Imagine

Dhaka was then, to my mind, a still sleepy little metropolis, just waking up and acquiring the trappings of a bustling, modern city. Industry was still in its infancy, the roads were uncluttered, and the migration of the population from the villages to the cities was a trickle, not a flood.

Bangladesh as a country was then still in its infancy, less than ten years old, and the air was filled with promise, with freshness, with the hope of bright tomorrows, of better days ahead. It was a country on which one could dream.

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Certainly, in many ways it was backward and behind-the-times. Certainly, the entire country was still mired in poverty and under-development and lack of access to basics such as education, health-care, safe drinking water, and electricity. This was before the social and economic revolutions engendered by the non-governmental sector and the garment industry.

But the sense was that we were at the beginning of something. That there was a clear path ahead that if we followed would take us as a nation to where we wanted to go, that the country that we all dreamed of lay just over the horizon.

In 2006 that Bangladesh seems as remote to me as the memory of the faces of the girls I used to admire from a distance as a young boy, of my cousins' stately white house by the lake-side, of the imposing pair of date-palms outlined majestically against the sky in our once capacious gardens; these things don't exist any more, or at least not in the same form. So complete is the transformation that one wonders sometimes whether they ever existed at all.

The Bangladesh I returned to again in 2003 was very different from the one I returned to as a child in 1980. The last time I had lived for one year continuously in Dhaka before my return had been 1985, before my pursuit of higher education, adventure, and the unknown had sent me on my long, rambling journey through Indian hill-stations to small college towns and then pulsing cities on the other side of the planet.

Bangladesh had changed. In some ways for the better, some for the worse. For the better: Dhaka was a vibrant, buzzing metropolis, with excitement in the air; there was a can-do, entrepreneurial spirit among the population who had realized that if they wanted anything done then they would have to do it for themselves.

But the changes for the worse were more readily apparent. Dhaka had transformed into a choking, crowded, polluted nightmare of traffic and concrete monstrosities, and seemed to be slowly sinking beneath the weight of the thousands each day who had been forced to leave the villages and farms of their ancestors and migrate to the city in the hope of earning a meager living on the pavements of what had become one of the mega-cities of the world.

Nothing worked the way it should have. Corruption was endemic, crime a daily hazard, everything, from justice to education, was up for sale to the highest bidder, the shimmering waterways of the city were clogged with filth, and no respite to these or any of the other ills that beset the country seemed open to view.

Most distressing of all was the change in people's attitude towards the country and the national inability to imagine a bright future for the nation as a whole.

It is this inability to envision a bright future for the country that has sent millions overseas to try their luck and seek out their fortune.

The poor are so desperate that they are prepared to mortgage their very lives for what they hope will be a better life as an indentured servant in the Middle East, they are willing to brave rough ocean crossings in crammed and leaking death-traps, and to put their lives in the hands of the most unscrupulous and cold-blooded of traders in human misery.

Even our best and brightest are to be found every morning in long queues outside foreign consulates, waiting patiently for the inky blots in their passports that will allow them to leave home, never to return.

I have seen the best minds of my generation teaching in community colleges in wind-swept prairie towns in the middle of nowhere or manning the computer help-desks of small suburban insurance companies.

These are the lucky ones. The unlucky drive taxi cabs and wait tables, their Masters certificates and scholarship awards gathering dust on the walls of their humble outer-borough apartments.

But they are all where they are for a reason. To make their lives better, to ensure a better life for their children than they could ever imagine for themselves. And, by and large, they are able to eke out happy and fulfilling lives. Lives on which they can dream.

They are doing right by their children and they send money to their families back home, often making the difference between comfort and penury for those who anxiously await their checks every month.

But they, like the rest of us, have given up on the project of nation building. Their aspirations, such as they are, are purely personal and not tied to any vision of building a better Bangladesh.

Why is this? It is not as though Bangladeshis are unpatriotic or do not care for their homeland.

Bangladeshis care passionately about their homeland, the placid beauty of the countryside, with its green fields and banana trees and still ponds, our simple, unhurried way of doing things, the little old-world courtesies of every-day life, the subtle grace of our poetry, the melancholy of our songs, the tastes and scents and sights and sounds that make up Bangladesh.

But there is a strong sense that the nation is heading down-hill, that things are getting worse every day, and that nothing can be done. The problems we face today seem so intractable, the long-term future so hopeless.

It is into this void that Dr Yunus has stepped and given us all reason to believe, in ourselves, in the country, in the future.

He has reminded us that the door to a bright future is never closed. It is never too late.

This is the essence of the gift that Dr Yunus has given to the nation. He has rekindled our national ability to hope, to dream, to imagine that we, too, can be more than we are, he has given us the courage, the audacity, to believe that there is nothing we cannot accomplish, nothing that is beyond our abilities.

This has been his simple message to the people of Bangladesh for these past thirty years. This is the simple philosophy behind the revolutionary idea of micro-credit: believe in yourself and you can do miracles.

Patience, hope, and courage: that's all we need.

Patience to understand that the world will not change in a day, that it might take a life-time, hope that we can indeed do it, and courage to take that chance.

Imagine a Bangladesh where there is no poverty, where each man, woman, and child goes to bed with a full stomach, where each of us can expect safe water to drink and electricity and a decent place to live, where everyone has the chance for an honest and dignified living.

These are not wild, extravagant fantasies. Just the very basics. And they are within our grasp.

It is not too late. It will never be too late. To get rid ourselves of the crooks and the cheats and the rent-seekers and their hired muscle that we have lived in fear of for so long.

It is not too late to build a clean and safe environment for our children to grow up in. It is not too late to build schools and hospitals and roads.

It is not too late to build a government and judiciary and civil administration and police force that is dedicated to the common good, that will ensure the security of all, that each citizen can look up to and respect and take comfort in.

It is not too late to heal the poisonous wounds of the bitter hatreds that have torn our society asunder.

Let us dream. Let us believe. And then let us get to work.

Zafar Sobhan is Assistant Editor, The Daily Star.