Zakir Kibria is a writer, policy analyst, entrepreneur based in Kathmandu, Nepal. Chronicler of Entropy | Chasing next caffeine fix, immersive auditory haze, free falls. Collector of glances. “Some desires defy gravity.” Email: [email protected]
In 840, the mayor always wins. The machine keeps humming. The tenders keep flowing. But the film exists. Someone made it. Someone watched it. Someone wrote about it. And that, perhaps, is where the next story begins.
A government that reduces VIP protocol but continues to evict vendors without rehabilitation has merely exchanged one performance for another.
Albert Camus wrote that we must imagine Sisyphus happy but for those caught in Bangladesh’s cycles of performative governance, happiness is not the point. Each new deadline, each “operation,” each raid is a boulder pushed up the hill. The problem rolls back down, and we begin again.
We now know exactly where we are, but we have lost all sense of where we could be.
We have a choice: To be passive consumers of the spectacle, or active collaborators in writing a different ending -- one based not on fear and division, but on the unbreakable, transnational solidarity of those who believe, against all odds.
The night is not one thing. It is a thousand negotiations, a million small decisions about where to stand, how long to stay, who to trust. The city's soul is not a fixed thing but a process -- an ongoing negotiation between collapse and creation.
From Victorian automata to today’s AI girlfriend apps, we have sought to mechanize intimacy, to distill love into algorithms. This musing traces that arc, using Joi as a lodestar to navigate the shadows of desire, capitalism, and digital isolation.
BNP has to govern not merely as the winner of an election but as the steward of a divided nation. Jamaat-e-Islami has to act as a parliamentary opposition, not as a liberation war revision society. The international community has to support democratic consolidation, not strategic alignment.
The polls close. One by one, the live streams flicker and die. The official pages go dormant, saving their energy for victory declarations or accusations of theft. The meme pages are quiet. The deepfake bazaar has shut its stalls. Your thumb, trained for twelve hours on a refresh-loop, finally has nothing to pull.
Dhaka’s walkers are not Darwinian subjects -- they are Darwin’s teachers. They have mastered the art of evolving within the apocalypse, turning every sidewalk and sewer into a classroom.
Ashfaq Chowdhury Piplu’s death is a question thrown at our feet by the city we are building. The falling rod asks: What do you value more? The abstract future value of a building, or the concrete, present life of a person walking?
The path forward begins by refusing to accept the silent exclusion as normal. It requires naming the disagreement for what it is: an attack on the pluralistic foundation of the state.
The question for a republic is whether it can learn to look away from the dazzling, authoritarian image long enough to see -- and rebuild -- the dull, demanding, and essential foundations of a reality-based politics.
The right to live in peace is not a gift from empires. It is a demand, shouted into the barrels of their guns. It is a world, built stone by stone, in the ruins they leave behind.
The message for Bangladesh's policy-makers is clear: ground this decision in data, not delusions of grandeur. Commission and publish an independent, peer-reviewed fleet plan.