"Made in Bangladesh" - from Clothes to Personalized Homepages

When I was young (and it is quite far off and not as recent as I like to pretend), there was this distinct feeling in the air that "Made in Bangladesh" was somehow not good enough. The 90s saw that memorable TV ad in which a father comes back from that oft-visited place called "abroad"/"bidesh" and hands out gifts. With typical bad acting, all the recipients of said gifts feign surprise when they find out that they were "Made in Bangladesh" (MIB).

The 90s saw a new born belief in Bangladesh and its abilities, culminating in the 2000s where almost every advertisement on television is draped in the red and green. So it surprised me when a good friend of mine expressed reservations about wearing MIB as recently as last summer after my annual Bongo Bajar/ Dhaka College shopping spree. How far this was a class issue (after all, she was wearing stuff from Westecs, also MIB), and how far this was the old colonial hangover I couldn't tell. A bit of both I suspected. It is definitely an elite issue. Since the elite have economic and social trend-setting power, making them consumers par excellence, this makes it an important factor for entrepreneurs to reckon with.

And it is a colonial hangover. It wasn't for nothing that Gandhi spun his own cloth. True, the immediate purpose was to break the monopoly of British textiles. But the long-term impact on the Indian psyche has been to rid them of the shame of consuming Indian, at least among the elite.

Bangladeshi entrepreneurs toil under this burden. Given two equally good choices between a Deshi and a bideshi product, most of my generation would choose the bideshi one. Most of the time of course, we were given a choice between a far superior foreign product and a very mediocre MIB product. BTV, with its unintentionally funny ads as described above and even funnier news, is a good example of this.

Clothes however do not fall into this category. Bangladesh pretty much clothes the entire world. What we don't do is make Armani shirts. Maybe we do, but "they" put in the logo and reap the profits when our elites buy them.

Here we come to the thorny issue of cultural products. Whose "culture" is better? Is English/bideshi music and movies really better than Bangla ones (no to the former, yes to the latter; it's simply a matter of taste and there's no right or wrong when it comes to that)? Whose brands are better? I used to know people who would wear nothing but Nike and would probably gouge their eyes out anything else MIB. Yes, it was that intense.

Needless to say, I wear my MIB clothes pretty proudly in foreign lands. True, I don't have a swish or a union jack showing, but I find I can live without such symbols. I, however, refuse to wear lungis. No cultural inferiority there (I hope), just never got used to them.

Recently, I've been hearing a lot about Pageflakes. 3rd world view did an entry on it last month which tickled my curiosity. It’s a personalized home page, with different modules known as "flakes" allowing you to build it up from scratch and individualize it to your heart’s content.

What really got me interested is the fact that their Chief Technology Officer is Bangladeshi. 3rd world view also reports that 18 Bangladeshis currently work for it, while Patricia from Underdogs Fight Back tells us that 3 Bangladeshi engineers were the original core developers. Bangladesh Corporate Blog mentions it when it wonders if a Bangladeshi MNC is ever going to be possible (incidentally, they forgot to mention by name the one city in which a truly Bangladeshi MNC would need to base itself in. No points for guessing which city.)

So here’s my small request to my readers. I’m not urging you to use personalized home pages (I don’t). I’m not urging you to switch from one in which you’re comfortable. I’m not urging you to sign up for an inferior product out of patriotism (economic nationalism is over-rated and passe). I’m simply saying that if you’re thinking of starting a personalized home page, you MIGHT consider consuming something MIB over Google or Yahoo. At least till some red and green seeps into the top tiers of those companies too!

In the meantime, I’ll see what I can do about the lungi-phobia.