Dostompur’s simplicity and freshness impressed me from the very beginning. It was green and yellow everywhere (mustard field). And a chilly wintry wind bringing out tears from your eyes without making you sad. I still remember Saikat Bhai's one line description of the village, 'Dostompur is a Cinema'. What better complement do you expect from a film guy? We were to stay at this village for 9 days to shoot a promotional film regarding education facilities.
Dostompur is 20km away from its nearest town, Pirganj which is again more than 400km away from our capital city Dhaka...The only way to go there is by road and if one does not have any private transport then he is to go first by a highway bus, then by a local bus and then by a richshaw-van! This remote village does not have any facilities like electricity, gas or land phone or does not have a doctor or medical facilities within 20 km....moreover half of the road upto this village is yet to be constructed....
It was the month of January and we were in the coldest part of our country in the coldest time of the year. Most of the time the temperature was below 10C. The sun appeared occasionally and even on the days it appeared, it stayed only for few hours. The Shikhon school starts at 10am and on such chilly weather we could hardly make our visit to the school. But the students lacked no enthusiasm. There were boys and girls of different ages ranging between 7-10 and all of them were from lower class families. A good number of them lacked adequate warm cloths. A boy named Samiul, of 9, was wearing a half-pant instead of a trouser and his bare legs were an embarrassing sight for all of us. I can’t remember any child wearing a second dress in our 9 days stay at the village. They may have 1 or 2 extra set of dresses for formal occasions but not more than that... But they seemed to be happy.They were well accustomed with visitors like us and knew very well the formalities of greetings. ‘Hallo Sir, Good Morning Sir’ and plastic smiles and hidden nervousness were all that they seemed to have. But our staying at their village surprised them. Probably we were the first to stay with them even after their classes. As time went by, they became free and easy and slowly the etiquette lessons gave way to their childish curiosity and noisiness.
It was important for us to get mixed with them. We must understand their situation and mentality. Most of the villagers there were day laborers; both father and mother of almost every family used to go to nearby sugarcane fields for work. One can earn 100 taka ($1.5) for a day of 10 hours of physical labor. Their payment may seem inadequate but the fact is job is hardly available there....almost half of the year they remain unemployed...That’s why they are very simple about their expenditures and they try to save as much as possible.
Most of them are skilled in different crafts. They grow their own vegetables; along with it a lot of household utensils and furniture are home-made. When the parents are away the kids look after their younger siblings and pass their time by playing simple village games.
We have found some government schools in the village but they don’t seem to be large enough to accommodate all of the children. Schools like Shikhon are providing non-formal education to such villages. Most of them are a one-room house built within the village. Some 30 chosen students are taught there for 5 years under 1 teacher. The aim is to provide them with basic educations. The students in the class seemed pretty happy. They were enjoying their involvement in something meaningful and probably were growing a hope about a good future. At least they got a starting there...
During our shooting the children became an issue. We made them free with us, gave them some biscuits, chocolates and sport items and they started liking us so much that they decided never to leave us alone! They never stopped laughing and shouting and the elders of the village joined them. For all of them it was a new experience. They have never seen a camera before and now they were enjoying shooting! For the first time they saw their own village at night under such heavy electric light as we had hired a generator for our night sequences. It was a tough challenge to take our dialogues and ambients properly as we can’t keep them quiet for long. But actually they were very helpful in everything, they participated in acting, kept sitting for hours to fulfill our crowd sequences, they fulfilled our props list by lending whatever we wanted and on occasions invited us to share Pithas with them.
Except the sun everything and everyone there worked for us. We finished our shooting on January 16. After whole day’s work we left the village in the evening. Like every departure it too was a sad and emotional one and like every other tour the sad feeling was supposed to go after coming back to Dhaka in our own city. But it stayed with me for several days. There remained an uncomfortable feeling about Dostompur. I didn’t leave the same Dostompur I found on my very first day. I don’t know how to explain it. Probably we often see what we want to see. Or may be my week-long stay made my vision little bit clearer...because now I see poverty beneath the apparent simplicity and impotence behind apparent freshness of Dostompur...what is simplicity to me is an imposed fate to the villagers and freshness was another form of poverty...I like simplicity and naturalness but only when these virtues are adopted intentionally and spiritually...it is our duty to ensure equal potential future for all...otherwise while the rest of the world keeps moving...the children of Dostompur will keep doing what their parents are doing...generation after generation...
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