Vagabond Journey Perpetual Travel

Impressions Of Dhaka

by Wade Shepard @vagabondjourney on April 10, 2016

When I was on the plane descending down into Dhaka it occurred to me that I hadn’t really thought about the place too much. I have this experience surprisingly often. I figured that Bangladesh would be a slightly more depressed, more natural disaster ravaged version of India. I figured that the culture would be basically the same — a little more Muslim, a lot less Hindu, same, same South Asia. After all, not too long ago they were part of the same country.

However, after I stepped off the plane it did not take long before it became apparent that comparing Bangladesh to India was like comparing Germany to France. Sure, globally speaking they’re relatively similar — the countries are nearby, they share a border, have an overlapping history, the people look and dress kind of the same, eat similar foods . . . but for anyone who’s ever actually been there, the similarities quickly give way to the differences.

There is a real good feel in Bangladesh. The country is an absolute mess, the cities are perpetual salvage projects — the people cram all in together because the traffic is too bad for them to viably spread apart (otherwise it would take all day just to get to work), there are giant holes in the sidewalks revealing deep drops into treacherous storm sewers below, the police are in the business of bribes, but there is just this feeling of engagement that you really become aware of when you walk around here.

By engagement I mean it is easy to connect with other people, that you’re a part of the cityscape, that you’re — for lack of a better way of putting it — in touch.

In some cities of the world people just don’t really look at you as you move through the streets; your presence doesn’t seem to register in their consciousness. You can move through these places as though you’re watching them in a movie, that you’re not really there — and you may as well not be for all anyone cares. Social engagement becomes a challenge, and the fruits of travel are more difficult to obtain.

While in some other cities you feel hunted — hunted by touts, scammers, people trying to sell you shit, and others who have no qualms about sacrificing all semblance of self-respect because you ultimately don’t matter. You’re just a customer, and these places are more or less giant shops.

Bangladesh is right in the middle, right in that sweet spot that could be called genuine.

Nobody really bothers you in Dhaka. People look at you — a foreigner — but they often do so while smiling. People make eye contact when you pass in the streets, smiles and head nods are reciprocated, and sometimes strangers offer a polite hello. This place is, to put it simply, cool. Even in the central inferno of the capital city, Bangladesh walks slow.

There is no real tourism industry to speak of here, so you’re not demoted to money on legs. You’re just a person, and you’re treated like it. You can stop at a tea stall on a street corner, get a cup from the kid selling it there, and have a chat with the people who are hanging out. They don’t expect anything from you other than conversation. This anecdote, really, is the definition of good travel.

That said, the horrid state of traffic in Dhaka meant that I walked everywhere I could, and I quickly found that the benefit of this wasn’t just because it was faster. There is good action everywhere here: colors, a melee of architecture, age-layered buildings, a kaleidoscope of faces, unexpected findings, and probably more memory-searing, WTF? kind of scenery per kilometer than almost anywhere else in the world.

“We get a lot of photographers here,” a friend in Dhaka told me. “Apparently, the word got out that you can point a camera at anything here and it will be a good picture.”

I like this place.

It’s Not The Right Time In Azerbaijan

by Wade Shepard @vagabondjourney on April 10, 2016

I set up an interview with the director of a major logistics zone and SEZ in Baku. I arranged a time, computed the time difference, then confirmed.

“Just a note: this year we didn’t change our clocks to summer time, so the difference between us is only 8 hours,” the director wrote to me.

What was he talking about? The time on my Google calendar said that Azerbaijan is nine hours ahead. How could Google not know what time it is there?

Azerbaijan decided to cancel daylight savings time this year. The stated reasons are because they feel it’s biologically detrimental to human health or something like that. Whatever, the reason why they did this is not what’s of significance here.

What is interesting is that the official time in the country is no longer coordinated with anybody’s cloud-connected clocks. Google calendar, iPhones, iPads, BlackBerries, Android-based smartphones, laptops, smart watches, internet browsers — pretty much anything electronic jumped ahead an hour for a daylight savings time that wasn’t.

“So there was a confusion regarding the time for a day or two,” the director said. “When you look at your clock or watch and it shows six o’clock when it’s really five o’clock. So you may want to leave work early,” he joked.

The people of Azerbaijan adjusted to this pretty quickly, but this has caused a minor riff in how Azerbaijan — a keystone country on the cusp of Asia, the Middle East, and the West — interacts with anybody on the outside. Before any kind of meeting can be set up or event can be arrange it has to be communicated that the time our machines give us for Azerbaijan isn’t really the time it is there.

Our devices that we meticulously program to think for us and make our lives easier can become far more of an inconvenience if we actually trust them. While humans can simply adjust to arbitrary changes, our devices cannot. We use these things that we call “smart” because they’re supposed to be smarter than us, how how smart can something really be if it can’t even tell what time it is?

Ultimately, the moral to this tale is the same as in any human vs. machines story:

Humans are unpredictable, and unpredictability is something that machines have no tolerance for.

The New Travel Strategy

by Wade Shepard @vagabondjourney on April 6, 2016

I have two modes of operation now: information collection and information processing. I travel in two month bursts through multiple countries doing research, interviews, and collecting content, then I sit in a room for the next month writing about it all.

One mode cannot exist without the other, and it’s really not efficient or effective to try to do them both at the same time.

I used to travel and publish continuously, but both of these activities were far less demanding then than they are now. I would travel slow, spend a month here, three months there, two weeks back here, and write and publish as I went. I took out time each day where I would sit and work, processing my notes into blog posts and articles.

Ultimately, I now basically do the same thing, only the two phases of this operation have now been separated. I travel fast, rarely spending over a few days in each location, and fill my days with meetings, visits, and other on-the-ground, intel collecting activities. There isn’t much time to sit inside and write — it’s full blown contact all the time. Then I return to a base of operations, write, and publish.

As I previously explained in an interview on RolfPotts.com:

I eventually realized that if I was ever going to successfully complete larger projects, such as books or working for larger publications, I was going to have to start setting up longer term bases of operation — places that I have all set up and fully stocked that I can come back to after research trips and jump right into writing. So I now rent out apartments by the year within regions that I’m focusing on. I spend around ten days to two weeks per month out traveling, experiencing what I’m writing about first hand, and then the rest of the month in the home base researching, writing articles, blog posts, and chapters for books, as well as setting up projects for the next time I’m out traveling. Of course, these bases of operation have a tendency of being on the beaches of subtropical islands.

These two separate phases suit my character. I’m most comfortable waking up in the morning, beginning one thing and doing that one thing until I go to bed at night. The vacillation of these phases keeps that “one thing” fresh and engaging. I go out and travel hard until I’m worn and weary and ready for a break, then I find a room to hid in, where I work until I can’t take it anymore.

Repeat.

Where the base of operations that I set up in are located is almost irrelevant. The only thing I do there is sit at a desk, staring at four walls and a laptop. Honestly, the less interesting the place is the better.

The irony of travel writing is that it’s best done from a desk.

More from the interview on RolfPotts.com:

When in interesting locations the last thing you want to be doing is spending time in your room on your laptop. But if you don’t put in that time then you’re going to be vastly unprepared to do anything of significance when in the streets. Setting up research projects, getting in touch with the right people, scheduling interviews, and doing pre-contact research takes a massive amount time, but it’s an integral part of travel writing. While, conversely, you need to be out in the streets talking to people to really get to know a place and obtain the depth of experience needed to write deeply about it.

New Silk Road Documentary

by Wade Shepard @vagabondjourney on April 6, 2016

The tracks leading to China on one side and Europe on the other at Kazakhstan's Khorgos Gateway, one of the premier projects of the New Silk Road. Image: Khorgos Gateway.

It’s now official enough to start talking about a little: I’m now assisting with a big, seven part documentary series about the New Silk Road. It’s called The Best of All Worlds, and is being made by Malcolm Clarke, Yi Han, and Lorenz Knauer — big documentary film makers who have won numerous awards . . . like Oscars.

I was very familiar with the films that Yi Han in particular had worked on. As far as documentaries about China go, they are modern classics: The Last Train Home, China Heavyweight… Malcolm Clarke doesn’t need my introduction, and Lorez, well, he spends his time hanging out with Jane Goodall.

So I knew who they were when they first reached out to me 10 or so months ago — which is interesting because the only thing that I’d published about my New Silk Road project at that point was a blog post that simply stated that I was doing it. Apparently, one of their researchers found it and got in touch. I took that as a very good sign that their research team works with a very fine toothed comb.

It started out as a research partnership. We’d both be traveling the same routes researching the same thing for the next couple of years, so why not work together? I’d share my notes and contacts with them for their film and they’d share their notes and contacts with me for my book.

Then it grew from there. We talked a little. We talked some more. We met up in Montreal a few months ago. We went back and forth on my role. I was invited in to be a researcher. I asked if I could be included in the film. They said maybe.

Partially, I wanted to be in the film because it would be a good promotion for my book, partially because it sounded like fun, and partially because I’ve always told my wife that I was going to be featured in a documentary someday and she never believed me.

My official role is Senior Research Consultant. Basically, I do anything I can to help and hopefully there will be an opportunity or two to learn a few things along the way.

“You’re poor, that’s why you can do what you do,” Malcolm said to me at one point during our meeting in Montreal. “If we were to send someone out to do research like you’re doing it would cost a ridiculous amount of money. That’s why we need people like you.”

I don’t feel as if I’m being taken advantage of when I hear people say this. I’ve heard this often, and I know this is my wild card.

I can travel cheaper and stay longer than anybody. I don’t require an expense account. I don’t clip receipts and push for reimbursements. I fund myself because I have the means to make travel profitable. I can go anywhere, stay for as long as I want, live cheap, collect experiences, observations, information, and at the end of the day I usually have more money than when I started. Travel has transitioned from an expense to an investment. Each day on the road I’m acquiring something that I can resell at a higher price. This is my business, it’s my competitive advantage, it’s what I can offer that others can’t — it’s my way of being useful.

Dhaka Must Have The World’s Worst Traffic

by Wade Shepard @vagabondjourney on April 3, 2016

My first day in Dhaka I thought that I would act professional and hire a car to go to my meeting. But this plan backfired fabulously. Rather than zipping across the city at a speed worthy of a vehicle propelled by an internal combustion engine, a half hour later I found myself sitting at an intersection hardly two blocks from where I was picked up.

All around me was a melee of gridlock. A battle scarred bus to my right would creep forward a tire rotation every two or three minutes, a tuk-tuk driver to my left stared idly into the screen of his phone, while my driver engaged in an extended haggling session with a street vendor over the greasy front axle he was trying to sell to people sitting in idle vehicles. Nobody was going anywhere. I inched my way across Dhaka, ultimately covering a few kilometers in nearly two hours.

Talking about how bad the traffic is in Dhaka seems to be the new way of saying hello. Where the usual stop-and-chat often consists of saying something like, “Oh, it’s a lovely day, isn’t it?,” in Dhaka it’s more like, “Oh, today’s traffic is so bad, it took me over two hours to get to . . .”

Dhaka has been called the traffic capital of the world, and the World Bank has asked if it is even possible to build the city out of its traffic congestion. The traffic problem in Dhaka has been going on for 10 to 15 years. This is nothing new. The start of the globalism age dumped an overflowing deluge of cars into streets that simply were not made to contain them. Carrying capacity was quickly met, then exceeded, then exceeded some more until the city became what it is today: completely broken.

“Dhaka is a totally unplanned city,” spoke the marketing director of the Asian Age newspaper as we sat entrapped in their company vehicle in a stagnant puddle of un-moving traffic later on that day.

My first couple trips around Dhaka I made a newbie faux pas by asking in advance how long the rides should take.

“It could take a half hour or it could take two hours. There’s no way to tell.”

This was always the reply.

Complaining about the traffic in cities undergoing the first wave of globalization can come off as cliche. The traffic is bad everywhere in South and Southeast Asia. But the traffic in Dhaka was really something special. Easily, it was the worst that I’ve seen in 16 years of travels that have often been centered on developing countries.

The place just doesn’t work.

This isn’t only a major impediment to life but business as well. This isn’t a place that you can fly into, have a business meeting, and then fly out. No, it can seriously take a quarter of a work day just to get downtown from the airport. It is simply impossible to get anybody or anything around this city efficiently — including workers, who must cram into the urban core because they can’t live in the suburbs if they want to make it to work at some point during the day. You can’t quickly get products in and out, the entire supply chain of the place is perpetually disrupted. You can’t even plan a meeting and expect it to actually begin anywhere near the start time.

“If you have a meeting at 10 am nobody is going to show up until noon,” an English businessman based in the city told me. “They’re all going to blame it on the traffic.”

Workers here often find themselves stuck on the road instead of inside their offices during work hours, and many have simply adapted by working in their cars. A friend there told me that he specifically hired a driver just so he can get work done in the passenger seat when stuck in traffic for hours and hours. The mobile office here is being taken to an entirely new level.

There are financial repercussions to this traffic as well. In terms of pollution and delays alone, the cost of Dhaka’s traffic congestion is estimated to be $3.8 billion per year.

If you ask someone in Dhaka what the country’s biggest issue is they probably won’t say sweatshops or sanitation or education or any of the other things the NGOs like to go there to fix, but traffic. Dhaka’s traffic problem isn’t something that the people there are so accustomed to that they view it as normal — no, they know it’s fucked; they know that cars are supposed to move faster than pedestrians.

There will be 21 million trips made in Dhaka today. Buses, cars, tuk-tuks, bicycle rickshaws, and pedestrians all compete for road space. Navigable sidewalks are rare — even where there is a separate sidewalk it is often used as parking space for cars or is in such disrepair that it is more dangerous to walk on it than in the road.

As I sat in traffic at an intersection in the consulate zone I was able to make a video of some guys installing an electrical line from start to finish. They were pulling wires directly over the cars without regard for the fact that they were mobile entities that could move at anytime. The entire installation process took around 10 minutes, but they didn’t seem worried that they were working right in traffic. They knew we weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

I watched as pedestrians were able to move around the car I was sitting in and on towards their respective destinations, and I found myself envious. The next time I go somewhere here, I promised myself, I too will walk.

It was faster.

Dhaka is probably the only city in the world where being given a lift is an inconvenience.

Flyovers are the great solution the government has come up with here. So huge concrete elevated overpasses are being constructed all over the city. They are national projects and seem to be used as a way of showing “the people” that their government is responding to one of their biggest needs. All over the partitioning walls of these construction sites are pictures of the president and slogans about glorious futures and all that.

However, many urban designers and lay people in Dhaka seem to view these fly-overs as redundant and obsolete half measures rather than a true fix for the core problems.

“The problem is all the trucks and buses on the road but the trucks and buses are too heavy to go on the fly overs, so why build them?” one resident queried.

According to a blogger at the World Bank, adding these fly-overs may even intensify the problem:

For many years, many cities in the world did try to build more roads to relief traffic jams after motorization took place. However, no city has been able to build itself out of congestion. In fact, allocating more urban land to roads means you have to reduce the portion of land allocated for other urban functions, such as housing, industrial, commercial and entertainment. What has also been widely recognized is that building more roads does NOT reduce traffic congestion. It would actually induce more motorized traffic and thus create more traffic congestion.

The irony of Dhaka is that it’s rapid development and progress has led to its biggest barrier to development and progress. This is a city that has developed itself into gridlock, and unraveling this knot defines the place at this juncture.

Talking Ghost Cities On Skylines, The CityMetric Podcast

by Wade Shepard @vagabondjourney on April 3, 2016

I was a guest on an episode of Skylines, the new CityMetric podcast, that was published on Friday. I talk a little about China’s new city building movement as well as how the ghost city narrative was created. I get a little . . . well, dynamic at times — it’s easy to get excitable when you finally have the opportunity to actually talk about you’ve been researching for three years. You can listen to the podcast below.

CityMetric is the urbanism site of the New Statesman. I’m their defacto China correspondent, and write a monthly article for them.

Where In The World To Find Non-Materialistic Cultures

by Wade Shepard @vagabondjourney on April 1, 2016

I received a letter from reader from the United States who basically wanted my advice as to where in the world he could go to find non-materialistic cultures and people who had value systems that did not revolve around money. I didn’t respond. Doing so probably would have come as a real buzz kill at best, highly pretentious at worse. I knew where the guy was coming from. In fact, it was a place I was once at myself.

As a young traveler just stepping outside of the USA for the first time at 19 I believed I was on some kind of a mission to find “my people.” I was looking for some remote tribe or something that was full of people who lived far beyond the world of dust — far from email and laptops and debit cards, who really understood the essence of life, who reflected my own purposefully assembled set of values. I envisioned myself being taken in and taught some kind of ancient wisdom, of being the chosen outsider who could go native — I probably saw that once in a movie.

Really, I was just looking for a group of “MEs” who thought like I did and lived as I envisioned myself wanting to life. It was self-validation that I was looking for. It wasn’t other people that I wanted, but myself.

Ultimately, it was really just a youthful play for status. When you’re 18 or 19, rejecting your superficial concept of your culture is fashionable; intentionally carving out what we think is our own, “different” intellectual path is part of our rite of passage.

Ironically, what I was trying to accomplish through being “non-materialistic” was very similar to that of those who strive for status through expensive houses, cars, and phones. Valuable material goods are statements saying, “This person is successful, smart, and/ or well bred enough to afford this.” I was merely substituting ideology for an Apple logo, and talking gruff about the materialism of others was just a statement saying, “This person is successful, smart, and/ or well bread enough to believe this.” Ultimately, it was the same thing.

But I was serious about my naive little mission, and I really went out there looking. Way out there. What I found instead was the polar opposite of what I sought.

If you want to find non-materialistic cultures don’t go to the poor, remote spans of the globe. These are the places where status symbols really mean something, where money impresses, where people are ranked by their possessions. These are the places where high value material goods are rarer, procure far more attention, induce more admiration, and mean far more.

If you really want to find non-materialistic culture don’t go to Guatemala, stay in the USA, go to Western Europe, Japan, Australia…. these are the places where almost anyone and everyone can have an iPhone and a car and can relatively easily acquire material wealth, so how can they be anything special?

A shiny BMW means something on Baily Avenue in the inner-city of Buffalo, but at the country clubs of Long Island, not as much.

The Chinese have a saying: làn dàjiē. This literally means worn-out street, but is used to indicate a status symbol that is over-saturated to the point that it becomes meaningless. The way it was put to me, it “means that if everyone can have it, everyone has it, it is not special anymore.” Kind of like how iPhones and Starbucks are becoming in China.

I once thought that being a poor, worldly, “non-materialistic” American would win me respect in the developing world. I though that it would get me regarded as being “different than the rest” or “the good one.” Instead it just won me confusion and scorn for being so spoiled as to have the privilege to turn my nose up at the things the people I traveled among would do about anything to be able to have.

This was probably way worse than being materialistic in the first place.

In Other Media – March 2016

by Wade Shepard @vagabondjourney on April 1, 2016

March 2016 was another productive month on Vagabond Journey. We continued gaining exposure in other media sources and had a good amount of articles published in big media.

Timeline referenced my book Ghost Cities of China as well as a story that I wrote for CityMetric in their article about China’s ghost cities and migrant workers in search of homes.

Next City referenced an article on CityMetric that I co-authored with CC Huang in their article entitled Can China’s Largest Cities Look Like This in 5 Years?.

While a blog called Deconstruct to Reconstruct passed an honor my way by including me on their list of the five great minds you should get acquainted with.

***

I’ve also had 14 articles published this month in other publications.

CityMetric

I had an article published on CityMetric that I co-authored with CC Huang. CC is a (big time) urban designer who is based out of Shanghai who helped devise a set of green and smart guidelines to help steer China’s future urbanization initiatives onto a more sustainable track. This was the first time that I’ve ever co-authored something with someone. It was an interesting experience, and showed the benefit that the combined experience and research of two people working together can have. This article was republished widely, appearing in a newsletter published by the US Department of Defense and the United Nations-accredited Global Forum on Human Settlements of all places

China’s Urban Policy Unit Just Met For The First Time In 38 Years And Here’s What It Recommended

Forbes

On Forbes this month I looked into China’s new urbanization guidelines, the appeal of Shenzhen as an epicenter for the world’s hardware innovators, as well as a series about China’s housing market.

What Is China Doing About Its 450 Million Square Meters Of Unsold Housing

How People In China Afford Their Outrageously Expensive Homes

The Real Reasons The Chinese Love Throwing Money Into The Housing Market

The Demand For Housing In China’s Heated Property Market Is Real

Why The West’s High-Tech Innovators Manufacture Their Dreams In China

The Impact Of China’s New Urbanization Guidelines Could Be Huge

Please visit my profile on Forbes.

South China Morning Post

I’ve also had seven articles published in the print edition of the South China Morning Post, with topics ranging from Zhengzhou rising as a major hub on the New Silk Road to the impact of refrigerated foods in China.

In Bangladesh, Someone Else’s Business Card Is Your Social Passport

by Wade Shepard @vagabondjourney on April 1, 2016

“Bangladeshis don’t give each other their own business cards, they exchange the business cards of the people they know,” a friend in Bangladesh told me.

“Why?” I asked, initially thinking that giving out someone else’s business card would very much defeat their intended purpose.

“A business card of a high ranking individual is a social passport,” he responded.

It then made sense. Yes, showing association with a high ranking person would probably grease the wheels of many social processes. But I imagine it could also do more than that.

Especially in Asia, a business card doesn’t just communicate who you are and what you do but, perhaps most importantly, where you rank socially. People need to know how to properly approach and speak to people, and when you can’t determine where you stand in relation to someone else things can get uncomfortable. There is just a different protocol for speaking to people who are your social equal than speaking to someone who is your superior anywhere in the world. Status and social rankings are real, even in sub-cultural or niche communities. It’s just something that’s built into our social programing — we just do it intuitively and cant stop it. So letting people know where you stand is just polite.

Showing the business cards of the people you’re connected to also shows the social network that you are a part of. This makes it faster and easier to identify common nodes — people or organizations that you are both associated with — which can drive an acquaintanceship a little deeper or lead to being introduced to other connections.

It could also give people who don’t know each other from a hole in the ground something to talk about — which is often clutch.

While I’ll probably never be so presumptuous as to go around showing off the business cards of various high ranking individuals that I’ve collected, I like the custom. It’s functional, and like most social phenomenon it probably arose out of a very real demand.

How The Police Make Money In Bangladesh (And Most Other Countries)

by Wade Shepard @vagabondjourney on March 31, 2016

A English friend and long term resident Dhaka told me a story about how he was riding with a Bangladeshi guy on a highway in the countryside when they were stopped by a couple of police officers pulling a rope across the road. A globally standard way of enacting a road block. The cop went through some BS rigamarole about lights or mirrors or speeding or something until the driver pulled out a little cash and handed it over.

“Doesn’t that make you mad?” my English friend asked as they drove off.

The Bangladeshi just shook his head and smiled.

“No, not really,” he said. “It costs a lot of money to become a police officer, you know.”

How do people become police officers in many countries of the world: they pay.

They pay for the job because that gives them the opportunity to collect bribes. This is how the police really make money — their official pay is often too low to warrant the kind of work they do.

The more money they pay the better position they get. By better position, I mean being stationed in a place where people are wealthier and can therefore afford to pay better bribes.

In some places, like in Central America, becoming a cop can be a community affair — a neighborhood will pool together the funds to buy one of their members into the police force, whereupon he will redistribute around a portion of his “earnings.”

Most often, this type of police-induced extortion is not really the practice of independent operators or rogue elements, but is a fundamental part of a much larger system. Street cops distribute a specified portion of their earnings to their superior, who will then distribute a portion of his earnings to his superior, all the way up the chain of command — which can stretch into the highest echelons of government.

Moving up in this profession means paying the required amount to get to the next rung. The higher up you can afford to get, the larger your take. It’s kind of like how spoils were once divided on pirate ships — everybody gets their appropriate cut of the booty.

We often view the police officers that we bribe as corrupt, we often view them as scumbags sucking out the essence of their societies. When cops do this in countries like the USA, that’s usually what they are. But in Asia, Africa, Latin America . . . it’s different. The cops themselves are caught in the middle. If they under-perform — i.e. don’t collect enough baksheesh to adequately pay it forward — they are moved to less desirable postings as punishment, where they will make far less money or, perhaps worse than that, actually have to work.

Corruption is a chain; with just one broken link it doesn’t hold together. Corrupt systems ensure that every link is solid.

When it comes down to it, baksheesh is what fuels the economies of many countries of this world. It’s liquid cash that keeps the economic wheels spinning. Black money can’t really be kept out in the open, it can’t be kept in a bank — it’s money that needs to be spent to make it white again.

In countries that are fueled by black money, where the cops are basically toll collectors, everybody knows how much to pay. It’s a socially ingrained practice that’s carried out as seamlessly as a handshake. You pay the toll and you’re free to pass. It’s just the price you sometimes have to pay to use public infrastructure. It’s akin to a social tax.

***

Although in Bangladesh most other desirable jobs are also acquired through payment, not just those in public security. It’s so institutionalized of a practice that a common question in an interview is, “How much are you willing to pay?”

“Bangladeshis aren’t shy. They are very upfront and say what they want,” my English friend explained. “So they will be like, so do you have 14,000 in your pocket? Or this is going to cost you 14,000 to be placed in this position.”

If something is normal can it still be corrupt?