Not all Americans are in reverse

Maswood Alam Khan from Maryland, USAbrANYBODY used to Bangladeshi styles visiting USA for the first time will be puzzled when she would attempt to switch an electric light on or off.brWe are used to pressing the lever of an electric toggle switch down to put the light on and to pressing the lever up to put the light off. But in America you have to follow just the reverse press the lever up to lit and down to unlit.brWe, Bangladeshis, are followers of British styles and manners, thanks to the legacy of British colonial era that has moulded our ways of living. And after liberating ourselves from the British colonial rule and then from Pakistani oppressive regimes, we didn't attempt to revert to our own language, culture and style and it took about 30 years for us to embrace our mother tongue Bangla as our official language since the British had left our soil.brBut, Americans are all along doggedly opposed to what are British even before their independence; they always wanted to stand out as the biggest, the tallest, and the sturdiest and, to top it all, as the un-British. Americans hate to follow anything un-American; they want others to follow their styles and élan. Americans, I guess, vowed to avenge the British discriminatory rule upon them by shunning anything British.brIf there could be a way Americans perhaps would have rejected the very language English and would have embraced altogether a different language named Americana with dissimilar alphabets and grammar as their official language; but they failed to eschew British English though they tried their level best by at least coining a multitude of new American English words and phrases in their efforts to liberate themselves from the British linguistic predominance.brShunning everything British was not possible due to opposition imposed by Americans many of whom were British loyalists---a problem that also adversely affected the American Revolution. Many Americans, the British supporters, had chosen to remain loyal to the mother country. In 1780, the Americans suffered a major blow to their hopes of emancipation when one of their heroes, General Benedict Arnold, joined the British army.brNevertheless, their electric switches, plugs and sockets, their traffic rules, their language, their accent, their lookout, and many things deemed American are quite different from those deemed Britannic or Bangladeshi.brThe next thing, after using an American toggle switch, that would puzzle a Bangladeshi, especially if she knows how to drive a car, is the American way of driving vehicles. My head reels whenever, during my present sojourn in USA, my sister-in-law Mini drives me in a car as she, sitting on the left-sided driver's seat, frenetically negotiates the busy roads and highways always driving on the right side of the road allowing traffics flowing from the opposite directions on her left side. At each turn and twist I get scared to death imagining every time a head-on collision of our car with vehicles moving in from other sides.brAmerica has many prides to boast about and not many shames to feel guilty about. They may not yet have succeeded in composing a comprehensive American lexicon full of words and phrases completely different from those of British. But, they have proven themselves superior to Britannia by introducing right-hand-traffic that is being followed by the majority of nations the world over though originally most traffic following the British custom drove on the left worldwide. Only 34 per cent of the world's people now live in left-traffic countries and 66 per cent in right-traffic countries.brIn the early years of English colonisation of North America, English driving customs were followed and the colonies drove on the left. After gaining independence from England, however, they were anxious to cast off all remaining links with their British colonial past and gradually changed to right-hand driving.brThe trend among nations over the years has been toward driving on the right; but Britain has done its best to stave off global homogenisation. In the 1960s, when Great Britain was contemplating to change their driving habit from left to right traffic, the country's conservative people in power who could not imagine compromising with their heritage did everything they could to nip the proposal in the bud.brToday, only four European countries still drive on the left the United Kingdom, Ireland, Cyprus and Malta. Countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Malaysia that were part of the British Empire adopted the keep-left rule, although there were some exceptions. Canada, for example, where the Maritime Provinces and Vancouver drove on the left, eventually changed to the right in order to make border crossings to and from the United States easier.brThere is a confusion we face while understanding right-hand-traffic (RHT) or left-hand-drive (LHD) and left-hand-traffic (LHT) or right-hand-drive (RHD). Almost always, in countries where one drives on the right-hand side of the road, the cars are built so that the driver sits on the left-hand side of the car. Conversely, driving on the left-hand side of the road usually implies that the driver's seat is on the right-hand side of the car.brAmong the shames almost all Americans including many Republicans feel guilty about is Bush presidency for its mishandling of Iraq war. American voters are now anxious to find among the presidential candidates---Obama or McCain---a person who is least like Bush, no matter whether he is a Republican or a Democrat. So are both Obama and McCain anxious not to display their characteristics that may smack of those found in Bush.brIn their quest for the best Presidential candidate who they can vote to White House most Americans depend on someone or some institution else to do the home work as they don't have time to do the research themselves. Most of the Americans besides casting a cursory gaze over the headlines can't delve deep into a news item, let alone read the editorials and analyses, while reading a newspaper.brTwo institutions, as I could find out talking to friends and relations, are doing their roaring business in spoon-feeding the Americans in general ideas and know-how on who should be their best candidate to be trusted with the onerous job of alleviating their sufferings and navigating their nation towards the goalpost of their dreams.brOne institution, comprising an army of pollsters, is one of many opinion polls agencies and the other, comprising a plethora of rumourmongers, is one of many rumour factories, as is chosen by an individual American voter.brHow reliable are those polls I asked this question to one of my relations. His answer 125 per cent bogus! Why 'I have never been polled', he complained. 'Some pollsters call us on the phone asking us for our opinion; but, most Americans are tired of calls from commercials and pollsters and most of them hang up on those callers. Of course, some people take time to respond and give their opinions. But, the opinions on a common issue or on a presidential candidate finally churned out from those polls agencies differ greatly depending on who the pollsters were. On a McCain-Obama opinion poll, for example, sited by the media Obama was shown ahead by about 9.0 per cent, while on the AOL poll McCain was ahead of Obama by 63 per cent to 37 per cent. Which one to believe'brThe second alternative institution, inevitable when opinion polls results are manufactured based on pollsters' fancies, is one of many factories exclusively defaulted to churning rumours, especially those rumours which speak of voluptuously depraved stories centring around presidential candidates.brI asked a Muslim Bangladeshi-turned-American acquaintance who he thinks will come out victorious on November 4. Undoubtedly, Obama! was his answer in an American accent. Why Obama I retorted in my Benglish accent. He answered Because Obama is a Muslim, many black Americans are Muslims and of late, Americans are embracing Islam in hordes.brLater I came to learn from USA Today, a prestigious American daily, that an Email rumour that 'Senator Barack Obama is a Muslim who had lied about his religious background, including his claim to being a devout Christian' has been in circulation since January 2007. Though the rumour has been proved 100 per cent false Muslims (most of whom are Obama supporters) along with political enemies of Obama are still spreading the rumour to the detriment of their own interests. Muslims living in USA idiotically think by propagating this rumour they were glorifying Islam and upholding the prospect of Obama's election. Americans would more love to see no sun in the summer than a Muslim American President in the White House.brThere are of course many plaudits favouring Obama. His victory over Hilary speaks a volume about his charismatic ability to win hearts of American people. With a view to dousing the flame of his burgeoning popularity researchers belonging to opposition camps must now be manufacturing stories to tarnish his image. Ironically, such political mud-slinging and smear campaigns often work to harm the targeted candidate when voters having no time for their self-judgements bank on hearsays either from opinion pollsters or from rumourmongers.brRumours of affairs, of weapons of mass destruction and their alleged removal to other countries, that John Kerry is French, that Obama is a Muslim and who is not even a US citizen, that John McCain had an illegitimate black child, that Sarah Palin (McCain's VP candidate) allowed her daughter to date a 23 year old grown man from the time she was 14---all of these involve statements whose veracity is in question or are simply false. Others are statements whose ambiguous nature makes them potentially appealing to different audiences who may interpret them in particular ways and circulate them.brExperiments have shown that people pay much closer attention to criticism than to praise. When we hear equally passionate positive and negative evaluations of a political candidate, the negative evaluation carries greater weight. The research suggests that our bias towards negative information comes about for the reason that negative information has a greater propensity to harm than positive information has to help. In this vein, Americans are no way different from Britons or Bangladeshis.brAmerica nevertheless is already different in many respects from a number of countries when everybody is deep asleep in Bangladesh, here in America all are busy at work, thanks to the Planet Earth's revolution every 24 hours keeping planetary inhabitants half asleep and half awake. I thought America should be different from Bangladesh in all other respects too like the way an electric toggle switch is handled. But, I was wrong.brWhile taking a ride in my friend's car on my way from Washington to New York I asked him in what else America is different from Britain or Bangladesh. He said In America you may have to turn the knob of a faucet clockwise for pouring running water and anticlockwise to stop. Americans once even planned to devise a screwdriver to turn anticlockwise for tightening a screw, but later abrogated the idea.brThank God America didn't proceed further! Otherwise, we had to rotate the steering wheel clockwise to turn the car left and anticlockwise to turn right. Or, for a shortcut, American clocks would run in the reverse direction e.g. in American term clockwise and in British term anticlockwise. Maybe, the day would then start at 8 in the evening and the night at 8 in the morning. You never know, we would then have found all Americans hand walking on the sidewalks with their legs thrust skyward! brThe writer is General Manager, Bangladesh Krishi Bank. He can be reached at e-mail brmaswood@hotmail.com