Dear politicians

Still you got our attention because there was magic in your words. You could grow flowers in barren lands. You could bring spate of water in dead rivers. Your gift of gab was soothing balm. It brought relief to disconsolate minds. Politicians, you were different from us. You spoke, we listened.

Now it seems that time has changed. We have heard the rumbling thunders of gathering storm. The wrath of people, taken too far, got out of hand. In one place people defied you and got their demands. In another place, they chased an MP who went out of line. Politicians, beware! Do not push your luck. People have reached their boiling point!

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So raise the walls around your houses. Get passports for your spouses and children. Make sure you have got visa for each of them. Start shredding all evidence and do not leave any paper trail. Take enough cash with you and carefully choose a country for asylum. Some countries will send you home, if you are wanted in your own country. Consult your physicians. Stack up sleeping pills, antacids, enough bandage rolls and ointments. Keep the medicine chest ready. Trust me, it will come handy one day, may be soon.

Bad news! The magic of your word may not work anymore. In less than six months, many of you will be out of office, some not re-elected, some not given party tickets! Soon you will be former MPs, a bunch of Wizards of Oz bereft of their wonder machines. Your familiar world of power and popularity will recede into the dense fog of oblivion.

Some of you will not give up, and will try to stay afloat in the political waters. You will sit on school committees, mosque committees, neighborhood this or neighborhood that, hoping to return to power in the next after next elections. You will look for opportunities to appear on TV or in the newspaper like a sinking man clutching at anything. You will frantically squeeze into public forums, trade associations, any other bodies, societies or organized platforms. You will spend money to buy your sphere of influence or the semblance of it. You cannot live without influence like fish cannot live without water.

Sadly, most of you at some point will live in the afterglow of your erstwhile past and will never return to the limelight again. You will grow old, fall sick, some will recover to live longer and others will succumb to fatal illness or natural death. You will leave behind your wealth, property, children, and memories of your days in power like embers smouldering in the ashes.

Some of you will get bored, womanize, drink, and litigate, vegetating in the feckless life of a prolonged twilight. In fact, your ill-gotten wealth will keep you locked in an absurd state. You will be neither powerful nor powerless, neither remembered nor forgotten, neither public nor private, neither common nor uncommon, neither loved nor hated. All these contradictions will run in your blood, pulling you in two opposite directions. You will speak, nobody will listen.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, but it also makes you lonely when you are not a hotshot. So many people have come and gone, so many leaders, so many minions, and so many ministers catapulted to glory and then thrown into the abyss by fate. Every life has a purpose that exceeds its physical dimensions. You have lived your lives in quiet desperation, all your efforts directed at physical gratification, power, affluence, comfort, fame, all driven by the romantic construct of your selfish imaginations. You are a disgrace for the nation, a moral affront to why it was created. You talk about liberty, freedom, martyrs and people, but bite your tongue, you do not mean them. Your sole focus is money; the blood and flesh of people are the grist to your greed mill where lives are crushed to turn ranking causes into spanking cash. Some of you are obviously lucky, returning to power again and again in your seasonal treks from party to party. You believe in power. But there is no power in your belief.

Politicians, you are shameless. Your children are fattened by ill-gotten money, your house shines like an ivory castle in the moonlight of grief where millions squirm in the heat, grope in the dark and drink water full of filth. You junket all over the world, your family goes on holidays to distant lands, but your national airline is going bankrupt, denied landing on foreign airstrips.

It is disgusting to listen to you these days in meetings, seminars, roundtables and on TV screen. You fight like alley cats, attacking each other like frantic warriors, telling lies, even worse, repeating them, in complete disregard for our intelligence.

You sit in the government, you sit in the opposition. In effect, it is all the same. You run this country like a joint stock company, sharing profits at the year end. Show me one politician who has not gained and I shall show you thousands of people who have lost.

Let me bring a joke from another country. What is the sixth sense that was developed within a Soviet citizen? A feeling of deep satisfaction is the answer. What is the sixth sense you have developed within us? A deep sense of realization that we are the citizens of this country

Dear politicians that sixth sense is becoming real. All these years you have hunted with the hunter and run with the prey. Now people are coming after you. It does not matter if you are in the government or opposition. They will find and hunt you down.

Meanwhile, it is your chance to think. Did you have to be so pathetic?

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.