Requiem for Dhaka

We don’t need any national or international index to conclude on the fact that Dhaka city is unliveable, although a teeming population, day in and day out, is making their living out of it. Despite its unliveable conditions, the city has an uncanny ability to draw its denizens from all corners of the country.

Perhaps that’s why some Dhaka-lovers celebrated 400 years of the city’s existence. At that time, I wondered what was there to celebrate. History? Heritage? Ability to exist? What were they celebrating? I still wonder.

The foremost element through which you assess a city’s liveability is to appraise the dwellers moveability from one corner to another. In that respect, our city’s managerial skills are at their lowest levels. There’s no doubt about it. 50% of its people may not have picked up the habit of making room for others on the roads, but the long faces of other 50 are quite noticeable.

The latter 50 try very hard to follow what the law says, but the system doesn’t allow them. It becomes unbearable when the flag-carrying vehicles of the lawmakers break the law of the roads. We don’t have anything else to do but to curse our own stars. What did we, in our previous life, do to deserve this?

Well, you put aside all irritation and negativity; you hold your patience and want to move toward your destination. You even pardon the unpardonable honkings from the other vehicles behind your one. To quell your negativity, you try breathing some fresh air. The stinking waste will pound on your breath with a reminder that you need a perfumed roll-on constant over your breathing senses.

Well, you know how to divert your attention from what you are in. You turn up your FM, try reading a newspaper, or browse Facebook to keep these thoughts away from your mind.

But something will surely prevent you from being submerged in your own world. The roadside waste bins will surely remind you about the obnoxious aspects of our waste disposal and management. Each and every neighbourhood is infested with the smell of waste with the centuries-old techniques of handling waste. Every city in the world has its smell that characterises its people and their lifestyle.

The smell of our city is not at all something to be proud of. There’s nothing happening in this city that could secrete any good smell. We don’t know how long it will take to implement a proper waste management plan in our city. You wish for a downpour so that all this waste is washed away, and your vicinity becomes a bit clean.

Then again, the rain creates another grave trouble for the city. When it rains, the water stays on the roads as we can’t create an up-and-running sewage system that can help make ways for the water to roll on to the water-bodies. Then again, we don’t have much of our water bodies left in the city.

Almost all water bodies have been utilised for human habitation. Even the seemingly nicest place in the city, Hatirjheel, also direly suffers due to water-logging after a rain.

Well, why do we need the water to roll on to only water-bodies? The soil could immerse it and take it under ground. There you go! We also have a problem of taking the rainwater to the soil. The percentage of visible soil is also decreasing. When we get out of our houses, we hardly see any soil.

On the other hand, we’ve been using our underground water for drinking purposes so much that it has created an underground vacuum beneath our feet, beneath our skyscrapers, beneath our homes. The experts have been perennially alerting about the fact that Dhaka city is at risk of going down if the vacuum continues to increase.

Who knows what will happen in the future? What will the people do if the city goes down? What will the government do if anything like that happens? If anything like that really happens, it will be uninhabitable. The dwellers will abandon their city. Have we thought about where will they go? Where will we accommodate the survivors? In Gazipur? In Narayanganj? Where?

Now, where do we get from here? We all know the state of our city, its prospects, and problems. If our ambition is to remain what we are now, we don’t have anything much to say. But, if our objective is to improve, then we should be serious about it. Without trying to beat around the bush and unnecessarily trying to beautify Dhaka, we should fix the basics first. Shouldn’t we?