After all, we do trust our government to legislate morality.

Don't we?

In this spirit, a letter was sent this week to all five of Bangladesh's cellular phone companies from the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, demanding that "free calls after midnight" offers be immediately shut off. According to press reports², this is to "protect the morals" of young people who were using the service to "form romantic attachments," "losing sleep," and indulging in "vulgar talk." I put quotes around almost every phrase in the preceding sentence because the source for all this data are "scores of complaints from parents" (sure). The BBC's Ronald Buerk helpfully adds his own generalization-simplification, "Many people are conservative in Bangladesh."

All this teacup storming reminded me of our own times as "young people." We were also trying to form "romantic attachments," but more ineptly than today, and with fewer tools at hand. St Joseph, like all missionary schools, was single-sex, but our afternoons were brightened by the arrival of the Siddiqui's girls. Siddiqui's was an English Medium school, preparing students to take the A Levels and go abroad. In those days (early 1980s), Dhaka teens were divided into BMT (Bangla Medium Type = St Joseph, Shaheen School, Government Lab, etc) and EMT (English Medium Type = Scholastica, Green Herald, Maple Leaf, etc)³. Siddiqui's was the rare EMT school without its own building, so they had to come to our school to use lab facilities. This meant we could get fleeting glimpses of girls, rare visions in our schoolyard.

In our pathetic, callow youth, we would wait around for hours after class ended in the hopes of that brief glance. But in all my time at St. Joseph, I don't recall a single person actually getting up the nerve to talk to one of the girls. All this unrequited swooning played havoc with our idea of relationships. Things got so bad that I was over the moon when an anonymous girl started calling my house. "Ami apnake kothai jani dekhechi" (I have seen you somewhere) was her coy flirtation and that was as hot and heavy as it got. But where had she seen me? WVA Meena Bazar? Newmarket? Elephant Road? The places to meet girls were very limited, so it could only be one of three places (this was before Aarong café added a fourth). But after a year of talking on the phone, I gave up because I realized that I had yet to meet her, and perhaps never would.

All this intense gender-segregation meant that when we finally got to co-ed Dhaka University, we had no idea what to do with ourselves. If you fell for someone, there was an elaborate ritual. You would let a male friend of yours know. He would then tell his friend who would tell the girl in question. Eventually through a daisy chain of whispered confidences you would figure out if all this was mutual. It was a slow, byzantine process.

All this sounds sweet -- innocent, bygone times, etc, but at the same time tremendously frustrating. There were few chances to meet and interact with women in a normalized setting. The first girl you fell for, you basically would have to marry, because there would be no second chances and no normal interaction outside marriage. You didn't date, you got married.

Through the decades, there were numerous interventions to ensure this suffocating condition continued. Recently I came across a photo from 1973 of my cousin in a band with local legend Bogey bhai (later founder of Renaissance). She was the tambourine girl and such innocent expressions of fun-loving high-jinks (think Josie & The Pussycats) were verboten. Similarly, Waves was a 70s rock band that faced morals tests. The sight of girls dancing on stage during the band's first and only appearance on television sent the guardians into a frenzy, with cries of "oposhongskrithi" banishing them from screens. It's especially worth remembering examples from the 1970s because, contrary to stereotype, virtue policing did not originate with the mullahs. In those days, it was the secularists that were up in arms, since their key plank was uber-Bangla nationalism. "Westernization" was the all-encompassing enemy, mullah politics still a twinkle in Jamaat's eye. From Abba to Boney M, everything disco was eventually hounded off the screens. One flash of Donna Summers' legs, and Solid Gold was also cancelled. For the rest of our school days, the only sanctioned music program was James Last Orchestra (German friends are baffled to hear this today!). Later of course, political Islam came to be seen as a bigger threat, and some secularists embraced the same opo culture as a weapon to goad the maulvis.

The 1980s brought a fresh military dictatorship and a new legal enforcement against "free mixing of the sexes." Tinted glasses on cars were banned to prevent "opokormo." Special police squads roved the area around Parliament, hoping to catch young couples. The few friends who actually had girlfriends (there were not many!) developed the technique of driving to Airport Road while holding hands. As with any dynamic where law enforcement meets morality (look at the Iranian and Saudi virtue police), the clashes were ugly. Stories of young couples being brutally harassed by police officers were frequent. Unlike other situations, it was not in the hopes of a bribe -- the public humiliation was what the police relished.

Today there is a tendency in the West to fetishize arranged marriages. This is pushed along by a segment of the Asian diaspora that wants to promote things from "the old country" as inherently better than "modern life." Articles like "Looking for Love on Craigslist" (soon to be a book!) argue that since modern romance is so random, we may as well retreat and allow parents to arrange marriages again. Exhibit A may be a "successful" corporate lawyer, but at the end of the day he wants to come home to mummy, have her cook khichuri and find a girl just like her (and of course, she will be the same religion). Divorce rates are high today goes the argument, bring back the good old days. No one mentions that divorce rates are also a function of situations where single or divorced women can live productive, stigma-free lives on their own. Anyway, some of us have no interest in going back to the "old ways" of arranged marriages. Better to make our own mistakes and learn from them.

Thinking back to those suffocating school years, it makes me happy to see today's young Dhaka lovers. For the most part I only see people holding hands near Dhanmondi lake, more pda (public display of affection) is not here yet. Of course, all this enrages the vice squad. This Christmas, three police officers (one on motorcycle, two with bulky wirelesses) surrounded a young couple on a rickshaw and held them for interrogation outside our Dhanmondi gate. A crowd gathered, everyone was there to see the tamasha. When I came to protest, I was harshly told to mind my own business. "Era kharap lok, apni nak golaben na" (these are bad people, don't stick your nose in). There was almost a Roman spectacle to the episode. As if the young couple would now be fed to the lions.

Rokkhok jokhon bhokkok.
All this may seem trivial compared to "bigger," "life and death" issues we face, but culture wars are core struggles and often Trojan horses for larger battles. This is why the recent attempt to ban phone calls after midnight to stop teenage lovers bothers me so much. This is a nasty move that tries to stigmatize normal behaviour and dictate an antique moral code. Relationship dynamics are slowly shifting in our urban centers. But there are people and forces (sometimes religious forces, but equally a city elite that is socially right-wing in spite of its pretences) that would like to turn the clock back. The problem they face is a genie out of the box, and they are now trying desperately to fold, tuck, nip, crinkle, and crush the new freedoms.

In earlier essays, I argued that people needed to urgently make the connection between the loss of civil liberties in one sphere (phone tapping) and the loss of liberty everywhere.

It's already starting.

Naeem Mohaiemen is a filmmaker and media activist.

Notes:
1 See my past articles "Your Last Phone Call" (12/12/05), "Big Brother is Taping You" (12/22/05) and "Dittrich Boulevard & Stasi Consciousness" (8/1/06)
2 BBC, 1/15/06
3 I am indebted to Dr. Amala Reddy for the terms BMT and EMT.