The Final Solution 2.0

Getting up at 3am for sehri is no problem despite the extinction of the selfless volunteer walking the neighbourhood and yelling for rojadars to wake up while hitting the metallic lamp posts with his stick. Now there is the noise of trucks unloading bricks at the wee hours from the omnipresent independent-house-to-apartment-complex plots that wakes you up without fail. Once all independent houses in Bangladesh disappear while turning the country into a collection of Rubik's Cubes, there will be a mobile app to wake you up during sehri with a choice of the sound of a stick against a lamp post or that of bricks being unloaded from trucks. 

Meanwhile the loss of revenue of mobile operators from 2 million biometrically flunked SIMs are probably recuperated within the first few days of Ramadan with the barrage of SMSs focusing on sehri and iftar while we mere mortals are scrambling during never ending hours BETWEEN sehri and iftar to restrain ourselves from fantasizing us dancing in slow motion and then diving into gluttony and food coma. Never has the barrage of waakh thooh spit projectiles on the streets been higher. I guess these SMSs serve some CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) purposes by putting our fasting and its main focus on restraint to the test. 

It really doesn't matter if the SMS of Tk. 1,200++ all you can eat (how much CAN you really eat?) buffet iftar ends up on the mobile phone of someone in whose case the price of the buffet constitutes 10 percent of his monthly salary. It will take a long time, if not never, for mass marketers to update their SMS databases (who gave them my number by the way?) on the profile of their market segments. After all, my octogenarian dad just got an SMS to join the Army, which he takes as a compliment. And this is no strange phenomenon of only a developing country. In the US, I received by snail mail a package containing a sample of a female hygiene product, addressed to 'Ms Naveed Mahbub'. 

Note, the SMSs need to be squeezed into 160 characters so as to bear the cost of a single SMS. Hence some creative acronyms. It took me a while to figure out the 'B1G1    ' on the SMSs meant Buy One Get One (Free) and not a mosquito borne virus. 

And that is a daunting task. One SMS directly from a major mobile operator asked me to 'dail' a certain number for details. The poor fellow composing the SMS made the typo while probably craving piaju made out of dail (lentil).  

Wading past the tsunami of food, this is a month of restraint to feel the pain of those with constraints, and restraints not only in the gastronomical sense, but in all areas flirting with evil. Of course, jacking up the prices of bare essentials to inflated levels, to some, is part of the restraining exercise – after all, they are kind enough to not take the price tag to astronomical levels. 

And that is why it hurts to hear about the worst mass shooting incident in the history of the US. And it hurts further that the one billion plus Muslims who are silently practicing restraint, tolerance, peace and coexistence in the true teachings of Islam, are somehow made to collectively bear the guilt of a few gross aberrations. If the internet is so strong as to advocate hate and the wrong messages, how come the same internet is not vocal on the true teachings of peace? The 100,000 signatories of maulavis and madrasa teachers in Bangladesh on peaceful Islam and taking that message to social media is therefore a stellar start. Let's just hope that it is not too little, too late, as one idiot in Orlando just got Donald Trump another step closer to the White House. Heaven help us if there is a Final Solution 2.0…

The writer is an engineer at Ford & Qualcomm USA and CEO of IBM & Nokia Siemens Networks Bangladesh turned comedian (by choice), the host of ABC Radio's Good Morning Bangladesh and the founder of Naveed's Comedy Club. 
E-mail: naveed@naveedmahbub.com