you, me and everyone we know – are killing. One day, not long into my journey, I travelled over tiny ridges and groaning bridges on the back of a motorbike to reach the remote village of Munshigonj. The surviving villagers – gaunt, creased people – were sitting by a stagnant pond. They told me, slowly, what we have done to them.
Ten years ago, the village began to die. First, many of the trees turned a strange brownish-yellow colour and rotted. Then the rice paddies stopped growing and festered in the water. Then the fish floated to the surface of the rivers, gasping. Then many of the animals began to die. Then many of the children began to die.
Welcome to Bangladesh in 2008!
The rest of the article, written by Johann Hari of the Independent, doesn’t get any more cheerful. (Although I found his attempt to wind up madrassah students unintentionally amusing.)
He writes that sea level rises, caused by climate change, will wipe out Bangladesh by the end of the century, forcing the exodus of countless hordes of impoverished refugees and Islamic terrorists.
He ends with an epitaph to a dead country: “The headstone would read, Bangladesh, 1971-2071: born in blood, died in water.”
But things do not seem all that bad from where I’m sitting.
Johann seems to ignore the fact that this is, after all, home to about 140 million hardworking and often incredibly ingenious people, who don’t want to become victims. Most climate change scientists do not estimate that the sea will rise to the levels that Johann thinks they might, although there is little doubt that the coastal regions of Bangladesh could be in big trouble in the next few decades.
If anyone can cope with climate change surely its the Bangladeshis?
In fact, their scientists and development experts seem sure that they will be able to teach the rest of us a thing or two, when the flood waters start lapping at the gates of our cities.
But Bangladesh seems to inspire this kind of doom-laden writing. I’m not entirely sure why. Here are the titles of some of the books in my office:
Bangladesh: A Legacy of Blood
The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh
A Quiet Violence: View from a Bangladesh Village
Miseries of Millions in Bangladesh
And first prize goes to:
Dhaka: A City of Dirt, Darkness and Deprivation
It is all a far cry from Rabindranath Tagore’s poem, adopted as the national anthem:
My Bengal of Gold, I love you,
Forever your skies, your air set my heart in tune
as if it were a flute.
