Like people, cities have phases of life: childhood, youth, old age. New York, for example, is an old man of a city: a dirty, cranky old man smelling of stale beer and cigars. Dhaka, on the other hand, wears its youth like a banner, unfurled for all to see. It is the ultimate, the quintessential adolescent city: awkward, insecure, lanky, with a breaking voice and a day's growth of beard.
Dhaka is a city full of reckless energy and vitality, a city of unbounded, planless growth. Most importantly, it is a city which is hardly a city at all, most of it having only just risen from the paddy fields a generation ago, and still carrying with it the raw provincial mindset of the village. We compare this with its erstwhile sister city, Calcutta. Though in the measure of years
Calcutta is the younger, through the wear and tear of the colonial ages she has aged the greater. Now we see her bent under the weight of years like a poor beggar woman, and her womb, that once bore such a plentiful harvest of culture, hangs now between her hips like shriveled grapes on the vine.
The pure image of Dhaka bespeaks its youth: in the broad, bold avenues that cut through the city, impatiently outstripping its growth; in the signs of construction everywhere as buildings rise from the virgin earth like new teeth; and in the upward thrust of the steel pilings that bristle from the roof of every house, which seem to proclaim: "Another storey is yet to come!"