"Smart Bangladesh" is rapidly becoming a catchphrase that encapsulates the vision for Bangladesh's future. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and other esteemed leaders of the government are ardently committed to realizing this vision.
While they undoubtedly possess their own distinct perspectives and aspirations for a "Smart Bangladesh," it is equally valuable to explore the perspectives of others. In this piece, I share my own insights.
The term "smart" carries diverse connotations. In Bangladesh, it commonly refers to individuals who are fashionable, well-groomed, and stylish -- in a word, dapper. In contrast, in the United States and most other countries I have visited, "smart" simply denotes intelligence, cleverness, the ability to think on one's feet, and articulate communication.
This sense of "smart" is often applied when referring to technology, such as distinguishing between a smart and a non-smart (or "dumb") phone.
In a similar vein, I propose distinguishing between "smart" and "non-smart" (or even "foolish") individuals. A renowned sociologist and my former senior colleague at the National University of Singapore, Professor Syed Hussein Alatas, once expressed his lament that ample scholarly attention had been devoted to intellectuals but not to fools.
Although he wrote a few papers on the subject, he did not fully develop it as a discourse -- a project I intend to pursue in the future. The late Professor Alatas was smart in both senses: Impeccably dressed with a keen sense of fashion and a sharp thinker. (If you are a smart reader, you may want to google him now.) Even Edward Said mentioned Alatas in his work.
An incident comes to mind when a visitor to our home, a PhD holder in a scientific discipline from the UK, inquired about our guest, a Bangladeshi woman, with the question, "Where is Bhai? Why isn't he here?" This PhD holder's assumption was far from smart. The lady in question had never been married.
Why assume that every woman must have a husband and that they should always be accompanied by one? A truly smart individual refrains from making such unfounded assumptions and engages with a woman as a person, not merely as someone's wife or sister.
Does this mean a smart person must be a feminist? Not necessarily. A smart person possesses common sense and an imagination compatible with modern society. In a rural Bangladeshi village, women once asked my Canadian friend: "Are you married?" or "Do you have children?" This wasn't stupidity but rather simple innocence. My Canadian friend wasn't offended and understood the context. She was smart.
Smartness should be contextualized. A smart person living in their village home and never venturing beyond is one who is keeping pace with the times. I encountered such individuals during fieldwork. They watched television, kept abreast of current events, and aspired to see their daughters become medical doctors.
Smart people are also self-assured. A Bangladeshi female domestic worker informed me that she was supporting her daughter's English-medium education so that her daughter could eventually come to Abu Dhabi and pursue a career like mine as a professor. That's smart.
Yet, smartness must be viewed in context. Believing that your favourite leader's face appears on the moon, unless you're incurably romantic and perceive your beloved's visage in the night clouds, is not a display of smartness. An engineer in Abu Dhabi once claimed that the moon landing was a hoax, and I promptly "unfriended" him.
Such a belief is not merely “unsmart”; it borders on sheer ignorance. While I can understand such beliefs in individuals with minimal education who rely on narrow, biased YouTube channels for information, it's baffling when expressed by an engineer who graduated from BUET.
To build a Smart Bangladesh, we must cultivate a smart populace. Smart infrastructure, electricity, and bandwidth are undoubtedly essential, but without smart citizens, nothing can be sustained. A smart citizen isn't just well-informed; they possess a keen understanding of what is feasible and what is not.
For instance, if someone believes a politician who promises to miraculously reduce commodity prices overnight upon election, they are not being smart. A smart citizen comprehends that inflation is a global issue, and politicians lack magical solutions.
A smart person is not easily gullible. I once received a text message from someone, again an engineer, claiming that the head of a foreign state was planning to burn a holy book and urged me to share it with my friends. This went beyond mere stupidity; it was downright moronic. I promptly severed ties with that individual. A smart person possesses the ability to discern facts from falsehoods, or at the very least, they are willing to differentiate what falls within the realm of possibility from what does not.
An unsmart person is unable to set aside their prejudices and tends to view everything through tainted lenses. They are inclined to make sweeping generalizations.
A smart person is someone who maintains an insatiable thirst for knowledge. In the days before internet search engines and ChatGPT, I often sought recommendations from individuals I considered smart about what they were reading and whose works I should explore. Reading might make you smart, although I cautiously use the qualifier "might."
Habibul Haque Khondker is a sociology professor at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi who previously taught at the National University of Singapore.