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[/caption]Being a first time voter isn’t easy, especially if you’re a class moddhbitto or above. There so many expectations. Everybody sees you and talks about you as the future of the country and how we will be at the helm of things soon. But at the same time, we’re dubbed irresponsible and uninterested. Some are actually nice enough to say that our generation (born in the 80’s) is just disenchanted. Fair enough. A lot of us, if not most, don’t see the point in queuing up and voting for people we barely know or know only from our social circles (Kamrul uncle, Ershad nana etc); people who’ll never get to know us either. Yes, it’s true, most of us don’t ardently follow politics or politicians, but the real question is, are they following us?
I missed my first ever chance to exercise “democratic” right as an adult citizen of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh in January 2007. Needlessly to say, I was ecstatic, spastic and thoroughly confused. Here are some comments from people like me who were/are excited about their voting rights. Barring the “drawing-room politics” of Dhaka, my political beliefs were naïve (sometimes they still are as I still dream of a utopian realm where religion isn’t abused), often misguided, sometimes based or judged simply on the basis of hearsay (TR’s alleged billions) and in most times just a spontaneous reaction to something I had just watched on the news (a former home minister’s comments on the accidental death of a child during a shoot-out or the public humiliation of a wife by her ex-president husband). Then the riots started. Anyone who was in Dhaka from December 2006 till January 2007 must remember the sights and sounds of public slaying/incineration of men, of burnt buses and terrified people. The whispers of “martial law” and “blue helmets” and rhetoric of a new and improved “option three” didn’t help either. We watched one party run a parallel government for five years paying no heed to rampant corruption and its media-aided world-wide publicity. The other went blood-hungry and berserk on the streets of Dhaka.
