Dhaka 2020

Its been so long that i felt the urge to write on my blog about something. It has been all routine for a while and visited place/countries i visited dozens of times. However, travelling to Dhaka gave me ‘that’ urge to write about it.

Muslim Country is a must to be mentioned. Bangladesh has a population of nearly 9 millions just in Dhaka over a total of around 165 millions of Bangladesh. The City is hectic in itself. Just reaching at the airport has been overwhelming. The first impression of the Dhaka at the airport is the feeling of reaching a very basic, abandoned Government social hall in Mauritius. It is huge and also a quite dusty. But I could not miss the fact that i have just stepped in an Islamic country.

The last Islamic country i have visited is United Arab Emirates. But nothing is more obvious than stepping in in a third world country, where poverty is alarming, where people do anything for money, including ripping you off as much as they can.

Things that you will see here and where it is non existent or rarely seen are:

• Guys peeing on the road. Lungi up, and they just sit facing a wall and pee. Yes! Sit!
• Rickshaws. Its practical and cheap. When you can be stuck for hours in traffic, you just take a rickshaw and off you go.
• Bargaining. For anything in any shops, except the ones where it is written in bold ‘NO BARGAINING’, you can bargain your price out of any product.
• Road. Actually we are lucky to be have good roads in our country. Here the roads are most made of tar, but that was done decades ago, therefore you can imagine how bad it is. The Government has even started building road made of bricks. It’s the next best alternative to a cheap solution.
• Before, because of the very dense population in Dhaka, there were a lot of beggars. As you must have seen in Slumdog Millionaire, these beggars are actually employees of the Mafia. They would cut your arm/s or leg/s or remove your eye, so that people feel for you, resulting in getting more money. The Government has recently taken a step into eradicating beggars by warning the public not to help beggars. Therefore beggars are less but it has obviously increase the crime rate.
• One thing that i still need to get used to are prayers. Being an islamic country, prayer time is always every 2-3hours. What i haven’t gotten used to, is the loudness. There is a speaker in every street!
• One of the most annoying thing which is very normal here is that people would spit anywhere. Being quite a sensitive person in terms of hygiene, its something that would take me a lot of time to get used to it or probably never will.
• In any country, when you get in a shop, the sales person greets you and you greet back. Here, the sales person greet and people act like they own the freaking shop themselves. I tried our way actually, and people just take you for granted. No one actually put much importance in you except if you show some kind of attitude.

I has been maybe 10 years since i came here last time, the only thing that changed was that internet is available. Apart from that, not much has changed. Probably a bunch of people are a bit more opened compared to my last visit but it is still a very well closed and conservative country compared to India, which is might be the closest you can get in terms of comparing.