Progress!

In twenty years, shopping in Dhaka as I knew it has changed dramatically. Back in the day, people shopped for clothes and other items at open-air stalls at New Market, where crowds gathered like flies at a garbage dump. There were no grocery stores, and no malls. This time, several grocery stores like Nandan and Meena Bazaar and malls such as Bashundhara City and Pink City have been established. In addition, Dhaka now boasts shopping complexes such as Rifle Square in my neck of the woods, at Dhanmondi. What’s more, places like Chandni Chowk and Rapa Plaza have centralized individual clothing and cloth stores into one location. Both are located in buildings with a few stories each. The inside of both are labyrinthine, but one is different from the other in a few ways. Rapa Plaza is smaller but more modern with escalators, and has a parking center next to it. Chandni Chowk is still in aditional setting with staircases tucked in, what seemed to me at the time, towards the center.

I went to my first big mall at Bashundhara City on the 22nd, a Friday afternoon, and got to see how things had really changed. There is a food court on one side of the top floor and a movie theater on the other. Each floor boasts different items with mens clothing being on floor, women’s on another, electronics on the main floor, and jewelry on yet another. Escalators and elevators carry shoppers from one floor to another just as at any other modern mall.

I bought a new Samsung cell phone from a store that day. My mom had bought a Grameen Phone SIM card earlier and gotten it registered with them. When buying it, the clerk put installed the SIM and handed it back to me along with a cell phone charger. My mobile is on the low end of phones, at 3300 taka (the equivalent of just over $47) with just the basic features. At this time, I can’t afford a higher-priced phone.

I stayed with Adina until the next day when a change of plans led me to call my cousin, Rafiba, in Bonani to pick me up and take me to her parents’ house. The plan was to stay with my cousins and go back to Dhanmondi after her parents, my uncle and aunt (my mom’s sister) returned from Singapore. They had flown first to China not just for the Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremony but also because my uncle has business interests there, as well as many other places. They then stopped in Singapore because Rafiba’s brother will start college (the equivalent of the 11th and 12th grades in the states) there. His parents went there to see him settled in.

The education system in Bangladesh is based on the old British system, so that students go through kindergarten or 1st grade to 10th, as usual. At the end of the 10th grade, or class 10 as they also call it, students take the O-level exams, also called the metric level exam, and then enter into “college,” or the intermediate level. The scores they get on their O-levels play a big part on what college they can apply for and get admission. At the end of class 12, or their intermediate studies, students take the A-level exams.

Note that two students are taught at two-different mediums: the Bangla (or Bengali) medium school and the English-medium school. Medium refers to the language used in teaching students. Communication between teachers, students, and administrators is also carried out in that language, whether Bengali or English. Many students who want to get into a foreign university, especially in Canada, Australia, or the United Kingdom, take their IELTS exam. Others who want to come to the states may take the SAT but need to take the TOEFL exam. Those who apply to universities in these countries for graduate study also need to take either the IELTS or TOEFL in addition to the graduate exam in question, whether the MCAT, LSAT, GMAT, or GRE. I only mention these details because different people I’ll mention in future posts are at different levels in the Bangladeshi education system and I want no one who reads my posts to get confused.

As for me, because I’d completed both junior high and high school in the states, I didn’t need to take the TOEFL exam. I took the SAT in high school and the GRE afterwards. In fact, every time I applied for graduate school, I was exempt from the TOEFL.