As I write this column on the afternoon of May 3, an overwhelming weight presses down on my heart. In recent days, I have been plagued by a persistent sense of unease brought on by a stream of distressing national and international news. But today, that unease deepened into despair as I witnessed a massive rally by Hefazat-e-Islam on my way to the office. They had taken to the streets in protest of the Interim Government’s Commission for Reforming Gender Policies.
Just as Dhaka was being transformed into a city of processions, news broke on social media that the Chattogram port was being handed over to foreign entities — triggering a storm of public outrage. It felt like one of those cruel historical turning points — reminiscent of when Emperor Nero played his flute while Rome burned.
I have a deep sense of nostalgia tied to Chattogram Port. I began my career in 1991 offering survey and inspection services entirely centred on that port. Draft surveys, cargo surveys, and container inspections aboard foreign vessels were my entry into the business world. Over time, I expanded into freight forwarding, multimodal transportation, MLO (Main Line Operator) agency work, and eventually set up a composite knit textile mill. Over the past 30 years, my work has remained intimately tied to the port, customs, VAT, and related sectors. Therefore, whenever I hear that local or foreign opportunists — akin to the East India Company — are eyeing these spaces, I feel a sharp pain in my chest.
I spent much of the first decade of my career in Chattogram. My office was directly across from the port jetty, near the Fakirhat overbridge. For operational ease, I maintained a rest house on the banks of the Karnaphuli River, adjacent to the port’s yard — a vantage point from where I could observe all port activities.
Whether by motorbike or car, I often roamed the port at night from one end to the other — jetty to jetty, warehouse to warehouse. Each shift saw nearly 50 of my staff on duty, and I frequently had to endure sleepless nights to supervise operations. I’ve held countless meetings with port officials, customs authorities, shipping agents, C&F agents, importers-exporters, foreign buyers, labour leaders, intelligence officers, and captains and crews of vessels.
To sharpen my business acumen and gain hands-on experience in port management, I visited many of the world’s leading seaports, airports, dry docks, and container yards. I attended numerous global maritime and aviation business conferences. Based on all that I’ve seen and learnt over the last three decades, I can find no justifiable reason for handing over Chattogram Port to foreign powers. So no — I cannot help but be heartbroken.
The inevitability of what’s now unfolding along the Bangladesh-Myanmar border first gave off a stench of danger back when the former government opened its frontiers to the Rohingyas. At the time, I wrote a column in Bangladesh Pratidin, and loudly voiced my concerns on Channel i’s Tritiyo Matra and other platforms: the Rohingyas would not return, and instead, we risked losing Chattogram.
While I sounded the alarm, leaders and followers of Awami League, BNP, Jamaat, Hefazat, and other Islamic factions were outdoing each other in welcoming the Rohingyas — staging "March to Cox’s Bazar" processions in a show of hospitality.
By sheer luck, mob violence wasn’t rampant back then — otherwise, many would have pounded me into mashed potatoes and marched to heaven with their ticket confirmed. Only God knows how close I came.
Most of my life’s sorrows stem from the brutal truths I’ve encountered in matters of livelihood, geopolitical reality, and human behaviour. Since childhood, I’ve pursued knowledge to the best of my ability. I’ve had the opportunity to interact with numerous renowned and notorious individuals from home and abroad. I’ve travelled extensively, lived intensely, and spent enough time in solitude to reflect on life’s deeper meanings. Thus, I often foresee current events well before they unfold — a curse that leaves me weighed down with dread and melancholy. And I still haven’t found a way to shield myself from this burden. I believe that everything in this universe unfolds according to the principles of quantum mechanics.
If you're familiar with quantum physics, you’ll understand why the planet Jupiter is seen as a symbol of fortune for Earth and humanity. The central tenet of this cutting-edge science is that everything on Earth is predestined — determined in a fraction of a fraction of the first second of creation. Therefore, whatever I am writing and feeling at this very moment was, according to quantum theory, predetermined at the dawn of the universe.
Thanks to this deterministic nature of reality, astrologers throughout history have been able to forecast celestial influences, future events, and human destinies with remarkable accuracy. Philosophers have analysed this science in great depth and divided it into branches, one of which is politics — later refined by political scientists across cultures and eras. Just as the movement of the moon, sun, stars, and meteorites creates ocean tides or reshapes the Earth’s crust, so too do they affect human moods and give rise to waves of turmoil in society.
The Indo-Pakistani war drums of today, the government’s reported war preparations, the humanitarian corridor proposed for the Myanmar border, the alleged plan to hand over Chattogram port to foreign powers, rumours about Saint Martin’s Island, talks of a “Rohingya Land” becoming either a Muslim or Christian state, and the fear of losing the Chattogram region — all of these developments must be viewed through the lens of history. If you examine events that occurred every 50 and 100 years — in 1975, 1925, 1875, 1825, 1775, 1725, and 1675 — you’ll find a haunting pattern: whenever something dire or destructive loomed, it crept ever closer to Bengal’s deltaic lands.
As the great philosopher Ibn Khaldun showed, world leaders who understood the timeline and rhythm of historical transformations were the ones able to shield their nations from fate’s cruel hand. But those who, out of ignorance, scorn the power of Jupiter and invite ghouls to their banquet during times of ease — inevitably face ruin. It is for them that the Bangla proverb was coined: “When life is good, the devil strikes.” So, seeing all this unfold, people like me can do little else but grieve, crushed beneath a mountain of nightmares and the fear of catastrophe.
The writer is a former member of parliament and political analyst.
