Lack of civic sense in Bangladeshis

Pratiti Shirin writes for DOT : 
There is an old saying that says do not ask men of their wage and women, of their age. But the average Bengali person just does the opposite. Not only does he ask of wage and age but of all other personal things which exist under the sun.
For example, after one’s marriage, it becomes the endless headache of distant relatives to enquire why the couple is not having children, or worse, when will it have one. Relatively unknown people who have no idea of your personal life, ask you to do hajj at Mecca or go to Ajmer Sharif to beg God for children. They might not think that this might be a case of medical intervention, or just lack of time. If the couple has a child, it is asked, when would it have its next issue and the list goes on ad infinitum. This is the case of married people. If one is unmarried, again, it becomes the endless worry of distant relatives and acquaintances why someone is not getting married. It seems it is our national pastime to break one’s head over other people’s (non) marital and (non)pregnancy issues.
Chatting up strangers and breaking one’s head over them is another problem of the notoriously over inquisitive Bengali mind. One oversteps the boundaries of courtesy when one asks a stranger in a park if that stranger has diabetes and arthritis because the latter is running so fast and doing some exercises of the back and the neck precisely not to get diabetes or arthritis very soon. Then there is of course, the turning of the street into a public toilet and a dustbin through public urination and spitting respectively. Both of them could not be controlled by the municipal corporation through either setting up fines (which is not implemented) or public toilets and dustbins which mushroomed under the late mayor Anisul Haque’s supervision.
This culture of not using a bin and spilling litter into drains and on the street just beside a bin is also not new. One wonders why one is tempted to throw rubbish on the street just when the bin is around. Then there is the practice of throwing garbage on the street from the balcony or inside the boundary wall of the neighbouring flat and also spitting randomly from a house on a pedestrian’s head! Most flats have communal systems of daily garbage collection and one cannot fathom why despite this, the domestic rubbish must be thrown on the street polluting the environment.
Then there is the notorious running over from one side of the highway or road, to the other side although the footover bridge is just 50 yards away. We wonder about why Dhaka city has one of the highest rates of road accidents which happen in the entire world. Yes, careless driving and overtaking by bus drivers is a major problem but another major problem is road crossing in this way. It causes extreme embarrassment for the drivers but more dangerously, it makes them unable to pull the brake in time, causing the accident. No person is as callous about his own life as we are on a national level because not even the mentally ill would often undergo such risky behaviour putting out their lives literally on the road.
Moreover, there is the residential road clearing after Eid-ul-Azha. Each time a cow is slaughtered, roads and alleys become unbearable to walk in with floods of cow blood and the reek of slaughter leftovers filling up a place. A simple solution is to clean up a place with water and spread bleaching powder after a slaughter but more than lack of awareness, it is often laziness that stops people from acting as such. The former mayor did introduce a fast service by the DCC to clean up after-slaughter leftovers but one is yet to see how long it remains in effect.
It is such behaviour displaying civic nonsense that makes living in a megacity such as Dhaka unbearable. Although time and again, Dhaka city saw various attempts to create awareness among its citizens, it has been observed that such attempts to clean Dhaka often have failed in the long run. Unless there is a change of mentality and attitude among residents of Dhaka, change will not be permanent.
The writer is an Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh. She can be reached at pratshirin85@du.ac.bd.