::: Star Weekend Magazine :::

Star Diary

Degrading Quality of Streets and Highways

A few months ago, most of the streets around the area I live in were repaired right after the monsoon had ended. But within a few months, the streets went back to the similar damaged condition they had been in. As a result, a few days ago, the labourers crowded the streets again, in order to repair them. The case is similar in the area I study, which is half way across the Dhaka city where I live. It's a common scene in Dhaka that streets are being repaired so frequently. It's evident that the pressure on the streets and the highways is much enormous than before as the population and the number of vehicles have increased exponentially over the last decade.

Photos: zahedul i khan

But as I pondered more deeply, it occurred to me that both the quality of materials used and the time taken to repair a street these days had decreased. Are they doing this intentionally so that once the roads are destroyed as has happened in our neighbourhood, they can again win the contracts for repairing the roads that will instead of rendering the public a service will fill their own pockets for personal gains?

On behalf of the public, I earnestly beg the authorities to do something about the 'tender culture' and give contracts to the parties who can construct high quality roads.

Rasheda Parveen
Banani, Dhaka

Kitty Parties at Office Place

I work at a private advertising agency and I have to work with both male and female colleagues. Being a progressive-minded man, I have no problem working with my female colleagues but there are some traits they practise which utterly bother me. Every other day, some of the female officers bring homemade or ready-made exotic food and throw some kind of unofficial kitty party in the office. I have no problem with it as long as it does not affect my work but most of the time these parties prolong even after the lunch break and the noise most of the participants create, disturbs many others and that includes most of my other female colleagues as well who are more professional in undertaking their duties. If any of the readers who can identify herself to those 'party animals', please think about other colleagues of yours who are trying to concentrate on their work and not much of a fun lover like you are.

Ashraful Shahidee
Gulshan, Dhaka

Foreign Treatment

A few weeks ago, I went to Malaysia for vacation. Everything was going beautifully until I tried to interact with some Malaysian people at a club. Most of them barely wanted to talk to me; and one of the guys I was talking to, even told me that the Bangladeshi labours basically introduced corruption to the Malaysian police. They also thought, I was an illiterate, corrupt labour who could afford to spend at a nightclub due to dishonest means of income. When told them I came here for a vacation, they were surprised. They were taken aback when they came to know that I actually worked in an internationally reputed company and they treated me better after that.

In a separate incident at the Singapore airport, I was treated like a criminal. They took my fingerprints because my passport was not machine-readable; they checked my entire luggage while the others who were not from Bangladesh were treated completely differently. I was taken to a room and interrogated as if I had committed a crime. These were scraps of many humiliating events I faced while my stays abroad.

I don't know whether it's their fault or ours that Bangladeshis are treated like this abroad; but one thing is for sure that Bangladeshis are stereotyped as corrupt and uneducated. The obvious reason is that most of the people in Malaysia, Singapore and the Middle East are familiar with only the labour class of Bangladesh and the behaviour they see in that particular segment of our populace. The government should take steps to train the migrant labourers so that they can live with dignity on foreign lands and negate the negative stereotype of Bengalis in these particular countries.

Sujoy Kabir
Brac University