There are many good things happening in Bangladesh, but somehow, we just forget to look or take note
- Aren’t we stronger when we take pride in who we are?
“Where in the world is a ruling government working so hard to build a negative image for the country?” asked my Swedish friend. I didn’t realise he was referring to Bangladesh.
The current government and its stalwarts and supporters are not keeping any stones unturned to show Bangladesh in a bad light. They don’t like the United States or Great Britain treating Bangladesh as a moderate Muslim country. Alexander the Great once told his comrade Seleucus how surprising this region was. My teacher wrote me a letter from Delhi, India in 1987 saying: “In the non-resident Bangladeshi circle, we are happier to be bashing Bangladesh rather than branding Bangladesh.”
Nobody seems to be asking the Bangladesh government why they don’t arrest the militants or take them to task. The US ambassador and his friends at Washington DC think the peace-loving people in Bangladesh will never resort to terrorism.
Some newspaper editors, ministers, and self-proclaimed civil society members think Bangladesh is full of religious fundamentalists, and that mosques are the hub of training in terrorism. At the same time, they want foreigners to invest in Bangladesh or take cognisance of Bangladesh’s growth story. What a joke.
This will surely have a negative ripple effect. When one is constantly hearing only the bad things about a country, the next generations are affected, and there prevails an overall feel of negativity.
I read an article by the esteemed president of India, APJ Abdul Kalam, where he shared his three visions for India. He dwelt upon different aspects of society, depicting where he foresaw scope for improvement, and explaining why India was still not a part of the developed nations’ club.
And I was thinking, each word, each sentence of that article is just as true for Bangladesh as it is for India.
We brand ourselves negatively as individuals, and the whole nation gets dragged in. Do we care? No. We are just happy that we bashed the opposition, branded the country as a terrorist one, and earned some popularity in the television talk shows, even by telling some blatant lies.
Besides the negatives, which every country has, there are many good things happening in Bangladesh, but somehow, we just forget to look or take note. If we can’t take credit for any good job, we don’t like it or talk further about it. When some good is spearheaded by an opposition leader, we decide to keep mum even if the whole world is talking about it.
It’s high time this culture of negative branding was halted. It’s time the world saw Bangladesh for all the glory she possesses. The media is already playing a strong role in shaping the opinions of people. They may play a stronger role yet – maybe as ambassadors of public relations for our country?
Having worked in many developing countries in the world, and many of those in no way doing much better than us, I dream of a positive portrayal of Bangladesh, of showing the land of hope to the world. I dream of conveying the story of a small town housewife, Shamima Khatun, receiving an award from Chelsea Clinton for her success in microcredit, or of Nilufar Yasmin making cricket bats in an unknown, unfamiliar part of the country. These are real-life heroines who are larger than life, who have fought with courage to challenge the clutches of poverty to march towards prosperity.
No matter what anyone says, Bangladeshis are peace-loving, hard working, and will get things done for a simple pat on the back. God-fearing does not mean fundamentalist. Bangladeshis are a fantastic example of drawing a balance between religious stipulations and cultural heritage.
I dream that a lot of tycoons will visit Bangladesh to watch our team’s super performance in cricket and whole-heartedly accept the success of our micro-finance institutions in bringing out a lot of people from the clutches of poverty, our political leaders joining in debates, joking with each other, yet remaining firm on serving the country’s interests together.
I often wonder what we gain out of negatively publicising our own country. Has it ever occurred to us that negative criticism by individuals collectively forms a negative image of the country?
We take pride in other countries’ achievements, but shy away from being proud of our own. It’s almost as if we are embarrassed to call ourselves Bangladeshis.
By degrading your own country, do we gain respect in the eyes of others? Does it make us eligible for citizenship in another country? What makes other countries stronger than us is their patriotism, and their pride in being who they are.
Source: Dhaka Tribune
I fully agree with the overall tone of this article and support author’s view that we should be “branding” positively and not “bashing” Bangladesh. Having said this, I also believe that the author might not have gone deep enough to explain why this happens, ie why do we ‘bash’ and not ‘brand’ Bangladesh positively. Both we as a nation and our politicians as the guide of our nation are equally responsible for this tragic situation.
Some of our politicians have figured this out long ago (and we as a nation that follow these scoundrels blindly are no less culpable) that in order to get to and/or to stay in power it is important to please and be in the good book of the powerful foreigners. So when foreigners got into the act of Muslim bashing the world over a part of our political spectrum saw this as a great opportunity and with complete disregard to what it would mean in terms of overall image of the country and how this may affect our long term interest, profiled Bangladesh’s rising Islamic nationalist identity as “Islamic terrorism”, as a way to attract support of these anti-Muslim marauders.
This worked for a while and indeed, this is how a certain party in Bangladesh came to power in 2008 – they licked the boots of foreign Muslim haters,with the promise that they would do a much better job of kicking and suppressing Bangladesh’s Islamist nationalists with bigger boots than those of theirs, which they did and doing even to date so. However, these idiots don’t realize that Muslim bashing is no more the flavour of the month and that this tactic does not work any more with most foreigners except of course one. But this does not seem to stop these goons from persisting with the business of throwing ink on the nation’s face.
Regrettably, we the people (not all but quite a large number of us, that is) seem to be happily and blindly following this tack and in the wake, giving moral and intellectual legitimacy to these evil acts.
If indeed we genuinely want get out of this rut and wish to brand Bangladesh more positively, the first thing we must to do as a nation is refuse to get duped into and thus conflicted by the satanic spells of our self-seeking politicians and reject all their machinations. We must also denounce and ignore all their efforts to manipulate us by presenting to us non-facts as facts, non-issues as issues and ask us to look backward and not forward and in the wake, divide and regress us,
Say to these scumbags – rest in hell!
The author very innocently addressed negativity in the context of our country as unusual and unnatural. In response, ADK, reacted with a certain degree of boldness, but left another question open: how to send these perpetrators against our country’s security to hell? In the historical perspective, this quandary reminds me of the famous quote of Karl Marx: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.” To narrow this world perspective to our national context, I must say, there is no easy way to bring about change except through the determined efforts to force that change. The agents of negativity in Bangladesh are a gang of mobsters who believe in balancing political opposition by negative propaganda against the state, no matter what its impact is on the country! The leader of this group uses immoral negative propaganda against the country on a constant basis, just to stick to power. This leader of the evil forces is a true believer in Machiavellianism, who can justify any means to achieve her desired goals. That is far from patriotism, that is a crime against the country, and the place for such an evil doer, surely is in hell.