What's in the Dhaka News??? ME!!!
How rare is it for someone like me to show up in Bangladesh? This is how rare…
Thanks to the gang of The Daily NewsLine for taking the time out of there busy day to talk with me. It’s an honor to be news….
How rare is it for someone like me to show up in Bangladesh? This is how rare…
Thanks to the gang of The Daily NewsLine for taking the time out of there busy day to talk with me. It’s an honor to be news….
Admission for one-day for one child at Disney World is $67. The average American family can handle this.
Admission for one-day for one child at Fantasy Kingdom in Dhaka is $2.60, a price beyond the reach of the average Bangladeshi family.
Fantasy Kingdom is surrounded by garment factories and rice fields. Many of the locals will go their entire life without taking the first step under FK’s bright, welcoming gates.
Today, for the price of one Disney World admission, I took 19 kids and one old farmer. We had the park to ourselves. There was no line. We were the line.
Roller coasters, playgrounds, and pizza filled our day. At times it seemed normal. And…
It’s not the most exciting audio-slideshow ever, but it gives you an idea of the runaround that I get trying to locate the factories.
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The night of the Bangla New Year, I went to an amusement park named Fantasy Kingdom with some friends. The place was packed and it didn’t take long for them to realize what life is like in Bangladesh for me: blatant staring, people wanting to touch me, get their photos taken with me.
My friends started to call me Tom Cruise and we brainstormed a business: Get your picture taken with Tom Cruise. We assigned rolls. Tuhin would be the manager and Kamrul the security. I, of course, was Tom.
You’re probably thinking that all of this is an exaggeration. That you’ve been places where there was no one like you and people stared. Trust me. Unless you are famous or are a whitey at…
I was trying to figure out the name of the shirt I wore during the Bangla new year and came across this website – hijabman.com/store.
I never did figure out the name of my shirt, but I wish I was Muslim so I could pull off this hijabman shirt that says: “Frisk me, I’m Muslim.”…
Happy New Year if you are Bengali, happy Saturday if you aren’t.
My day started at 4am. I am beat. I’ll write more later, including how my “White Boy” fame nearly started a riot at a rock concert. This day was so, so very long. For now here’s me and Bibi on her rockin’ truck of Bangla beats…
How are you spending your Bangla New Year?…
I gotta go.
The night bus rolls on and I make a pact with my bladder: The next stop, I’ll let him go.
I’m in the twilight that comes with sleeping, not so much because you need to but because you don’t want to see what rules of the road and physics the bus driver is trying to break, and don’t notice the bus has stopped. Finally, I awake and step off the bus. A shanty town bus station. I ask a lonely ticket saleslady where the toilet is. She points around to the back of the buildings.
“Hey boss. You need toilet? I show you.” Says the bus attendant.
I’m led around the corner of the building.
“It’s in there?” I point to dark…
In Wednesday’s “The Independent” (Dhaka) the lead story was about an anti-sweatshop bill in the US Senate.
Read it to get the Bangladeshi perspective on this issue. I really can’t weigh in on any of this at present time, but would like to hear some of your thoughts.
I love reading the newspapers wherever I travel. I’m sure this story was reported much differently in the USA….
My brother, Kyle, introduced me to Kurt Vonnegut. I’ve only read 3 or 4 of his books, but enough to know that I enjoy being inside of his head for a few hundred pages at a time.
He may have died, but I look forward to getting to know him further through his work. He was from Indiana and loved Indiana. Any writer from the Midwest is a hero of mine, especially when they are as funny as Vonnegut.
Vonnegut flatulated my all-time favorite quote:
I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.
Speaking of which, a random thought…
Bangladesh is the most densely populated country in the world. What would happen if its 150 million people…
The entire time I’ve been thinking and planning this quest, I’ve only thought about the garment factories and not the production of the textiles from which they are sewn.
The city of Narsingdi is Bangladesh’s cloth capital. Rickshaws are heaped with colorful cloth and trucks carry so much that they won’t fit under power lines. I was welcomed with open arms, cookies, and tea to 3 separate plants. I could ask any questions I wanted and take any photograph, even if it was of underage kids working (Bangladesh requires a minimum age of 18). I explained my quest to each of the owners and they were more than happy to walk me through their factories.
They were all sweatshops, possibly in the…