Down to Earth
Pre- Eid nightmare of shopping and travel
The city-dwellers are at present passing through a nightmarish experience in matters of shopping and travels before Eid. As the big festival approaches, the nightmare gets intensified with the shopping spree surging towards the crescendo. The same phenomenon affects the travelling arrangements before Eid. In these respects, all considerations of discretion and judgement are thrown to the winds with a sort of desperation.
All the shops dealing in Eid requisites, be they located in showy important commercial zones or in less important areas, become packed with frenzied crowds of shoppers. Of course, the composition of such crowds of shoppers varies according to categories in social and economic strata to which they belong. The affluent classes of shoppers frequent the more elegant establishments, while the less so meet their requirements from the shops more modest, by comparison or from the sidewalk selling outlets.
One aspect of the nightmare lies more in the greater volume of customers on the city sidewalks. Since all of them, more or less, come under the sway of hawkers, it is a difficult exercise to get access to any shop standing by the sidewalk. When eventually one gets entry into any of them, which remains always overcrowded, he gets so perplexed that he fails to determine whether the price asked for an article is fair or not. In the frenzy of shopping, it may often turn out that what is given publicity as discount price is actually more than the normal price and the customer goes for it without any question. In the midst of the maddening crowd, there is no scope for checking with a couple of shops nearby whether the asking price is really reasonable. The frenzy takes such a turn in this situation that the overwhelming impulse that develops is to make the purchase, whatever be the price, and get out of the shop as early as possible.
The roadside hawkers selling some common items more in demand, such as punjabi, babywear, sandals, caps, etc. for the Eid, attract more people and they make the total shopping scenario more confusing and chaotic. One important factor in this context is that sometimes the hawkers sell their wares at prices lower than those charged at regular shops. Such concession in prices is sometimes found to reach a level which beats the legendary Bangabazar prices. The resultant attraction create greater number of customers and these bargain-hunters cause greater chaos with their pushing and jostling.
A striking contrast is sometimes presented by some elite shopping malls in posh areas like Gulshan, Baridhara and Banani, where women's apparels are reportedly sold at prices which may be considered as fantastic by ordinary standards. Yet there is no dearth of customers at these high-profile shops.
A dreadful spectacle is presented by the awful congestion created by the various modes of conveyances carrying passengers to their destinations for shopping. These include the stupendously high number of cars, micro-buses, autorickshaws and the locust-like swarms of rickshaws. In the pre-Eid time, such huge conglomeration of vehicles of all descriptions present such a harrowing sight that movement even on foot on every road in the city becomes a terrible ordeal. In such traffic chaos, travel by rickshaw becomes particularly hazardous, because in course of their slow movement in a traffic jam, they tend to hit one another from behind. In case hitting gets a little hard for any of them, a passenger runs the risk of being thrown out his seat on to the ground with consequent injury. This is a constant danger for rickshaw passengers on the traffic-congested roads. In the pre-Eid period, such traffic congestion continues unabated from early morning till late at night.
Travels by trains, steamers or long-route buses are similarly awesome before the Eid. Quite some days ahead of the big festival, advance-booking of tickets for such journeys is so misused that a considerable part of such advance tickets go into the blackmarket whose operators dare to ply their illegal profit-making business unchallenged. Of course, there are isolated attempts at curbing this evil by the law-enforcing agencies. But, in fact, as the Eid gets nearer, the malpractice gets so widespread that controlling it doesn't prove to be an easy job.
Apart from that, there is the risk of overloading of passengers on trains, launches and buses. Such overloading in many cases becomes the cause of accidents, involving loss of lives. This phenomenon is always there on the eve of a big festival. Past experiences show that preventive measures in this regard have not proved adequate.
With a large part of the city's populace reduced on account of outward journeys of people for visiting their village homes, the city wears a contrasting look. On the day after the Eid, it is a pleasant experience going on a show ride in a car or a rickshaw along the roads free of traffic jams. All the city dwellers who stay back welcome this short break in the usual pattern of hectic activity and high tension, contributing a watershed to our urban life.
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