# The Unemployed, the Jobless, the Wooden-Unemployed There exists a curious gradation in the lexicon of idleness, a hierarchy of uselessness that our language has carefully codified—as if poverty itself admits of degrees, as if destitution might be arranged on a scale. Consider the man who is *bekarpraye*—nearly unemployed. He retains something of the appearance of purpose. Perhaps he possesses a trade he has not yet fully abandoned, or maintains connections that have not quite dissolved. He is unemployment in prospect, not yet in fact. There remains in him a ghost of former utility, a half-remembered skill. Society has not quite consigned him to the margins; he hovers there, still touching the ledger of the employed, still counted among the questionably useful. Then comes the *bekar*—the unemployed proper. Here pretense falls away. He is unemployable, or has become so. He has crossed the threshold and is now on the other side of the dividing line that separates the wanted from the unwanted. He is a man without market value, without the commodity that the world requires: his labor. Yet even in this category there clings a certain dignity of negation—he is known by what he lacks, defined by absence. There is a void in him that the world recognizes. But the *kathbekar*—the wooden-unemployed, the dummy-jobless—he is something else entirely. He is a man so thoroughly superfluous, so completely drained of even the capacity to be missed, that unemployment itself becomes almost a metaphor for his existence. He is not unemployed because the work is absent; he is unemployed because *he* is absent—from utility, from relevance, from the machinery of the world. He is the man who, if he were to vanish, would leave no gap. The world would not pause. No one would notice the absence of what was never present. Is this not, in its way, the most honest category of all?

One. Facebook has a few genuinely excellent features. Sometimes, against your better judgment, you'll find yourself on the pages of women celebrities—actresses or models from various countries, say. Scroll down to the comments section of their photos, and you'll witness how many men on your friends list are posing as utter frauds and charlatans there, though some women are present too, just fewer in number. The men leave comments so vile, so pointless, that they stand in complete contradiction to who they actually are. These men from this zoo of mediocrity know full well that the actress or celebrity they're commenting about will never even glance at their drivel, while their own friends will certainly see it. What won't men do to cool the heat of their petty minds and bodies? Yet take that very same man and examine him closely, and the saint-like persona he affects on Facebook bears no resemblance to his true self. They wear not one face but at least two. Looking at them, you wonder if even they know what they want. Such hypocrites repel you instantly.

Two. When men clash with men, there is dispute; when women clash with women, there is apocalypse; but when men and women clash, there is compromise.

Three. In our country, those who dabble in politics or business are instantly dismissed as idle—as though they do nothing all day but wander about. Yet look closely: it is the businessman and the politician who actually run the country. There is no larger platform for serving one's nation. Still, what passes for politics these days leaves you confused whether such people are unemployed, something, nothing, or what exactly. And in our society, even now, when a grown young man of marriageable age does nothing, his parents arrange his marriage under the guise that he is a "businessman." Later it turns out the business was never his—it belonged to someone else. Because these lies have persisted through the ages, people have come to assume that if someone "does business," it must mean the boy is idle. On the other hand, those who invoke political credentials often commit the most abominable acts in plain sight for everyone to see. So our society still hasn't quite accepted this class either.

Four. How do you recognize an idle man? I'll give you three types:

1. A man who doesn't work is not really called idle; rather, a man who doesn't even attempt any work—he is the truly idle one. There's more. He doesn't work, true, but you'll find him meddling in someone's chores at every neighbor's house, at any hour. Had he channeled even that time into something productive, he might never have been idle at all. And here's another striking trait of the idle: glittering on the surface, sewage beneath. Looking at most of them—their clothes, their perfume collection, their airs—you'd never guess they're unemployed. Most successful people in the world walk about in rather plain style. An idle man has all the time in the world for such frippery. A man absorbed in real work has no time for such theatrics, and besides, most working men are fairly careless about dress anyway. Many of them wouldn't even remember what shirt they wore two days ago, let alone spend time wondering what to wear today.

This is true for girls as well: when you see a girl who is excessively fashion-conscious, who insists on calling the sari a *saaaaaari* in the name of style, who squanders at least two hours on jewelry and adornment, you can be fairly certain that she is a useless girl—that is to say, a girl fit for nothing. She was born merely to spend all her time primping and preening, to turn some poor boy’s head. It is right that girls should have some concern for beauty and dress—that is the rule. But a girl who is conscious of *only* that one thing is undoubtedly useless. She doesn’t help her parents with any work; quite the opposite. She spends her boyfriend’s tutoring fees on clothes and cosmetics, and then shows off to her girlfriends. If you don’t believe me, look around—there is no shortage of such shameless girls.

2. Then there is another breed of boy or girl, those who write lies in their marriage CV. You must know this: a marriage CV in our country is nothing but a carefully arranged platter of falsehoods! The sheer nonsense they put down, as if scribbling it will somehow make the marriage happen! Even now, seventy to eighty percent of people write fabrications in their CVs, padding them with unnecessary, irritating details—adding things that are neither true nor relevant. In both marriage and job matters. In the CV they write about how the girl’s or boy’s first cousin’s father-in-law’s childhood friend’s younger brother’s wife’s deceased uncle’s adopted son’s sister-in-law’s pre-marital third boyfriend’s friend’s distant nephew’s close friend’s maternal uncle’s brother-in-law’s brother-in-law passed the 38th BCS exam up to the viva board last time…

What a strange country we live in, where everyone inflates their own height in writing! The first thing that will catch your eye when you meet is that very thing—the height. Brother, if you get that wrong, won’t the person definitely be caught? Won’t the girl’s side realize that the boy is a liar? These fools, if they are 5 feet 7 inches tall, instead of simply writing 5 feet 8 inches, they write 5 feet and 11 inches! Our hypocrisy has no creativity in it either; all our lives we prefer to keep making the same mistakes. A friend of ours once submitted another friend’s CV for a job, with just copy-paste—which was not the issue. The trouble was, he didn’t even change anything except the applicant’s name: the father’s name, the mother’s name, the address—none of it was his own! While his father was still alive, the CV already had the word “Late” before his father’s name! Here’s another thing. The one thing that girls absolutely, positively, definitely apply both in their CVs and in real life is…reducing their age! The art of age reduction is probably something girls learn even while in their mother’s womb, hearing it from their mother’s lips!

So what was I saying? You will find some boys who write out elaborate details in their marriage CV about their father, older brothers, uncles, and sisters’ husbands—the whole extended family—yet write nothing at all about themselves except their school, college, and university names. And what would he write anyway? What does he have to write about? That the boy is a complete blockhead—does that really need to be stated? The other day, when I asked someone to introduce himself, he said he was a friend of the PS of some MP! I laughed for a long time. He asked, “Brother, why are you laughing?” I said, “Brother, from happiness, from joy, from sheer irony…”

3. There’s another type of boy who keeps saying, “I’m trying to go abroad, I’ll leave any day now!” The truth is, he’s only making the attempt in words. Six months ago he was saying the same thing: “Next month, for sure, I’m leaving!” And a year from now he’ll still be saying it…g-o-i-n-g…g…g…! He makes no real effort to study for it, no genuine attempt at anything, yet he never stops talking about it. Meanwhile, whatever studies he was doing here at home—those he abandons, throws away if he can. Oh, what a world, where you can run your whole life on imagination and pretense! And plenty of people do, actually! In a country where “my son lives abroad!” is counted as a qualification, as a virtue—well, what else would you expect? Look around at your relatives and acquaintances and see who actually goes abroad, and who just adopts the air of being an expatriate! Most of these expatriate boys are exactly like that hundred-taka lungi—the one with five hundred takas knotted into it, yet it still costs a hundred takas at the shop, even though the way that lungi struts and leaps about, you’d swear it’s worth six hundred!