Sense of Scale – Part 2

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As I prepare to board my plane to leave Bangladesh for India, I am struck by my inability to create a single photograph which adequately illustrates Bangladesh’s sense of scale. As the plane climbs away from Dhaka, I am surprised to see an even stranger anomaly. The scene which unfolds before me could occur over any major western city. The neat rows of large apartment buildings are arrayed along a network of city streets. As we fly over the adjacent rural areas, I see neatly arrayed homes surrounded by large expanses of uniformly divided, well-maintained farmland. I was completely unprepared for this discontinuity with what I thought I knew from my experiences on the ground. My impression of Bangladesh is formed By my experiences being surrounded By incredible densities. On any given city street, I am constantly overwhelmed by the number of people, rickshaws, CNGs, cars, trucks, and busses all competing for limited road space. Crowding the edge of the roadway is a seemingly endless row of shops. Your sense is that if you can only get out of this area, things will calm down. Yet along the 170 km drive from Chittagong to Dhaka, this scene repeated itself every 5 km. Even the most rural of villages maintained a teeming bazaar at its center. Scale. From the ground, Bangladesh appears chaotic, frenetic, and crowded. From the air, Bangladesh appears regular, sparsely populated, and serene. Which is the true Bangladesh?