Some years ago, I travelled to Barishal for teaching purposes. That afternoon, a boy in my class mentioned, almost casually, that he had cycled three hours from a remote corner of the district to attend.
Three hours one way, and three hours back that evening, and again the next day. He was not complaining. He simply wanted to learn, and this was the price, so he paid it.
He is not an exception. Multiply him by millions, and you have the students of Bangladesh, fighters in villages and towns across the country.
Thousands of miles away, here in Melbourne, I wake up and see the midnight bulletins from home. This year's Higher Secondary Certificate exams began on July 2, with nearly 1.3 million candidates sitting them, and within two weeks the country was gripped by a fresh wave of Gen Z protests over how those exams were being run.
Torrential rain flooded parts of Chittagong and waterlogged Dhaka, and the Education Ministry pressed on regardless in several districts. Then an audio clip of the education minister went viral, in which he was heard comparing anxious students to "farm chickens" who catch a fever if they get a little wet.
My first instinct, I admit, was the older-generation reflex: Why does every difficulty become a movement? But a deeper thought settled in and would not leave.
Here is what I see from my window in a city that sits near the top of every global liveability ranking. Bangladeshi students, numbering in their thousands, cycling through winter rains at single digit Celsius, delivering meals at midnight, packing shelves before the early morning lectures begin.
Seventy-hour weeks are the norm, and the pay is often not even enough for locals to consider.
Their friends are in Dhaka, a city near the bottom of that same liveability list. They are living at home, eating their mothers' cooking, and they are on the streets, shouting, hopeless.
The same generation, often the same schools, the same para. One half is content grinding through hardship in a foreign winter; the other half cannot bear an exam hall in their own country.
If the problem were laziness, both halves would be lazy. They are not. The problem is something else.
The boy delivering food in Melbourne believes in a simple bargain: If I work, it counts. Hours convert into rent paid, a degree earned, a future that follows knowable rules.
Hardship you choose, in service of a goal you can see, is bearable. It can even feel like dignity.
Humans tolerate enormous suffering they choose, and almost none that is forced on them, with disrespect poured on top.
The student in Dhaka has no such bargain. He has grown up watching question papers leak, syllabuses change like the weather, and merit lost to connections. This year, students demanded not just the minister's resignation but correction of errors, along with fresh exams for those who could not reach flooded centres.
When the exam itself cannot be trusted, it stops being a test and becomes a lottery run by people who hold you in contempt.
Protesting a rigged lottery is not a weakness. It is the only rational move left. The minister eventually apologized in parliament and agreed to arrange retests for affected students, which was itself an admission that the anger had a legitimate core.
My father's generation loves to remind us of its toughness, and fairly so. In his time, they sat two entrance examinations in a single day and walked to the hall barefoot.
Their resilience was real, and today's students should sit with that history honestly. Not every hard question is an injustice; not every discomfort deserves a road blockade. Somewhere in the noise of this movement, that self-reflection must happen too.
But here is what has changed since my father walked barefoot to his exam, and it is not the softness of the young. It is the internet.
His generation endured because they could not see an alternative. This generation scrolls through the alternative every night, watching cousins and classmates abroad work brutal hours and remain hopeful, because effort there buys something. You cannot un-show them that.
This is not the first time such a cycle has occurred. During the mass uprising of 2024, when students attacked the Secretariat building, the government decided to cancel the remainder of the HSC exams altogether, the first time in the nation's history that such an exam was cancelled mid-exam.
While reading the news that day, a title popped into my head: Hajar Bachhor Dhore by Zahir Raihan. For a thousand years, the same water rising, the same voices dismissed, the same loop. A minister mocking a student, a protest, a committee, a compromise, and the loop begins again. We were here in 2024. We will be here next year unless something changes.
That something is a mindset, and it belongs to us, the elders, far more than to the students. The instinct that says we know best, that a student's complaint is an excuse until proven otherwise, that a girl who falls ill in the rain is a farm chicken rather than a child failed by her state.
Every concession the government eventually made, the re-sits, the corrected marks, the suspended paper-setters, quietly admitted the students were right. Offered a week earlier, with respect instead of ridicule, there might have been no movement at all.
Bangladeshi students will work. Melbourne's winter streets prove it every night; the boy from Barishal on his bicycle proved it years ago.
What they will not do, anymore, is work hard for a country that treats their effort as worthless and their voice as noise.
Tahsin Anjum is a PhD Researcher, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia.
