Tangents
Column <i>101</i>
...where my parents, grandparents and their parents lived, loved and worked... Photo:ihtisham Kabir
This is the 101st Tangents column. Thank you, dear reader, for reading and supporting Tangents over the last two years. The roots of this column go back to 1995 when we returned here after living abroad for many years. Friends in the USA were eager to know how we were faring. Instead of writing emails to them, I started writing a blog called Back to Bangladesh. In it I recounted - with words and photos - our adventures while adjusting back in our native land, including the joys and challenges, discoveries and re-discoveries. Much had changed, but much remained the same. The readership of the blog soon grew beyond my friends' circle to those with a general interest in Bangladesh. I had always been a keen photographer. Now I wandered with my camera, photographing the places I found myself in and the people I met. In the blog, I experimented with ways of mixing text and photographs to tell stories and discovered different ways to assemble a documentary narrative using words and pictures. While re-discovering Bangladesh, I was impressed by her progress and the resilience and hard-work of her people. Living abroad, I had disliked the overwhelming negative light in which western media presented Bangladesh. After all, wasn't this the same land that my parents, grandparents, and their parents had lived, loved and worked in? It couldn't be that bad! So in my portrayals I strived for an even-handed representation of this country. In early 2010, after persistent encouragement and inspiration from the editor of this newspaper, I wrote a proposal outlining my vision for Tangents. I wanted to tell stories with words and photographs: a diversion that would entertain and educate while empathizing with the Bangladeshi experience. I would succeed, I thought, if readers sought out the column every week. The name Tangents came from this: our daily lives are like circles, going round and round every day. A tangent is a line that moves away from the circle after touching it. My goal was to take the reader on a tangent away from day-to-day life for a few minutes every week. Sometimes the column was based on delving deeper past the surface of a photographic subject. On other occasions, I wrote about thoughts, memories and dreams triggered by a photograph. Sometimes the text of the column was the real story and the photograph simply illustrated it. Thus, I tried to vary the relationship between text and photograph and the relative weights they carried. Finding the topic every week was the biggest challenge for me. Often, when my intellect chose a topic without my heart's consent, I had great difficulty writing about it. Whenever I felt passionately about the subject, however, the writing flowed freely, no matter how difficult the material. Truly, I feel blessed that I have had this opportunity, I feel blessed to have these few minutes from you, the reader, and I feel blessed to explore this beautiful land and her people who readily share their stories with me, which I will continue to write about.
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