Our runaway civic sense

Despite taking immense pride in our heritage of being hospitable, we never really shy away from displaying a surprising level of antagonism when things don't quite go our way! If a queue has a long wait time, we sneakily cut in line; once we're done consuming a burger, we nonchalantly dispose of our litter on the roadside; if we encounter a customer at our workplace, we are desperate to enforce a satisficing solution rather than a satisfying one. Why do we, regarded as one of the most hospitable nations in the world, display such a lackluster disposition when dealing with others?

Could the reason be camouflaged in the plethora of disservices we're subjected to everyday? Dhaka dwellers, for instance, start their day facing horrendous traffic. According to a news report, the average speed of cars has halved from 13.7kph in 2010 to 6.4kph in 2017. And we witness the consequences on a daily basis! Agitated drivers engage themselves in a game of brawn, shoving forth, nudging here, dodging there, and wedging themselves awkwardly in between other awkwardly positioned vehicles, creating an even more awkward mess of things. The palpable tension eventually gives way to rude outbursts, followed by agitated reciprocation, often culminating to fist fights involving multiple parties.

Dhaka-dwellers are thereby served with yet another cause of prolonged traffic aside from the knee high rain water overrunning the clogged sewage systems. Those people lucky enough to be riding, as opposed to driving the vehicles, seek an alternative platform to vent their angst and embroil into heated virtual altercations with quasi-strangers who are most probably stranded in the same traffic strain a few miles away, tapping away onto their screens with equal ferocity. Had frustration been a measure of GDP, Bangladesh would be a thriving tiger economy in Asia.

Perhaps the excruciatingly long waits on the roads and unwarranted subjection to torturous travel environments are what inculcate impatience in us Bangladeshis. Having squandered hours travelling brief routes, we are eager to just step on the accelerator once the convoy of VIP passes or waist high rainwater recedes. And hence we witness (and perhaps partake in) the mad sprint across roads with an overhead footbridge or the insane act of springing up from aircraft seats immediately after touchdown despite the seatbelt signs being on. This impatience to wait in queues, the urge to dash forward at the expense of everything that stands in the way, the compulsion to risk lives and even travel atop train tops, the raw emotion to be anywhere but here, might very well have its roots in the less than efficient systems that we need to avail on a regular basis -roads, banks, immigration queues, ticket counters, passport office, food joints, hospitals, and so on!

Consider us, the very same Bangladeshis, in another city, say in Singapore, where everything is processed several times faster than in our homeland. The immigration folks are speedier than their Bangladeshi counterparts, and for that matter, Singapore is making towards electronic immigration where a simple fingerprint will be sufficient to allow a foreigner in or out of the country, reducing wait time significantly. Public transportation works like a well synchronised ballet performance. The entire island city is connected by a rail network with MRTs arriving every 2-6 minutes depending on rush hour. Places without MRT lines either have bus services that can be accurately tracked through apps or have an ongoing MRT construction. In fact, Singapore is a country that is under perpetual construction! And most of the people contributing to the country's super efficiency are none other than Bangladeshis, plucked right out of amongst us!

And once we land there, our demeanour is something to behold! Not only would we wait our turns in queues (albeit with less regards for personal space) no matter how long they are, but also display considerable assiduousness in terms of crossing roads only from designated areas. Cutting lines either through brute force or through subtle monetary transaction is unheard of and we join steps with the host nation in synchronised orderliness with military precision. A far, far cry from our cacophonous lifestyle back home!

The reason? Perhaps it's the fear of the cane or the hefty fine for breaking the law that the island nation imposes upon rule breakers. Or perhaps people are not compelled to step on the gas because the country ensures a seamless lifestyle by operating with maddening efficiency and would never allow a traffic gridlock due to VIP movements or rainfall. Especially NOT rainfall, since rain water is precious and the government goes to great lengths to actually harvest it for meeting the country's demand for water!

And it's not just the public sector that goes all out to create an impeccable living condition, the private sector works pretty amazingly too. Nobody's patience level is tested with executives manning stalls, counters or desks at the speed of Flash from Zootopia. I met wonder woman about three years ago at a famous pretzel chain at a Bangkok shopping mall. She single-handedly managed a 200 square feet stall, starting from making the dough, to baking the pretzel, to plating the orders, to serving the customers to managing the transactions. I am reminded of her every time I visit a road side kebab place in Dhaka near my office or wait in queue at the outlet of a gargantuan local brand where multiple staff would stand at the counter, engrossed in their personal conversations, and only one would ineptly and half heartedly make feeble attempts at serving an ever expanding queue of customers growing impatient by the minute.

Interestingly, in countries like Singapore, one would also notice the efforts taken by citizens at an individual level to take the ownership by doing their parts, however small. Think for an instance the nonchalant act of tossing away a plastic container vs. taking the effort of sorting through your waste and disposing of them in three types of colour-coded and clearly labelled trash bins for - plastic, papers and cans! And no wonder that these waste would never end up clogging their sewage system and contribute to raising water levels despite Singapore enjoying 2340mm of annual rainfall, higher than that of Bangladesh!

It's worth pondering why most of us in Bangladesh become characterised by an apathetic disposition when tossing out a paper cup from the top of say a double decker bus oblivious of the inconvenience of the person below? Why has our nation, often touted as one of the most hospitable, got our service industry trapped in such dire straits? Why are we comfortable in concocting fake stories to garner sympathies even at the expense of incrementing the anguish of a real sufferer? I won't even bother to drag religious faiths to this article but even a cursory contemplation would reveal the stark hypocrisies in our daily living.

And in spite of such intense soul searching, we are none the wiser about what can be done to ease the pain of an ordinary daily commuter or a mere service seeker. Perhaps an amalgamation of public and private sectors, and individual-level initiatives is in order for us to take the first small step out of this vicious continuum of terrible service, sordid disregard for others and inherent impatience that keeps moving in loops, towing the poor participants into abysmal depths of frustration. But that one small step is necessary and only then it could become a giant leap for the nation!

The writer is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the School of Business and Economics, North South University. She can be reached at [email protected]