Save Milestone School from becoming a zoo

Hearing the words of a student from Milestone School and College, I felt utterly ashamed. Standing in front of a television camera, the student said, “People are coming to visit our school when they feel bored. Bringing their children along with them, they’re eating peanuts, jhalmuri, sugarcane juice, and chotpoti. Our school is now a zoo. If we sold tickets, we’d have become millionaires. As they can’t see anything because of the crowd, they’re asking the gatekeeper to open the gate. They want to go inside and see. What will they see inside? The burnt corpses of children? They’ve come to see the burnt corpses of children.”

Listening to the girl, it felt as though she had slapped the face of the entire nation. The girl must be around twelve or thirteen. She was speaking calmly. Where did this young girl learn to speak such whip-like words?

She learnt such words of anguish from her sorrow. She saw her dear friends burn to death right in front of her eyes. And yet, some fools have turned up there for entertainment! Not hundreds, but thousands of people! Every day, thousands are crowding there. It’s been nearly a week since the accident occurred. Still, thousands are gathering in front of Milestone School and College. They’re coming from far and wide. As if a circus has been set up! Families are coming, bringing children. What madness!

Don’t they have any sense that people died here, that children died here? There’s nothing here to see. The girl used just the right words: people are coming to see our school because they’re feeling bored!

Can you imagine? Even sociologists might not be able to explain this. What do these eager spectators actually want to see? What are they trying to understand? Do they not feel even a little sadness? That student girl was speaking in a very sorrowful voice, “When our friends were burning in the fire, some people were still rushing inside. They wanted to see the scene of people burning with their own eyes. A father took his half-burnt son to a shop to buy water. The shopkeeper demanded Tk 600 for one bottle of water. And when the father said that he didn’t have that much money, the shopkeeper replied, “Then I can’t give you water. I have many other customers.” Who were those customers? The small children with burnt bodies—they were the customers.

Now how do you feel after hearing these words? Who are the people still going and crowding in front of Milestone School and College? Do they have no basic education, no sense of proportion? What kind of spectacle are they going there to see? And why is the administration allowing them to do so? They’ve closed the school, but they should not have allowed anyone to go near it.

In the midst of all this, hundreds of journalists have gone and covered every detail of the event. There are countless content creators as well. It seems they’re enjoying it more than collecting news. This too is a kind of pornography. Psychologists have said that many people derive a kind of sexual pleasure from others’ suffering and distress. Some even derive joy from horrific accidents.

Why has this “morbid curiosity” spread like a pandemic among the people of our country? Do they not have any normal joy in their lives? No wellness? No healthy entertainment? We can understand the absence of these from various sick symptoms we see around us.

This is no longer a matter of moral education, or of saying what is right, or even of scolding. What we truly need now is social research—why do our people become so elated even during others’ disasters?

And it’s not just ordinary people. Politicians didn’t miss the chance to politicise it either. As a nation, how far we are descending—this is a reflection of that. Even after this horrific accident, we witnessed many types of chaos in our society, our state, and our administration. We saw that many of our decisions were wrong, many of our actions were wrong. And the price for those mistakes had to be paid by innocent children. Even witnessing the deaths of these children in front of our eyes hasn’t taught us anything.

And in the end, some words of truth emerged—from almost a child. A little girl pointed her finger at our faces and said: our education has failed. We are still a long way from becoming civilised human beings.