Tea garden owners have claimed that in the ongoing strike by workers --- and this is till Tuesday of this week --- they have lost as much as Tk 161.96 crore. There is hardly any reason to question that figure or not to sympathise with the owners. When an industry is in crisis, it affects society. All of us suffer in the process.
And yet on this question of suffering we need to sit back and reflect on the suffering tea garden workers in no fewer than 241 tea gardens in the country have been going through in these inflation-driven times. Prices have taken a leap in every area of life. And when we are informed that these workers have so long worked for daily wages of Tk 120 a day --- which is a pittance --- it is that old matter of insensitivity which hits us in the face.
No one appreciates a strike; no one desires that business be suspended through agitation. But when those who resort to strikes do so for bare survival, the issue takes on a wider meaning. Be it noted that it is not enough to try to assuage their feelings by offering them a mere Tk 25 rise in their daily wages. There is not much of a difference between Tk 120 and Tk 145. Is it really that hard for tea garden owners to cough up Tk 300 for each of these workers?
Imagine the lives these workers lead --- of hardship brought on by penury, of the longing for food they must keep in check because they cannot afford that food, of the children they must feed at the end of their tough leaves-picking day. In a society where the chasm between the affluent and the hungry widens with every passing hour, why must we require strikes to force a change, or negotiations to work out a settlement? Of course, we know the answer.
These are times which test those of us who happen to be part of the middle- and lower-middle classes. For the absolutely poor, it is an era where the future has been obscured by the harshness of the present. Why else would some good souls, young people driven by idealism, come forth to have the hungry consume a plate of rice once they have done a good deed for the day?
It is a harkening back to ancient religiosity, to the biblical, when these selfless young administer, here in Dhaka's Tejgaon, an enterprise they call Bhalo Kaajer Hotel. No fewer than 600 to 700 hungry men, women and children, each having done something noble in the course of the day, go home --- if they have homes to go back to --- fed and praying for the well-being of those who have not let them go hungry.
That is a revival of nobility. If these young people can undertake such an enormous task --- one does not know how much longer they can do it --- why should our affluent classes, people who can rise to the call of philanthropy, fall behind?
We are all suffering these days. When hoarders make it hard for us to buy eggs at reasonable prices and when everyone involved in the transportation, marketing and sales of eggs goes round and round the bush and in the process comes up with excuses to explain his position, we are not surprised. Such predatory behavior has always been the ugly norm in our markets and no one seems to be ready to crack down on it.
There are, worryingly, individuals and groups at a remove from the broad social structure. For these people Bangladesh's citizens are today suffused in wealth. There are no beggars holding out their hands in expectation of alms nowadays. How so? Take a look in Gulshan, Banani and Dhanmondi, they will tell you without batting an eyelid. Step into one of those elitist restaurants and you will find you must wait to be called to a table once those who have been having their meals there vacate it.
And that is progress, Sir? On social media happy, well-fed people post images of food many of us can only dream of. Who will enlighten these sybarites on the virtues of sobriety? In these tough days for Bangladesh's people, who will gently tell them that those images should not be there? And will they listen?
Ask those students, boys as well as girls, who have been going through an ordeal on the food intake issue at the nation's public universities. They come from struggling families in our villages and towns and cities. Many of them spend entire afternoons and evenings, once their classes are over, trekking to the homes of people whose children they tutor.
These students are hungry and thirsty and in need of rest and reflection on their academic pursuits. But that money from those tuitions at the end of the month is their lifeline. Ask them about life. The answer is writ large in their eyes, in their sunken cheeks, in their meaningful silences.
These students are in a deepening crisis. The price of food at the university halls has gone up. Where earlier they paid Tk 35 for a meal, now they must cough up anywhere between Tk 40 and Tk 50 for the same meal. And, yes, the food has slipped in quantity as also quality. At the Ducsu cafeteria, on the plate there is less rice, less fish and less meat than before.
The canteen owner at a hall at Jahangirnagar University grieves: a 1kg chicken, earlier bought at Tk130, now demands Tk200; hundred eggs are now priced at Tk1,200 from the previous Tk700; a 50kg sack of rice, earlier had for Tk1,900, now calls for Tk3,200. How do we allay his worries?
The Vice Chancellor of Dhaka University has promised to monitor the canteens of the university halls. But without subsidies of some sort, how will monitoring help?
Let us take a walk to the neighbourhood eatery, for sales have dwindled there. You take a shingara but forgo the tea. You order a plate of rice and some daal. Fish is what you dare not have anymore. A single daal puri is what you can afford, not the usual two.
Ageing parents in the silent village worry. Have their son and daughter in the city gone to bed hungry? Sleepless in his hall dormitory, the young university student calculates how much money, earned through tutoring children, he can send to his needy siblings back home.
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