Older Than High-Rise

Last weekend we made a visit to the College of Christian Theology, Bangladesh. Lovely people, I knew, but I must confess that I went along mostly because it wasn't going to cost me very much. Opportunities to escape the cycle of home-office-club-home-church in the Dhaka bubble really aren't very plentiful, and you tend to take them wherever they are to be had - even in the not-terribly-enticing prospect of treating a seminary as an interesting day out.

Well. Let me be forgiven for such dismissive nonsense. I haven't had a day as pleasant as that for quite some time - a reminder that time spent in nice surroundings with good people is a tonic all of its own. It is a pervasive lie (not least amongst we soft westerners who live in The Noise) that you have to spend on creature comforts in order to be relaxed.

Not so. The world, even in Bangladesh, is capable of being beautiful all by itself.

The traffic was sparse and the temperature tepid, which helped. I love this time of year - just right for jeans and t-shirts, full of bright sunlight that doesn't cook you and the feeling of cool air against your skin.

But what really made the day was the fact that the college has been there for longer than Bangladesh has. Now just outside the city limits of Dhaka, it was once miles out, surrounded by rice-paddies.

The significance of this is easy to explain. Whereas today each square inch of land is worth more than ten people's lives, the college was built in more expansive, simple times, when Bangla builders had not totally abandoned the idea of space. The campus is nice enough, but after two years in the concrete-sardine-box environment of Dhaka, filled with trapped filth and haste and hopelessness, it was spacious enough to feel like the promised land.

The college building was designed in a way which I'm coming to recognise as classical Bengali. It's concrete, but there is open-ness, even greenery. Rooms are simple, cool and sparse, but clean and without all the smoke-soaking filth of the more coarse concrete used in the buildings I've lived in in Dhaka. Open balconies run along the front of all the doorways, inviting breezes. It's not luxurious, but it has space. You get the feeling that the primary aim of the architect was to create a living environment, not just a place for stacking human beings while they sleep.

This, I realise, is much closer to the Bangladesh that my colleagues and Bangla friends are familiar with, than the concrete jungle I came to in 2009 and felt ashamed for loathing. Buildings from decades past have a more open aspect to them; Dhaka University is the same. As little as ten years ago, even central Dhaka was a combination of a few high-rise buildings and a blanket of the two- or three-storey buildings known as 'bungalows', each with - gasp! - a plot of land around them. Unimaginable nowadays.

Now, there is just too much money in overcrowding for the owners not to demolish such human dwellings and put up a six-story high-rise instead. Property developers run adverts 24-7 on Bangla TV - 'you should see what we can do with your land...' they purr, and you can almost hear Kaa the snake hissing in the background.

I don't want to romanticise Bangladesh's past. There have always been slums. I'm certain that things were just as miserable then for the poor as they are now, and I know for certain that progress has been made in the availability of clean water. And of course, the further you get from a civil war as poisonous as the one in Bangladesh in 1971, the better. Rose-tinted spectacles should melt in Bangladesh from the wattage of their own shame.

Nonetheless, this was a glimpse of a Bangladesh which has almost gone. Non-rural, but not so toxically urban as it has become in the last decade or so; a Bangladesh I can get right alongside.

Hopefully, there are living remnants of this lost Bangladesh in the new, brash, person-minimising filth of modern Dhaka. Hopefully, understanding how it has been is a key to understanding - even loving - how it is. Hopefully, I can continue my own journey away from the piteous poison of culture shock to something more open and celebratory.

It was nothing more profound than a happy combination of factors that made it a good day, but such combinations rarely seem to be benign in Dhaka. I'm very thankful that it all came together, and I understand Bangladesh a bit better.

The best news of all came from my boss today at lunch - we're about to go away on a staff retreat, all 200-odd of us, and apparently the destination is similarly old-fashioned, pleasant, and open. But for the RC Cola factory next door.

What an incredibly Bangla juxtaposition. I'll let you know how I get on.