David's World

January 16, 2006

No Woman, No Call in Bangladesh

A while ago, researchers with a knack for headline-making stories at the London School of Economics dug shallow and compiled a list of the happiest people on earth. Guess what, it's the Bangladeshis, a comparatively poor nation.

Bangladesh is getting modern: the introduction of cell phones drives some of the cultural change. Turns out, calling it modernization is a vast exaggeration. The other day, mobile phone operators were ordered to stop offering free nighttime phone calls to protect the morals of the young.

What happened was that teenagers had started to "form romantic attachments", and parents complained about "vulgar talk". As I've learned, attaching to another person romantically is discouraged. Arranged marriage is the deal there. Humans being kept from looking for mates, hey, that's not merely a matter of different cultural standards.

Sometimes it's hard to reconcile the news. How can Bangladeshis be the happiest people on earth? Then again: no woman, no cry.