One With the Tropics

On the 1^st of February 2004, I walked into the IRSAM office with tales of burned-out electrical fuses and stack upon stack of empty beer bottles from our third and final Beach Party at 3433 St. Denis. Everything in Montreal, and most of Canada for that matter, is frozen solid at this time of the year, so our annual mid-winter party was our one and only opportunity to simulate the warmth of the tropical sun and to forget the icy sidewalks and chilling winds outside.

On February 1^st, 2005, however, I stepped into the offices of BRCT in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where I’ve been living and working amongst palm trees and poverty for the past five months. Instead of burns from frostbite or short-circuiting electrical panels, my face was a patchwork of sunburn-red and farmer-tan white, the result of spending a full day watching the fifth and final B’desh versus Zimbabwe cricket match at the National Stadium under the surprisingly intense winter sun sans sunscreen.

Moreover, instead of gossiping with friends over the scandals that surfaced over the course of the past week at McMUN 2004 and at the Beach Party itself, I found myself laughing with my exuberant Bangladeshi colleagues over the shock they experienced when they saw me singing, dancing and driving an ox cart the previous evening on Bangladeshi television. The scandals in February 2005 weren’t related to Poli Sci students with cabin fever and the consumption of too many Coronas, but instead to a ‘marriage of convenience’ proposal from my fellow foreign co-star and the tender yet scripted touchy-feely nature of one or two scenes in the video itself.

If I had begun to think about how my world had turned itself onto its head over the past 365 days this morning I might have had to slap myself in the face. Fortunately, however, I didn’t begin to make these comparisons until returning home this evening, for the next-to-first degree burns on my nose and cheeks would have made it sting mightily.

Aside from the burns (now soothed with aloe from a generous friend) suffered by sitting in the exposed bleachers of the Banghabandu stadium, the cricket match was a roaring good time in many more ways than one. The crowd - no longer subdued by the Ramadan fast as it had been during the match against New Zealand in the fall - was a dancing, chanting, 50, 000 person strong sea of Bangladeshi pride. The Tigers themselves performed spectacularly, buoyed by their raucous supporters, an experienced Zimbabwean lineup and a partnership between our two star players, Rafique and Aftab, which produced close to 90 runs.

Fortunately for us, we didn’t attract the celebrity attention we had at the first game; this time the crowd was as loud and energetic as we were. Our bamboo flagpoles were also confiscated at the gate for security reasons, though, so we were also considerably less conspicuous than we had been during the first match. Nevertheless, we were told the next day by our colleagues at the office that they’d seen us on TV waving our de-poled flags and celebrating one of many 6-run shots with clenched fists and high-fives.

Who would have thought that on the 3^rd day of a hartal imposed by Bangladesh’s official opposition party, I would manage to appear on Bangladeshi television on two separate and completely unrelated occasions; that Bangladesh would come back from a 0-2 deficit to win their five-game series 3-2; and that I’d be on the other side of the globe in tropical South Asia, my world turned both literally and figuratively upside down, only a year after making the tropics come to me in frigid Montreal?

What I do know is that the sunburn is less painful, the TV appearance more exciting, the Bangladeshi victory more exhilarating, and the violence-free hartal more gratifying, all because it certainly wouldn’t have been me.

***

In international news, the situation in Nepal has just taken a turn for the worse: King Gyanendra has dissolved the Nepalese government and declared a state of emergency. Just as the political assassination that sparked the recent three day hartal here in Bangladesh hit very close to home (and that will now be extended another four days, dawn-to-dusk, beginning on Thursday), the political turmoil in our neighbour to the north might do the same. A friend of our director is the commissioner of the Nepalese Human Rights Commission, a government-appointed position, and I had the chance to meet him when he visited our offices in October. Judging by one of countless anti-democratic and dictatorial measures imposed by the King described in this quote from the BBC, Commissioner Susil might now find himself in rather dire straights:

Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba and members of his government have been placed under house arrest and have had their homes surrounded by soldiers.

All formalities aside, what’s with political turmoil in South Asia these days?