Bangladesh Vision 2020
Tuesday, 18 September 2007
Maswood Alam Khan
FORMER President of India Mr. A P J Abdul Kalam once asked a young girl when she asked for his autograph, "What is your dream?" The girl instantly replied, "I want to live in a developed India." Kalam later, before his tenure as President, dedicated to that girl a book he wrote along with Mr. Y. S. Rajan: "India 2020: A Vision for the New Millennium."
Anyone who paid a visit to Malaysia must have noticed a slogan, on billboards and topiary gardens, written in both Malay and English: "Wawasan 2020" or "Vision 2020" -- a Malaysian ideal the then Prime Minister Mahathir Bin Mohammad introduced while tabling the Malaysian Development Plan in 1991, to turn his country into a fully developed nation by the year 2020. Neither a city nor a souvenir shop you will find in Malaysia where this slogan will not draw your attention. Malaysian boys and girls will pay an extra Ringgit (Malaysian currency) for a cap with the 'Vision 2020' slogan embroidered on the visor. Any important ceremony in Malaysia must conclude with Wawasan 2020, also a patriotic song on the same idea sung in Malay the last few lines of which are: Wawasan 2020, Satu pandangan jauh, Bukan impian malah kenyataan, Bersama kita jayakan (Vision 2020, A far view, Not a dream but reality, Let us all achieve it).
On an occasion in Kuala Lumpur in 1997, thanks to my stay there for a couple of years on my official assignment, I was lucky to hear the Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir deliver a lecture from a distance of only 10 yards. Mahathir, in his cute style -- as if he were grinding something with his jaws -- addressed the gathering for only 10 minutes in his avuncular tone exhorting his compatriots to learn how to smile while greeting a tourist.
He urged his fellow citizens not to build their country as a duplicate of those developed countries like the USA or Sweden but to develop their country in their own mould. I sat on a chair simply frozen hearing his advice in English, his most appropriately chosen words woven with a fusion of orders, instructions, love and patriotism. Would our country ever be blessed with such a towering leader, I wondered at those mesmeric moments, who could lead Bangladesh with such an enthralling command? One who saw the state of affairs of Malaysia in early 70s and later visited the country under the premiership of Mahathir can very well infer how leadership can transform a nation from a molehill to a mountain.
Mahathir of Malaysia and Kalam of India were not the only leaders in the world who envisioned bright futures for their countries in 2020. Patrick Manning, Prime Minister of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, an archipelagic state in the southern Caribbean, also introduced his Vision 2020 development plan for his country to attain the status of a developed nation by the same year, a year that beats more rhythmic as 'twenty- twenty' than 'two thousand twenty'.
With cricket of limited 20-overs gaining tremendous popularity as "twenty-twenty" tournament, people the world over after 13 years would love to pronounce the year 2020 as twenty-twenty, not two thousand twenty. Thirteen years, nevertheless, is a long period and it is not easy to visualise how life would be like in Bangladesh after more than a decade. Things in Bangladesh, after all, change very dramatically.
In 2020, the baby who is now studying in a nursery would be a matured boy or a girl studying in a college or a university and we are still in the dark how our government would be like then. Would it be a presidential form of government or would continue as a parliamentary form? Will the system of caretaking government continue? Who will then be our Prime Minister? Would our population be more than 200 million or less? Will people be as enthusiastic as we are now in politics? Will Bangladesh win World Cup in cricket? Will rickshaws be plying on the streets of Dhaka city? What ranking Bangladesh would be awarded in the long or short list of corrupt nations?
We, humans, are very thirsty to know what will happen in future. In the twentieth century, one of the few occult scientists who could quench human thirst for knowing the tomorrows was Cheiro who mastered all the arts of clairvoyance, palmistry, astrology and numerology. He read palms and told the fortunes of celebrities like Mark Twain and the Prince of Wales. But, Cheiro like all other palmists of the past and the present while telling fortunes always used a vague language connoting to a number of alternative futures anyone of which, according to the science of probability, was highly plausible to occur in his client's future life, given his past track records and backgrounds.
Historians project patterns observed in past civilisations upon present- day society to anticipate what will happen in future. However, such anticipation in the present-day world of internet and webulation (revolution of WEB) has to be derived through a different calculus computer system analysts are more capable to grapple with than historians. Still, there are areas where the smartest computer scientists fail miserably to predict. People in Bangladesh who used to lead regal lives and were voracious readers of history could not imagine in the early part of this year that some of them would have to spend the rest of their lives inside prisons. Indonesians on the Christmas night of 2004 could not presume that a tsunami wave would take away millions of their lives next morning.
We are living in a world where numbers are crunched at sonic speed, fashions are changed on monthly basis, models of equipment get obsolescent before the accountant can calculate their first annual depreciations and business is lost if decision is taken in the afternoon instead of, in the morning. For our survival, we have to chase our goals in the same pace our counterparts in the rest of the world move. We cannot afford to indulge ourselves in the luxury of Test Cricket wasting five days as couch potatoes. Instead, we should opt for Twenty-20 tournament, which we can watch for three hours and then go to sleep.
In a makeshift school in a slum area in Dhaka, where I spend a little bit of time on Friday afternoons, I asked a little girl, "What is your ambition?" She promptly replied, "I want to be a teacher just like you." This girl, around five years old, would be eligible to cast her vote as an adult of 18 years in the Year 2020.
What awaits this girl in her country in the year 2020? Whom, among our leaders, may we ask this question? Is it not time for us, most of who will die before 2020, to hoist billboards at strategic crossroads with a bold slogan: *"Bangladesh will stand with her head high as a developed country in 2020"* on the eve of her 50th birthday? Should we, who are already on the wrong side of the age, not be afforded at least a glimpse of a dream that one day Bangladesh will be on a par with any of those developed countries in the Occident -- or on a par with 'Malaysia of today', at least?
The writer is General Manager, Bangladesh Krishi Bank and can be reached over internet at [email protected]
FORMER President of India Mr. A P J Abdul Kalam once asked a young girl when she asked for his autograph, "What is your dream?" The girl instantly replied, "I want to live in a developed India." Kalam later, before his tenure as President, dedicated to that girl a book he wrote along with Mr. Y. S. Rajan: "India 2020: A Vision for the New Millennium."
Anyone who paid a visit to Malaysia must have noticed a slogan, on billboards and topiary gardens, written in both Malay and English: "Wawasan 2020" or "Vision 2020" -- a Malaysian ideal the then Prime Minister Mahathir Bin Mohammad introduced while tabling the Malaysian Development Plan in 1991, to turn his country into a fully developed nation by the year 2020. Neither a city nor a souvenir shop you will find in Malaysia where this slogan will not draw your attention. Malaysian boys and girls will pay an extra Ringgit (Malaysian currency) for a cap with the 'Vision 2020' slogan embroidered on the visor. Any important ceremony in Malaysia must conclude with Wawasan 2020, also a patriotic song on the same idea sung in Malay the last few lines of which are: Wawasan 2020, Satu pandangan jauh, Bukan impian malah kenyataan, Bersama kita jayakan (Vision 2020, A far view, Not a dream but reality, Let us all achieve it).
On an occasion in Kuala Lumpur in 1997, thanks to my stay there for a couple of years on my official assignment, I was lucky to hear the Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir deliver a lecture from a distance of only 10 yards. Mahathir, in his cute style -- as if he were grinding something with his jaws -- addressed the gathering for only 10 minutes in his avuncular tone exhorting his compatriots to learn how to smile while greeting a tourist.
He urged his fellow citizens not to build their country as a duplicate of those developed countries like the USA or Sweden but to develop their country in their own mould. I sat on a chair simply frozen hearing his advice in English, his most appropriately chosen words woven with a fusion of orders, instructions, love and patriotism. Would our country ever be blessed with such a towering leader, I wondered at those mesmeric moments, who could lead Bangladesh with such an enthralling command? One who saw the state of affairs of Malaysia in early 70s and later visited the country under the premiership of Mahathir can very well infer how leadership can transform a nation from a molehill to a mountain.
Mahathir of Malaysia and Kalam of India were not the only leaders in the world who envisioned bright futures for their countries in 2020. Patrick Manning, Prime Minister of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, an archipelagic state in the southern Caribbean, also introduced his Vision 2020 development plan for his country to attain the status of a developed nation by the same year, a year that beats more rhythmic as 'twenty- twenty' than 'two thousand twenty'.
With cricket of limited 20-overs gaining tremendous popularity as "twenty-twenty" tournament, people the world over after 13 years would love to pronounce the year 2020 as twenty-twenty, not two thousand twenty. Thirteen years, nevertheless, is a long period and it is not easy to visualise how life would be like in Bangladesh after more than a decade. Things in Bangladesh, after all, change very dramatically.
In 2020, the baby who is now studying in a nursery would be a matured boy or a girl studying in a college or a university and we are still in the dark how our government would be like then. Would it be a presidential form of government or would continue as a parliamentary form? Will the system of caretaking government continue? Who will then be our Prime Minister? Would our population be more than 200 million or less? Will people be as enthusiastic as we are now in politics? Will Bangladesh win World Cup in cricket? Will rickshaws be plying on the streets of Dhaka city? What ranking Bangladesh would be awarded in the long or short list of corrupt nations?
We, humans, are very thirsty to know what will happen in future. In the twentieth century, one of the few occult scientists who could quench human thirst for knowing the tomorrows was Cheiro who mastered all the arts of clairvoyance, palmistry, astrology and numerology. He read palms and told the fortunes of celebrities like Mark Twain and the Prince of Wales. But, Cheiro like all other palmists of the past and the present while telling fortunes always used a vague language connoting to a number of alternative futures anyone of which, according to the science of probability, was highly plausible to occur in his client's future life, given his past track records and backgrounds.
Historians project patterns observed in past civilisations upon present- day society to anticipate what will happen in future. However, such anticipation in the present-day world of internet and webulation (revolution of WEB) has to be derived through a different calculus computer system analysts are more capable to grapple with than historians. Still, there are areas where the smartest computer scientists fail miserably to predict. People in Bangladesh who used to lead regal lives and were voracious readers of history could not imagine in the early part of this year that some of them would have to spend the rest of their lives inside prisons. Indonesians on the Christmas night of 2004 could not presume that a tsunami wave would take away millions of their lives next morning.
We are living in a world where numbers are crunched at sonic speed, fashions are changed on monthly basis, models of equipment get obsolescent before the accountant can calculate their first annual depreciations and business is lost if decision is taken in the afternoon instead of, in the morning. For our survival, we have to chase our goals in the same pace our counterparts in the rest of the world move. We cannot afford to indulge ourselves in the luxury of Test Cricket wasting five days as couch potatoes. Instead, we should opt for Twenty-20 tournament, which we can watch for three hours and then go to sleep.
In a makeshift school in a slum area in Dhaka, where I spend a little bit of time on Friday afternoons, I asked a little girl, "What is your ambition?" She promptly replied, "I want to be a teacher just like you." This girl, around five years old, would be eligible to cast her vote as an adult of 18 years in the Year 2020.
What awaits this girl in her country in the year 2020? Whom, among our leaders, may we ask this question? Is it not time for us, most of who will die before 2020, to hoist billboards at strategic crossroads with a bold slogan: *"Bangladesh will stand with her head high as a developed country in 2020"* on the eve of her 50th birthday? Should we, who are already on the wrong side of the age, not be afforded at least a glimpse of a dream that one day Bangladesh will be on a par with any of those developed countries in the Occident -- or on a par with 'Malaysia of today', at least?
The writer is General Manager, Bangladesh Krishi Bank and can be reached over internet at [email protected]