It is often difficult to be articulate when one is trapped within the traffic of the city. It can feel like coagulated phlegm throbbing away inside the chest, formulating a disturbing and nauseating sense of unease.
The usual remedy consists of dissolving it or forcing it out altogether somehow, but unfortunately, that analogy is more difficult to enact on the tightly-packed streets of our ever-expanding metropolis.
We, as a society, perpetually confined within buses, cars, or CNGs, do our utter best to come up with solutions that we feel are unique but that could, more often than not, result in potential plagiarism lawsuits.
Perhaps, as a test scenario, we could come together as citizens to fund a more efficient private traffic police task force to tackle the accumulation of unnecessary and oftentimes melodramatic scenarios. That idea, however, doesn’t seem likely to come true.
But, supposing that hypothetical scenario does come to pass, what, then, stops the unyielding allure of coerced money from suddenly apparating into the magical Mary Poppins-themed pockets of these new enforcers? Nothing. The very notion of accountability is as magical and mystical as the famed Arthurian quests for The Holy Grail.
Without, of course, the benefit of the passage of time to sanctify any unwarranted cynicism.
Why is there so much traffic in the city? The days surrounding Eid (only recently gone) is often an obnoxious and malignant mirage to us city-dwellers. As soon as we reach out to touch it, it fades back into the despondent hue of bus smoke and lamentations towards God, asking for the traffic to move a few inches. And that is in the most literal sense applicable.
As only a sporadic visitor to my home city, the first few days of acclimatising myself with the traffic congestion can feel like quite the adventure.
I imagine myself as a sole narrator inside an epic dramatic monologue. A lone sojourner somehow trapped and forced to come to an overwhelming narration of things to be.
But sadly, that realisation slowly begins to draw bleak parallels within the similarly confined spaces of the late 19th and early 20th century cities described by the likes of William Blake in London:
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear
Or in the general atmosphere best illuminated in Baudelaire’s poetic-prose depiction of “the city of lights” in Le Spleen de Paris.
Playing that role for a longer period in the city comes at a great price. That homebound feeling which is filled with biased saturations of vividly-coloured memories finds itself usurped by a sudden coup d’état of resentment by the never-ending struggle of having to wait one-and-a-half hours to move an insignificant distance. In the aftermath of that uprising, trapped in a prison between exhausts and perpetual exhaustion, I do ponder over certain things.
Perhaps I muse all this with the naivety of a child’s inquisitiveness, but why is it simply so difficult to just improve the infrastructure of the city?
If we are incapable of addressing this concern ourselves, there is no dearth of countries we can approach for help regarding the issue, provided it becomes a frequently discussed topic, of course.
If there were internal communications via trains coming into the city from the outskirts (like Gazipur, for example, which happens to be the astounding distance of 37km away, not counting in hours for brevity’s sake) for daily commute, then some might fancy utilising just that.
If the British could cover nearly the whole of India by railway more than a century ago, I highly doubt it would take such a long time to cover the whole of Bangladesh, within a slightly improved timeframe of course.
Another nice inclusion could be a proper bus system where passengers do not have to fear for their lives or the lives of those not-fortunate-to-be-in-that- bus-at-that-given-time. Although a lot of industries seem to be migrating out of the city now, perhaps even better-incentivised relocations could also play a role in a more movement-orientated traffic?
