Rubana Huq

It was 2013 that brought about a massive change in the local garment industry. Rana Plaza had collapsed and with around 1,132 lives lost in the incident, the entire nation suffered a sense of collective grief.

We are living in a time of self-doubt, of suspicion, of negation, and of regret.

When the sky isn’t looking clear anymore, to say you are watching the clouds go by with the hope of a better day is being cautiously optimistic.

I took a break from writing columns ever since I took over as the President of the Bangladesh Manufacturers and Exporters Association.

Over 8,000 km away, everything looks different. The skies, the sunrise, the people and of course, trade. In Paris, the three-day Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Forum on Due Diligence in the Garment and Footwear Sector,

I always need a clean sheet to write on. I always prefer the backside of a calendar month to detail projects.

Back from the UNGA. In the last 5 months and 10 days that I have been serving as president of Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, my brain has been on an overdrive.

Your columnist has just completed a little over a month of being a “female” leader of an exporters’ association.

It's an era of innovation. It's an era of efficiency. In one part of the world, they are making “smart” jackets, which are creating a microclimate for the wearers, by using carbon fibre heating pads, and are also using Amazon's smart assistant Alexa to even pre-heat the jacket before the consumers are putting them on.

A friend of mine calls me a “wo-man”. The reason why he hyphenates and breaks the word is a surprise. I asked him why he does so and he explained.

Close to midnight, it felt surreal. Being in the Samsun Airport in Turkey, only 1.5 flying hours away from Istanbul, made me feel as if I were in a new world. It wasn't a world of magical surprise or rapid development, but one thing was for sure: it was a land that told and sold stories well.

I laugh when the western media goes on a rant about us, the eastern democracy, the eastern economy and the eastern human rights condition.

Ever since 1996, your columnist has been in business. She runs a company that has multiple businesses which once grew from one core business of exporting readymade garments years ago.

Half an hour away from home, the air smells the same; the people seem similar, but there's definitely a lack of ostentation. One does not drive through streets of Kolkata in the latest cars; the roads are still swamped with yellow taxis and a touch of Uber and Ola has changed the scene only a bit.

Education indeed. Getting to Phnom Penh took me to yet another learning curve. Not being able to fly out of Dhaka for almost close to 18 hours is a story to share, but getting de-planed and watching passengers reacting to the situation is another narrative altogether.

Conversations end with half nibbled canapés,

Every time a tragedy makes an unannounced entry, our lives turn into a pile of grieving memories. Once struck by loss, one moves on to a totally different plane where laughter is almost immediately followed by a fear of an unknown tomorrow.

The wars that we wage within and beyond our own borders kill us. Yet, we seem to be perpetually living in a state of war where hate speeches flood the internet, trade wars cause the economy to slow down, borders cause tension and perception becomes the truth.

When Accord and Alliance came to town, the brands and retailers had offered assurance of business continuity and were paying for the audits and assessments.

Your columnist was in a private conversation with her daughter stressing on the need of a new oven.