What do we envision when we think about the future? Don’t you always dream of a brighter one? I never came across someone who would imagine a future similar to the present or worse. Besides, I have observed children imagining an open playground or the sky and adults — especially the urban professional ones — thinking of a running track while planning for the future.
The stark contrast in these imaginations is not a coincidence. In our post-colonial culture, success is achieved by pursuing certain goals in prescribed directions. While a predictable, familiar goal can sound comforting, a lack of audacity to imagine a different future can resist change and eventually innovation.
Do we want to see the Bangladesh of today as it is 100 years later? Surely not. Hence it is essential to decolonize our dreams.
How can dreams be colonized? In our country, children are encouraged to work towards becoming doctors, engineers, lawyers, or government officials so that they can have a “good future.” A good future usually translates into a stable, predictable future that is tested, where risk is low, and income and social status are guaranteed.
But can the child of a landless farmer who did not get a chance to go to school, yet learned to make various tools by themselves, get a chance to study in an engineering school in Bangladesh? No, they cannot. Many would even laugh at the question.
In the second semester of my engineering university, we decided to publish a magazine at an event. Besides our write-ups, there were going to be our profiles printed. The classmate who designed the form to collect our data included a question — what do you want to be when you grow up?
It is a familiar question for middle-class, urban children in Bangladesh, but it sounded absurd in the second semester of an engineering institution since the future of all of us was locked. So we laughed hysterically at the absurdity of the question. One of our classmates wrote, “I want to be a doctor.” We laughed again as we knew that it was impossible to become a doctor at that point.
Many years later, when I was graduating as a foresight strategist from a design school in another part of the world, I got the opportunity to listen to a doctor who was an undergrad student at the same university. He shared how the undergrad program in drawing and painting honed his sense of aesthetics and precision, helping him later become a skilled plastic surgeon.
Can we imagine graduating from Charukola and getting into a medical college in Bangladesh? Impossible. The system has divided our children into science, arts, and commerce groups at an early age and chained their fate to those boxes. Their dreams are limited to the size of the boxes and the linear upward stairs laid out by the system. The ability to climb those stairs depends on one’s socioeconomic condition, educational qualifications, professional credentials, and many other parameters that rarely one can control.
One fall can be an end to one’s progress. If a student fails to take an exam or loses one semester, it would be a miracle to recover from that loss for the rest of their life. If a woman falls out of the workforce after childbirth, getting back into work can be no less than climbing a mountain for many. The idea of taking time, changing the path, or going in a new direction is far-fetched in a system that does not allow most to take a detour or a break in life, especially those who lack power and privilege, and that is where the trail of post-colonial patterns become relevant in futures thinking.
How do we unlearn these patterns? How can we dream without restricting our imaginations to linear upward pathways? I vividly remember the first day at the design school when we were told during the orientation, “You need to be open to the ambiguity of the future.” In addition to working towards specific changes, there has to be room for that uncertainty. Being agile to adapt to those changes is an integral part of that process.
The Covid-19 pandemic was a recent collective example of the unpredictability of life. All plans, national, international, and private, big and small, collapsed due to the advent of a strange virus. No one thought the world would change this way. The pandemic was an opportunity to realize how far we can go back if we run to achieve certain goals without the readiness of alternative realities. However, it also opened the door to many new possibilities that humankind never imagined before.
It is crucial to be able to see these possibilities to find new ones. When plans and strategies are made, it is usually decided when and what to do in which step, leaving no room for future uncertainty. When our calendar is full of activities and the budget is locked to be utilized in a certain period, we have little chance to do anything new even if new possibilities appear within that window.
Even though in many cases these activities might look like progress, we often create “used futures” as Sohail Inayatullah, the futures studies researcher states — a repetitive practice that does not work, yet we keep doing it and eventually occupy and waste future possibilities.
I once worked for a state-owned company. Once the government directive came to go paperless, we took official communications to emails instead of printed letters. Every time an email arrived, my boss would ask me to print the email and keep it in a file. That is how our workload doubled as the boss was not ready to give up his habit, contributing little to the idea of using less paper.
Anyone living in Bangladesh would know that this is not an isolated incident. Doing things in a certain way, every day, for years is a norm and even considered efficient in our country. How can we adapt to an ever-changing world if we aren’t ready to think differently? How can our children dare to have their own dreams if they are weighed down by the decade-old dreams of their elders?
The challenges we observe are usually just the tip of the iceberg, supported by latent social reasons, conflicting worldviews, and cultural narratives. Long-term transformation requires an in-depth understanding of those realities and the readiness for change.
In a post-colonial society dominated by patriarchal norms and capitalist principles — where financial abundance is considered success and power trickles down through the socioeconomic hierarchy — a holistic future requires participatory changes to challenge the status quo, breaking the linear stairs of success, and creating access for everyone to the open field, the playground and the open sky of the future, where we all have equal rights and dignity regardless of gender, race, religion, sexuality, class, caste, education, age, disability, etc.
I envision an inclusive future where everyone has a voice, everyone can have independent dreams, where humans are in harmony with nature, and where development ensures the safety and sustainability of all living beings in the ecosystem. The journey starts within us, by getting ourselves ready to learn and unlearn and make room for the untapped possibilities of the future of Bangladesh.
Trishia Nashtaran is a feminist organizer, foresight strategist, and a transdisciplinary designer.
