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GAME OF THRONES
THE saying goes, “Be careful of what you want -you just might end up getting it." The desire is snap elections. What you get is snapped electricity. Who cares that the nation's spine has been snapped in the meantime. First, no electoral power. Then, no electrical power. Then power is eventually restored, but that's not exactly the power that was desired. Talk about alternating current.
The Shipping Minister explains that utility workers, irate over blockades, snapped the electricity connection. LMAO - Landline, Mobile Also Off. Gulshan falls off the map of Digital Bangladesh. With a barrage of dropped calls (if a call goes through at all), Grameenphone launches its new slogan - "50 Million Subscribers - Pissed!" The idea was to flush out the residents of a building. Recalling the Jihad incident, wonder if it would have been easier to take a low tech approach and just cut off the water supply to the building. The inhabitants would have HAD to come out sooner or later, for the sake of hygiene.
So, the impasse continues with hartal and oborodh - an exercise of showing how much power can be yielded when not in power, so that voters know how much real power will be wielded, when in power. And don't forget the gift of oborodh/hartal to our kids - long winter holidays while looking forward to long summer holidays, thanks to global warming. Continuous hartal and oborodh - aiming high to make Bangladesh a class 10-pass nation.
And the media is shy to openly diss either side. With ETV and then NTV seeing their bosses being picked up, now RTV, SATV and Shomoy TV are freaking out, considering it's all happening in alphabetical order.
It's really a game of tennis at Flushing Meadows with the green meadows being flushed down the toilet: Call for mass meeting: fifteenlove, sand trucks roll in: fifteen-all, hartal/oborodh: thirty-fifteen, Viber blocked: thirty-all, PM's Gulshan visit: advantage, visit snubbed: deuce, continued hartal/oborodh: advantage, connectivity snubbed: deuce...
And the spectators who paid for the tickets? Those who could at best be in the nose bleed sections are bleeding, literally. The even less fortunate who couldn't care less, have a burning desire (an angry pun) for an end to the longest game of tennis that pales test cricket into a brief history of time.
And those who paid the big bucks to be in the front row? Well, they have also lost mobile phone connection, the price of living among the posh. Ah, the nostalgia of now having to make trunk calls.
All would have been fine if we had already reached the stunted intellectual growth from indefinite school closures. But that hasn't happened yet. To make it worse, the Late US Senator Warren Rudman refrains us from being nonchalant: "Politics is too important to be left to the politicians. " So, while every living room and tea stall rages with debates on the same (old) topic, we seek refuge to more philosophy to avoid coming up with a definitive answer.
Uhm. My take? I say what we really need are some more EPZs - Exclusive Political Zones where hartal, blockage (arson), counter-blockage (sand truck, Viber, mobile phone, Section 144,...) can go on in full swing while life outside the EPZs remain normal. Once the dust settles, just tell us the score and we'll vote for the winning team.
So, what happened to our post war dreams? When we sleep, we do have those dreams and when we wake up, we have nightmares. For now, just stay safe on the roads, ok? We can't afford to lose any more tax payers...
The writer is an engineer & CEO turned comedian (by choice), the host of NTV's The Naveed Mahbub Show and the founder of Naveed's Comedy Club.
E-mail: naveed@naveedmahbub.com