My Reasons

I have decided to write and share my observations on topics and issues that are of interest to me. I’d like to make it a recurring event, perhaps once or twice every two weeks. However, before I take the plunge, it is important for me to provide an explanation of my motivations. After all, it is eminently possible that only a few people, if any, would read any of my posts.

I grew up in Dhaka, Bangladesh in the 1980s. We moved from Chittagong to Dhaka in 1979. Unlike my new peers – the children of educated middle class families in Dhaka – I did not get to watch television regularly because we did not have a television. We also did not have a cassette player, the ubiquitous music player of the 1980s. We did have a radio, and we had books – many, many books.

My father had his collection befitting the professor of literature he was. My elder brother, however, was by far the more prolific collector of books in the family. Although a student at that time, he frequently bought books using whatever little money he had. At the height of it, he once purchased between two and three hundred books from a book store that was about to go out of business.

An additional source of books in our house was the gift from the authors to my father. Although such gifts arrived the year-round, the numbers literally exploded during the month of February. I remember carrying loads of books from the car almost every day as my father came home from office. Some of those books were from established authors while some were from brand new writers – the first effort of the very young poet or the autobiography of a retired civil servant or of an insurance executive. I was especially intrigued about these autobiographies. Most of these authors had no known records of achievement in the public sphere. Some of these books were well-written with references to important people while some of the other autobiographies were at best awkward descriptions of rather average lives. In my middle teens to the early 20s, I wanted to know why those people had spent their time and money publishing books that perhaps nobody would ever buy or even worse, read.

Thirty years down the road, I know the answer. The authors had believed that they had something to say and they said it. They did not care if anybody ever read it. Thirty years down the road, I find myself in a very similar situation. I just turned 50. Although not yet retired, I seem to have developed the desire of the middle class, retired Bengali gentleman – to say something.

This is my explanation for writing my observations. I’ll, however, try to save my reader (if any) as much as I can. I’ll not write about mundane events that took place thirty years ago involving people nobody has any idea about. My writings would instead revolve around topics and issues that I believe are relevant today.