Shuvo shokal from Dhaka, Travellers to South-East Asia will know that Asian people typically love their colourful bling. Bangadeshis are unashamed bling lovers, too. The taxi driver in Bangkok has flowers hanging from the rear-vision mirror. The bus driver in Sri Lanka has coloured lights and brightly adorned religious figurines on the dashboard. The truck …Read More
Shuvo shokal from Dhaka, Running a Melbourne Cup sweep in a foreign culture is hilarious. Apparently, this hasn’t been done routinely at our school, so I took on the gig. I tried to include all of the staff, as I have always done with such things, but this is not as simple as publicising the …Read More
Shuvo shokal from Dhaka, “You can live like a king,” was a common refrain in the international school community. It was never our motivation for coming here. From the outset, we’ve been interested in the differences in wealth and happy to act as minor agents for redistribution. We knew we would struggle to some extent …Read More
Shuvo shokal from Dhaka, Jamuna Future Park 6. Standing incongruously in neighbouring Bashundhara is Jamuna Future Park. This is a complex which includes a colossal shopping mall – less than half-filled at this stage – cheek by jowl with a ride park, replete with modern, new theme park-standard contraptions designed to terrify (you know the …Read More
That’s a photograph of a pile of recycled paper, with each piece being about 1 metre x 1 metre. You can see about a third of the piles in this shot. Shuvo shokal from Dhaka, short at the cash register 1. Linda and I were shopping one evening during this past week and finished in …Read More
Shuvo shokal from Dhaka, Remember your school excursions? It was great to catch a coach to a dairy farm outside Albion Park, or to play another school in soccer on Elizabeth Park, Bellambi, or even to see a play at the Seymour Centre. Pelican Sheep Station was as far as most of us went. …Read More
Namaste from Kathmandu, The Green Revolution has indubitably come to Nepal. It’s had the same consequences as everywhere else: elimination of hunger; but also the less desirable effects of hastening rural-urban drift and swelling the population of the urban centres manifold. It has turned the Nepalese into a nation of vendors very few of …Read More
Namaste from Pokhara in Nepal, I’m not sure I can articulate what my expectations of Nepal were prior to coming here, but there’s absolutely not a skerrick of doubt they were different from the reality. I think I had images of dry, steep, rocky, sparsely populated mountains; wrong on every count. …Read More
Shuvo shokal from Dhaka, Both Matt and I were new to the school. As we were scanning the programmes for Grade 10 in the week before school began we came across a reference to a field trip destination: Tioman Island. “Perhaps it’s an island in the Buriganga River, “opined Matt. “Yes, probably …Read More
Shuvo shokal from colourful Dhaka, Special Foodie Edition It’s been no surprise to either of us to discover the fact that Bangladeshis take their food seriously. Shortages of said substances usually do wonders in galvanising the thoughts on the subject, eh what? But, most people here are not starving. Not even the stray …Read More