Dr Md Idris Bhuiyan :
Though earlier I visited Singapore, Malaysia, Mauritius and Philippines as many other visit, but this time I visited with my friend Abul Mansur Ahmed, Iqbal Hossain Chowdury and Kazi Burhan Uddin who are travelling for long with manpower business promotion. I have been the main feature of the Bangladesh experience with modernity. I have used the heroic figure of overseas Bangladeshi workers as an analogue for a nation in the throes of globalist modernisation. They who bravely wrench themselves free from everything that is familiar-family, community, and nation-in order to participate in societies and culture of which they often know nothing, to earn a living among strange peoples that normally welcome their labour but necessarily their person, in a time of great uncertainty and danger, in world pregnant with the possibilities of personal disintegration but also reinvention. I consider our overseas Bangladeshi workers are ‘true modern’ and my sense is that a close look at their
situation may illustrate for the realities and challenges facing us as a nation.
The story heroic achievement of the Bangladesh nation has also been a story of ceaseless coping with recurrent problem that worsen with time Like the overseas Bangladeshi workers, we drift a nation, we manage, and we coast along, and miraculously survive the trials that come our way, until another major crisis hits us. Then we summon all our faith, and draw from a heroism that we think no longer have. We jolt the whole world by the awesome risk we take, and surprise even with the providential results we achieve by our recklessness. No wonder we are a people of uncommon faith.
But our problem is graver with every passing days. The silent crisis we live in is more dangerous. We have not prepared ourselves for the economic storm that is shaking the rest of the world. This is all because we tend to receive our passion and heroism for those
dramatic moments— the people power events — rather than for long intervals when we seem to be at rest, when nothing great seems to be happening.
We give in to cynicism so easily; we allow ourselves to be intimidated by the complexity of the task at hand, and to be discouraged by the pettiness of our politicians. We demand so much of our governments, but expect so little from people we elect to public office. Again it is because we don’t se the interconnections.
To be modern is not just surviving a world of continuous change; more than this, it is to be able to exercise a measure of control over our lives. This we cannot do by being satisfied with mere coping.
And here I go back to my friend a legal scholar
promoted land reforms in English Speaking Africa, which overthrew the old colonial structure, Prof Patrick MacAuslan who worked with me in ADB’s Dhaka Urban project used to says.
To be modern is to open ourselves to the possibilities brought about by the unending flux innovation and obsolescence. It is to welcome change, and to be at home in it, rather that to sneer at the new from the vantage point of a romanticized past. But to be modern is also to grow in freedom with time, to strive to reduce our vulnerability to unsettling events and phenomena, and to discipline and form ourselves into a confident, stable, and peaceful community.
In a inception workshop organised by ADB and Bangladesh Government on strengthening RHD at BIAM Auditorium, Dhaka on April 7, almost all international and national experts expressed their opinion, ‘the modernisations is always challenge. Now Roads and Highways Department to choice.’
To be pre-modern, it is to reject out of hand a world that contradicts our faith, while to be modern is to leap into it and to create ever new meanings and ever new lives on the back of time without losing sense of what it is to be human.
The formation of new culture hospitable to social justice, democracy, and freedom will not come from the simple revival of indigenous values, though without any doubt we may draw some strength from them, nor will it come from the blind imitation of western institutions and practices. As in the past, it will come from the imagination of those who, like — could step out of the skin of the existing culture, criticize this in relation to the urgencies of survival in a vastly changed world, and offer new perspectives appropriate to the times in which they continue to be remembered.
