It breaks the heart. When even chickens must be sold in pieces because buyers cannot afford to cough up the money to pay for the whole chicken, you tend to wonder which way society in Bangladesh is headed.
Yes, we have a thriving garments sector. Yes, we are privy to all those remittances from our struggling fellow citizens abroad. Yes, we have a GDP that instils pride in us. Yes, we are poised to graduate from LDC status to that of a middle income country.
All of this is true. But look at the other side of the truth. Covid has caused a whole tranche of poverty to invade homes in the country. The middle class, unable to ensure food on the table because many in this class have lost their jobs, is in dire straits.
And the poor? Each day they manage to survive, barely, not knowing what the next day will bring. Children have dropped out of school and many of them have gone looking for work to help their families survive.
And there is that darker truth. Money has been and is being laundered abroad. No efforts are being made by the state, by its agencies, to ensure that those who have smuggled money abroad, have bought homes abroad with stolen money, are prosecuted.
Every year the corrupt are given a fresh lease of respectability when nothing is done to have the law applied to them over the black money they have accumulated at home and in the banks.
Indeed, when those who wield authority make it clear that all those men and women who hold black money ought to be given an opportunity to invest their money and so turn it white, you as a citizen of this People's Republic go red in the face.
No one speaks for the common man. The poor, the middle class, the peasants, the farmers, and the workers wallow in poverty as they have wallowed in penury all these decades. The gap between rich and poor has widened. Our health services are ill-equipped to treat the poor and those who cannot afford treatment abroad.
And even as we are regularly reassured that our hospitals are ready to provide treatment of a global standard to those who need it, the affluent fly off abroad (with some of them even cheerfully posting on social media their presence in hospitals abroad). Politicians come back home once hospitals abroad have given them clean bills of health.
In all these decades since the liberation of the country, we have not been able to build a welfare state catering for citizens across the board. With the jettisoning of socialism from our lives and from the structure of the state, pseudo and therefore exploitative capitalism has had a field day. No limits are there on the acquisition of property.
No measures have been there to tax the rich and so ensure the economic stability of the state and of the have-nots of society. In circumstances where workers do not have the right to form trade unions and thereby empower themselves, arbitrary behaviour takes increasingly bigger swathes of the national economic landscape.
And with Ramadan up ahead, appeals are being made to traders not to raise the prices of essentials. The appeals are an annual feature and so is the way traders regularly disregard them.
At a time when citizens in a good number of Muslim or Muslim-majority states will celebrate their governments because those governments will order, and implement, a considerable degree of reduction in prices, in our circumstances traders stand ready to fleece citizens.
That will be salt to wounds already open and raw.
It is our collective shame when respectable heads of families, unable to provide their children with the kind of food they have been used to partaking of, must go looking in the markets for the innards of chickens in the nocturnal hours so that some degree of happiness will light up the faces of the children.
It is a shame when, in this day and age, villagers must move around with empty bags in hand in the local haat, unable to decide what items they can buy with the meagre amount of money they have in hand.
These villagers have not had meat or fish on their plates for months. And now there are other citizens, those whose lives revolve around urban settlements, who are faced with the reality of going without meat, fish, and eggs for lunch or dinner.
Fish has gone beyond the reach of the middle class; the poor have stopped thinking about fish. When a kilogram of beef costs no less than Tk800, one does not require much imagination to understand the predicament citizens face. Add to that the regular increases in the prices of gas and electricity and public transport.
Your income has not gone up. In many instances, it has taken a plunge or disappeared altogether. Where does that leave you? Where does that leave everyone else around you? The rickshawpuller must ration his intake of a cheap bun and a simple banana because his family waits for food at home.
The children who sell, or try to sell, flowers at important city crossings should have been in school. Their hunger compels them to spend the day, in rain or shine, on the streets, in the hope that those more fortunate than they will buy the fast shrivelling flowers they have on offer.
And speaking of hunger, why should little children in schools in the rural interior be told that they cannot have any more midday meals? The university student whose parents send him money for his upkeep decides to forgo a meal every day because rising prices are beyond his reach.
At university halls, the quantity as well as quality of the food that sustains the health of the young has declined, for food items are getting harder to buy.
Housewives spend time racking their brains about the contributions they can make to the family finances. Some of them have been spotted in the long queues before those TCB trucks selling food items at subsidized prices.
Educated young men, unable to pay the high fares charged for autorickshaws or plain rickshaws anymore, travel on buses already crammed with men in whose eyes despair is writ large.
Should we complain about all these tales of deprivation? Must we ask that a just society be cobbled into shape? These are questions we have raised over the years. The answers have always been reassurances about a future built on dreams, except that the dreams did not amount to much.
In these days of heartbreak, traders spewing religiosity will unabashedly raise prices in the holy month of Ramadan. The authorities will appeal to them to consider citizens' travails but will not have the wherewithal to force businesses to stay within the bounds of decency.
Rice will become elusive, meat will go missing at home, fish will be hard to come by. And vegetables will go out of reach.
So what do we do? Democracy flourishes when citizens are happy. It goes fugitive when the corrupt are treated with respect, when black money is sought for investment, when the price of rice goes beyond the capacity of the common man.
Socialism once underpinned the sovereign nature of this republic. Can someone give it back to us, please?
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Consultant Editor, Dhaka Tribune