The pundits' claim Dhaka is amongst the fastest growing city in the world. The population is multiplying in geometric proportions and if the same pundits' are not too smart, which I am afraid most of them are not always, the population and the city will soon collapse under their own weights. Do we see the pundits smirk now?

However, Dhaka is being inundated by a migrant population flocking in their millions to the beleaguered city, in search of jobs, opportunity of which there is not to much, to beg at the city light, steal, collect tolls, smash cars, you name it. Of course, the city fathers in solemn tones inform us that the law and other situation is better now than what it was even a short while ago.

Every once in a while our city fathers and mothers will also took the other way, when it comes to solving the accommodation problems of the teeming millions in the city. There are buildings springing up like mushrooms in this our beloved city, ostensibly to house the multitudes but more often than not to fetch fat rents for the chaps who matter. How it is possible for these building to come up overnight, taxing an already groaning basic facility network like the water, sewerage, and electricity to its breaking point, is a wonder. All these buildings of course cannot be built without permission from the 'relevant authorities' who again cannot give permission without proper assessment.

The grotesque structures rising all over the city, without let or hindrance, is a positive environmental hazard of course, because the facilities to go with all these structures are stretched to meet demands. They are already stretched to their limits and no way can go any further. The only problem here comes to be the city authorities who are so blinded with keeping the beggars away so they do not hinder the "games", that they do not seem to have the time to anything else. And if they cannot those ugly, big structures mushrooming all over the city, they are in big trouble. It is a dispiriting exercise, this entire effort of trying to make "them who matter" see anything they are not interested in seeing. Admittedly, air this seems perhaps funny in print, but in real life, it somehow seems to have lost its humor as the city groans under the continual construction of high rise buildings.