Taking a leap in the dark

Maswood Alam Khan
A great majority of the investors who are playing the game of stocks in Bangladesh are not necessarily like those addicted gamblers playing games of chance with roulettes, pokers and blackjacks. As is evident from the statement of Hasibul Hossain, many are very young who are unemployed. In order to escape the cursed life of the unemployed these youths are risking their families’ nest eggs to earn a little bit of money to flower smiles on the faces of their parents. They are taking a leap in the dark, writes Maswood Alam Khan

I AM fortunate that I didn’t pick the habit of playing cards though I did enjoy the warmth of a friend’s place at Gandaria in Dhaka where every Sunday in the late 1970s our common friends would gather to play cards for money all daylong and I would often join them just as an onlooker, perhaps only to relish some free tea and at times a free lunch. All those eats and teas were bought by subscriptions from each of the players and the biggest winner would have to bear the lion’s share of the cost.

At the end of the games, having nothing to lose myself from my own pocket, rather always a gainer of free food and drinks, I would relish sitting on the fence and observing bright beams of victories and dark shades of defeats on the faces of my friends, some immense losers and others huge gainers. But, I could never really fathom out the post-defeat behaviour of a particular friend of mine named Mona who was a regular player of cards in our Sunday get-together. Every time he lost in the game, Mona, who was losing his hair in his young age, would sift out from a small tuft of his thin hairs only one single hair and pull it out from its root with a sudden jerk.

One day I asked Mona: ‘Why do you uproot one single hair every time you lose?’ He answered: ‘That helps me steam off my frustration.’

After about 35 years one so familiar face, an apparition of my deceased friend Mona, reappeared vividly in my mind as I was reading the story of the frustrated investors uprooting quite a big and tall tree at the road divider near Shapla Chattar at Matijheel in Dhaka and brandishing high above in the air the whole tree in their procession, chanting slogans at the top of their voice as much as their lungs could afford. All the onlookers — police personnel, pressmen, pedestrians, men and women peering out the windows of their offices — were stunned at such a weird behaviour of the protesters on February 7.

On Monday last, the general index of Dhaka Stock Exchange closed at 6394.53, losing 324 points, a steep fall of five per cent with a turnover of around Tk 6.10 billion. Shocked at the sudden fall, retail investors became violent and took to the streets to protest and ventilate their frustrations — a regular culture, perhaps unique in the whole world, of Bangladeshi investors voicing their protests against the government and the regulators whenever the general index plummets.

One of the frustrated investors, Hasibul Hossain, while narrating his fate to a journalist said he had invested one million taka that he had borrowed from his father’s pension fund and he lost 80 per cent of his investment in a matter of a few minutes. When the journalist asked why they uprooted the tree, Hasibul replied: ‘Everybody is out of their minds.’

To some of us, the incident of protesters uprooting a tree may sound like an amusing story of fun, what in journalistic parlance is called a soft piece of news that serves as a balm to perk the readers’ mood up. But it was not at all funny! It would be a gross blunder for us if we take the incident as a mere comic story. Uprooting such a big tree was a telltale signature of built-up anger of the youths getting ominously flared up, like the initial smoke spewing from the mouth of a volcano immediately before its eruption.

A great majority of the investors who are playing the game of stocks in Bangladesh are not necessarily like those addicted gamblers playing games of chance with roulettes, pokers and blackjacks. As is evident from the statement of Hasibul Hossain, many are very young who are unemployed.

In order to escape the cursed life of the unemployed these youths are risking their families’ nest eggs to earn a little bit of money to flower smiles on the faces of their parents. They are taking a leap in the dark. When these youths are frustrated they become blind, they lose their commonest senses and do whatever their agitated minds give way to. They grab at the slightest chance when all hopes are slipping away. Like a man in the peril of drowning they catch at a straw or a twig. They become literally walking time bombs! When our emotions run high we lose our sanity and our innate animalistic instincts are bared. Like an animal approaching its prey, we at times lose our rationality. Hairs stand erect on our heads and limbs when we get teased by frustrations.

When we are acutely frustrated, we pull out our hair. But, when we are stabbed from the back our frustration knows no bound. We, like a raged animal, feel like biting our own hands; we feel like uprooting even a tree. We feel tempted to set fire to anything that comes by.

This time around frustration of our youths in their pursuits of gaining profit in share markets may turn out to be an unprecedented volcanic eruption that may take the shape of inconceivable violence on the streets if the government does not take immediate measures to cool their nerves.

The best solution is to create employment opportunities. But, creating enough jobs to accommodate millions of the unemployed youths like Hasibul Hossain may not be so easy in the shortest possible time. What the government may perhaps do is float ‘bonds only for the unemployed youths’ that may offer interest rate at least at 5 per cent over the inflation rate i.e. 15 per cent per annum if inflation is 10 per cent. Before a youth finds a gainful employment he or she can borrow from his or her father a million taka and get a monthly dividend of Tk 15,000 instead of plunking the nest egg down the drains of share markets.

Maswood Alam Khan writes from Maryland, USA. maswood@hotmail.com

New age

Leave a Reply