A smart Bangladesh is the refrain in the country these days. Almost everyone you know in politics or business or in the media is talking about it.
That is as it should be, for if there is anything of importance a society is perennially in need of, it is smartness. Smart men and women are a sight to behold. Nothing is healthier for the eyes than the images of people who in their bearings, in the way they walk, in the way they appear before us or pass by us, leave us with beautiful thoughts. And we marvel at such people, remarking on the joy of being in their presence.
So, yes, we need smart people for the good reason that they will collectively transform Bangladesh into a smart country. But even as we go for the creation of a smart society, something worries us, something insinuates itself into the mind. Is being smart the end or the means to an end? And how precisely do we define smartness? There might be as many interpretations of the term as there are people willing to proffer their versions of it.
The point here is that while we go about shaping a smart Bangladesh, there is something more important, more attuned to this first quarter of the twenty-first century that ought to come with it. And that something is enlightenment or, in a mundane way of referring to it, an ability to deal with the world on one's own terms. Smartness without enlightenment, without the intellectual ability to comprehend the ways of the world in every field of human activity is symbolic of vacuity. For Bangladesh, therefore, it is crucial that the slogan of a smart Bangladesh be amended to one of a smart and enlightened Bangladesh.
Or turn the argument around. A society or nation will be smart only when it has first qualified to be an enlightened body of men and women. Enlightenment is inclusive of smartness, but pointless smartness does not reassure people that enlightenment comes attached to it.
In Bangladesh, therefore, the imperative is one of the nurture and growth of an enlightened society. And it begins with an education system based on global standards being in place. All the way from school through college and university, our education system continues to suffer from a paucity of research necessarily directed at an attainment of knowledge.
That lapse will not make us smart. All those golden GPAs that students, teachers, and guardians celebrate every year are anything but an opening of doors to smartness. We need our young, at all levels of education -- and that includes the madrasas -- to be educated in the habit of reading.
If digital technology has raised communication to levels unprecedented in nature, it has also successfully banished the individual curiosity for knowledge, for an understanding of cultures and lives pushed, for want of a better expression, into the woods. The mobile phone has replaced books, journals, and newspapers. Schools do not have libraries; and those that do generally suffer from the malady of infrequent or rare use of them by the young.
If we must turn the young away from the mobile phone and toward reading books in the old fashioned way, we are also in need of a smart and enlightened society of teachers and academics across the land. You can have smart pedagogues, but you will not have enlightened teachers when those who teach cheerfully go into the not so smart business of identifying themselves with partisan party politics.
When teachers -- and add here the media -- happily engage in behaviour which places their politics above the calling of their profession, enlightenment does not happen, though hollow smartness might be there.
A smart and enlightened society is one where citizens are in constant contact with the outside world and are able to engage in discourse on contemporary global events. Can we honestly say that in Bangladesh in these times, the education system is actually producing such models of smart enlightenment?
A smart society minus enlightenment holds the danger of ending up as a docile society for the worrisome reason that while the social structure may make it possible for it to come by economic gratification, it will at the same time leave it bereft of the inclination or ability to question the powerful elements ensconced in that social structure.
It then follows that when people are enlightened, they will naturally be smart enough to ask questions the powerful will be compelled to answer. Smartness thus takes on a wider meaning. It is not only a matter of being financially happy; it is a whole lot more than seeing the country take giant leaps in economic progress through investments and trade deals with other nations.
Smartness, because it comes with the substance of enlightenment, will enable citizens to look beyond money or its accumulation. A smart society is thus one which fields questions at the powerful, questions which must be answered.
A smart society based on the philosophy of enlightenment will protest injustice anywhere and everywhere. It will not be talked down to, for it holds in its hands the power to grill those whose politics and policies leave citizens' lives in disarray. Smart and enlightened people will ask how so many bank officials, once they have purloined money from their own banks, have slipped out of the country.
A smart society is one which asks how bureaucrats and politicians purchase homes abroad, for their families. In a smart society, there ought to be the courage to demand information on the circumstances allowing lawbreakers to flee the country, and on those powerful elements assisting them in their flight out of Bangladesh and to distant lands.
Building a smart and enlightened society in Bangladesh will demand every ounce of energy we can give to the effort. Our diplomats need to be smart enough to engage in substantive, purposeful negotiations with their counterparts in other nations.
At home, civil servants will be able to demonstrate their smartness not through a careerist approach to their profession but by convincing the 160 million people of Bangladesh that they do their homework in their ministries before going out to handle public grievances.
A smart society is built on the foundations of smart politics. Polemics is not smartness and neither is an unquestioning acceptance of wisdom from on high. Politics is not about browbeating or humiliating rivals in public. That would not be smart. But politics, if it is to be part of the smart society narrative, will be about informed and therefore meaningful debate on the issues on the floor of parliament.
A smart Bangladesh will emerge when we -- all of us -- set up libraries, read books, pore through the newspapers and formulate our individual opinions on the issues of the times, take the powerful to task when they fall short of fulfilling the promises they make before the nation.
A smart Bangladesh will necessarily be a society enriched by education, a people able to weigh the pros and cons of a given proposition, a nation bold enough not to take things lying down.
A smart society will not pander to sycophancy. It will not bend or crawl before authority but will compel authority to do its job in line with the constitution and in accordance with the law.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Consultant Editor, Dhaka Tribune
