Sending Billions Home

After traversing kilometres of muddy pathways through flooded rice paddies to enter a village in the most remote northeastern corner of Bangladesh, then dodging oxcarts and hand-pulled rickshaws along earthen streets, I walked through a set of glass doors to find myself facing what might be the world’s most pointless escalator.

In a place where a good percentage of families were getting by on less than a dollar a day, where almost all transportation was provided by human or animal muscle, and where digging mud by hand from the ground to make bricks was considered a good job, the escalator had just been built as the centrepiece of another otherworldly incongruity, a two-storey shopping mall with plate-glass windows and bright halogen lighting. A few dozen people had made their way up the betel-encrusted sidewalk to visit this mall, a good many of them families who had come only to examine, and perhaps take a ride upon, the first escalator they had ever encountered...