Greeting, not Gritting!

Dear XYZ,

I'm sending this to ask you for a brief recommendation of my work that I can include in my LinkedIn profile. If you have any questions, let me know.

Thanks in advance for helping me out.

-Insert name of the requester here

This is a standard Linkedin template for asking people for recommendations. To be superfluous, Linkedin is the business oriented brethren of facebook with a lot less (garbage) and a lot more (networking tools). Receiving and giving recommendations is a core part of the linkedin experience, where people usually write very nice stuff about others with the hope to get the same in return.

A person has recently sent me one of these emails. I feel pity for these emails because they try to sound personal, but they aren't. Secondly, people often send these emails in batches, i.e. to everyone in their contact list which further diminishes the personal touch.

In today's era of auto completing forms, pre-made templates and bot generated emails, it is sometimes too much to expect a personalized email even from your close friends. The impersonal email phenomenon has stretched its evil aura of influence in to short messaging service, too.

Once upon a time not too long ago, SMS was treated as the most personal and surefire way of one to one communication. I remember hearing people say "the sound of SMS receipt cannot be ignored or missed by mortal beings--people might ignore calls, delete emails without reading them or burn direct marketing snail mails, but they are bound to read SMSs delivered to their cell phones.

Well, does the above still hold true? Not really. Thanks to spamming in the name of SMS marketing, people are getting bombarded with promotional short messages from dusk till dawn. However, that's not a big problem, nor is the tradition of sending SMS to the customers is unheard of. In fact, most other Asian telecom operators send more SMS to their customers than our operators send.

But the problem is, along with the plethora of impersonal SMS and emails being exchanged, we are getting used to this impersonal style of communication. Every year during festivals, I get a number of SMS from friends, colleagues, contacts and acquaintances. Not a single of them seems addressed to me. You ask me why, and I am telling you why.

A person who never addresses me anything but buddy sends a message stating "May you and your family be blessed with blessings on this blissful occasion- Mr. XYZ, doing ABC job". It's a dead giveaway--you have been hit by a carbon copy (!).

Once native to email clients like Eudora and Outlook, CC culture is paralyzing SMS now. Long time ago an operator launched a fancy service called "group SMS" which had the capability of sending 10 people from your contact list the same message in one go. Charging could be done individually (i.e. X amount per message delivered) or an overall group rate could be imposed.

But due to the arrival of advanced phones, that service has lost its charm. Nowadays one can easily CC the same message to everyone in his contact list. This means a meager 255 from the SIM or virtually unlimited contacts from the phone can get your "blissful blessings" message within a short time frame, and to make it even better, one recipient will not never know who else got the same message, which is in contrast to email CC where everyone in CC can see each other’s email addresses.

Just like the recommendation seeking Linkedin email, the content of these messages are impersonal, boring, and they give out an essence of "doing something that needs to be done instead of doing something that feels good to do".

The psychology behind these messages is mostly linked with the need to remain connected. A quick analysis of the messages I received during Eid this year tells me that the highest number of messages came from business partners, followed by lesser known acquaintances and a few stragglers, err strangers (!).

Surprisingly, I received similar messages from some family members and friends, too. I know life is busy and it’s busier during Eid holidays, but it doesn't take more than a minute to write a personal message. This year, I tried sending personal messages to some near and dear ones whom I couldn't meet. The result was pleasant.

I received wholehearted and relevant thank you replies. When I sent them greetings, I tried to make the messages sound as personal as they can be. I wrote stuff that an auto-generated or templated message can never convey.

Our life is hectic, and we are alarmingly becoming robotic as the days are rolling. To put an end to this miserable situation, we should keep no stones unturned, and every opportunity of bringing back the days of adda and casual conversations (the real Social Networking) should be availed.

By the way, what I really want to write as a recommendation to the person mentioned in the beginning of this article is this:

"I know ABC from my university days. No matter how hard I tried to avoid him by switching phone numbers and changing email addresses, he has managed to keep contact. During our brief time together as classmates, I've seen him as a slacker, a bad influence and a horribly uncouth person. He never tucked his shirt or t-shirt, and he could never avoid the influence of local dialects while speaking in Bangla or English. Despite of being a senior student, it took him more than six years to complete his undergraduate degree. He has a great skill of bragging; he never runs out of fresh new stories about his special exploitations and escapades. I wonder how he ended up as a business graduate, and to make it further amazing, he is now holding a respectable (!) job in a reputed (!!) organization. I wish him all the best, but I feel pity for the organization at who's expense the well-being of Mr. XYZ is being achieved."

I also got a blissful and blessing-filled Eid greeting from him, too, but I felt like gritting instead of being greeted.

Wrote this article a few days after Eid Ul Fitr 2011.

After Abstinence Come Celebrations

I wrote this article on request from a good friend of mine who works in The Independent. This version (that got published) was heavily edited and it only contains 30% of what I originally envisioned. After submitting the first draft, I was asked to modify the article to a certain extent, i.e. to make it shorter and to include more happier stuff.

Thus I came up with a second version with more happier elements and less amount of doom and gloom. I was told that this version would be published without much editing.

However, when I collected the physical newspaper, I found out that 50% of the 2nd draft was modified and I can barely recognize my own writing! Almost everything, including the title has been changed. The key ideas from my original draft is still there, but the sarcasms and puns have mostly been removed.

I belief the nation deserves to know the truth, and thus I will be posting my first two drafts in subsequent posts.

No one might read these now, but I am sure 50 years down the line, someone from my lineage will stumble upon this blog and get to know how we lived our lives in Dhaka.

Tales Of Dhaka CIty Roads

This article has been published in The Independent's Weekend magazine:
http://theindependentbd.com/weekly-independent/49569-tales-of-dhaka-city-roads.html

I observed a very unusual incident a few days ago. A young guy was talking on the cellphone while riding his bike. One cannot really imagine how this feat can be achieved unless seen by own eyes. To make things more incredible, he was actually using his one hand to attach the cell phone with his right ear while trying to maintain balance with his solitary unoccupied hand. Result—he stumbled in front of a car and almost got hit by the rickshaw I was riding. The guy had a minor fall and I gave him a friendly advice – “Brother please don’t use the cellphone while driving”. My words did not register in his ears; he did not even look at me. He simply got up, set his cycle on the street, gave a meek smile and within no time, I saw him repeating the same activity. Soon he had to slow down again to avoid getting hit by another speeding vehicle.

This is an extreme example of the roadside hazards that we face everyday in our beloved Dhaka city.  Thanks to the bread earning job, everyday I have to make two mandatory travels—one in the morning and the other after sunset. Apart from these, I also have to do those small strolls and extended rides to satisfy various needs during the day time.

In my opinion, pedestrians and rickshawpullers are the prime reason behind traffic jams and accidents in Dhaka city. Almost everyday, we have to exercise rock’ n roll dance moves in our car in order to save the lives of a pedestrian or two.

Let me paint an everyday picture for a better understanding. Imagine you are driving your car at normal speed on a typical Dhaka evening. Car movement is slow due to dense traffic. Suddenly you notice that there is a significant gap between you and the next car ahead. Naturally, you would want to speed up to cover the distance. However, it is almost biblical that a stray pedestrian will want to utilize the gap and run to cross the road. So what happens is that you have to break hard, make some deafening tire screeching noise and stop the car “just” before hitting the adventurous jaywalker.

Now you just stopped yourself from killing an innocent. Innocent, is he? No, he is not.

He did not assess the traffic situation before attempting to cross the road. He failed to notice the incoming, speeding cars. He is totally irresponsible to both himself, his family and everyone around. He nearly killed himself, and it is only because of your extraordinary braking skill and driving finesse he can still glare at you unharmed. It is only natural that he will shout out obscenities at you for being a “mad, people killing” driver while you will be in a bewildered state.
The pedestrian walks away unharmed, but you, the driver, continue to remain grumpy and shaken. He just “unmade” your day. For the remainder of the journey, you tend to be over cautious and slow. This causes you severe annoyance to the other drivers on the road. They get impatient by your slow driving and make it a holy quest to show you the way “it is done”. For the remainder of your journey, all you hear is deafening honking of varied horns at the back. 

According to everyone’s trusted friend Wikipedia, a vehicle horn is a sound-making device used to warn others of the approach of the vehicle or of its presence. However, I am quite sure that once overused, the “warning” part of the definition turns in to “annoying”. Actually a vehicle horn becomes a sound making device that is used to annoy others.

It seems that drivers are always keeping a hand on the horns just to annoy pedestrians and other drivers on the roads. The relentless honking of several kinds of horns (ranging from hare krishna hare raam type sounds to vuvuzela imitators) will make even the most ardent heavy metal fan’s ears revolt. It is a mystery how we, the Dhaka city dwellers are still eluding deafness. Or are we? Maybe there is some unpublished statistic that shows that on average, 80% of the city dwellers are already suffering from some kind of hearing imparity.

And these are just a few examples of what goes on in the streets of Dhaka....