Vegetable Mutant Ninja Turtles

Thank Heavens for the recent smuggling bust at Dhaka Airport. Things were getting rather boring. To make it interesting, this time it's not gold, but rather, pond turtles from India en route to Malaysia. Remember the tale of The Tortoise and the Hare? Slow and steady wins the race. The 'exporters' (traffickers) rush to take us to Malaysia by sea which results in us languishing there or being three feet under. Slow down and you can fly us comfortably on a jet plane, that is, if you pack us neatly in boxes labeled 'Vegetables'. Please learn from the case of the intercepted turtles. 

Good going Customs boys and gals! Hope you can now catch the much larger consignments of vegetables, aka, cute turtles which arrive on tourist visas and then all of a sudden become ninja turtles, aka, expert consultants, presenting Bangladesh the best thing since sliced bread. Guruji, at least please don't give us business cards with Shakespearean Hotmail accounts…

Of course, we never dare argue. Have we ever seen any of us engaging in a furious road rage or cussing contest with a bideshi? I may rush out of my car with my nunchucks, "Why you!..." and the minute I lay my eyes on the soon-to-be-skinned person's skin tone which we would give an arm and a leg and a tube of Fair and Lovely for, I am now the vegetable, as I instantly transition from being ominous to propitious "…oh! What a 'my dear' person you are!" Besides, S@ifurs doesn't teach us to quarrel in English, but rather, to sneeze in the Queen's language (I still prefer the pure Bangladeshi one – a two minute pre-amble, a gusty and squally tsunami of a crescendo,  7.6 on the Richter Scale with the pleasure  of a mild orgasm). 

But there is an explanation. We are historically a hospitable people. We lay out a lavish five course meal: 

The starter – 'vegetable' turtle soup.

The second course is the sweet waters of the Ganges. Bangladesh is apparently getting more than its share based on the flow measurements made by Mamata Banerjee by viewing CCTV footages at the Farakka Dam. Damn! This is Dum Maro Dum 2, starring Super Didi! Professor Jamilur Reza Chowdhury, move over, you have competition. 

Course three. Six Giga watt Indian power transmission from Assam to Bihar to go via Dinajpur. Actually, that's a side dish for us too. Aside from claiming standard wheeling charges, how about Bangladesh applies some, ahem, 'system losses'?

Course four. India to lease bandwidth from Bangladesh. Good. We can now build a digital Farakka to whimsically control the bit rate and hence the download/upload speeds downstream. 

And finally, finishing off with the perfect dessert. The free-wheeling BSF jawan Amiya Ghosh of Felani fame is on an acquittal streak. I am sure the tribunal has determined that he, like many of his comrades-in-arms, is from among a lot fresh on a rotation from the high energy India-Pakistan border and is thus a victim of PTSD – Pakistan Traumatic Stress Disorder. It is therefore only natural to be jittery and trigger-happy at the beefed up, beef-intercepting India-Bangladesh border. So, what really is the beef, eh? 

Oh well. It's all part of the package – see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Thus, ONLY see Zee Bangla, hear Sidhu and speak Hindi just like Pokemon.

Let's be fair. If East India Company can lay anchor, so can India Company.

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