[Reader-list] Love in Cell Phone Time

Fri Jan 27 19:35:11 IST 2006

Love in Cell Phone Time
By Naeem Mohaiemen
DAILY STAR (Bangladesh), January 26, 2005

Last week, the government launched another mini-salvo
in their war against free speech.  The new year
already brought an amendment to the Telecommunications
Act which gives intelligence agencies power to
monitor, and stop, phone calls and e-mails in
Bangladesh .  But these are only steps to police the
political sphere.  For the enactment of a total
surveillance nation, the private sphere and especially
the area of loose morals has to be brought under
state control.  

After all, we do trust our government to legislate
morality.  

Dont we?

In this spirit, a letter was sent this week to all
five of Bangladesh's cellular phone companies from the
Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, demanding
that "free calls after midnight" offers be immediately
shut off.  According to press reports , this is to
protect the morals of young people who were using
the service to form romantic attachments, losing
sleep and indulging in "vulgar talk".  I put quotes
around almost every phrase in the preceding sentence
because the source for all this data are scores of
complaints from parents (sure...).  The BBCs Ronald
Buerk helpfully adds his own
generalization-simplification, Many people are
conservative in Bangladesh.

All this teacup storming reminded me of our own times
as young people.  We were also trying to form
romantic attachments, but more ineptly than today,
and with fewer tools at hand.  St Joseph, like all
missionary schools, was single-sex, but our afternoons
were brightened by the arrival of the Siddiquis
girls.  Siddiquis was an English Medium school,
preparing students to take the A Levels and go abroad.
 In those days (early 80s), Dhaka teens were divided
into BMT (Bangla Medium Type = St Joseph, Shaheen
School, Government Lab, etc) and EMT (English Medium
Type = Scholastica, Green Herald, Maple Leaf, etc.). 
Siddiquis was the rare EMT school without its own
building, so they had to come to our school to use lab
facilities.  This meant we could get fleeting glimpses
of girls, rare visions in our schoolyard.

In our pathetic, callow youth, we would wait around
for hours after class ended in the hopes of that brief
glance.  But in all my time at St. Joseph, I dont
recall a single person actually getting up the nerve
to talk to one of the girls.  All this unrequited
swooning played havoc with our idea of relationships. 
Things got so bad that I was over the moon when an
anonymous girl started calling my house.  Ami apnake
kothai jani dekhechi (I have seen you somewhere) was
her coy flirtation and that was as hot and heavy as it
got.  But where had she seen me?  WVA Meena Bazar? 
Newmarket?  Elephant Road?  The places to meet girls
were very limited, so it could only be one of three
places (this was before Aarong café added a fourth). 
But after a year of talking on the phone, I gave up
because I realized that I had yet to meet her, and
perhaps never would.

All this intense gender-segregation meant that when we
finally got to coed Dhaka University, we had no idea
what to do with ourselves.  If you fell for someone,
there was an elaborate ritual.  You would let a male
friend of yours know.  He would then tell his friend
who would tell the girl in question.  Eventually
through a daisy chain of whispered confidences you
would figure out if all this was mutual.  It was a
slow, byzantine process.

All this sounds sweet-- innocent, bygone times, etc.,
but at the same time tremendously frustrating. There
were few chances to meet and interact with women in a
normalized setting.  The first girl you fell for, you
basically would have to marry, because there would be
no second chances and no normal interaction outside
marriage.  You didnt date, you got married.

Through the decades, there were numerous interventions
to ensure this suffocating condition continued. 
Recently I came across a photo from 1973 of my cousin
in a band with local legend Bogey bhai (later founder
of Renaissance).  She was the tambourine girl and such
innocent expressions of fun-loving high-jinks (think
Josie & The Pussycats) were verboten.  Similarly,
Waves was a 70s rock band that faced morals tests. 
The sight of girls dancing on stage during the bands
first and only appearance on television sent the
guardians into a frenzy, with cries of
oposhongskrithi banishing them from screens.  Its
especially worth remembering examples from the 1970s
because, contrary to stereotype, virtue policing did
not originate with the mullahs.  In those days, it was
the secularists that were up in arms, since their key
plank was uber-Bangla nationalism.  Westernization
was the all-encompassing enemy, mullah politics still
a twinkle in Jamaats eye.  From Abba to Boney M,
everything disco was eventually hounded off the
screens.  One flash of Donna Summers legs, and Solid
Gold was also cancelled.  For the rest of our school
days, the only sanctioned music program was James Last
Orchestra (German friends are baffled to hear this
today!).  Later of course, political Islam came to be
seen as a bigger threat, and some secularists embraced
the same opo culture as a weapon to goad the maulvis.

The 1980s brought a fresh military dictatorship and a
new legal enforcement against free mixing of the
sexes.  Tinted glasses on cars were banned to prevent
opokormo.  Special police squads roved the area
around Parliament, hoping to catch young couples.  The
few friends who actually had girlfriends (there were
not many!) developed the technique of driving to
Airport Road while holding hands.  As with any dynamic
where law enforcement meets morality (look at the
Iranian and Saudi virtue police), the clashes were
ugly.  Stories of young couples being brutally
harassed by police officers were frequent.  Unlike
other situations, it was not in the hopes of a bribe--
the public humiliation was what the police relished.

Today there is a tendency in the West to fetishize
arranged marriages.  This is pushed along by a segment
of the Asian diaspora that wants to promote things
from the old country as inherently better than 
modern life.  Articles like Looking for Love on
Craigslist (soon to be a book!) argue that since
modern romance is so random, we may as well retreat
and allow parents to arrange marriages again.  Exhibit
A may be a successful corporate lawyer, but at the
end of the day he wants to come home to mummy, have
her cook khichuri and find a girl just like her (and
of course, she will be the same religion).  Divorce
rates are high today goes the argument, bring back the
good old days.  No one mentions that divorce rates are
also a function of situations where single or divorced
women can live productive, stigma-free lives on their
own.  Anyway, some of us have no interest in going
back to the old ways of arranged marriages.  Better
to make our own mistakes and learn from them.

Thinking back to those suffocating school years, it
makes me happy to see todays young Dhaka lovers.  For
the most part I only see people holding hands near
Dhanmondi lake, more pda (public display of affection)
is not here yet.  Of course, all this enrages the vice
squad.  This Christmas, three police officers (one on
motorcycle, two with bulky wirelesses) surrounded a
young couple on a rickshaw and held them for
interrogation outside our Dhanmondi gate.  A crowd
gathered, everyone was there to see the tamasha.  When
I came to protest, I was harshly told to mind my own
business.  Era kharap lok, apni nak golaben na,
(these are bad people, dont stick your nose in). 
There was almost a roman spectacle to the episode.  As
if the young couple would now be fed to the lions.  

Rokkhok jokhon bhokkok.

All this may seem trivial compared to bigger, life
and death issues we face, but culture wars are core
struggles and often Trojan horses for larger battles. 
This is why the recent attempt to ban phone calls
after midnight to stop teenage lovers bothers me so
much. This is a nasty move that tries to stigmatize
normal behavior and dictate an antique moral code. 
Relationship dynamics are slowly shifting in our urban
centers.  But there are people and forces (sometimes
religious forces, but equally a city elite that is
socially right-wing in spite of its pretences) that
would like to turn the clock back.  The problem they
face is a genie out of the box, and they are now
trying desperately to fold, tuck, nip, crinkle, and
crush the new freedoms.  

In earlier essays, I argued that people needed to
urgently make the connection between the loss of civil
liberties in one sphere (phone tapping) and the loss
of liberty everywhere.  

Its already starting

Naeem Mohaiemen (Mohaiemen at yahoo.com) is a filmmaker
and media activist. 

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