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Dhaka Day by Day

Reticent about Reading

by Fayza Haq
Although reading and writing begins at the age of three in Dhaka, and tutors have to be kept for children from the age of five to twenty-one. yet I know of a student of class X who is more interested in watching video, and reading comic books, rather than reading nov els from his school library. Shahriar, in Mo-hammedpur .does his English homework all right, and his mother is afraid to press him further This is because at his school, and in other similar schools where he has friends, children have taken to wild life such as smok Ing hash and worse. "Our days were quite d»f-ierent from theirs. Shariar s mother tells me, when I suggest mildly that her son should be a regularly member of the British Council Junior section.
Shahriar's English Is not poor .and is accent ts good by all standards , but I am amazed at his lack of interest tn novels. I Ie says he Just
docs not have the lime after doing his regular homework with science subjects; after struggling through Maathematics and Bangla. and after watching his favourite vldoes and listening to his treasured tapes. I have known the child to be extremely dilligent in his studies .five years ago .and feel It is a pity that his reading habits are perhaps not the best.
Rlzvana .tn Tlk-atully .reads a lot of books_ but only for the story. She skips many pages and her grammar Is still shocking even though she is
21. She is a confident speaker, full of Joie de vtvrc, and so gets away with her intertwined sentences with their syntax in the wrong position. She is a housewife, and there is no one to correct her Jumbled grammar. She is now so wrapped up in the buslncs of running a house and trying to get a Job in some office, that she has no time for formal correction of her grammar.
She is too old to be corrected like a child all the time .and her fluency over English certainly surpasses many tn Dhaka. Yet I do wish her to have a mastery over the language and not to pass her time with a narrative about heroes on charging horses and damsels In distress with yard-long eye-lashes.
My aunt of 65 loves to read newspapers, magazines and books. When my uncle was alive, and he had a regular Job, she was a regular member of a library. Today she has stopped reading anything beyond her Bangla newspaper and titbits from an English one. She has to cook, chop vegetables, meat and fish .and even takes to washing and sweeping, as she has only a part-time maid. I think it is a pity indeed that someone who read translations of Dickens and Maupassant . must succumb to titbits from the local press. 1 find the same ap-(riles to many of my older relatives and riends.
I personally know of colleagues in the city , who have read more as "O" level students .than they do as career persons. They have their schedules at home . social functions to attend , along with censorious in-laws to apppcasc.
It was explained to me by a friend and an
ex-teacher at Alliance Francaise .that as you get older, and have a desk Job to concentrate on, your mind is full of cobwebs .and you cannot comprehend what you did at age 21. Sitting In Dhanmandl. my University books are like Greek to me at age 44 I find my friends tn Moghbazaar. Khatalbagan, Banani all have the same complaints. Sometimes they simply scan a couple of newpapers . but cannot take in novels or books on philosophy an psychology , which they did as teen - agers.Studying at St. Francis Xavier's convent, my friends and 1 read much more as students .than we do today as adults In the city .full of magazines and books In the local hotel kiosks .and the foreign libraries.
1 admit that at Purana Paltan . Central Road , Circular Road . Shegunbageecha and in Dhan mandi offices I know of those who go about with novels and dessertations under their
arms. Yet they leave out the basic article when they speak or write. I wonder how deep they delve jn the books that they flaunt
Sometimes hus bunds and In-laws In the city .discourage the habit of reading tn the case of a woman, and would prefer her to stick to conventional chores such as cooking . bringing up children, dusting, cleaning and gardening. 1 would have understood If Dhaka was a city like London or New York or Mel bounre. where hired hands are expensive. Why
cannot a woman read In peace, without being goaded* on to pick up nappies and make "halwas" or "singaras"?
I know many mothers in Dhaka who prefer their teenaged daughters , or their offsprings In their twenties ,to look after the household .and even sing or dance rather then read. 1 am told tn the city that Dhaka men do not like women to be "too serious .
It Is strange that people, with their limited reading habits pop in for books and disappear. Once an ex-colleague of mine told me of and incident .when a frined of his informed him that the had created a library of his own , at last. On going to examine the library my excolleague found the books to have been all originally his owri. once lent out to this so-called friend. Incidentally, the owner of the library Is still poor in his knowledge of literature. politics, history, economics and anything else they you could point out. 1 cannot comprehend why people create libraries simply to impress others.
Newspapers are pasted on the wails of the newspaper offices, yet how many of the millions in the city stop and pause to read from page to page, tn their rush of life ?
Old bookshops are there .but I have never known them to be crowded as they once used to be two decades back. Similarly, magazine kiosks and agents on the roadside in the city sell little beyond "Times", "Newsweek". "Dcsh" and "Bichitra". It is the scandal sheets the mushroom occasionally that arc read from cover to cove,.while a magazine like the "Courier " is often Ignored as too high-browed.