Dhaka in pictures: a city of culture, opportunity and deprivation

Gallery TED Fellows

Nurur Rahman Khan was born and bred in Dhaka, Bangladesh. A practicing architect and university lecturer, Khan alternately marvels at the city’s convivial culture and bemoans its economic and structural deficiencies. He’ll brook no debate over the quality of Dhaka’s food, though: It’s miraculously good. Here’s a taste of Khan’s Dhaka, photographed by Mohammad Tauheed, a TED Senior Fellow, architect, designer and technology consultant.

This wasn’t your regular photoshoot. Tauheed was hampered in his task by the tense political situation. Earlier this month he wrote, ”We just faced around six days of hartal [strike]. Vehicles were torched, crude bombs exploded and around eight people died across the country. In Dhaka there were no cars in the street, only rickshaws and bikes. I was running errands on my bike with a camera for the photos, and a few locations were just a bit too dangerous to cover.” As we post this, another 48-hour strike is under way nationwide, as the country gears up for parliamentary elections due to be held in early January. Such tumult is a visceral reminder that democracy is very much a work-in-progress — and our sincere thanks go to both Tauheed and Khan for working with us even as their daily life is upended regularly.

Dhaka looks peaceful from the water — shown here, the Gulshan 1 area, one of the city’s upscale residential and commercial districts. But it’s a messy and chaotic place, says architect Nurur Rahman Khan, a heady mixture of culture, opportunity and deprivation. Salvador Dalì would not have found success in Dhaka, says Khan: “The city’s already surreal.” See Gulshan on a map of Dhaka.

Read the profile about Nurur Rahman Khan and life in Dhaka »

Look carefully at this photo and you’ll see a pair of eyes, part of the Inside Out Project, started by the 2011 TED Prize winner JR. The eyes loom over rooftops in Dhaka’s Korail slum, home to thousands of rural migrants, and they were installed on September 13, 2013. As the project’s blog describes, the eyes represent those of Bangladeshi garment workers, and they “look up into the high-rise lofts of two of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the capital.” See the Korail slum on a map of Dhaka.

Read the profile about Nurur Rahman Khan and life in Dhaka »

At the heart of the city is Ramna, a central district that’s home to some of city’s key institutions, including the University of Dhaka. This picture shows Sohrawardi Uddyan in Ramna, a vast green park in the middle of the concrete jungle. According to Tauheed, “it connects many neighborhoods around it, and its historic significance and proximity to Dhaka University makes it a popular destination for hangouts and big festivals.” See Sohrawardi Uddyan on a map of Dhaka.

Read the profile about Nurur Rahman Khan and life in Dhaka »

Opened in 1982, the Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban (National Assembly Building) is extraordinary, a colossal floating palace that seems to have equal heft and weightlessness. Dhaka’s modernist jewel, it was the final work by American architect Louis I. Kahn. Khan has lectured widely on his fellow architect’s work at universities including Yale, Columbia and Harvard. Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban, Mohammadpur, Dhaka. See the Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban on a map.

Read the profile about Nurur Rahman Khan and life in Dhaka »

Like other megacities around the world, Dhaka is blighted by heavy traffic. This is a common scene on most major streets, this photograph taken near Farmgate over Kazi Nazurl Islam Avenue. Tauheed comments, “It can easily take two hours to go around 11 km from Dhanmondi to Gulshan during rush hour. Bikes are much faster than cars.” See Kazi Nazurl Islam Avenue on a map of Dhaka.

Read the profile about Nurur Rahman Khan and life in Dhaka »

Read the profile about Nurur Rahman Khan and life in Dhaka »

The smell of food pervades Dhaka, not least in the oldest parts of the city. This is a typical scene on a typical street in Old Dhaka (when the city is operational, that is). Here, and most everywhere, you’ll find a frenetic melting pot of pedestrians, street food vendors, porters carrying goods to and from the nearby river port and thousands of wholesale shops, rickshaws, push-carts, bicycles, and motorbikes all packed into the narrow streets.

Read the profile about Nurur Rahman Khan and life in Dhaka »

In Dhanmondi, a residential area west of Dhaka’s center, the pace of life slows. Dhanmondi Lake is the go-to public hangout, filled with amazing street foods, restaurants, lush green, water and boats. Still, architect Nurur Rahman Khan reports that many of the city’s parks are in a state of disrepair. See Dhanmondi Lake on a map of Dhaka.

Read the profile about Nurur Rahman Khan and life in Dhaka »

The residents of Dhanmondi are among Dhaka’s most fortunate. “It’s a great area,” says Khan. “People are on their feet or on rickshaws doing their shopping.” The district is also home to a concentration of art galleries. Here, the cafe of the Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts, a popular place to see exhibitions and hang out. Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts, House No. 42, Road No. 16, Sheik Kamal Sarani, Dhanmondi, Dhaka. See the Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts on a map of Dhaka.

Mohammad Tauheed is a TED Senior Fellow, an architect, web and graphic designer and technology consultant. He is the Editor-in-Chief at ArchSociety, and he curates and organizes TEDxDhaka and the World Economic Forum’s Dhaka Hub.

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A culture shock for universal emotion

The Boston Globe looks at the increasing evidence against the idea that there are some universally expressed facial emotions.

The idea that some basic emotions are expressed universally and have an evolutionary basis was suggested by Darwin in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

The concept was further explored by psychologist Paul Ekman who conducted cross-cultural research and reported that the expression of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise were universal human characteristics.

However, these ideas have recently been challenged and a debate recently kicked off in an issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science and the Globe article does a great job of covering the fight and its fall out.

…psychologists Azim Shariff and Jessica Tracy detail accumulated evidence that they argue makes the case for an evolutionary view of emotional expressions [pdf]. Some, they say, may have evolved for a physiological purpose?—?widening the eyes with fright, for instance, to expand our peripheral vision. Others may have evolved as social signals. Meanwhile, in a commentary, Barrett lays out a point-by-point counterargument [pdf]. While humans evolved to express and interpret emotions, she contends, specific facial expressions are culturally learned.

Barrett believes that the universality of recognizing facial expressions is “an effect that can be easily deconstructed,” if, for instance, subjects are asked to give their own label to faces instead of choosing from a set of words. In another recent paper [pdf] in the same journal, she argues that a growing body of research shows our perception of facial expressions is highly dependent on context: People interpret facial expressions differently depending on situation, body language, familiarity with a person, and surrounding visual cues. Barrett’s own research has shown that language and vocabulary influence people’s perception of emotions. Others have found cultural differences in how people interpret the facial expressions of others?—?a study found that Japanese people, for instance, rely more than North Americans on the expressions of surrounding people to interpret a person’s emotional state.

A fascinating discussion that tackles a taken-for-granted psychological assumption that is now being challenged.

Link to Globe piece on culture and facial expression.

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A culture of sacrifice to the body beautiful

The New York Times has a excellent piece on the culture of plastic surgery in Brazil by anthropologist Alexander Edmonds.

Edmonds notes that surgery is not considered to be a correction or salve against the sagging of the years but a beauty treatment in its own right that is justified by a folk psychology of self-esteem.

Yet, such desires are not simply a matter of psychology. Brazil’s pop music and TV shows are filled with talk of a new kind of celebrity: the siliconada. These actresses and models pose in medical magazines, the mainstream women’s press, and Brazilian versions of Playboy, which are read (or viewed) by female consumers. Patients are on average younger than they were 20 years ago. They often request minor changes to become, as one surgeon said, “more perfect.”

The growth of plastic surgery thus reflects a new way of working not only on the suffering mind, but also on the erotic body. Unlike fashion’s embrace of playful dissimulation and seduction, this beauty practice instead insists on correcting precisely measured flaws. Plastic surgery may contribute to a biologized view of sex where pleasure and fantasy matter less than the anatomical “truth” of the bare body.

Link to NYT piece on A ‘Necessary Vanity’ (via @moximer).

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A culture shock in brain ethics

Dana has an eye-opening article on the challenges of doing brain research in cultures that don’t share the same assumptions about science and human nature.

There are several sections of the article which turn our research assumptions on their head, owing to the fact that some common principles of ethical research turn out to be based on quite a narrow view of human values.

The idea that donating tissue is simply a matter of individual choice is not a belief held by many communities who believe that all people are interconnected – making individual donations a group decision.

The article touches on an example from the Havasupai people and a similar situation was discussed in an All in the Mind interview with a Maori neuroscientist.

However, I was particularly struck by this part on confidentiality which is often assumed to be the bedrock of human research.

Confidentiality poses another ethical challenge to researchers working with indigenous peoples. Participants in academic studies are invariably anonymous, but in many Native cultures, not identifying oneself, one’s family, and one’s homeland is unacceptable. Anonymity, they believe, undermines the cultural fabric of the community, and is akin to stripping its members of their traditions and beliefs.

Link to ‘Cross-Cultural Neuroethics: Look Both Ways’.

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