It is supplementary to the views expressed in the DS Editorial of November 29 and subsequent article with above title (DS:12.02.2004). The inquiries regarding the status of urbanisation in Dhaka are indeed thought provoking. One's affiliation to his/her home town is a natural phenomenon in most of the Asiatic cities because of their way of life and the pattern of their familial and community relationships. A quote from Prof. Mowla of BUET (Asiatic Society Journal, 48(1), 2003, p146): "Almost every large Asian city has apparently owed half or more of its recent rapid growth to migration. In most Asian cities, migrants continue to maintain close ties with their rural origins and periodically return there. One may cite the common Indian and traditional Chinese practice of giving one's ancestral village as the place of origin or even of birth on the part of the people who are unambiguously urban" supports this notion.The emotional attachment to one's home town is generally strongest when a person is a first generation urbanite, it gradually becomes weak in subsequent generations but is never wholly obliterated as can be seen in "The Roots". It is perhaps an indefinable human instinct that creates this nostalgic feeling towards one's ancestral place. The author of "Where is home?" tried to identify the reasons for this affiliation in terms of personal, emotional, professional, economic, nationalistic, ideological or a combination, but I guess it is much more than just these ties. This is an intricate socio-spatial phenomenon that guides the whole process of place making. Pace and nature of urbanisation depends on human communities and their territoriality.
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