June 27, 2007

"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.

56 comments:

Fuad Ali said...

im a flagrant violater of londoner dress codes and flaunt futwas, sherwanis and panjabis on a daily basis... if its cold i will don a magrabi jedi cape. not because of love of the sahaba, more sheer ummahtocultural vanity.

the deshi-bideshi thing bothers me a great deal. today i wanted to buy honey. I doubted my ability to get genuine deshi-sundarbani honey, so i got a foreign import.

at home, i see clothes that are made in desh, but usually they are of the budget variety and if thats what im buying, thats what ill get. though i have mixed feelings about the rmg industry.

sometimes nationalising consumer habits can only promote rubbishness(ie. biman). I really am looking for the nice stuff, but at the end of the day i dont really buy much other than food , transport and books.
anyway, thanks for page flakes.

now bring me an autonomous culture of science!

asikha said...

Liking Bangla movies is definitely wrong, especially if they're from Desh.

a said...

"Ummahtocultural vanity" - live it to you to coin words like that. Heheh... yeah I used to wear this Kashmiri cap to Eid prayers back home and got some pretty weird stares may I add. The same stares I get when I wear my punjabi on Eid day. My mother has made sure that she has given one for every Eid I've been away from home. They're piling up fast!

Purple, would you count Matir Moina in that too?:) Nahh I stand by my statement. It's a matter of taste. I cannot objectively and in good conscience tell someone that "Beder Meye Josna" (typical Dhaliwood fare) is worse than "Die Hard" or even "Remains of the Day". All art really is a matter of taste.

Sajid Huq said...

Hm. My roommate, who's a Literature guy, is big on high art and low art. For example, he listens to Hindustani and Western classical and eschews a lot of stuff that plays on my ITunes. I gradually broke him into some Indian Ocean and Junoon. But he insists that some artistic productions are more "learned" than others. To be honest, I haven't thought this through, and I am probably divided on this.

Btw, we've restarted our blog.

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Forgot to type the link.
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Anthony said...

Hmmm.... I had to read the post a number of times to make sure that I understood it. Some observations.

1. Preferring bideshi item over deshi one may be elitism/colonial hangover. But there is also a simpler, economic, explanations. The purpose of a brand is to signal information about its quality. Bideshi brands signalled quality. For most of our lives (and those of our parents) bideshi manufactured products were of higher quality. So even if a deshi product has exactly the same quality as its bideshi counterpart, given history (and uncertainty about the quality), it is rational for the typical consumer to choose the bideshi good. A consumer will only buy the deshi product when it is head and shoulder above the bideshi one.

2. What constutes superior culture? Man, why even raise a question like that?

3. Notwithstanding number 2, I can offer my personal experience on Bangladeshi movies. After a decade abroad, I returned to Dhaka in late 1999. I wanted to brush up on the 'ancholik' Bangla and thought Dhallywood would do the trick. This didn't really help me with Bangla, but it did endear me to house helps (result being extra pampering of the 'bideshi bhaijan'), and I came to really enjoy the movies. Fast forward to Jan 2007 and a DVD shop in Rifle Square. I asked for Bangla movies. The guy at the counter said 'ei sir-ke classic boi dekha'. I said 'bhai classic chai na, commercial nai?' The poor guy couldn't believe that any 'bhodroloke' would want that stuff.
I did manage to buy 'Sujon shokhi', 'Rongbaaz', 'Rupban' 'Teen konna', 'Dossu Banhur', 'Masud Rana' and 'Pitch dhala pothe'. Bangla cinema zindabad!

a said...

Anthony,

Sorry for the late response. Kinda forgot this comment of yours, which was as challenging as usual.

1. Yes, I'm aware of that angle of the brand argument. Which is why I focussed mainly on clothes, which is sometimes the same in Bongo as in Bologna. The difference is seriously the logo, which rather than symbolising a brand and the information it carries about quality/durability etc., has come to symbolise prestige. And how prestige is determined is slightly dependent on the postcolonial dynamics you had to admit. More Veblen and less von Neumann-Morgenstern, I'm afraid ;).

2. I confess, nothing but the simple desire to create some controversy and get some roaring responses. Sadly, I seem to have failed.

3. Good on you mate! 'Cause frankly we need to revive Dhaliwood. Enough of this arthouse-matinee dichotomy bullshit. Bring your blog's fantasies to Dhaka and we'll see what we can do!:D

Anonymous said...

I am looking for clothes from Bangala because i am going on a trip in august any sudgustions?please email me asap!

holdingontochrist@gmail.com
thanks a bunch!

Sincerely,
Laura H

Anonymous said...

You need to collect more stuff, dude.

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