Rajon: I lose one more time…
A major challenge that children of migrants, at least of first generation, face growing up in a new country is confusion about their identity. Often, if not always, migrant parents tend to pass their own social and cultural identity to their children. As parents, we have been doing the same over a decade too. We have been telling only the glorious stories about Bangladesh to our children for all these years and now they to some extent feel proud of being Australians with Bangladesh origin. This morning the FB posts about the barbaric killing of Rajon is shaking me so terrible that I am forced to think whether I should be proud as a Bangladeshi any longer? Is it time to come out and confess and reveal to my children the ugly face of our society?
I have seen that one of my good friends has posted on FB that the killers of Rajon should face ‘cross fire’. I understand the emotion behind it………. but shouldn’t this rather be treated as a core social issue that need to be addressed holistically? Whatever offence a 13 years child commits, a civilized society would never even think of touching him or her physically. I can not be barbarously brave enough to watch the video of torture but what I gather from news, this heinous crime was committed at a public place, witnessed and even videoed by many others. Isn’t therefore a social approval for such brutal treatment of a mere child for an alleged theft? It is not enough to punish the killers and their accomplices which would nothing more than a Band-Aid solution to this permanent problem. This crime also reminds us how direly legal, moral and humane education is needed to have a civilized society in Bangladesh that never fails to respect and protect young children. The State as well as individuals should also come up to permanently address the issues starting from poverty that lead Rajon and millions of children of his age to prevent from being in such a vulnerable state of life. RIP Rajon……….
Tushar Das
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tushar.das.5209?fref=nf
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Thank you Tushar Das for expressing your honest opinion. I agree with you.
I was taught to be proud of Bangladesh during my school years in Bangladesh. So when I first went overseas for Uni studies, I used to feel and express my pride of being a Bangladeshi and used to tell all the positives about my country of origin to others.
But as years went past and I saw how different things were in civilised societies, I slowly realised that a lot of that pride was fake. Yes, Bangladesh is now progressing economically. But there are still so many more things to be disgusted about regarding Bangladesh’s social system than there are to be proud about.
What has happened here to a child is just one of the many issues that exist in Bangladesh. But there are so many more issues.
Violence is prevalent and widespread in Bangladesh. ‘Mastani’, ‘Chadabaji’.. I do not even know the English equivalent of these words because these are not common in civilised societies.
Widespread violence.
Widespread corruption – politicians, police, public servants, businessmen. It is like everyone is competing to be corrupts and cheats because that is what seems to take everyone ahead. Only the honest people are the ones that stay behind.
Widespread human rights abuse of various forms.
Culture of ‘showing off’ of wealth.
Widening gap between the rich and the poor.
Having many servants, which is actually modern day slavery.
Widespread discrimination.
Air pollution.
Over population.
Traffic Chaos and noise.
I can go on with this list..
I went to Dhaka in recent years and asked a high school friend in Bangla, ‘I am shocked by many things here, do people not have any moral values here?’
He replied, ‘What are you talking about dosto.. this word does not exist in our Dictionary’.
When coming back at the airport, I was in the queue for passport checks, suddenly a family of influential people came out of no where and went to the front of the queue lead by a member of the airport staff. The customs officials also processed them without any questions. I asked, ‘Why are you jumping the queue? You can not do this.’ No one paid any attention to me, I was totally ignored.
How can we change this situation?