Colombo

It was Friday afternoon. I found some of the shops in Colombo are closed. I was little surprised until I realized that these shops were owned by the Sri Lankan Muslims and it was the time of Jumma prayer. Soon the prayer was over and people came out of the mosque in groups. This is how I identified the mosque. I also discovered that there was temple beside the mosque. Muslims and Hindus don’t find any problem in worshipping their God side by side in Colombo. Does their minority feeling in a Buddhist majority country bring them close and make them so tolerable? Interesting indeed!

My Sri Lankan colleagues invited me to join for a drink with them after office. I politely declined. This was my last day in Colombo. I wanted to take a long walk in the streets before leaving the country in the late night. Per capita income in Sri Lanka is more than 2000 US dollar, more than three times that in Bangladesh. Development is always self-manifesting. Sri Lanka is probably an exception. The part of the city I walked around was nothing different from Dhaka in terms of infrastructure, roads and conditions of transport. The main difference, however, was the absence of traffic jam. Spending last couple of weeks in Sri Lanka, I now know more than ever, how significantly quality of life increases in the absence of traffic jam.

I saw couple of banyan trees in Colombo. When I was a child, our family had two very large banyan trees. Their roots were so huge, we could easily play and sleep on them. Even the grownups used to sleep in them in the summer. One of them was partially damaged in a cyclone in 1982 and was eventually cut. The other one was also cut two years later to build a school. Sometimes I think how useful it would have been today had the second banyan tree were preserved while building the school. Kids could play on it during the break. Children and adults could still sleep in its roots in the summer. Anyway, Colombo reminded me of my childhood.

I saw a big pond in Colombo. This kind of pond is still found in many district towns of Bangladesh. I was really disappointed to see that the water was extremely polluted, green and stinked like anything. One of the things Sri Lanka is currently selling to the rest of the world is its ‘green’ garments produced without polluting the environment, and here in the heart of Colombo pedestrians have to try hard to hold their breath as long as they can while passing by this pond. This is called marketing and globalization. This is not the only pond of this kind to force the pedestrian to practice the breath holding exercise in Colombo!

Notwithstanding these pockets of pollution, the general environment in Colombo is very good. There is no air pollution. The town has preserved its greeneries very well. Life is still laid-back. The country in general has not done any significant damage yet to its natural beauty and greeneries. Sri Lanka is half of the size of Bangladesh with a population of about twenty million, only about one-eighth of Bangladesh’s population. The high land-population ratio certainly makes life more organic and environment friendly here.

At one point, I found a big signboard that says “Association of Colombo Housewives”. I have seen many associations, starting from butcher to medical doctors, but this is the first time I have seen housewives’ association. Naturally, first I was surprised but then I was rather impressed by the courage of the Sri Lankan housewives. In these days, it has become a fashion to talk big about women’s equal right and empowerment in Bangladesh. To many of the leaders of women’s right movement, equal right has become synonymous to joining the labor force. ‘Housewife’ as a profession is considered to be a failure. In imitating the west blindly, the importance of household investment is trivialized. The west can do that because of the (partial) substitutability between market and household investment and the existence of well-functioning market. The fools of our country are either dishonest or do not understand the limited power of our market to substitute the role of a mother to some extent.

While a hard effort not to identify oneself as a housewife has become the norm in a circle in Dhaka, a group of housewives in Colombo are very upfront with their professional identity. Rather than giving up the pride of their work of immense importance, they come out in groups to remind us not to disregard them in the name of so-called modernism. I salute them!