Karim Waheed

A white man walks through Old Dhaka with a camera strapped to his face. A thumbnail screams INSIDE THE WORLD’S CRAZIEST CITY. Another one discovers fuchka, because apparently the entire nation was waiting for Brad from Bristol to taste tamarind water and confirm that, yes, it has flavour. Another foreign vlogger takes a boat ride on the Buriganga and stares into the black water as if he has personally discovered pollution. Congratulations, the river was dead long before you discovered it.

In December 2012, I walked into a photo exhibition in Dhaka as a young journalist and came out a changed man. The exhibition featured Raghu Rai’s photographs from the 1971 Liberation War. I did not know then that I was about to meet not just a photographer’s work, but a chapter of our history that had somehow lived outside my own imagination. Until that day, my understanding of 1971 had been rooted in Feni and Cumilla, in family stories, and especially in my father’s memories as a freedom fighter.

In 1980s-90s Dhaka, “recycling” wasn’t a virtue you announced like a new gym membership in the first week of January. It was the background music of middle-class life. We weren’t sitting around dinner tables discussing carbon footprints. “GDP” wasn’t something you heard on TV. The country was materially strapped, on paper and in practice. Bangladesh’s GDP per capita in 1990 was under US$ 300, which is a polite way of saying: everything had to stretch, especially the taka. So, we stretched.