We Bangladeshis are a peculiar bunch.
When World Cup football season is here, we gleefully hoist Brazilian and Argentine flags onto our rooftops, and hit the streets when our team wins. Sometimes we even end up in street clashes over our support for countries we know very little about, and have very little in common with.
When a convicted war criminal doesn’t get the death penalty we think he deserved, we occupy the streets of Shahbagh and sloganeer day and night at the top our lungs until the ruling changes.
When we catch petty crooks, muggers, thieves, or homicidal drivers on the streets, we routinely beat them up in murderous rage on the spot. Passers-by who have no personal stake in the matter often have no qualms about joining in.
When we win one single cricket match against a team like India, we go berserk. Our nationalistic vitriol knows no limits, as we proceed to tastelessly bash a country of over a billion people, simply because we had one measly victory.
When we lose in the same sport, we can’t shut up about how it was all rigged against us, going on never-ending cuss-filled rants about how we were robbed, how unfair the world is, how we’re such victims, how the big bad bullies have cheated us.
When it is time to have elections, instead of negotiating to work out a grown-up solution, our opposition party goes on a spree of destruction, burning buses, vandalising property, and killing people in the equivalent of a temper tantrum.
When we read something online that we don’t like reading, or we stumble upon a blogger whose opinions we disagree with, we decide to hack them to death. These murders get a frightening amount of support from the so-called educated community as well. Somebody wrote something that rubs you the wrong way? Kill them!
When the birthday of a long-dead poet comes along, we construct stages and podiums and sing his songs all day and eulogise him on the airwaves till our ears bleed. We dare not suggest that our national heroes were mere mortals who are fair game for criticism. We take devotional fervour to a new level.
Maybe the Gallup poll results showed that Bangladeshis are really a resilient bunch, putting up with ups and downs in life that would have worn down people from anywhere else. That no matter what disaster strikes us, we withstand it with a Dude-in-Big-Lebowski-like sense of equanimity. I would like to believe that we are good at “unemotionally” dealing with all the chaos we are dealt. Unfortunately, it seems more likely that we deserve the chaos we get.
