Those old songs still touch our hearts. Remember Diana Ross, Céline Dion, Stevie Wonder, Frank Sinatra, Lionel Richie or Adele — and even singers in the Bengali and Hindi languages.
The singers, lyricists and composers of those songs are almost all gone. But the songs they sang still stir our hearts.
For the current generation, those songs are often viewed as being only about sadness. Our psychiatrist — who is also our eldest daughter — advised us not to listen to these older songs.
She says that listening to sad songs makes one’s mind even more melancholic and can lead to depression. These are the views of many psychiatrists.
But we grew up learning to extract small joys from sorrow. That is why many of us often return to those days and listen to the songs of that time. At least for me, my mood improves. While listening to those songs, I can even manage to write an article for The Dispatch.
“Hello! Is it me you’re looking for” by Lionel Richie, or “As All in Fair Love” by Stevie Wonder.
There are many more songs in our mother tongue. “The boundless sky, and beneath it, look — people sleep; only pain and lamentation remain awake,” by Hemanta Mukherjee, in Bengali.
This song tells the stories of ordinary people in my native country — Bangladesh — and in India, and even here in the United States. The stories of simple laborers and common people.
Do they still sleep under the open sky? I wonder whether homeless people still sleep that way at Dhaka’s railway station. Do hundreds of people still sleep on the sidewalks of Kolkata, India? Perhaps they do.
These thoughts came to my mind because of Sir Deaton’s words. Professor Angus Deaton of Princeton University, the 2015 Nobel laureate in economics, who is British-American, once asked, “Is it better to be poor in Bangladesh or in the Mississippi Delta?”
This gentleman is not only a Nobel laureate but also a genius. He also asked who is better off — the poor in a remote village in India or the poor in a trailer park in Milwaukee? This means that even in this extremely wealthy and powerful country, the United States, there are many poor people.
I have not seen the Milwaukee trailer park, but I have seen the Mississippi Delta. More than 12 years ago, our eldest daughter, Wittika, stayed in a trailer home in the Delta for a month during her medical internship. We visited the area once during that time.
We visited a charitable community clinic — the only health care facility for the people there. It was a community clinic in a wealthy country. If I must make a comparison, I would say we were better off in Bangladesh. Sir Deaton, of course, meant something similar.
It can be described as a situation in which houses in the Delta region are without windows, without electricity, and sit on muddy ground.
There is only one difference: these poor Americans do not die of starvation. The government provides food stamps, and many churches and NGOs provide food as well. But maintaining good health remains difficult.
Professor Deaton also said something very true. Inequality between countries is decreasing, but inequality within countries is increasing. The poor are becoming poorer, or at least the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. If that is the case, this progress means little to me.
After learning that Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal by inflicting suffering on the poor, how can one fully appreciate it?
According to 2023 statistics, out of 8.2 billion people in the world, 757 million are hungry. Most of them live in developing countries. However, it is surprising that even in the United States, 47 million people experience hunger. There is no shortage of food production in the world.
Perhaps because I am from Bangladesh, I feel particularly troubled seeing food wasted. One estimate says that Europe and the United States together waste about 94,000 tons of food every day.
In a democratic country, why can’t we practice some socialistic ideas to improve the well-being of the poor?
Jiben Roy, a native of Bangladesh, is a retired chemistry and pharmaceutical sciences professor at Mississippi University for Women. He writes occasional columns in The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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