Bangladesh x Bangladesh

It was said to be the worst flood in one hundred years. As I walked down the flooded street leading to Kamlapur Railway Station in Dhaka, I was struck by the woman striding down the middle of the road. There was a studio on the left called “Dreamland Photographers” which was still open for business. It reminded me, that through it all, life goes on. Kamlapur. Dhaka. 2nd September 1988. Shahidul Alam/Drik/Majority World

Climate change survivors.
©Tanvir Ahmed/drikNEWS

Bangladesh x Bangladesh

I discovered Bangladeshi photography in an unusual way. Like many people I spend too much time on Facebook, the social networking internet site that everyone seems addicted to. I have collected a large number of Facebook friends, many of them photographers from all over the world. Some I know and some I don’t After a few weeks on Facebook I started to get strange messages at the bottom of the screen popping up as live conversations, from photographers who wanted to talk. Some could barely type a word of English. They were awkward moments. I didn’t know what to say. It turned out that many of these little blips on my Facebook radar were from Bangladesh. This got me curious–there seemed to be quite a few photographers from Bangladesh. Checking the search engine Google for searches using the key words “photo magazine” by geographic location showed that the leading source of the searches were coming from Bangladesh. Amazing.

This issue of 100eyes shows a country as seen through the eyes of its own photographers. There is nothing remarkable about that, except in this case the country is one of the poorest nations in the world, known for being a subject for photojournalism rather than as a provider of photojournalists. Photographers flew into Bangadesh from New York, Paris, or London, that is, when they weren’t headed for nearby India. Photographers will still be flying to Bangladesh, including myself hopefully, but we won’t be alone. In 1989 Bangladesh was depicted for Western eyes in a famous essay by photographer Sebastio Salgado that presented the shipbreaking yards at Chittagong. Twenty years later Bangladeshis are now behind the camera, and the results are stunning. One of the featured essays this month is “Breaking Ships, Broken Men,” an essay by Saiful Huq Omi that looks at the same shipbreaking yards that Salgado photographed. Instead of reducing the workers to so many ants on a giant steel ant hill, Huq addresses the horrific conditions that the men work and live under–while retaining the atmospherics that made Salgado’s work so compelling twenty years before. Its fabulous work.

If there is a message in the emergence of “indigenous photographers” it is that these photographers are able to achieve an intimacy with their subjects which enhances their humanity rather than objectifying and reducing the disadvantaged to stereotypical images of suffering. We are all too familiar with the pictures that accompany the campaigns of organizations responsible for feeding those who can not feed themselves. This imagery strips the impoverished of identity and renders the third world in one dimension– poor, and the result is more often than not that the poor stay that way.

As economically challenged as Bangladesh may be, there are 200 newspapers in the small country, and many of them are staffed by students from Pathshala, a school founded by Shahidul Alam, the central figure in the emergence of photography in Bangladesh, and the author of the cover image of this issue of 100Eyes. Alam developed into a photographer in Britain in the 1980’s after receiving a Doctorate in chemistry, and in 1989 started the Drik Picture Library and Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography, the latter as part of a World Press Photo initiative. Most of the photographers showing work in this issue of 100Eyes went to Pathshala or taught there.

A traditional sanskrit world for “center of learning,” Pathshala, according to Alam is “‘far more than teaching photography. It is about using the language of images to bring about social change. It is about nurturing minds and encouraging critical thinking. It is about responsible citizenship.”
He contines, “In a land where textual literacy is low, it is about reaching out where words have failed. In a society where sleek advertising images construct our sense of values, studying at Pathshala is about challenging cultures of dominance.”

Alam and his fellow teachers, along with the World Press folks including Robert Pledge of Contact Press, have done a fantastic job. The students are exposed to classic photojournalism, poring over old issues of Life and National Geographic. Having spent hours going through the Drik archives I can testify to the training of the photographers– they always look for the single image that tells the whole story. I wondered to myself how there could be so many fortuitousy placed buildings in Bangladesh, as the Drik photographers seem able to find a high vantage point for every breaking news story. Abir Abdullah’s coverage of a horrific high rise fire in Dhaka, is as if he is almost one of the rescuers himself. Tanvir Ahmed is a very gifted photographer who seems able to move from news to features, and from color to black and white effortlessly. What can you say about Mumen Wasif? At 27 he is already working at the level of a Magnum photographer. I can’t say enough about all these photographers– they deserve attention and employment outside the confines of Bangladesh.

Inside Bangladesh the photographs carry the importance that Life Magazine stories had. And in a country where literacy is so low, as Shahidul Alam points out, “what better way than pictures” of gaining understanding?

Looking at Bangladesh through the haze of the internet imakes me nostalgic for the time when photojournalism mattered, When people opened their weekly copies of Life or Time Magazine and looked to photographers to show them what was happening in their country and the world. At that time it seemed as though photography could really make a difference– and that time was not that long ago. I was one of those photographers.

I get a similar sense when I look at the work of the Pathshala photographers– that their work is not just for the vacumn of the internet, meant only for other photographers to admire, or rendered “modern’ and fit only for curation and the gallery wall. Far from it, their work has relevance and a purpose within their own country, which may be underdeveloped in some ways, but seems progressive in others.

There are huge problems ahead for Bangladesh. Overpopulation, an enormous burden of poverty in mouths that the country itself can not feed, energy dependence, and the ravages of the monsoons combined with the floodwaters from the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta, all these problems are facing a country with limited ability to develop on its own, But one thing is for certain– whatever happens in Bangladesh will be well photographed

–Andy Levin/New Orleans. Louisiana

The Current State of Health Care in this Country

By Arjun Janah

I have learned, from experience with my aged parents and my younger sister-in-law, that elementary services, or even basic coverage, can be denied on the flimsiest of grounds.  My own experience with physicians and hospitals has been that I normally get at most 15 minutes with the first, and less than a day to recover after surgeries with the second, before being shown the door.  There is also no followup.

It is true that, given a reasonable plan (obtained either by means of collective bargaining if one is fortunate enough to belong to a large organization and so paying group-rates, or else by paying high individual-rate premiums if one is lucky enough to be affluent) expensive tests and high-tech procedures may be ordered, that often involve tens of thousands of dollars of charges.  But these seem to be driven more by considerations of profits than by true concern for the long-term well-being of the patients. Less profitable and less drastic procedures, that may be very simple, on the one hand, or may involve sizing up the whole individual and his/her history and circumstances, and utilizing lifestyle changes and long-term remedial services on the other, are simply not part of the health-care equation.  Though they might drastically reduce health care costs, while improving long-term outcomes, they yield less profit, and might even make much of the current health-care behemoth redundant.

A tremendous amount of effort goes into paperwork — leaving n urses, for example, relegating basic patient-care duties to nurses’ aides. Surgeons are usually unavailable after an operation, despite all that may go wrong during recovery. Internists often have little or no coordination with specialists, to whom the whole picture of the patient’s health is of little or no interest.

Doctors themselves run up huge debts in medical school, and are mercilessly driven as interns, where they often have shifts that run for days with little or no sleep, while yet being responsible for most of whatever little routine medical attention a ward patient receives. They then scramble to set up a practice, preferably in a lucrative surgical specialty, so as to pay off the debt, and then often endeavor to stay as far away from hospital wards and routine patient care as they can get.

Surgeons are willing to spend time with a patient prior to highly expensive (and often unnecessary, though profitable) surgeries, but usually have no time for them after-wards.  Other physicians  are forced to cram in as many patients as possible per day, either to meet their basic expenses and their chosen lifestyles, or else to satisfy HMO’s and hospitals for whom they work. Fifteen minutes has become the standard maximum per patient, including time for basic physican’s paperwork. Many spend far less time.  Basic examination tasks, once performed by physicians, are increasingly assigned to physicians’ assistants, nurses, medical assistants or others.  Those who buck this trend find them selves in trouble, either financially or with their overseers — often people who have no medical background.

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Farewell to an India I Hardly Knew

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

MUMBAI, India  The first thing I ever learned about India was that my parents had chosen to leave it.

The country was lost to us in America, where I was born. It had to be assembled in my mind, from the fragments of anecdotes and regular journeys east.

Now, six years after returning to the country my parents left, as I prepare to depart it myself, the mind goes back to the beginning, to my earliest pictures of it.

India, reflected from afar, was late-night phone calls with the news of death. It was calling back relatives who could not afford to call you. It was Hindu ceremonies with saffron and Kit Kat bars on a silver platter.

India, consumed on our visits back, was being fetched from the airport and cooked a meal even in the dead of night. It was sideways hugs that strove to avoid breast contact. It was the chauvinism of uncles who asked about my dreams and ignored my sister’s.

It was wrong, yet easy, to feel that we did India a favor by coming home. We packed our suitcases with things they couldn’t get for themselves: Jif peanut butter, Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Gap khakis. These imports sketched a subtle hierarchy in which they were the wanting relatives and we their benefactors.

My cousins in India would sometimes ask if I was Indian or American. I saw that their self-esteem depended on my answer. “American,” I would say, because it was the truth, and because I felt that to say otherwise would be to accept a lower berth in the world.

What it meant to be American was to be free to invent yourself, to belong to a family and a society in which destiny was believed to be human-made.

I looked around in India and saw everyone in their boxes, not coming fully into their own, replicating lives lived before. If only they came to America, I told myself, so-and-so would be a millionaire entrepreneur; so-and-so would be as confident in her opinions as her husband; so-and-sos’ marriage would be more like my parents’, with verve and swing-dancing lessons and bedtime crossword puzzles; so-and-so would study history and literature, not just bankable practicalities.

I moved to India six years ago in an effort to understand it on my own terms, to render mine what had until then only belonged to my parents.

India was changing when I arrived and has changed dramatically, viscerally, improbably in these 2,000 days: farms giving way to factories; ultra-cheap cars being built; companies buying out rivals abroad. But the greatest change I have witnessed is elsewhere. It is in the mind: Indians now know that they don’t have to leave, as my parents left, to have their personal revolutions.

It took me time to see. At first, my old lenses were still in place  India the frustrating, difficult country  and so I saw only the things I had ever seen.

But as I traveled the land, the data did not fit the framework. The children of the lower castes were hoisting themselves up one diploma and training program at a time. The women were becoming breadwinners through microcredit and decentralized manufacturing. The young people were finding in their cellphones a first zone of individual identity. The couples were ending marriages no matter what “society” thinks, then finding love again. The vegetarians were embracing meat and meat-eaters were turning vegetarian, defining themselves by taste and faith, not caste.

Indians from languorous villages to pulsating cities were making difficult new choices to die other than where they were born, to pursue vocations not their father’s, to live lives imagined within their own skulls. And it was addictive, this improbable rush of hope.

The shift is only just beginning. Most Indians still live impossibly grim lives. Trickle down, here more than most places, is slow. But it is a shift in psychologies, and you rarely meet an Indian untouched by it.

Grabbing hold of their destinies, these Indians became the unlikely cousins of my own immigrant parents in America: restless, ambitious, with dreams vivid only to themselves. But my parents had sought to beat the odds in a bad system, to be statistical flukes that got away.

What has changed since they left is a systemic lifting of the odds for those who stay. It is a milestone in any nation’s life when leaving becomes a choice, not a necessity.

My parents watch me from their perch outside Washington, D.C., and marvel at history’s sense of irony: a son who ended up inventing himself in the country they left, who has written of the self-inventing swagger of a rising generation of Indians, in a country where “self” was once a vulgar word.

At times, my mother wonders if they should have remained, should have waited for their own country’s revolution instead of crashing another’s. And as I leave India now I can only wonder how history would have turned out if the ocean of change had come a generation earlier.

Because it came between their generation and mine, the premise of our family story has been pulled out from beneath us. We are American citizens now, my family, and proudly so. But we must face that we are Americans because of a choice prompted by truths that history has undone. They were true at the choice’s making; in India, I saw their truth boil slowly away.

They don’t crave our mayonnaise and khakis anymore. They no longer angrily berate America, because they are too busy building their own country. Indian accents are now cooler than British ones. No one asks if I feel Indian or American. How delicious to see that unconcern. How fortunate to live in a land you needn’t leave to become your fullest possible self.

And how wondrous, in this time of revolutions, to have had my own here.

I grew up in America defining myself by the soil under my feet, not by the blood in my veins. The soil I shared with everyone else; the blood made me unbearably different. Before I loved India, I loathed it. But that feeling seems now like a relic from a buried past.

I leave now on the journey’s next stretch, with sadness and with joy, humbled by India, grateful to have been at the revolution and to have known the revolutions within.