Addicted to happiness

‘How are you doing?’

I am asked that so many times a day that I have recently given up on coming up with answers that give a correct projection of my state of being. So, once and for all, here goes: I am addicted. Yes, I am addicted to the state of happiness that I have learned to be on the lookout for as long as I can remember. And, like any self-respecting addict, I will tell you too: I don’t get enough! What is worse is that whatever little I get ‘I don’t get no satisfaction’. Still I just can’t stop myself looking for it in all the wrong places. This airy taste of not having enough ‘joy’ in life, this quest for constant well-being is almost an acquired taste! While I am at it, why just me, happiness it seems is a global obsession now. No, not an obsession; it is an addiction. What is worse, it’s been perfected into a science!
For starters, what is this with Bangladesh being ranked as the 41st happiest nation in the world? As if that was a troubling fact to digest, the Brits are 108th, while them damn Yankees came out way back at 150 among the 178 nations surveyed by the New Economics Foundation. I just do not buy into all of this. I’ll come to that later. But first things first, how can we be so happy? With such talk of eternal love, absolute honesty, or pure knowledge, how can anyone climb the high mantles of perfectionist ideals, and say, ‘Yes, I am happy!’
If you ask me, here is what I think: we are taught happiness, and that is the problem. For an average bloke, it’s already been prescribed: a respectable degree, a well-paying job, a good-looking wife, an apartment, a car, the kid’s college fund (no longer an American expression, mind you), etcetera, etcetera. You have all of these, and bam: you are happy! And yet the countless and clueless graduates, the high-paid clerical jobs of business executives devoid of personal imagination, the three-bedroom 64-apartment blocks in the concrete jungle of this mad city, the reconditioned paradise on four wheels guzzling millions of barrels of subsidised petrol are things I don’t get. Excuse me, but that is not happiness in my books.
So maybe it’s not happiness per se, rather the aura of a happy live is what we are taught to strive for. I am tired of this attempt of giving an impression of a happy life. Maybe, we are not meant to be happy if things are not so. At least not all the time. Utilitarianism doesn’t work. Period. Quantitative maximisation of happiness has its limits. So, is it going to be spiritual? Will it be the utilisation of the 72,000 nadis (energy cycles) that the Indian spiritual chakra-system stipulates? Or, maybe we are bound by the shackles of complex reasoning that the Zhuangzi philosophy of the Chinese blames for our eternal dilemma as the ‘thinking’ animal. For all that I know: I need to find a way out of this happy-holic syndrome. I want to be free of this addiction to the quest for happiness.
So, now back to the question of why Bangladeshis are so happy. Yes, friends have come up with various reasoning other than the ones the New Economic Foundation came up with: life satisfaction, life expectancy and ecological footprint. The more frivolous ones came up with the ‘Bangladeshis don’t know what happiness really is’ observation, and the ones waxing philosophical went as far as to comment on the ‘closer to the soil, and simple living’ argument.
Here is my take, and thank our lucky stars if I am right: we are yet to learn the ‘prescribed’ definition of happiness. Probably our lives are yet to be on track, so to speak. We Bangladeshis are still happy with whatever comes along. The ‘promised’ highway to happiness is still not in sight for us. And that is all the more reason why we are not yet restless when we don’t find things that were never supposed to be there. A Danish photographer on assignment in Dhaka went berserk on his first day out. But the next day, he had a big smile as he met me. ‘It works!’ were his first words. The inches between two rickshaws in Thataribazar, or the even the lack of it, and the following arguments had made sense to him, eventually. ‘Rather than concealing, or blocking, all of the grudges and complaints, you just let it out into the open’, came his reasoning. So, isn’t that good. It works!
In fact, that is what I am doing from now on. Next time I am dumped (well, provided that I am ‘picked’ in the first place), it’ll show. And when the CNG driver tries to pull my leg tomorrow, be sure he will get a piece of my mind. Above all, I defiantly renounce all those paths to happiness that ‘they’ tell me to take. While I am renouncing things, I also declare the survey that says Bangladeshis are 41st as bogus, and give my full support to the World Happiness Survey done by the Americans, which has been ranking Bangladesh as the happiest nation in the world, every year.

So, go ahead and ask me how I am?

To Dhaka, with love

The clouds are almost still. Cracking loudspeakers atop the spires of thousands of mosques carry the muezzin’s azan. Countless crows move with tense steps around the garbage trucks. The city cleaners are still sweeping the avenues, streets, by lanes. Slow paced old men and women, wearing their jovial smiles and booming with stories of the way of the world, old and new, crisscross the streets. A city — my city — is waking up. Dhaka is rising, again.

Along Elephant Road, Mirpur Road, Kawran Bazaar, and the many major lanes, that now also house glass-wrapped shopping malls and other gargantuan edifices, tired day labourers have already woken to another day under the same sky. The strained muscles, levers and engines that build and move this sprawling capital have started their never-ending motion of change. Not that it ever goes to sleep, for abode to millions, this city — Dhaka — beats like the heart of a country. Always!

Today, like every other day, thousands will arrive at Phulbaria, Gabtoli, Sayedabad, Sadarghat, Kamlapur to her promise of a ‘better life’, and the other thousands will stand still by the roadside, the black pitch staring back at their momentary hopelessness in this metamorphosing capital of a young nation.

Dhaka is also a city of memories, of dreams made, of hopes shattered. She is our city. Save a few grumpy faced historians, debating over the ‘exact’ date (yes, even the year is disputed!) of Dhaka’s emergence as a formal city, last week was widely proclaimed as the tilottoma city’s birthday. Four hundred years of history as the centre for a people, Dhaka has seen them all come and go. Emperors, colonials, ‘fake’ federalists, and the eventual emergence as the capital of a nation of its own. That is the story of Dhaka that the pages of history will tell. However, people make the place. Probably, therefore, Dhaka’s story is essentially of its people too. From the eccentric Dhakaiyyas of Old Dhaka to the nouveau rich scattered across the new city, and to the recent suburban Dhakaites of Uttara, the millions of lives that make up this city are as fascinating as they are diverse.

While it remains as the city of fleeting lives, the past few decades have seen the rise of a collective consciousness for an entire generation of urbanites who have been born, have grown up, and dreamt, within the confines of this concrete jungle that is Dhaka. I am one of them.

Like millions of the post-liberation era, I was also born in Dhaka. No midwife, but a doctor delivered me; no azan proclaimed my birth, but a certificate; no grandparent’s mango orchard to spend the year-end vacation (well, sometimes for Eid maybe), but an alley crisscrossed by an amusing game of light and shadow that came through the openings between those ever-increasing multi-storied ‘homes’ of other such city boys. Still, today, take me out of this city for more than a week, and I suffocate. Yes, I have learned to discreetly smug at the smog, and profusely fume at the traffic, but it has come to be a part of my life.

Rather than being a continuous stream of memories, Dhaka has filled lives with moments. Events — collective and personal — have created a connexion of shared experiences. While these have made us all part of the larger texture of this metropolis, like the many others around the world, they have severed us from each other.

Growing up in Dhaka has been somewhat of a solitary experience. While the neighbourhood-feel of paras is still there in smaller towns around the country, the new urbanites of Dhaka were never truly a part of the place. With millions living in rented housing, and the other millions living in shifting slums of the periphery, Dhaka never owns anyone. To me, the memories of personal and collective experiences make up Dhaka. And, how sparing this city has been when it came to experiences!

That non-descript last house at the dead-end narrow alley in Shantinagar, where one misty winter morning a seventeen-year old boy had paused for a while to look at the sheuli flowers spread out like ‘happy flowers from the mountains’, is tucked neatly somewhere in memory. So is the exhilaration of being a part of the jubilant crowd of thousands on the streets of the capital when Bangladesh won its test status, is etched in recollections. The Igloo van on lazy afternoons or the fading voice of the chanachurrrrr-man all make up my Dhaka. And yes, this city holds memories of many firsts. Yes, the girl who looked at the sky for far too long, after one of many coaching classes, was naturally my first crush. Of falling in love, of heartbreaks, of hidden kisses on rickshaws beaten down with the rain of cumulous city clouds, is my Dhaka.

Sometimes I hate her for making my life miserable, I curse her for not growing up, and for not becoming mature like those other cities of the world, and right then she holds me tight, like a long lost love. In a while, when the rickshaw puller will pedal me through those familiar streets, my city will whisper their names to me: Manik Miah Avenue, Dhanmondi 32, Shatmosjid Road, Central Road, Bhuter Goli, Aga Moshi Lane, Free School Street…