It was something much more personal. I grew up in Khilgaon as a child and used to hang out on the very spot that now boast this modern flyover. In fact my grandfather used to take me on mandatory long daily morning walks straight after Fajr prayers. We walked several miles from Khilgaon Government High School all the way up to the thriving market where this flyover now sits. Needless to say he was very fit - God bless his departed soul! Images of scattered colorful saaris blowing in the wind and khaki and blue police uniforms being left hung to dry in the scorching heat of late afternoons by the local launders in the yesteryears flashed through my mind. A few friends and I formed a "sports-club" and bought bamboo sticks and nets to mark our territory so we could play badminton there; many a time I even tested theories of turning coins into magnets by putting them on the nearby railway tracks as speeding trains approached in the hope that some day it might work. The only thing we worried about back then was getting caught playing in the heat and being so fearless!

My story would be incomplete if I didn't mention the poor homeless dwellers who lived in the large roadside concrete pipes destined to become part of sewers that lie beneath today's "Biswa Road"; their morning chatters and the smoke bellowing from their make-shift cookers burning leaves and papers were a quintessential part of the organic social cocktail of that transient community. The generation before me was uprooted from where the Kamlapur Railway Station now sits and rehabilitated in today's Khilgaon; whenever they told me stories about what Kamlapur used to be like before the terminal was built, my young mind never quite managed to grapple with the image of where my grandparents raised their family. "How can you have a house on train tracks?" I recall asking myself. "Were their houses on wheels?" I guess now I know what it feels like to see modernity take over from the lush green grass where my fond childhood memories lay! I never thought this was possible.

Like the prime minister said, features like this will indeed go a long way to create a positive impression of Bangladesh in the eyes of foreign visitors and investors instead of the hurtful words "shanty town" used by an old Philippino friend from my Maltese boarding school to describe the city of my birth as after making a whistle stop back in early eighties.

"Shabash Bangladesh!"