When it comes to national aspirations, we Bengalis are perhaps world champions! We are bubbling with millions of ideas that, we think, can lead us to one of the revered lots in the international arena. All of us want to make ourselves proud; all of us have at least one idea of “Making Bangladesh great”. However, somehow, our leaders may not always feel the way we feel. They may have their own ideas for developing the country.
But there are a few who also think like the people of the country do.
I’ve recently been to Cumilla city where I was part of a programme for building a safe water drinking plant at the railway station there. We went to Cumilla for inaugurating the project. The chief guest who inaugurated the project was the Member of Parliament from Cumilla-6 constituency AKM Bahauddin Bahar.
He delivered a great speech at the inauguration ceremony. During his speech, Mr. Bahar was explaining his and his party’s vision about the future of Bangladesh. At one point, he said, they wanted to see a Bangladesh in 2041, when children across the world would no longer read ‘A for Apple and B for Bat’ in their textbooks; rather, he said, they will read ‘A for America and B for Bangladesh’.
Although America may not enjoy the same status as it is doing now, yet I fell in love with his ‘B for Bangladesh’ dream. Although I could feel that as a politician, this was a very well-crafted and well home-worked political statement for winning the hearts and minds of the people, yet it had an element of boosting the aspirations of his audience. At least, it stirred my aspirational emotions.
The statement evoked thoughts in my mind about what we can become as a nation if we wish to. It also led me to think about how as a people we require to have some collective aspirational dreams and a concept of what we expect from our leaders. For a nation, the collective aspiration is quite necessary for true advancement. We did have a leader who had a dream and more importantly, made us dream of an independent country about half a century ago.
After our leader was killed in 1975, there had been a huge void in our ability to dream. Life, here, has been a struggle for mere survival. A mammoth shadow of negativity had blocked our minds. Our struggle was only to stay away from trouble in order to stay alive. We didn’t dream; we didn’t aspire. We simply tried to feed our families and stayed alive. There was no room to think about excelling in anything as a nation.
Many years ago, our only aspirations were to seek food, clothing and shelter for us and for our families. Over time, that state of mind has changed; we — side by side of thinking of our basic needs — wanted to think about other aspects of life; we wanted to dream beyond our basic amenities. However, no one was leading us to dream and aspire. The common people need some help and some little pushes in building aspirational objectives in their minds from the people who claim themselves as leaders.
We don’t want merely to aspire for the basic needs; we want to aspire for multiply our production; we want to develop our professional skills to the level of international standards; we want to become world champions in the games and sports that we play; we want to aspire for scientific inventions; we want to have the best educational institutions right here in Bangladesh; we want to develop ourselves without any aid money from the foreigners; we want to let the world know about our history, art and literature; we want to make Oscar-winning movies right here in Bangladesh; we want our children to have a great future for which they need a right atmosphere.
Being able to think like that requires great leaders who can inspire us.
Our present prime minister has been trying her best to inspire the nation with positivity. She was the one who has shown ways to become a self-sufficient country. I am not flattering her. Okay; let me give you an example. Whoever had thought that a bridge over the river Padma could be built without any aid from the foreigners! We always thought our development is rooted in donor money. Our prime minister was the leader who led us to believe that ‘we can build our own bridge’.
Now, we’re in the process of building the bridge with our own money and our leader had to aspire for it. Aspiration is such an element that when a person aspires to achieve something, he or she finds a nice and honest way to accomplish it, no matter how hard-to-achieve the dream is.
We, therefore, request all our leaders to imbue the sense of aspiration among us. We also wholeheartedly with that Mr Bahar can spread his ‘B for Bangladesh’ dream among the people in his area. Our other public representatives may also emulate Mr Bahar and develop that own aspirational tagline in order to inspire the people.
Ekram Kabir is a story-teller and a columnist